Journal of Royal Anthro Inst Dec 2010

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Book reviewsjrai_1661 905..951

Archaeology, art, and artefacts always concentrating on ho
w individuals,
families, and the communit
y have changed in
relation to pottery produc
tion and distribution.
A rnold, D ean E. Social change and the These chapters lay the fou
ndation and allow the
evolution of ceramic production and distribution reader to have a good sens
e of the social,
in a Maya community. xxx, 351 pp., maps, economic, and technologica
l changes Ticul has
tables, gs, illus., bibliogr. Boulder: Univ. experienced over these three
decades. The
Press of Colorado, 2008. £54.50 (cloth) predominance of the pottery
production in Ticul
remained household-based,
even in large units
Few researchers have been committed to with wage-labour household
s. Arnold
conducting ceramic ethnoarchaeology for their documents a kin-based mode
l documented by
entire career. However, Dean Arnold, who using genealogical data, r
esidence maps, and
trained originally as an ethnographer, reveals participant observation. T
he distributional
that to recognize the complexities of social and changes started with potte
ry sold at the local
technological change, one must be devoted to markets and estas and expan
ded into more
longitudinal research. Arnold’s research urban markets when a highway
system was
encompasses thirty-two years beginning in 1965 built. This led to more sp
ecialization with
and continuing to 1997 in the Maya community brokers, who could act as
intermediaries selling
of Ticul, Yucatán, Mexico. to the rising tourist market
s of Mérida and
The book is divided into four parts, the rst Cancún.
part beginning with a lengthy theoretical The third part of the
book uses a life-history
introduction focused on social and technological perspective through discus
sing changes in clay
change in relation to several paradigms, and temper procurement, co
mposition of
including Cathy Costin’s specialization pottery fabric, forming tech
nology, and nally
parameters, evolutionary processes, ring technology. Arnold doc
uments that ‘all
technological choice, and cognitive choices are social’ regardin
g the complexity of
anthropology and engagement theory. The clay and temper procuremen
t. Furthermore, he
latter part of the introduction concentrates on challenges the predominant
view that elite
the use of ethnographic analogy, Dean’s control of resources restric
ts the mining of clay.
methods, and a short discussion concerning Rather he emphasizes the ex
ibility that potters
how the book is organized. engage in while procuring
clay and temper and
The second part of the book systematically forming and ring vessels, w
hich becomes
discusses the thirty-two years of changes in the increasingly specialized,
ef cient, and
Ticul population and organization of potters, productive, consequently d
ictating the
and the demand, consumption, and distribution complexity of pottery prod
uction. Archaeologists
of pottery. What makes this book accessible to will discover his most imp
ortant contribution is
both archaeologists and ethnoarchaeologists, that production did not gr
ow but the intensity
and hopefully ethnographers, is that Arnold of production increased by
individuals
removes the static dimension of materials by specializing in speci c task
s. The biggest surprise
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 16, 905-951
© Royal Anthropological Institute 2010
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906 Book reviews
from reading the book is that INAA (instrumental Dingwall,
Paul R., Kevin L. Jones &
neutron activation analysis, a method of Rachae
l Egerton (eds). In care of the
materials analysis) was inconclusive in detecting Southe
rn Ocean: an archaeological and
subtle clay and temper changes. I commend histor
ical survey of the Auckland Islands. v, 317
Arnold for including these data as negative pp., m
aps, gs, tables, illus., bibliogrs.
evidence demonstrating to archaeologists and Aucklan
d: New Zealand Archaeological
ethnoarchaeologists that the use of high-tech Associa
tion, 2009. $57.00 (paper)
equipment to see slight changes in clay
and temper procurement may prove In care of
the Southern Ocean documents the
ineffective. 2003 New Z
ealand Department of Conservation
In the book’s conclusion, Arnold concisely scienti c and
historical survey of the Auckland
summarizes the dramatic changes and Islands, a
survey which gave particular attention
reconnects the introductory chapter by to the arc
haeological remains left by the
discussing Ticul’s ef ciency and paradigms of different visi
tors to the islands. The Auckland
social change and specialization. These Islands ar
e situated 450 km south of the
changes, as well as the increase of demand for southernmo
st part of New Zealand, in latitude
0
pottery, display the complexity of craft 50 South,
a latitude that is comparable with
specialization, and by taking a holistic approach that of Lo
ndon and Frankfurt in the Northern
(i.e. studying the social, as well as the Hemisphere
. However, as the botanist Joseph
technological aspects) can make a lasting Dalton Hoo
ker pointed out in 1845, such a
contribution concerning how archaeologists comparison
belies the extreme weather
interpret the past. conditions
of the Southern Ocean and the
Arnold’s engagement in participant Southern Hem
isphere generally, where tree lines
observation has allowed him to describe the are about
1,000 metres lower than they are in
intricacies of pottery production, especially why the north.
some families adopted some techniques but This mo
nograph documents the fragmentary
rejected others. So how should archaeologists archaeolog
ical traces left by a succession of
use the Ticul case study if it occurs within a human visi
tations, beginning with ancient
capitalistic, cash economy system? Arnold rightly Polynesian
s in the thirteenth century AD, about
argues that this study has important relevance to the same t
ime that New Zealand itself was rst
archaeologists since it relates to a long colonized.
This brief occupation adds another
continuum of Maya pottery production. chapter to
the remarkable story of Polynesian
Archaeologists cannot separate the past exploratio
n across the entire Paci c from the
from the present and we are all dependent on tropics al
most to Antarctica. Between the
the use of analogy tied to the present. Arnold thirteenth
and the early decades of the
contends that the role of demand is the key to nineteenth
century AD, the islands appear to
craft production, and archaeologists will have been
left to the seals, the hardy Southern
need to separate out elements associated with rata (Metr
osideros umbellata), and a oor cover of
the modern world economic system from giant herb
s. Then, between 1807 and 1810, Nigel
qualities that are related to their own Prickett,
in his chapter on sealing, estimates that
society. as many as
30,000 seal skins were exported
The production of the book is excellent, from the is
lands, a loss that has taken between
containing plentiful maps, graphs, and tables, as then and n
ow to repair. This points to the
well as numerous black and white photos that fragility a
nd harshness of the Auckland Islands’
aid the reader in conceptualizing the cultural environmen
t, a fragility which saw the failure of
and technological changes that Ticul has attempted
farming settlements, a brief return of
undertaken over a span of three decades. All Maori and
Moriori to the islands in the
who are interested in ethnoarchaeology, pottery, mid-ninete
enth century, scienti c expeditions,
and craft specialization should read this book notably th
e German Transit of Venus Expedition
and it would be a welcome text for courses in 1874, a
nd more recent surveys and
focusing on ethnoarchaeology. Dean Arnold’s conservation
studies.
remarkable commitment to ceramic The shi
pwreck era, which probably continues
ethnoarchaeology research in Ticul is a to the pre
sent day with long-distance ocean
signi cant contribution to the eld of racing, is dis
cussed by Paul Dingwall. The
archaeology. Auckland Is
lands were on the Great Circle sailing
John W. Arthur University of South Florida St route from
Australia to South America, or to
Petersburg Europe via
Cape Horn. Given the vagaries of
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Book reviews 907

charts and navigation in an environment where Chapters by Atho
ll Anderson, Kevin Jones,
fog and rain prevented celestial navigation, it is Geoff Walls, Steve B
agley, Rachael Egerton, Nigel
a wonder that there were not many more than Prickett, and Paul D
ingwall represent signi cant
the ten shipwrecks recorded. The shipwreck statements of the ar
chaeological and historical
story is also a story of castaways stranded on heritage of the isla
nds. Overall, this volume is
the islands for months, of deaths from excellently written
and well produced. The New
drowning and exposure, of hut sites and other Zealand Archaeologic
al Association Monographs
buildings which now make up a prominent are an important ser
ies and the Auckland Islands
part of the archaeological heritage of the volume is a worthy a
ddition to the volumes
islands. As shipping companies and the currently available.
governments of Australia and New Zealand Har
ry Allen University of Auckland
became aware of the possibility of castaways, a
series of depots were set up. These contained
matches, food, and an essential box of books Henare, A miria, Ma
rtin Holbraad & Sari
to while away the months before rescue. An Wastell (eds).
Thinking through things:
extraordinary feature of the Auckland Islands theorizing artef
acts ethnographically. x, 233
landscape is signposts ( ngerposts) which pp., g., bibliogrs.
London, New York:
pointed the way to depots at the northern and Routledge, 2007.
£22.99 (paper)
southern ends of the islands. These are a
melancholy and forbidding sight, almost The editors’ introduct
ion makes clear the
exemplifying the slim chance a castaway had in ambitiousness of thi
s essay collection. They seek
this environment. The presence of feral animals not only to promote
thinking through things,
on the islands – pigs, mice, and cats – remains but also to promote a ne
w way to conduct
a threat to this environment, though rabbits, ethnography.
mice, and cattle have been eradicated from They nd signi cant f
ault with all prior
Enderby Island. approaches. First, t
hey are objects people, which
At the beginning of the Second World War, means they reject th
e cultural and social turn
the German ship Erlangen cut timber from taken by anthropolog
ists, starting with the
Carnley Harbour in an unsuccessful attempt to post-Rivers era of t
he early twentieth century.
reach a neutral port. As a response to this, the They want to bring o
bjects back in. At the same
New Zealand government set up coastwatching time, they are not c
ontent with scholars like
and radio stations on the islands to monitor Daniel Miller and hi
s material culture studies or
shipping and deny access to enemy ships. This those associated eit
her with science technology
resulted in one of the longest periods of studies (STS) or act
or network theory (ANT).
continuous settlement, and these stations have The trouble with
these other objects people
left a notable archaeological signature. This is that they do not
go nearly far enough. For all
period also saw extensive surveys of plant and their talk about con
nections, mutuality,
animal life as the coastwatchers included notable hybridity, and netwo
rks, they remain mired, at
scientists Charles Fleming, Richard Falla, and their base, with an
analytic assumption of
Graham Turbott. object/person separa
tion in the rst place, such
Much of what took place in the Auckland that they can come t
o be seen as related in the
Islands concerned Enderby Island and Port Ross, second place. Instea
d, a way needs to be found
at the northern end of the chain. Separating to grasp the unity o
f a people and their
each historical episode into different chapters artefacts, graspable
as a single phenomenon.
makes it dif cult to grasp the concentration of Such a unity gets us t
o the ontology of a
activities there. The volume could have been people: the nature o
f what their material-social
improved if the two overview chapters – one on being is.
landscapes by Jones and Dingwall, and the The key methodolo
gical move for the
second on the plant trail by Geoff Walls – had anthropologist is thus
to understand the
been placed towards the front, as these provide methods people thems
elves are using that make
information essential to understand the nature their personhood and
objects as one. The
of historical experience in the Auckland Islands. mission enriches the
home turf by informing our
Finally, given that much of what is recorded on thinking with the va
rying modes of ontological
the Auckland Islands is the result of short-term existence practised
by other peoples. The
visitation, I was surprised that the expedition did anthropological imag
ination – and
not also record their own archaeological methodological toolk
it – expands not just with
signature. instruction of other
s’ folkways, technical
Journal of the Royal Anthropological
Institute (N.S.) 16, 905-951
© Royal Ant
hropological Institute 2010
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908 Book reviews
practices, and cultural stances, but also with what are more like
pronouncements of what
modes of being through stuff. each kept object m
eans. Seldom is there
Intriguing as all this may sound, I could not evidence that woul
d bolster her suggestion
nd the sharp distinction the editors are making versus any number of
alternative interpretations.
with the objects-orientated predecessors they In his aptly title
d ‘Talismans of thought’, Morten
seem to disdain, despite claiming their work as a Pedersen indeed ma
kes a case for how objects,
rst step to ‘ontological breakthrough’ (p. 15). such as shamanic costume
s, transform the being
Try as they might to avoid it, I nd at least some of the user. Far fro
m the Mongolian scene, I
of them locked in the in nite regress faced by thought of the way a
drag queen becomes
others who similarly strive to de-privilege the through her high-h
eel shoes. Pedersen may not
myopic social scientist. I did not nd advance to appreciate such an a
pplication from West
the great debates about how natives think, and Hollywood; the aut
hors almost assiduously avoid
indeed sometimes a lack of discipline allowed parallels with Wes
tern folk thinking. But
plunges into ungrounded assertions about how Pedersen does reac
h towards grounding his
other minds work. And I kept thinking they observations in mo
re general bio-cognitive
would bene t from familiarity with efforts from processes (‘cognitive
scaffolds’, p. 145) that
ethnomethodology and Meadian symbolic would place all th
ese discussions into a broader
interaction that struggle with some of the same analytic and, iron
ically, broader cultural register.
issues they take up. A chapter by J
ames Leach in critique of Alfred
But these authors nevertheless do some real Gell comes off as
a rather miscellaneous effort,
anthropology. Adam Reed writes convincingly of given the context
of chapters devoted to
cigarettes’ centrality (they are ‘king’) in the particular ethnographic
cases. And why Gell and
Papau New Guinea prison he studied. Whereas not, say, Latour o
r any of the others who have
such goods’ importance similarly shows up in missed the ontologic
al boat? A report of the
many researches on prisons (none cited), here author’s own partici
pation in an art-science
they are all that matters, a somewhat unlikely project does not h
elp edify a rationale.
outcome (what about sex, after all?). Several With implicati
ons for the book as a whole,
essays are not really about artefacts at all (a Martin Holbraad wr
ites about the ‘power of
word used in the subtitle of the book), unless powder’ in the conte
xt of Cuban Ifá. I much
that word is stretched to include property rights appreciated his se
arching discussion of mana to
(as opposed to property itself) and legal mount his more gen
eral explication of how
contracts. Amiria Henare is informative, none the thing and belief a
re in recursive and indexical
less, with an interesting exegesis of what might relation, or, in s
till more radical ways, constitute
be thought of as Maori mobilization of Western an ontological who
le.
property rights doctrine in pursuit of indigenous This book disp
lays erudition and most
claims. chapters inform. B
ut its call to ontological arms
Sari Westell’s piece on Swaziland kingship is weighted with amb
iguity, infelicity, and
similarly centres on an abstraction, in this case partiality. So muc
h of the writing is turgid – a
divine kingship in Swaziland. Here the emphasis cost to the commun
ity.
is on the identity of monarchical enunciation, Harve
y Molotch New York University
not just as exercise of divine right, but also as
kingly power in the somewhat beguiling sense
that ‘everything that escapes his lips already is Meskell, Lynn (ed.
). Cosmopolitan
the world’ (p. 86). Here we are beyond charisma archaeologies. 2
96 pp., illus., bibliogr.
precisely because these utterances are in fact London, Durham
, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press,
things, or at least thing-like. More obviously on 2009. £59.00 (cl
oth), £14.99 (paper)
the artefact topic is Andrew Moutu’s chapter on
collecting; it is ‘a way of being’, he says, and he Archaeology has recent
ly developed sensitivity to
displays how acts of collecting construct, in the its position withi
n contemporary society. Even
very process, the nature of the artefacts the most admirable
accounts, however, seem to
themselves. In so doing he recapitulates points have missed an obv
ious point: if archaeology
made by various museum studies scholars, speaks to the peop
les of the present, then, even
particularly those alert to social-material (especially) amids
t a globalizing world, its
re exivity. language needs to be
understood by multiple
Rebecca Empson, in her chapter, attends to audiences. As such
, archaeologists need exhibit
the display and storage of family mementos in attentiveness to t
he perception of meanings
Mongolia; she uses the word ‘suggest’ to make produced in the presen
t.
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Book reviews 909

Cosmopolitan archaeologies is an important Kruger National Park,
South Africa. A disturbing
and thoughtful collection, one which displacement of the
inhabited past is presented;
demonstrates why the validity, not only the a process reinvigorat
ed in the post-apartheid
place, of the modern archaeological enterprise era. Alfredo González-R
uibal, in chapter 5, notes
requires scrutiny. The volume comprises ten how archaeologists ha
ve for too long been
chapters and an editorial introduction. Through caught up in the ne
oliberal rhetoric of
various vehicles of cosmopolitan commitment development, which he
lps to preserve the very
the contributors depict the interplay between inequalities it purpo
rts to alleviate. Alternatively,
international bodies, ethnic identities, economic he calls for vernacu
lar research which
regimes, heritage and ecology movements, and documents transparentl
y the annihilations of
conservationists and developers. The modernity and the fr
equent deceptions of
contributions attend to diverse temporal and communities in which
archaeology is
geographical studies but share at their core not practised.
merely appreciations of the multi-scalar In chapter 6, Chip
Colwell-Chathaphonh
repercussions of their projects but also an describes, through the
elaboration of Zuni, Hopi,
acceptance of the responsibility for them. and Navajo cases, a ‘comp
lex stewardship’
The introduction offers a framework for the model that embraces dif
ference. This entwines
chapters which follow, principally by outlining openness, participation
, and negotiation to
the development of select cosmopolitan overcome problematic co
ncepts such as
theories, archaeological ethics, and the universal entitlement.
Chapter 7 by Sandra
micro-politics of disciplinary practice. The work’s Scham examines the fashio
ns/obligations of
primary theoretical paradigm draws from the archaeological attentio
ns in the ancient Near
writings of Anthony Appiah and takes the form East. Hospitality as a
form of negotiation is used
of ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’, a dialectic concept to demonstrate why archaeol
ogists need to
which accepts a multiplicity of attachments to consider the economic w
elfare of the
place and social networks, resources, and communities within whic
h they work. After all,
experiences. This permits a construction of hospitality is a form o
f gift-giving and requires
cosmopolitan archaeology which, as the editor reciprocation. Negotiat
ion is also Ian Hodder’s
notes, ‘acknowledges its responsibilities to the focus in chapter 8, in wh
ich he offers interesting
wider world yet embraces the cultural contextualization to so
me events relating to the
differences that are premised upon particular site of Çatalhöyük. The inter
play of the politics
histories, places, practices and sentiments’ of multiple, changing ide
ntities is well
(p. 6). examined.
In chapter 1, Jane Lydon explores the powers, Chapter 9 by Lisa B
reglia illustrates the
claims, and appropriations of global heritage fractious nature of the
local through her
discourses in contemporary Australia. The long-term ethnographic
study of stakeholders at
bifurcation between valuing diversity and the Mayan site of Chichén
Itzá. Indeed
promulgating universality is shown to be considerable stresses a
re observed between
hazardous in that heritage agendas actually indigenous site custodi
ans and Mexican visitors.
disenfranchise communities, mainly in detaching In chapter 10, Hugo Ben
avides recounts further
materials from their local matrices of meaning. ethnographic research c
onducted at
Chapter 2 adopts a more positive tone. Ian Lilley archaeological sites wh
ilst dissecting the ctions
elucidates why, in the Australasian context of timeless cultural au
thenticity within the
speci cally, the discipline has developed closer, Ecuadorian state project.
These nal two
‘professionalized’ relations with indigenous chapters, in particular, hi
ghlight usefully the
communities. ways heritagescapes are
at once universal and
Archaeology is often about access and relative.
rights. Discourses concerning the ‘ownership’ In this reviewer’s opinio
n there were two
of the past take many forms. Denis Byrne in minor shortcomings. Fir
stly, as cosmopolitanism
chapter 3 describes the relations between in general posits the o
verarching sameness of
nature conservation and cultural heritage, humanity, the primacy a
fforded to ‘rooted
alternatives to so-called ‘fortress protectionism’, cosmopolitanism’ seemed inapp
ropriate. Indeed
and the epistemological disharmony between most of the contributor
s’ formulations of local
cosmopolitan plurality and post-Enlightenment identities appear more
akin to the ‘tribal
secular rationalism. Lynn Meskell takes some of constructs’ of diluted co
mmunitarian positions.
these themes forward in chapter 4 by way of Therefore the theorizat
ion of other forms of
results from an archaeological ethnography in political, sociological
, and institutional
Journal of the Royal Anthropological I
nstitute (N.S.) 16, 905-951
© Royal Anthro
pological Institute 2010
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910 Book reviews
cosmopolitanism may have been constructive. observations (Basa
k) about aeolean,
Secondly, some essential elements of the uvial/pluvial centr
ed displacements in tools
unfolding cosmopolitan awareness necessitated onto some evolved
statistical measures of these
greater discussion, in particular the negative and phenomena. Which w
ould have suggested that
unintended consequences which result from they did imbibe so
mething of Lewis Henry
well-meaning archaeological actions. Binford’s labours (w
ith the ‘French Mousterian
Timothy Clack University of Oxford of the Levallois F
acies’ article) of half a century
ago, and would hav
e helped them for once to
break off from the
Indological/Orientalist
Paddayya, K. (ed.). Formation processes and narratives of how
many inches/millimetres a
Indian archaeology. vii, 294 pp., maps, tables, particular artefac
t moved (and in which varying
gs, illus., bibliogrs. Pune: Deccan College, direction) over a pe
riod of twenty or so years of
2007. Rs 500/- (paper) repeated eld visits
. Field visits are of course
welcome; however,
a progressively re ned set of
The editor of this book, a great luminary of observations regar
ding deposition and
Indian archaeology and theoretical archaeology, post-deposition, m
easured quantitatively,
has, for the purposes of this volume, selected beyond elementary
descriptive statistics, is
a galaxy of post- and pre-depositional welcome even more
so. The time has gone
archaeologists like Lewis Henry Binford, Michael when Indian archae
ologists might have got away
B. Schiffer, and Carla Sinopoli; younger Indian with giving their
studies such titles as
authors such as Arati Deshpande-Mukherji, Richa ‘Preliminary observa
tions on stone and bone
Jhaldiyal, and B. Basak; older ones, like J.N. Pal, displacements’. Over
all, however, this book is a
V. Jayaswal; and a few others who use their pathbreaking foray
into a hitherto
eld-based studies to cast light on and bring under-explored and v
ery under-represented eld
their colleagues up to date with formation of Indian archaeol
ogy.
processes and Indian archaeology. Most students Ajay
Pratap Banaras Hindu University
of Indian archaeology when they enter the
Master’s programme at Deccan College, to
which this reviewer has a subsidiary af liation,
receive a thorough pedagogic grilling in
eld-based geomorphology, both practically and Childhood and youth
theoretically. Indeed, no fewer than thirteen of
the authors in this volume hail either directly
from the College, or were, for a time, af liated A lber, E rdmute, S
jaak van der G eest &
with it. Susan Reynolds
W hyte (eds).
In brief, Formation processes and Indian Generations in
Africa: connections and con icts.
archaeology is about a theoretical patch-up, 416 pp., table
s, bibliogrs. Berlin: LIT Verlag,
coming of age from the classical era of Indology, 2008. €39.90
where theories of migration and diffusion were
marshalled to explain similarities and differences Although there has
been an outpouring of
in tool-types/kits across the country and not writing on childre
n and youth around the world
simply within a region of it. From this volume, it in the past decade
, much of the most
looks like Indian archaeologists have moved to stimulating work h
as come from work in Africa.
landscape and regional frameworks to help Child soldiers, th
warted promises of education
explain and investigate the processes of and development, p
olitical upheaval, religious
site-formation, both prehistoric and historic. I movements, and a b
undle of new problems
have browsed and re-browsed the book but have surrounding sex ha
ve led Africanists to question
in particular read the essays dealing with Bengal, what youth or chil
dhood means both in
two from Uttar Pradesh, and Vijaynagar, in analytical terms a
nd in local cultural worlds.
Karnataka, and wonder if this does or does not Some of the freshe
st work situates those
do justice to the volume. However, as these are, questions in explo
ration not just of the
I think, a somewhat representative sample, what categories themsel
ves, but in the relationships
do I really think and feel? through which they
take form and are
Well, I feel that the eminence of the authors negotiated, especi
ally intergenerational
ought to have moved them to consider relationships. Thi
s collection of sixteen papers
extending their analyses of pre- and along with a broad
introduction, which grew
post-deposition beyond the realm of basic out of an earlier
conference, explores various
----------------------- Page 7-----------------------
Book reviews 911

dimensions of intergenerational relations across (again, not just the o
nes in the ‘past and
the African continent. present’ section) note a
disruption of
The editors’ introduction lays out the ‘traditional’ reciprocities
binding generations
problems and potential in the term together, through not
only the advent of money,
‘generation’: the term has been used to talk but also state interventio
ns, shifting political
about statically reproduced structures of movements, and new rel
igious engagements.
descent, about society-wide cohorts produced For some, the past is
a nostalgic mirror to the
through control of procession through a present, to others it
is corrupt and sti ing, but in
life-course (such as age-sets), and about the both instances the pas
t is brought creatively into
idea of historical cohorts which develop negotiations of curren
t relationships – evidenced
different orientations and sensibilities through vividly in Koen Stroek
en’s essay on bongo ava, a
(and themselves making) processes of historical Tanzanian rap form.
change. In each of these approaches, the Perhaps not surpri
sing to Africanists, many of
tensions between groups and the processes of the intergenerational
tensions discussed in the
succession are a source of dynamism and often book circle around gra
ndparents, and especially
cultural creativity, whether in the joking grandmothers. Grandmot
hers often care for their
relations between mother’s brothers and children’s children while
those children are eking
sister’s sons or between grandparents and out bare survival in cit
ies, or are developing
grandchildren, in the resentments and political relationships with new
lovers or spouses. As
con icts between fathers and sons, or in the Claudia Roth points out
for Burkina Faso, and
wide array of exchanges that ultimately knit Erick Otieno Nyambedha
for Kenya, if the
together and distinguish groups in processes grandmother works to s
upport the children, the
well explored in theories of reciprocity. The ‘intergenerational contr
act’ has been inverted,
‘generativity’ of generational relations is grandmothers assume parent
al authority, and
particularly signi cant as people negotiate and men’s roles in supporting
women are also
thereby shape political, economic, and cultural reversed. By contrast,
as Gertrude Boden
changes. describes for Namibia,
the state has taken on
The editors organize the sixteen contributions sources of elder’s autho
rity – access to health,
into four sections: reciprocity, past and present, education, and livelih
ood – giving young people
politics, and virtue. As might be expected from a sense of liberation
they link to post-apartheid
such a large collection of papers stemming independence, but also
weakening elders’
initially from a panel at a conference, whose respect for the young.
Other elderly women in
contributors come from all stages of their Ghana nd themselves lon
ely caretakers in
careers, and some of whom are more focused migrant children’s elabo
rate new houses, built
on the practical implications of their studies far from supportive ne
tworks and known
while others are more focused on theoretical neighbours, poignantly
described by Valentina
implications, there is some unevenness in the Mazzucato. In a crispl
y argued paper on
contributions. A theme that runs through much Tanzania, Mette Line R
ingsted discusses how the
of the volume (though with a particular focus in life-course of teen mo
thers is the object of
the reciprocity section) is the effects of markets struggle and con ict bet
ween the young
and money on intergenerational relations. David mothers and their own
mothers, through issues
Kyaddondo notes how children, who now can such as childcare for
the infants, expectations of
contribute cash to their households, also are youth’s opportunities, a
nd the (grand)mothers’
empowered to demand service and negotiate own struggles for surv
ival.
prices in shops, contravening expectations of The volume as a wh
ole, though the chapters
respectful behaviour towards elders: ‘Today, are very diverse, makes
clear the complicated
even a two-year-old understands the value of relationship of genera
tions to history. While
money’, people say (p. 36). In Zimbabwe, people are formed in and
by history, as the
however, attempts to empower children in volume’s references to M
annheim’s theories of
child-led organizations, giving them real generational cohorts m
ake clear, the papers also
leadership and management roles, stumble on show how much history
is made and remade in
issues of money, either because children haven’t the context of intergene
rational negotiations.
yet developed budgetary competencies, donors Even as children, pare
nts, and grandparents
and banks don’t trust children with nancial reshape their relational s
tatuses, they rework the
management, or children might model their histories, past, prese
nt, and future, that are
behaviour on self-serving politicians, according bound up with generati
onal identities.
to Michael Bourdillon. Several of the essays Deborah D
urham Sweet Briar College
Institute (N.S.) 16, 905-951
© Royal Anthr
opological Institute 2010
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912 Book reviews
A rgenti, N icolas & Katharina Schramm facework (Kidron,
after Goffman), ritual acts,
(eds). Remembering violence: anthropological material objects,
place, absence, or further
perspectives on intergenerational transmission. violence? Is the w
ithholding of experience by
ix, 270 pp., tables, illus., bibliogrs. Oxford, the senior generat
ion itself an act of violence
New York: Berghahn Books, 2010. £60.00 towards the next, or
can silence be therapeutic
(cloth) or redemptive? Wha
t are the tensions between
‘repeating’ and ‘working
through’ unspeakable
This collection of consistently interesting articles acts, and are they
equivalent for one generation
contributes to the very boom in studies of and the next? How
do we reach, index, or
memory towards which the editors ambiguously evaluate ‘closure’, an
d closure for whom?
claim some scepticism. Janine Klungel offers a Finally, in compar
ing various cases, how should
provocative paper on remembering rape, a we set the balance
between ‘objectivism’ (as
subject of national interest in Guadeloupe characterized by t
he work of cognitive
through the heroine of a historical novel and psychologists or a
s taken up by proponents of
central to the imagination of the matriarch of the ‘trauma’ discourse) an
d ‘relativism’? How, as the
family with whom the author lived. Dorthe editors helpfully
phrase it (p. 21), do we address
Kristensen suggests that the practice of Mapuche the ‘methodological
[and ethical] challenge of
medicine in southern Chile helps bring closure combining phenomen
ological and constructivist
to violence committed by the Pinochet regime. analytical perspec
tives’?
David Berliner examines responses to the As these quest
ions indicate, remembering
termination of male initiation ritual among the entails social str
uggle of some kind or becomes
Bulongic of Guinea, and Jackie Feldman analyses an object of strug
gle. Memory happens
tours to the death camps in Poland for Israeli (succeeds or fails
) not simply in the enclosed
youth. Adelheid Pichler explores successive brain of the indiv
idual or the fully public space
historical memories embedded in Palo Monte of history books o
r monuments. Indeed, another
rituals in Cuba, while Paola Filippucci shows theme addressed in
many of the chapters
how place constitutes a vehicle of memory for (especially well b
y Filippucci and Feuchtwang)
the former inhabitants of villages in northern concerns the tensi
on between state- and
France destroyed in the First World War. Carol kinship-based form
s and forums of
Kidron compares how second-generation Israelis remembering, and i
ndeed the ‘violence’ entailed
and Cambodian-Canadians describe their when the former at
tempt to appropriate the
respective legacies of violence, and Stephan latter.
Feuchtwang explores the various modalities of Feldman and Ki
dron’s essays are especially
remembering loss following an event of violent important. Feldman
offers an exemplary analysis
repression by the Taiwanese state in the early of the way in whic
h orchestrated performances
1950s. by survivors at Au
schwitz offer a redemptive role
Collectively, these essays address the to the state and,
in effect, reproduce new
after-effects of violence. How are violent acts generations of wit
nesses. Kidron not only shows
acknowledged or commemorated, and how can the relevance of d
istinctive cultural ideologies
or should they be? Rather than drawing on the and national conte
xts for the signi cance of
concept of ‘memory’, which seems (to this forms of remembering (
albeit without taking
reviewer) more a potent symbol of our time and into account the p
ossible effects of the age
place than a useful analytic construct for social differences betwee
n her two groups of subjects),
science, each chapter focuses, more or less but she is the onl
y author to indicate fully the
explicitly, on intergenerational transmission, a sharp debates that
characterize the study of
concept highlighted in the subtitle of the memory. Some contr
ibutors slip into an
collection. This clearly displaces the subject from unfortunate con atio
n between Freudian and
the bounded individual and emphasizes the trauma theory when
in fact part of the debate
social and interpersonal aspects of stands on recogniz
ing how different they
remembering. Similarly, in emphasizing the are. Trauma theory
is quite distinct from
processual, it helpfully de-objecti es the topic. psychoanalytically i
nformed approaches insofar
A central theme is thus the matter of how as it does not rec
ognize the unconscious,
second and subsequent generations come to con ict, fantasy, or
even culture (see, e.g., Ruth
learn about and understand the experience of Leys, From guilt t
o shame: Auschwitz and after,
their parents and in what forms they are able to 2007).
transmit it in turn. Is suffering put into words or In an otherwis
e insightful and comprehensive
transmitted silently – in bodily comportment, introduction, the ed
itors might have marked
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Book reviews 913

explicitly their advances over past The third chapter, b
y Roncoll, Crane, and
anthropological discussions such as those in Orlove, is jumbled beca
use it addresses two
collections edited by Paul Antze and Michael different audiences. It
describes the methods and
Lambek (Tense past: cultural essays in trauma and successes of cultural a
nthropology for
memory, 1996) or Gerald Sider and Steven Smith non-anthropologists, wh
ile arguing that ‘[t]o
(Between history and histories: the making of make anthropological in
sights relevant to policy,
silences and commemorations, 1997). Sadly, they anthropologists must tr
anslate them into
do not contribute chapters of their own. Finally, programmatic prescripti
ons for decision-makers’
Rosalind Shaw points out in an astute and (p. 104).
helpful afterword that the anthropological Oliver-Smith’s straig
htforward and useful
interest in memory is not simply a cover for account of the processe
s of forced migration
talking about ‘continuity’. Indeed, one could completes the rst section an
d exposes a crucial
argue that it concerns (or ought to concern) the weakness of the volume
as a whole. As he notes,
dialectic of structure and event, especially as it is ‘[T]he literature on disp
lacement and
constituted through forms of intergenerational resettlement is cluster
ed around three themes:
and popular transmission and struggle. disasters, civil and mi
litary con icts, and
Michael Lambek University of Toronto development projects’ (p.
127), leaving us to ask
what is distinctive abo
ut climate anthropology. Is
it about CO2 emissions
and the threat of
anthropogenic climate c
hange, or is it just
Environmental anthropology another take on natural
disasters, environmental
degradation, and/or ine
quality in the world? If
advocacy is to work, th
ese can and must be
C rate, Susan A. & Mark Nuttall (eds). linked theoretically an
d practically, but that
Anthropology and climate change: from requires a political co
n dence the volume lacks.
encounters to actions. 416 pp., maps, gs, Part two, ‘Anthropologi
cal encounters’,
illus., bibliogrs. Walnut Creek, Calif.: Left includes eleven case st
udies. Their geographical
Coast Press, 2009. $75.00 (paper) spread is extensive, bu
t feels arbitrary. Colombi
describes the Nez Perce
salmon shers’ sense of
The editors of this volume hope to galvanize place in the Columbia R
iver basin, Strauss tells
anthropologists to advocacy, so they and their ‘glacier stories’ in the Sw
iss Alps, as does Bolin
‘ eld consultants’ can intervene in climate for the Quechua of the Peruvi
an Andes. Lazrus
debates. It is an admirable aim. I only wish that writes of sinking Tuval
u, and Jacka considers
it were more cogently realized in what feels like rainforest consequences
in the highlands of
a bandwagon book. Papua New Guinea. Green
worries about
The twenty-four essays are divided into three funding for more TEK re
search while describing
sections. The rst, ‘Climate and culture’, begins ‘how sociocultural inequality r
educes resilience
with an archaeological perspective. The tone of to climate change among
indigenous
Hassan’s essay is curiously alarmist in spite of his Australians’ (p. 218). Hitc
hcock writes of the
message that ancient human populations increasing impoverishme
nt of the Kalahari San.
survived climate change and ‘the impact of Finan looks at shrimp aqu
aculture in Bangladesh
severe abrupt climate events is not necessarily to make a case for jobs
in applied anthropology.
negative’ (p. 42). Politically, the essay is also He borrows the ‘livelihoods
approach’ from
unsettling. It amounts to a liberal version of development studies to
assert that ‘anthropology
climate denial and jars with the rest of the provides an appropriate
lens to assess the nature
volume. of adaptation, vulnerab
ility and resilience’ (p. 162,
Peterson and Broad’s second chapter would my emphasis). Unfortunate
ly, these three
have been a better place to start. They give a buzzwords, along with t
he notion of ‘mitigation’,
concise historical account of the treatment of are used uncritically t
hroughout the volume, as if
climate and weather in anthropology, from they were useful terms
of analysis, rather than
nineteenth-century environmental determinism, neo-functionalist ways
of describing the world.
through the ‘disaster anthropology’ of the However, the clutch of
papers on the Arctic is
1960s, ethnoscience and TEK (the acronym strong. Marino and Sche
itzer describe talking
for ‘traditional ecological knowledge’), about climate change with t
he Inupiat of
ethnoecologists’ interest in coping with northwestern Alaska. Crat
e writes of horse and
uncertainty, to questions of social justice, new cattle herders in Russi
an Siberia, who, according
social movements, and climate politics. to their proverb, ‘will s
urvive until the day when
nstitute (N.S.) 16, 905-951
© Royal Anthrop
ological Institute 2010
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914 Book reviews
the Arctic Ocean melts’ (p. 145). She is visible in environme
ntal anthropology. This book
concerned with the potential loss of ‘a culture’s is another instance of
that bashing. It is based
core’ (p. 148), and ethnodiversity, both issues on work that Nazarea
and her colleagues have
that are threaded through the volume. Henshaw been doing for wel
l over a decade, and is aimed
writes modestly, but powerfully. The Baf n at modernity in two
distinct ways.
Island ‘Inuit themselves, not anthropologists, are One of those way
s is a criticism of modern
their own best advocates when it comes to agriculture, which
Nazarea sees as concerned
climate change’ (p. 161). But she allows a role for overwhelmingly with
yield. What bothers her is
the anthropologist in ‘[t]he collaborative, how the concern is p
ursued, through the
community-based work that de nes much of the development of plant
varieties that require
research in the Arctic [and] can serve as an intensive, expensi
ve, and rigid cultivation. For
important model for other regions where Nazarea, the resul
t is monocrop industrial
indigenous rights are not recognized to the agriculture, which
relies on a very small number
same extent ...’ (p. 162). The third, of varieties to prod
uce the vast majority of the
‘Anthropological action’, section of the volume crop. Her concern is n
ot, then, simply the loss of
includes chapters by Broadbent and Lantto on the family farm, b
ut rather is increasing
the Swedish Saami, and Nuttall on Greenland, uniformity in cult
ivation. That uniformity
while Stuckenberger writes about ‘Thin Ice’, a appears as the overwhe
lming in uence of a
museum exhibition she curated. Taken together, small number of se
ed companies, as
these Arctic papers serve the editors’ aims well. standardized product
ion techniques requiring
Other papers in the third section are more extensive chemical
inputs, and as the reliance on
diverse. Wilk writes on Western consumer a very small numbe
r of cultivars. For Nazarea,
culture, Bohren on car culture in USA, but neither this is an agricul
tural system that is dangerously
manages to use the word ‘capitalism’, and nor prone to disaster.
does anyone else. Fiske offers an ethnography of Her other atta
ck on modernity is a re ection
US government policy makers and carbon of her concern wit
h industrial agriculture, but is
trading, but without reference to the erce cast more broadly. T
hat is her criticism of the
oppositional arguments of climate activists. uniformitarian app
roach that she sees as
Puntenney describes the UN as ‘at the centre’ of underlying the moderni
st worldview more
global efforts to ‘confront the impacts of climate’ generally, which she c
alls ‘linearity’. This
(p. 311), but mentions neither the global oil, coal, uniformitarianism
may be based on reasonable
gas, and motor industries that oppose such motives, such as t
he desire to produce
efforts, nor those that believe that the UN inexpensive food.
However, it tends to end up as
processes are nothing like radical enough. Button a search for the o
ne best solution to a problem,
and Peterson focus on a Bayou community to whether of food su
pply or anything else, and
demonstrate the importance of participatory the wholesale impl
ementation of that solution.
research. Finally, the paper I most enjoyed is The result is a lo
ss of diversity, and also of the
Barlett and Stewart’s ‘Shifting the university: playful, the irreveren
t, the activities pursued
faculty engagement and curriculum change’. simply because they
are enjoyable.
There is good work here. But the volume is The vehicle fo
r these attacks is a loose
marred by repetition and dull, predictable description of ‘seed
-savers’. These are the people
writing. More crucially, ‘climate anthropology’ who continue to cultiv
ate plant varieties that are
remains a catch-all category and there is no no longer importan
t in large-scale, commercial
beating heart, no political centre, which could agriculture, the ‘he
irloom seeds’ of the book’s
inspire anthropologists to advocacy in ways that title. Because Naz
area has been carrying out
might make a difference. research related t
o this for so long, the examples
Nancy Lindisfarne School of Oriental and that she invokes c
ome from a variety of places,
African Studies though she devotes
the greatest attention to
people in the Phil
ippines, parts of Latin America,
Nazarea, V irginia D. Heirloom seeds and their and the southern U
nited States. I use the word
keepers: marginality and memory in the ‘examples’ advisedly,
for the book is not a
conservation of biological diversity. xii, 193 pp., systematic study
in any conventional sense.
illus., bibliogr. Tucson: Univ. Arizona Press, Rather, it is the
pursuit of a theme and the use of
2005. $35.00 (cloth) occasional illustr
ations to pursue that theme.
The theme itse
lf is implicit in what I have said
Modernity has been taking a bashing in thus far, a challe
nge to modernist uniformity. In
anthropology, and recently this is especially the early part of
the book, Nazarea links this
----------------------- Page 11-----------------------
Book reviews 915

challenge to Barbara McClintock’s work on documentary, this one-hour
DVD will be an
genes that move from one position to another in extremely useful teachin
g resource. It presents
a chromosome as a result of stress, and to Ernst anthropological insights
prompted by
Bloch’s description of itinerant French lmmaking grounded in long-t
erm familiarity
booksellers of the seventeenth and eighteenth and involvement with a c
ommunity. It
centuries. At a basic level, however, this linking also demonstrates the be
ne ts of an
provides little more than a metaphorical anthropologically traine
d lm crew. Only the
rationale for Nazarea’s purpose in the volume. anthropologist, Ton Otto,
appears in frame, but
That purpose is a celebration of diversity, both his two lmmaking and doct
oral student
genetic and social, not an analysis of it. It is collaborators, Christian
Suhr and Steffen
pursued through descriptions of changes in Dalsgaard, are very much
present in the intimate
agricultural practices that reduce genetic camerawork and excellent
continuity editing.
diversity, of the varieties of plants that are Ton Otto’s re exive and expl
anatory comments
lost and of the individuals who still tend the to camera and as backgro
und narrative work
old crops. well to ground the lm in
the complex
Of her description of these three forms of negotiations and challen
ges he faces when
diversity, what Nazarea has to say about the organizing funerary exch
anges, most particularly
individuals is the most telling. These people are a pukankokon (to open th
e money), for his
the focus of much contemporary adopted father. The nal,
Rouch-inspired section
anthropological concern, the underdogs who of the lm, a screening to
the community three
resist efforts to bring them into conformity with years after the initial l
ming, serves to
dominant structures. This resistance, though, is re-establish the mandate
for the lm and af rm
not militant or even, in many cases, the role of the key char
acters.
self-conscious. Rather, it is the resistance of The lm is divided by n
ine chapters that
something like indifference. These are people enable dipping in and ou
t for teaching and
whose values and orientations lie at right angles further exploration: ‘Hous
e of Ngat Selan’,
to what Nazarea sees as the values and ‘Announcement’, ‘Shopping for
the ceremonies’,
orientations of modernity. These are people ‘The day of the ceremonies’,
‘Relatives come
embedded in the past and the social relations with contributions’, ‘The ce
ment ceremony’,
that de ne it and that infuse the places where ‘Pukankokon: to open the mon
ey’, ‘Division of
they live; they talk about their practices in terms money’, and ‘Three years lat
er’.
of personalities rather than things; they are The lm begins with Ton
Otto’s rst return to
concerned with pleasurable celebration in the the village since his ad
opted father died. As one
doing rather than ef cient productivity in of his most well-off sons,
he feels duty-bound to
the result. help organize funerary r
ituals his family have
Nazarea presents interesting stories as she been unable to carry out
because of lack of
pursues her central argument. At times, funds. This draws him in
to many conversations
however, readers may nd themselves wishing and debates with his fathe
r’s clan and others on
for a more judicious consideration of the vices the need for the pukanko
kon and who should be
and virtues of both modernity and diversity than recognized genealogicall
y through requests for
she provides. In the absence of such help and the gift-giving
.
considerations, we are left with a celebration of The discussions and a
sides to camera
the small and the marginal. beautifully demonstrate
that what is ‘traditional’
James G. Carrier Indiana and Oxford Brookes or custom is at once fam
ilial, political, and
Universities personal. As Sakumai Yep
, the leader of the
Sakumai clan, to which T
on Otto has been
adopted, explains to cam
era at the end of the
lm: ‘I myself perform the c
ulture, I myself can
Ethnographic lm change it’ (57.12). The self
-aware and locally
recognized ‘game-playing’ as
pect of the
performance of this vita
l life-cycle ritual is made
Suhr, C hristian, Ton Otto & Steffen evident on many more occ
asions. This is one of
Dalsgaard . Ngat is dead: studying mortuary the joys of the lm. We ge
t to relate to
traditions. DVD video. Moesgaard Film, 2009. individuals with complex
motivations and
af liations, who demonstra
te in their
Straddling the permeable genres of particularity and person
alities a subversion of
ethnographic, participatory, and narrator-driven some of the terms that T
on Otto is attempting to
Journal of the Royal Anthropological In
stitute (N.S.) 16, 905-951
© Royal Anthropo
logical Institute 2010
----------------------- Page 12-----------------------
916 Book reviews
frame in an understanding to us the audience. W erbner, R ichar
d. Séance re ections. DVD
The depth of involvement with the key video. English
subtitles. Distributed by the
individuals serves to weaken the stated aim ‘to RAI, 2005.
understand why people maintain these
traditions that take up so much of their time and W erbner, R ichar
d. Shade seekers and the
involve them so deeply’ (3.06), raising questions mixer. DVD video.
English subtitles.
as to why the key characters argue, or not, for Distributed by
the RAI, 2007.
the need to carry out actions ‘traditionally’. This W erbner, R ichard. E
ncountering Eloyi. DVD
seemingly unintentional, but very effective, video. English
subtitles. Distributed by the
incongruity, more evident after several viewings, RAI, 2008.
encourages a further encouragement of
re exivity, as we the audience wonder how Ton W erbner, R ichard.
Holy hustlers. DVD video.
Otto has framed his research questions in terms English subtitl
es. Distributed by the RAI,
of how he has imagined his audience. As a result 2009.
the DVD would also have bene ted from more
references to textual materials for those who Trans guration and r
e exivity are key cinematic
want to gain further general information about subjects in this m
agni cent series of four lms
this area of Papua New Guinea, and more documenting the ar
guments over personhood
particular context to Ton Otto’s long-term that pervade popular
efforts to achieve
research. well-being in cont
emporary Botswana. Richard
There are wonderful moments of Ton Otto Werbner’s lms follow
Njebe and Martha
gaining insight through receiving and giving Gabanakgosi, a hus
band and wife having
explanations, on one occasion as his sister dif culties conceivi
ng a child, as they travel
explains why someone is angry, and on another, between rural vill
ages and the city of Gaborone
why one should expect complaints. In fact, as to consult diviner
s and church leaders. In deeply
the lm develops, we start to see the possibility contested ways, thes
e ritual specialists address
of complaint in a more balanced light, in terms shared presumption
s among Batswana that
of ethnographic speci cities and as rhetorical personal well-being
depends on the perceptions
strategies that both re ect and constitute the of others, on placem
ent with others, and on the
depth and breadth of relationships that in their manner in which a
person incorporates
duration and complexity cannot but lead to substances derived
from others into his or her
debates over the rights and responsibilities body. In searching
for well-being, sufferers
precipitated when someone dies. Half way commonly aim to be
trans gured in aesthetic
through the lm, it is made explicit that custom terms. They may seek
cleansing from senyama, a
is talk, and that ‘people are different ... some condition of occult
darkness documented in
have this idea and others have another (Panou Shade seekers and
the mixer associated with being
Selan, 32.42) and later, ‘some people will never unrecognized by ance
stors and powerful others,
be satis ed ... that is part of custom’ (33.11). or pray to God to ‘reviv
e all their goods dressed
As an ethnographic lm that demonstrates in glory’, in the word
s of a church prophet in
the value and developing insights of long-term Encountering Eloyi
. Diviners and church leaders
eldwork, this is excellent. As an exercise in make forceful and so
metimes domineering
visual anthropology and development of efforts to trans gur
e themselves and their clients
Rouch’s work, it would have bene ted from through forms of dress
, placement in light or
more commentary about the power of the shade, and express
ions of vicarious suffering.
camera and its role, as Ton Otto acknowledges, Like trans guration,
re ection on the motives
in the very ‘competition that is part and parcel and practices of pow
erful others is a necessary
of exchange ceremonies on Balau’. We also see condition of well-be
ing, given the precariousness
only a third of the team on camera, and often it of persons’ moral pl
acement in others’ regard, as
is not clear who people speaking to camera well as pervasive
concern about deceptive
actually are and to whom they imagine they are appearances and th
e potential for self-
speaking. More inclusion of the interviewers and aggrandisement at
the expense of public good.
particular questions of who the speakers to The rst pair of l
ms, Séance re ections and
camera supposed would see the lm would have Shade seekers and th
e mixer, focus on practices of
opened up the lm to wider discussions of the envisioning ancestry
in the village of Moremi in
kinds of relationships (imagined and real) the northeastern T
swapong region of Botswana.
constituted in lmmaking. The diviner Rantii i
nduces Njebe to envision the
Mike Poltorak University of Kent wrath of his decea
sed grandmother by
----------------------- Page 13-----------------------
Book reviews 917

indicating the positions of the fallen lots, as well Werbner’s lms compelli
ngly display the
as by looking directly into Njebe’s eyes as Rantii arguments of images arisi
ng from the diverse
indicates through gestures how the spirit styles of trans guration
and re exivity that are
searches parts of the body to nd where the necessary conditions for
well-being in Botswana.
trouble lies. Rantii himself is an object of Like the medical techn
ologies shown by Julie
scepticism and suspicion on the part of four Livingston to transfor
m the signi cance of
prominent Moremi elders who in Shade seekers debility and humanity,
in Botswana varieties of
re ect critically on his practice of combining religious assertion deri
ve their form and
divination by lots with biblical testifying and meaning from aesthetic
s of well-being.
prayer. Villagers envision through the image of Fred
erick Klaits Duke University
seriti (dignity) the imperative to have other
people regard one’s conduct in the best possible
light. One who has achieved the shadowy aura
of seriti is seen to have obtained the blessings of Evolutionary anthropol
ogy
ancestors by balancing ambitions for personal
gain with action for the public good. While
Rantii asserts in his praises that he has ‘created Fuentes, Agustín. Evoluti
on of human
increase’, village elders fear that his insistence on behavior. xiv, 300 pp
., tables, gs, illus.,
‘mixing things up’ indicates self-aggrandizing bibliogr. Oxford: Univ.
Press, 2008. $79.95
tendencies that cause witchcraft and drought. (cloth)
Encountering Eloyi and Holy hustlers shift focus
to the city, where young male Christian The topic of this book
is human origins in the
Apostolic prophets likewise assert powerfully light of modern evolut
ionary theory. Instead of
their capacity to foster well-being, but do not making his own argumen
t, the author surveys
aim at reconciliation with ancestors. Instead, the proposals currently
in circulation, totting up
Eloyi prophets call upon God to help them ght points for and against a
nd attempting a
the pervasive in uence of demons and witches, compromise. The outcome,
I am afraid, was, for
drawing on Old Testament authority for this reviewer, a tediou
s read.
sacri ces aimed at protection and blessing. Eloyi ‘Clearly’, we are reminde
d in the preface, ‘a
prophets often induce fear in their clients and large part of the gene
ral public has a poor
extract money in private séances, understanding of human ev
olution, and even in
de-familiarizing them with their accustomed broader academic circle
s that understanding is
visions of the world and leading them to not always much better’.
By way of a remedy,
attribute evil intent to kin and neighbours. Yet to Fuentes offers ‘a synthe
sis of the structural
regard these prophets as simply cynical would similarities and differ
ences across published
be to overlook their empathetic enactments of hypotheses/proposals fo
r the evolution of
clients’ sufferings with their own bodies, and human behavior’, aiming ‘to e
lucidate common
their public vulnerability to the witchcraft themes and patterns and
move toward a more
substances they extract from clients’ houses. In integrated perspective(s)
on human behavioural
Encountering Eloyi, prophets trans gure Njebe evolution’. ‘Rather than pres
ent a dogmatic
and Martha’s house as an abode of witchcraft as assertion that there is o
ne way to understand
they ransack their possessions, the bishop how human behavior evol
ved’, the author
likening the destruction to ‘maintenance’ continues, ‘I present an over
view of ideas,
necessary for the well-being of house and paradigmatic approache
s, and major hypotheses
persons. This material presents an important and proposals’. It’s as if
the author were
counterpoint to my own book Death in a church conducting a poll on th
e basis of a new system
of life (2010) documenting the efforts of the of proportional represe
ntation.
female bishop of the Baitshepi Apostolic Church The book consists o
f nine chapters plus an
in Gaborone to foster love, forgiveness, and epilogue. Chapter 1 war
ns: ‘Misunderstanding
resignation following deaths. Baitshepi members human behavioural evolu
tion can result in
viewing Holy hustlers expressed outrage at a potentially dangerous
ideas’. Chapter 2 reviews
scene in which a male prophet shows the history of evolutio
nary theory, touching on
compassion to Eloyi adherents by weeping like a Darwin, Wallace, Baldw
in, Washburn, Tinbergen,
mother over their sufferings. How, Baitshepi Hamilton, Wilson, Triv
ers, and Dawkins. The
members asked, is a person to console herself author isolates ‘kin sele
ction, reciprocal altruism,
with the prospect of eternal life if she beholds sociobiology and the se
l sh gene’ as four
pain on a prophet’s face? different ‘perspectives’, not
ing reassuringly that
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918 Book reviews
all four ‘intertwine to produce a shared basis, a All allegedly agree o
n the importance of
set of common understandings about ‘language’, ‘tool use’, ‘the
nuclear family’, and
evolutionary systems ’. This might seem an odd ‘the heterosexual pair-
bond’. But we also read
claim since sociobiology by de nition is the use that monogamy ‘received
little note’ in the
of sel sh gene theory, is the theory of kin thirty-eight hypothes
es considered, and that
selection, and is the theory of reciprocal child-rearing by ‘mul
tiple caretakers’ is
altruism. Given such joint authorship, it’s hardly commonly assumed. ‘Sham
menstruation’
surprising that the perspectives appear to emphatically does n
ot assume nuclear families,
‘intertwine’. The next chapter introduces ‘basic any more than does ‘co-oper
ative breeding’.
assumptions’, focusing on HBE (human Chapter 6 leaves thes
e and other contradictions
behavioural ecology), EP (evolutionary hanging in the air.
psychology), DIT (dual inheritance theory), and Towards the end
of his book, the author
memetics. Again, puzzlingly, the author equates attempts a synthesi
s. He calls it ‘a hybrid of
1970s ‘sociobiology’ with 1940s evolutionary biology an
d anthropology’. Each
‘Neo-Darwinism’, treating sociobiology as topic – for example ‘male-f
emale co-operation’ –
something quite different from kin selection and is discussed under
the headings ‘fossil data’,
reciprocal altruism. Chapter 4 offers a reasonably ‘comparative data’, ‘para
digmatic views’, ‘my
up-to-date summary of the fossil and cultural thoughts’, and ‘testabi
lity’. Under ‘my thoughts’,
records of human evolution, followed by a brief the author tells us
of his hunches, his biases, his
discussion of ‘behavioural inferences’. doubts and tentative op
inions. At every stage,
The core of the book is chapter 5. ‘I have he attempts to nd the
middle road –
made a concerted and largely successful effort’, somewhere between nat
ure and culture,
explains the author, ‘to capture and present a xenophobic cruelty an
d loving solidarity, Charles
realistic and accurate overview of the main Darwin and Margaret
Mead. For this reviewer,
perspectives and proposals.’ Hypothesis 1 is the message is unconv
incing and the project
Darwin’s The descent of man. Hypothesis 2 is misconceived.
E.O. Wilson’s 1975 Sociobiology: the new synthesis, Chris
Knight Comenius University
which apparently proposes a ‘state wherein
most human groups are territorial and
xenophobic’. Hypothesis 7 is the idea that Rousseau, J érôme. Rethi
nking social evolution:
‘cruelty, especially in males, is a human the perspective f
rom middle-range societies. x,
adaptation’, this explaining such things as 291 pp., maps, gs,
tables, bibliogr. London,
bloody rites of sacri ce and the Ithaca, N.Y.: McG
ill-Queen’s Univ. Press,
‘pain-blood-death’ complex supposedly 2006. £48.00 (cloth)
fundamental to ‘forager society’. In all,
thirty-eight variegated hypotheses are violently Rethinking social e
volution is written clearly. The
juxtaposed and brie y summarized, leaving arguments are set out
carefully and many
chapter 6 to sort out the mess. detailed case studi
es are analysed and
There is a huge problem with all this. Mostly, compared. The book
is squarely in the tradition
the supposedly different ‘hypotheses’ operate on of Marx, White, Sahlins
, and Service. For
such different levels that they cannot be Rousseau, social ev
olution means progressive
compared or forced into competition. For evolution, from sim
ple to complex societies, and
example, ‘tit-for-tat co-operation’ – treated as a not Darwinian adaptation
to speci c
distinct hypothesis – may well be an internal environments. Althoug
h there is more than one
component of all thirty-eight. The same applies way of reviewing th
is book (see Paul Roscoe’s
to Fuentes’s own hypotheses, which is termed review in Cambridge A
nthropology Journal 18: 3,
‘co-operation – a general pattern’. In what sense 2008, 441-2 for an altern
ative perspective), I set
is this an alternative to, say, ‘co-operative out my take on the vo
lume as follows.
breeding’, ‘grandmothering’, or ‘sham In explaining how human
societies move
menstruation’ – narratives focusing on beyond absolute simplic
ity, Rousseau relies
co-operative strategies speci cally between heavily on Woodburn’s d
istinction between
females? The author is aware of this dif culty but immediate and delayed
return. He accepts
doesn’t consider it insuperable. Woodburn’s claim that t
he distribution of
Table 6.7 lists ‘the most prominent immediate and delayed
return systems cannot
commonalities from the proposals’. All be explained by ecolo
gy (contra Layton in Man
apparently agree on the importance of con ict 1986: 18-33), and tha
t all immediate return
between groups and co-operation within them. societies are hunte
r-gatherers, on the base-line of
----------------------- Page 15-----------------------
Book reviews 919

social evolution. His explanation for the strategies tend to occur
in social or ecological
simplicity of forager society is based on a contexts where everyone
expects to suffer
tautology: ‘the human need for sociality has two shortage at different, but
unpredictable, times in
sources: humans, like other primates, are social’ the future. Friedman, in a
study of the Kachin
(p. 44), and yet, in ‘simple human societies ... cited by Rousseau (’Dynamics
and
members are trying to remain autonomous’ transformation of a tribal
system: the Kachin
(p. 49). Middle-range societies emerge with the example’, L’Homme, 1975), at
taches particular
transformation from immediate to delayed importance to the need f
or regular movement if
return. This comes about because ‘it is onerous swidden agriculture is to
remain viable, causing
to be obliged to share the product of one’s the instability of local-l
evel leadership that leaves
labour with others’ (p. 61). the Kachin stranded on one
of the lower rungs
Providing the term ‘progressive evolution’ is of social complexity. Rousse
au’s example of the
expanded to encompass any unidirectional trend collapse of large game s
haring when Chinese
driven by the dynamics of an ecological or social traders come to the Kaya
n with refrigerator-
system, and not con ned to the classic equipped boats shows that
people can adjust
band→tribe→state model, then such temporal their strategies when circum
stances change.
processes can be identi ed in both ecological Even in Darwinian evolutio
n, ecology is the
and social systems. However, comparison of ‘backdrop’ against which the
relative tness of
societies that are not historically linked risks the alternative genetically
generated variants is
fallacy that Needham (1963) identi ed in his tested.
introduction to Durkheim and Mauss’s Primitive The concept of tness la
ndscapes was
classi cation: lacking any evidence that change introduced in evolutionary
biology to model the
has taken place in a particular society, they ways in which different
species interact during
assume that which they hope to establish, their evolution (e.g. pr
edators and prey), making
namely that state A is prior to state B. A formal it possible to explain d
irectionality in natural
congruence is not evidence of an evolutionary selection. Rousseau nds t
he tness landscape
progression. Moreover, to write as Rousseau concept very useful for
explaining social change,
does, that the Nuer have ‘incipient notions of but I found no indication
of how Rousseau’s
strati cation’ (p. 113) implies knowledge of the non-Darwinian tness might be
measured.
future course of Nuer society. Tracing Rousseau sees agency as
the key to liberating
archaeologically or historically known trajectories humans from the constrai
nts of ecology.
would be preferable. ‘Self-interest is not suf ci
ent to explain social
Interesting as the internal dynamics of social evolution, but social ev
olution cannot be
systems are, I am puzzled by Rousseau’s understood without it’ (p. 2
27). However, he
rejection of social adaptation. He does not concludes that ‘the uninte
nded consequences of
consider why some societies are conveniently purposeful change and mu
tation and selection
stuck in the middle range, why complex social can have unexpected long
-term consequences’
systems sometimes collapse into simpler ones, (p. 228, my italics). He
re, perhaps, the
or why farmers or herders occasionally revert to approaches of the review
er and reviewed nally
foraging. Rousseau objects that the hypothesis converge.
‘that alternative practices may differ in the Robert Layto
n University of Durham
survival advantage that they provide’ (p. 32)
cannot readily be tested because, in many
small-scale societies, there are no alternative
Globalization, nationali
sm, and
strategies competing with each other. But
comparative method, as used by Rousseau, has diaspora
also been used to test hypotheses concerning
human social adaptation. While at one point he
accepts the adaptive value of sharing and A lexiades, M iguel N.
(ed.). Mobility and
co-operation in human evolution, Rousseau migration in indigen
ous Amazonia:
argues that adaptation merely imposes limits on contemporary ethnoec
ological perspectives.
agency. He does not consider whether agents’ xviii, 310 pp., maps,
tables, bibliogrs. Oxford,
behaviour is itself adaptive, for themselves or for New York: Berghahn B
ooks, 2009. £45.00
those who exploit them. Ecology (resource (cloth)
distribution) does not, contra Rousseau, just
impose limits on agency; it also encourages Despite an upsurge of in
terest in the historical
particular types of social strategy. Egalitarian contingency of nature an
d of human-
nstitute (N.S.) 16, 905-951
© Royal Anthrop
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920 Book reviews
environmental interactions in Amazonia, or severing relation
ships both to the land –
assumptions persist that its indigenous peoples through toponymy, fo
r example – and to
are historically emplaced and spatially static. So people, living and d
ead. A short chapter by
asserts this timely volume, which proposes to Pinedo-Vasquez and P
adoch, while less
assess interrelations between ethnoecology and concerned with knowl
edge per se, draws
movement, migration and displacement. Not attention to how pea
sant households commonly
only have mobility patterns in general been span rural, urban, a
nd even suburban locales,
given relatively short shrift by scholars, but, as and Newing further h
ighlights the complexity
Alexiades notes in his introduction, relatively few and dynamism of rura
l-urban relationships in her
Amazonian societies presently occupy the same analysis of the issu
es raised by high personal
areas they did a century or even a few decades mobility for communa
l natural resource
ago, raising important questions about how management projects.
such dislocations bear on environmental The close connec
tions between ways of
knowledge, practices, ideologies, and identities. engaging nature and
the management of ethnic
As many of the contributors show, notions of boundaries constitut
e a second salient theme.
knowledge loss or acculturation following such Micarelli considers
how traditional and emerging
spatial upheaval generally fail to square with forms of ecological
understanding are involved
outcomes that instead often involve dynamic in mediating relatio
ns between ethnic groups
processes of appropriation, experimentation, and to the state in
a Colombian resguardo.
and innovation. Dudley examines proc
esses of ethnogenesis and
The book grew out of a panel of the Ninth landscape transforma
tion in two Lecos
International Congress of the International communities, and Zen
t argues that issues of
Society of Ethnobiology, held at the University of access to scarce res
ources, natural or otherwise,
Kent in 2004, and the approaches span social have shaped Piaroa e
thnic frontiers and
anthropology, historical ecology, geography, migration patterns s
ince pre-contact times.
ethnobotany, botany, and evolutionary biology. Thirdly, several con
tributors show how group
The title notwithstanding, three chapters migrations can preci
pitate knowledge diffusion
(Pinedo-Vasquez and Padoch, Newing, Voeks) and enhancement. Cle
ment, Rival, and Cole’s
focus on non-indigenous peoples, which is ambitiously multidis
ciplinary chapter assesses
appropriate given both their evident mobility the likely role of h
uman movement in promoting
and the uidity of contemporary Amazonian processes of plant dom
estication. Alexiades and
identities. The interdisciplinarity is refreshing and Peluso argue that re
location and sedentarization
valuable, but also accentuates a considerable prompted Ese Eja to
increase their
diversity of interests and concerns. Alexiades’s pharmacopoeia by appro
priating medicinal
introduction reads more like a literature review plant knowledge from
outsiders. Athayde et al.
than an attempt to frame a general theory or explore the revitali
zation of Kaiabi basketry
position, but he offers a useful and following their relo
cation to the Xingu, and
encyclopaedic overview of the pre- and Voeks, focusing on t
he African diaspora in Brazil,
post-conquest history of indigenous migrations, demonstrates the uidi
ty and adaptability of
as well as the current state of play in Amazonian ethnobotanical knowl
edge as it crosses even vast
historical ecology and ethnoecology. ethnic and geographi
cal divides.
The book is structured in two parts. The rst, An intriguing pict
ure emerges of how people
entitled ‘Circulations’, deals more explicitly with subtly recon gure relation
ships to the land as
mobility patterns; ‘Transformations’, the well as to others as the
y travel through space.
lengthier second half, shifts attention to the The book raises more
questions than it answers,
consequences of earlier group migrations. however, about conte
mporary forms of
Amidst the broad range of issues addressed, at Amazonian mobility.
Only two chapters
least three common themes can be discerned. (Pinedo-Vasquez and
Padoch, and Newing)
The rst is the relational character of Amazonian present relevant quant
itative data, and only one
environmental knowledge. This underpins Rival’s (Feather) explores in
much depth the meanings
argument that the ethnobotany of the mobile, of travelling to ind
igenous peoples themselves.
foraging Huaorani, which is highly contextual Little attempt is ma
de to connect or differentiate
and prioritizes phenology, remains no less the consequences of,
say, forced relocation,
developed than that of more sedentary seasonal migration,
and spontaneous individual
cultivators. Feather reveals how Nahua journeys. The author
s nevertheless make a
journeying is closely associated with the convincing collectiv
e case for an understanding
acquisition of knowledge and with establishing of ecological knowle
dge as historically
----------------------- Page 17-----------------------
Book reviews 921

contingent in space as well as time, effectively Creolizing practice
s take place in the sight of
complementing the importance now placed on powerful actors and ins
titutional controls. There
local historicity with a sense of different ways of is always, therefore, a
compromise with power
inhabiting and relating to space. in any attempt to local
ize ‘home’ and ‘freedom’.
Harry Walker London School of Economics and Hence, creole subjectiv
ity, and the tactics of
Political Science placing the self, invol
ve making marks whereby
egalitarian and hierarc
hical gestures are
conjoined. The forms of
equality derived cannot
C richlow, M ichaeline A. Globalization and be appreciated without
understanding the
the post-creole imagination: notes on eeing deployments of hierarchy
they have entailed. As
the plantation. xvi, 305 pp., gs, bibliogr. an argument, this is a us
eful corrective. Within
London, Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, an ‘entangled modernity’, t
he contradictions
2009. £59.00 (cloth) £14.99 (paper) and refractions created by
these hierarchico-
egalitarian gestures ar
e all too visible.
The debate around ‘creolization’ has fairly Crichlow talks about ‘limboin
g struggles for
well-established positions. From one side, the place’ and ‘secreting respe
ctability’ as aspects of
view is that the remit of the term has so a creole tactics. In th
e absence of
expanded that it has lost whatever analytical institutionalized right
s and citizenship,
purchase it once possessed. In particular it has creolization becomes a
pragmatics of
lost contact with the regional background which ‘citizenness’ derived from
the activity of homing
gave it its original signi cance. As Sidney Mintz or placing freedoms. The
elaboration of these
has pointed out, we seem at times to be using and other images and me
taphors is the book’s
the word, often fairly loosely, to talk about major strength.
‘change’. From the other corner, creolization Some weaknesses of the
book come to the
continues to be a valuable descriptor of social fore in its treatment o
f facts and factual debates.
processes in a world where people move or are To evidence her model o
f creolization, Crichlow
displaced, where practices and ideas have to be deploys arguments aroun
d post-slave
reformulated; where the emphasis is on peasantries and the var
ious economic
searching for, rather than reiterating, adequate trans gurations that have
taken place in St Lucia
institutional forms. Some sophisticated attempts and Jamaica. She dismis
ses previous research: we
to salvage creolization have been made along are told that (unspeci ed
) previous accounts
these lines, and Crichlow’s book is one. This is a have romanticized peasant
‘resistance’ and
demanding and provocative text. It also has a essentialized peasants
at the expense of
rushed quality, as if the author wanted to understanding the ‘in uence
of the world
publish it as quickly as possible; but, then again, economy’ (p. 82). This is
not a very generous
there is a creole feel here too that certainly rendering of long-stand
ing regional debates.
carries the writing along in an engaging way. When Crichlow does supp
ly facts on rural
Crichlow makes a number of insightful adaptation in St Lucia
and Jamaica, these largely
interventions, usually by way of pinpointing a conform to a story fami
liar from the work of
problem in how creolization has been used and Besson and others. One
case study in particular
then bringing new analogies into play. She (p. 147), of a woman se
lling corporately owned
argues that creolization best describes the tactics family land for persona
l gain, immediately calls
or strategies of a self who, while ‘ eeing the to mind the many discussion
s of these kinds of
plantation’, simultaneously tries to ‘place’ his or tactics or ‘crab antics’ made by
Besson over
her freedoms somewhere. ‘Homing’ or ‘placing’ the years.
freedoms becomes the book’s central motif. The There has been some p
oor editing of this text
plantation initiates a trajectory and a rhythm of that does not do great
credit to Duke University
escape (there is a debt to Benitez Rojo in this). Press. An interesting,
if slightly thin, discussion
There are several lines of argument. One is that of St Lucian satirists
becomes jumbled in chapter
creolization must account for vertical 4 with apparently contr
adictory facts expounded
(hierarchical) as well as horizontal (equal) social in different places (cf
. pp. 118 and 125). That said,
relationships in its guring. This point, though the arguments here are si
gni cant – once they
not absolutely new, is well presented. An have been reassembled.
Crichlow rightly
attractive mnemonic is invoked – the cross. In criticizes Burton for ass
uming a teleological
order to mark a cross, the hand must make an stance from which to ju
dge Caribbean ludic
adequate conjunction of the vertical and the practices as merely ‘oppo
sitional’ rather than
horizontal against a speci c ground. ‘resistant’ (p. 75). The disc
ussion of St Lucian
nstitute (N.S.) 16, 905-951
© Royal Anthro
----------------------- Page 18-----------------------
922 Book reviews
satire supports her critique. This is a book, then, contradictory, cont
ingent, and contested
that clearly attempts a mimesis of the creole or processes of meanin
g and power.
‘post-creole’ processes with which it is engaged. Dube’s contributors s
et about illuminating
And there is in it a heady combination of the this. By way of the
Bandung Conference, Dipesh
revelatory, the obscure, and the analytically Chakrabarty would u
nsettle an easy
valuable. periodization of th
e twentieth century: of
Huon Wardle University of St Andrews anti-colonialism gi
ving way to post-colonialism
and then to globali
zation. Michael Herzfeld
compares Greece and
Thailand in order to
Dube, Saurabh (ed.). Enchantments of overcome the absenc
e of anthropological
modernity: empire, nation, globalization. xv, theorization ground
ed in non-colonial
504 pp., bibliogrs. London, New Delhi: dominions. Saidiya
Hartman examines the
Routledge, 2009. Rs 850 (cloth) constitutive nature
of loss in the making of an
African Diaspora an
d the role of grief in
To read this informative, scholarly, and sincere transatlantic ident
i cation. William Mazzarella
volume of critical re ections on ‘modernity’ is to explores affect as a terr
ain that is pre-subjective
become apprised of the size and seriousness of without being pre-s
ocial. Jean and John
the issue. Can knowledge, ethics, and practice Comaroff interrogat
e the rural South African
that begin locally (entailing a particular history resolution to a con
tradiction at the core of
and cultural framing) possess a universal human neoliberal capitali
sm: offering wealth to those in
provenance, applicability, and truth? Can control of its tech
nologies while threatening the
knowledge be differentiated into kinds: very livelihoods of
those who are not.
‘Humans can speak’ being, then, absolutely Turning attention t
o the subcontinent, Deena
differentiable from ‘Humans can speak the word Heath explores the fa
ilure of the colonial
of God’? Are there not gradations of human government in India t
o regulate ‘obscene’
rights: ‘I can bene t from the deliverances of the publications effectivel
y, while Milind Wakankar
scienti c method’ undercutting, then, ‘I can re-examines Indian litera
ry-critical thought under
bene t from the deliverances of religious colonial conditions.
Naveeda Khan approaches
tradition’? Islamic iconoclasm as
an affective form of excess,
The volume doubts the possibility of concealing prior in
timacy with images. Veena
‘revitalizing liberalism’ (Craig Calhoun), Das uses the lens of ma
dness to explore the
however, and reinstating humanist universalism modernity of the ex
cluded urban poor of India.
as a legitimate and necessary intellectual and Ashis Nandy feels t
hat ‘development’ will not
moral endeavour. There are nineteen eradicate poverty b
ecause the concept is
contributions, from a set of eminent scholars of unstable and rarely
refers to absolute destitution;
anthropology, history, and literature (although a moreover, democrati
c politics in multi-ethnic
number of the essays have appeared before, and societies entail co
-opting majorities into
sadly there is no index). The volume is part of patronage structure
s that remove poverty from
Routledge’s ‘Critical Asian Studies’ series and the top of political agen
das. It was for the latter
printed in India: the subcontinent is a major reason, explains Fa
isal Devji, that Muhammad
focus of the contributions. Iqbal urged that Mu
slims in pre-partition India
Contrary to narratives of modernity that be assured dispropo
rtionate political
describe the triumphal rise of rationality, representation (ove
r against Hindus): here was a
universalism, and disenchantment, Veena Das vision of democrati
c rights and ethical advance
explains in her foreword, this book tracks based not on Europe’s
perverted egos but on an
enchantment as a major affect. Saurabh Dube appreciation of the
role of religion (as against
elaborates. Modernity’s purported rupture from pure thought) in elev
ating individuals and
the world of magic, superstition, and hierarchy is transforming societ
ies. For Gandhi, too,
itself a mythic narration: ‘enticements’ of according to Ajay Skari
a, the religious politics of
representation and practice lie behind the myth the ashram were the
route to a ‘neighbourly
of modernity’s immaculate origin, the magic of nationalism’. And yet,
Uday Mehta reveals,
money, market, and state, and the hierarchical Gandhi claimed to b
e a loyal subject of the
oppositions between emotion and reason, ritual British Empire, con
sidered as a uni ed moral
and rationality. These mythemes are formative of (rather than politi
cal) project. Freedom from
the ‘modern’, comprising its condition of colonialism did not nee
d to wait because an
knowing. However, there remain ‘plural, ‘ethical cosmopolitanis
m’ recognized all
disjunctive articulations of modernity’: individuals everywher
e as having the capacity for
----------------------- Page 19-----------------------
Book reviews 923

moral action and self-control, whatever the level that, say, cultural ide
nti cations, religious
of social development. traditions, and communa
l solidarities are matters
The theme of cosmopolitanism – the attempt of subjective aesthetics,
while the individual
to frame liberalism beyond national right and the human cap
acity to exercise
memberships – is pursued by Craig Calhoun. aesthetic judgements are
universally recognized.
Cosmopolitanism cannot of itself provide an Nigel Rappor
t University of St Andrews
adequate defence against empire, capitalism,
fascism, or communism. To counter the illiberal
manoeuvrings of the likes of Malaysian Prime French, Jan Hoffman
. Legalizing identities:
Minister Mahathir Mohamad – who claims that becoming black or Indi
an in Brazil’s northeast.
human rights are the new Christianity, enabling xxiv, 247 pp., maps,
illus., bibliogr. Chapel
European countries to invade, and subvert local Hill: Univ. North Ca
rolina Press, 2009. $59.95
traditions and values – cosmopolitanism cannot (cloth), $22.50 (paper
)
simply conceptualize the world in terms of
diverse individuals: collective projects, cultural Studies of race and eth
nicity in Latin America
identities, and communal solidarities must also traditionally tended to
separate out the study of
have their starting-points within it. Liberal race and of people who
are now often called
democracy must emerge locally, empowering Afro-descendants from t
he study of ethnicity and
people in the context of actual conditions: amid those labelled as indig
enous. In the last decade,
traditions, commitments, and belongings. an increasing number of
scholars have tried to
It was Hegel, Walter Mignolo explains, who bring these two current
s into the same stream,
gave Kant’s eighteenth-century ‘cosmopolitan’ questioning the analytic divi
des between
vision a synchronicity such that the East and blackness and indigenei
ty and between race and
Africa were deemed backward versions of the ethnicity. Jan French’s e
xcellent study pushes
West, but it was in the North Atlantic forward the challenge t
o traditional distinctions
commercial circuit of the sixteenth century that between blackness and i
ndigeneity in new and
the Western imaginary of the modern rst challenging ways. She exa
mines how both
emerged. The seduction of such an imaginary ‘black’ and ‘indigenous’ identi
ties emerged, over
was a clarity that misconstrued the many Others a period of about thirt
y years, in a small area of
it created. It was (and is) a limited epistemology, northeastern Brazil whe
re all the dwellers were
maintained by violence. As Michel-Rolph part of a rural peasant
ry, of very mixed racial
Trouillot elaborates, the imaginary of the ancestry; prior to abou
t 1975, people barely
modern ‘appear[s] to refer to things as they identi ed themselves as ‘blac
ks’, descendants of
exist, but because [it is] rooted in a particular Africans or slaves, or
as ‘Indians’.
history, [it] evoke[s] multiple layers of French’s ethnography s
hows how federal
sensibilities, persuasions, cultural assumptions, legislation – rst, the Ind
ian Statute of 1973
and ideological choices tied to that localized (directed at Amazonian
peoples) and, later, the
history’. quilombo clause of the 19
88 constitution, which
My query for the volume as a whole opened the way to land
claims for the
concerns the ‘but’ in Trouillot’s statement. Why descendants of people who had
notionally lived
need an interpretation conceived from one in quilombos (maroon sl
ave communities) –
history and culture not refer to things as they are provided avenues which
people could travel,
and exist universally? ‘A global cartography reshaping them en route,
towards new identities
emerged from the Western imaginary of the and land rights. She al
so shows how
north-Atlantic commercial circuit’: can such a fundamental the Catholic
Church, red initially
cartography not be actual and accurate? by liberation theology,
was in promoting these
Likewise, a global meteorology, or journeys. The reasons s
ome local people ended
palaeontology, or genomics, or neurology, or up as Xocó indigenous peo
ple, while others later
dietology, or paediatrics, or science of human became members of the M
ocambo quilombo
play, or problem-solving? Indeed, it becomes (and yet others remaine
d as neither), are tied up
apparent that the things not universalizable, not in complex and very loc
al labour and land
globally identi able accurately and actually from con icts, in which local pr
iests and other
a particular human locale, are the exception. church-related activist
s mooted the legal
One might call this domain that of aesthetics, or possibility of making i
dentity-related claims,
culture. The issue of universals for a liberal or which were later reinfo
rced by government
cosmopolitan anthropology is holding fast to a anthropologists sympath
etic to the idea that
distinction between domains of knowledge; so new identities could em
erge or be recovered. In
nstitute (N.S.) 16, 905-951
© Royal Anthrop
----------------------- Page 20-----------------------
924 Book reviews
a sense, the move towards one identity rather America. She shows
the importance of the law,
than the other was historically contingent. yet also its exible
and emergent character; she
Like many anthropologists faced with these provides a convinci
ng account of how and why
emergent identities – which are often challenged new identities emerge
and why they have the
as inauthentic and ‘invented’ by critics, such as power they do.
landowners fearful of dispossession, but also Peter
Wade University of Manchester
observers simply incredulous that people who
look, if anything, ‘black’ could possibly be ‘real
Indians’ – French challenges the essentialist view Pirinoli, C hristine.
Jeux et enjeux de
that identities must have continuous, stable mémoire à Gaza. 383
pp., illus., bibliogr.
roots. But she also makes a convincing case – Lausanne: Antipod
es, 2009. €26.00 (paper)
along the lines argued by Sahlins – that the
identities that people gradually construct are In Jeux et enjeux d
e mémoire à Gaza,
woven out of existing elements. They are not ab anthropologist Chri
stine Pirinoli combines, on
novo constructs invented according to one hand, the exami
nation of the ways in which
instrumentalist schemes to get land or three generations o
f Gazans remember – and
responding simply to the availability of new forget – pre-1948 Pal
estine with, on the other,
legal categories. They are identities that, because the investigation o
f how a modi ed version of
they resonate with people’s history and that memory has been
instrumentalized by the
experience and are linked into struggles for a Palestinian Authori
ty (PA) for the consolidation of
better future, command emotive – one is a state bureaucracy.
With a focus on the 1998
tempted to say, authentic – attachment. celebration of the fti
eth anniversary of the
Thus a long-standing story about a local man Nakba, or catastrop
he, as Palestinians refer to
‘buried alive’ for having sex with the the events that led to
their exile, the book
landowner’s niece was quickly reshaped to introduces three main
arguments: rst, in the
recount that the man was a black slave, the boss selection of past e
vents operated by memory,
a white slave-owner, and that Afro-Brazilian the ongoing context
and perspectives for the
religion had a role to play. But French argues future play a funda
mental role; second,
that the new version retained older elements, Palestinian memory
evolves as a mirror image of
such as the detail that the black man’s sons, by the Zionist; and, nall
y, the PA, challenged by
his wife, were mixed race (caboclos), recognizing the tasks of state
construction, has refashioned
pervasive race mixture in the area; or the fact such memory, disgui
sing as Palestinian
that the niece’s child, who came out white, ‘traditions’ what are act
ually clientelistic
could end up living with her father’s black practices and the inc
reasing centralization of the
family, a re ection of long-standing practices of political power.
racial inclusion. Two main divisi
ons, preceded by
French could have made more of the fact that introductory chapte
rs, compose Jeux et enjeux.
the ‘new’ identities which these people adopted Researching remembrance
s and forgetfulness
are very long-standing ones – indio, negro – on among refugees, Pirinol
i, in the introductory
the Brazilian and Latin American scene. Here is a sections, justi es he
r decision to conduct her
very powerful structural continuity. I think she investigation among
the ex-residents of Barbara,
could also have paid more attention to the fact a Palestinian villa
ge which was situated on
that, while certain narrative elements refer back territory annexed b
y Israel and has been
to previous histories of mixture, the people who destroyed. By selec
ting a ‘unity of memory’
engage in these identity-based struggles may rather than an exis
ting place, the author exposes
often use quite essentialist notions of stable, eventual aws of some
ethnographic work
continuous roots, including notions of ‘blood’, conducted in refugee ca
mps with the naïve and
to talk about themselves. It is vital to show, as often frustrated ex
pectation that they function
French does exceptionally well, that these like the isolated T
robriands. The rst division of
essentialist narratives are only part of the story – the book is dedicated
to demonstrating how
and their essentialism stands alongside, for Barbarouis’s accounts
– analysed in terms of
example, the fact that some people in this area both the contexts i
n which they are enunciated
of Brazil claim to be both indigenous and black and their respectiv
e contents – are gathered in a
at the same time – but they are present. Palestinian nationali
stic discourse, which
French has produced a great and intriguing opposes itself to a
nd mirrors the Zionist one.
book, which is required reading for people While the latter en
deavours to portray Palestine
interested in racial and ethnic identities in Latin as an empty desert,
waiting its redemption by
----------------------- Page 21-----------------------
Book reviews 925

Hebrew pioneers, the former reacts against this woman peasant, called
upon to become an
attempt at obliterating Palestinian existence. In atemporal, apolitical
, and mute repository of
this sense, there is little surprise that the fellahin tradition.
(‘peasants’) have become an icon for the Well argued, richly d
ocumented, and nely
Palestinian nationalistic discourse as, contrary to written, Jeux et enje
ux is of interest to students
the Zionist depiction, their cultivation of the land not only of the Pales
tinian-Israeli con ict, but
provides evidence of Palestinian continuous also of the relations
between memory, gender,
presence on the ground throughout the and state constructio
n.
centuries. On the other side, however, as shown Gustavo Barbosa
London School of Economics
in the second division of Jeux et enjeux, there is
and Political Science
room to ask to what extent nowadays the fellah
can still signify Palestine. In the face of the
generalized disappointment with the meagre T heodossopoulos, D
imitrios & Elisabeth
results achieved by the Oslo agreements, the PA Kirtsoglou (eds).
United in discontent: local
reinvents Palestinian memory to mask its own responses to cosm
opolitanism and
political failures: if the spatial return to historical globalization. vi
i, 186 pp., bibliogrs. Oxford,
Palestine has become increasingly unattainable, New York: Berghah
n Books, 2010. £35.00
refugees are expected to content themselves (cloth)
with a temporal return, that is, with the
re-enactment in the present of some of the Why is empathy extend
ed by Greeks towards
pre-Nakba traditions. The price to be paid, warns their traditional ene
mies, the Turks, and towards
Pirinoli, is that memory ceases to work as a other ‘Middle Eastern’ Mu
slims (Iraqis, Iranians,
‘identitarian cement’ enabling cohesion among Afghanis, Palestinians),
on the basis of them
the highly dispersed refugees, leading instead to being fellow-sufferer
s in dispossession from
the bursting of the Palestinian ‘imagined ‘American imperialism’? Why
has Israel in the
community’. past been attacked by t
roops from Pakistan,
The book’s weak points are few. One Cuba, and North Korea,
from Sudan, Saudi
problem is the rather ddly mirror image: while Arabia, Syria, Iraq, Ku
wait, Libya, Algeria, Tunisia,
it assists in the demonstration of how Palestinian Morocco, Egypt, and J
ordan, as well as by
and Zionist memories are structurally latter-day jihadists,
Palestinian and other? This
homologous – in the values assigned to a volume would supply nua
nced answers to such
golden past, the arduous exile, and the questions: How Greeks
see a global conspiracy
redemption of the future – it does not of Western realpolitik
which trades in ne words
completely account for the internal dynamics of – ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’, ‘cosmo
olitanism’ –
Palestinian recollections, to a great extent but actually delivers
inequality and unilateral
presented as a result of outer conditions. In interventionism. How
disrespect for the ‘Islamic
addition to that, the two main divisions of the nation’ continues to in
spire militancy against
book remain very much apart, and Pirinoli’s ‘the Western secular, lib
eral, post-Christian
argument would bene t from a more uid capitalist ideology and w
orld view’ (p. 64).
dialectic between refugees’ discourses and those The sympathy underl
ying Dimitrios
of the powers-that-be. Theodossopoulos and E
lisabeth Kirtsoglou’s
Among the book’s many merits, three edited collection is re
layed thus: let us proceed
particularly are worth mentioning. First, in a ‘as if dissatis ed people
around the world were
self-re exive tour-de-force, Pirinoli faces all the entirely right in their
judgement that current
obstacles characterizing eldwork in a highly political and ideologic
al developments relate
politicized environment and does not fall prey to closely to an unfavou
rable distribution of power
velleities of objectivity and neutrality. Second, that excludes far mor
e than it includes’ (p. 169).
she pays attention to the social signi cance of A paradoxical fact then
emerges: anti-globalist
silences in more than one level: Zionist efforts to critiques commonly as
sume a global and
silence Palestinians and make them vanish from cosmopolitan perspect
ive, deploying global
the landscape, for instance, by extracting and motifs, technologies,
and imaginaries. Here – to
replanting trees rst put in place by Arab hands, combine insights from B
enedict Anderson and
and Palestinian attempts to gloss over class and Arjun Appadurai – is an
imagined community of
gender differences through the adoption of the the globally disconte
nted whose empathy,
unifying and essentializing image of the fellah. paradoxically, is equ
ally global in imagining
Last, she emphasizes the social prominence coevals everywhere wh
o are dissatis ed with the
gained recently in Palestinian imagery by the current neoliberal re
gime. ‘Anti-cosmopolitanism
Institute (N.S.) 16, 905-951
© Royal Anth
ropological Institute 2010
----------------------- Page 22-----------------------
926 Book reviews
inspires a cosmopolitan imagination of political inspirati
on for combating ‘hegemonic
resistance to and discontent with those who ... capitalistic cosmop
olitanism’. Lastly, C.W. Watson
“hold both the pie and the knife”’ (p. 99). evinces how popular Indon
esian magazines such
What, in this imaginary, ‘as if’ construction as Sabili potently expr
ess dissatisfaction with
actually concerns ‘globalization’ or ‘global processes’, includi
ng the penetration of
‘cosmopolitanism’? The question is not really repulsive Western cultu
res and the dangers of
pertinent. ‘Global’ and ‘cosmopolitan’ are Zionism (and co-conspirator
ial freemasonry), and
‘catchy idioms’ which are semantically vague the need for the ‘Muslim
World’ to stand united
with no essential core. In their local usage, these against colonialism
, political, economic, legal,
terms can be understood anthropologically as and cultural.
epiphenomena which disclose broader concerns This is an impo
rtant volume, and the
with power and inequality. ‘Globalization’ contributors’ command of
their material and
implies a super-organism that has penetrated commitment to their
areas of research are very
too far too fast, involving neoliberal processes of clear. I would end
this review with a general
commoditization and Westernization. question, however,
concerning the limits and
‘Cosmopolitanism’ implies an ideological virtues of anthropologi
cal sympathy. Bill Watson
product designed to serve certain political admits that Sabili
contains ‘strident, absurd and
interests while pretending to promises of unacceptable’ anti-Ch
ristian and anti-Jewish
rationality, openness, and trust. What is messages; Elisabeth
Kirtsoglou admits that while
signi cant, anthropologically, is the global some discontent voice
d by informants is valid,
phenomenon of people in peripheral locations some is far-fetched
. And yet we are urged not to
being unable or unwilling to suspend their see Sabili as fanat
icism but ‘in its own terms’;
disbelief concerning how power actually and we are encourag
ed sceptically to indulge
promulgates a global system of inequality. our discontented in
formants even when we
Theodossopoulos and Kirtsoglou supply cannot empathize wi
th them. Why? Because in
three powerful and cogent pieces to this volume ‘joining the communit
ies of the discontented’
(introduction, conclusion, joint chapter) in we can capture loca
l meaning and move
elaboration of their position. Six further towards the true co
smopolitan practice of
contributions then demarcate the global democratic dialogue
. But an important
imagined ‘community in discontent’ in different ingredient here is adve
rted to by John Gledhill:
locations. John Gledhill describes a widespread anti-globalization
(as with an earlier postcolonial
disconformity with the cosmopolitics of critique) ‘builds on,
and would be unthinkable
neoliberal elites – espousing the virtues of a without, the intellec
tual values generally
market society and the free movement of people (though not necessa
rily uniquely) associated
and goods – in places such as Mexico and Brazil. with the Western Enli
ghtenment’ (p. 148). Not
Victoria Goddard describes how Argentinean every symbolic cons
truction of the world is of
urban poor experience the cosmopolitan equal worth or vali
dity; nor may their
programme of immigration, development, and imaginative project
ion be deemed an
modernization, planned by the state, as a inconsequential ind
ulgence. I would sympathize
disciplinary regime that perpetuates relations of with Sabili and the
jihadist imagination to the
inequality. Àngels Trias i Valls describes how extent that I do with
Mein Kampf or the Spanish
ideas of anti-cosmopolitanism emerge in Inquisition.
non-metropolitan Japan amid worries One of the inte
llectual values I associate with
concerning social inequality, environmental the Enlightenment i
s bringing humanity to truth.
degradation, and national identity: a The right of every
individual to live according to
renunciation of Japaneseness before strangers the best knowledge
humanly available is,
and foreigners feels like disenfranchisement. indeed, my understa
nding of the ‘cosmopolitan
Andrew Strathern and Pamela J. Stewart examine vision’. And while no
t everything falls easily at
how a range of indigenous rural rooted people – present (or may ever)
under the rubric of the
Taiwanese village leaders, New Guinean cargo universally veri able
– including mystical
cultists, Nalik followers of Bahai’i, Ulster Scots – revelations, dreams, se
nses of beauty and of
experimentally combine their local concerns relative deprivatio
n – it remains an
with a sense of global outreach and so shift anthropological dut
y to distinguish between
centrality back to themselves. Iain Edgar and best knowledge and
that which is merely
David Henig describe how Islamic jihadist night circumstantial or c
ontextual, and so to help limit
dreams, locally conveying prophetic revelations paradigms of falsi ca
tion.
from Allah, provide sources of spiritual and Nigel R
apport University of St Andrews
----------------------- Page 23-----------------------
Book reviews 927

History and politics civility and incivility
. His research indicates that
the speci c histories of
the development of (state
and non-state) governan
ce in France, England,
Davetian, B enet. Civility: a cultural history. x, and the United States h
ave in uenced how
607 pp., tables, bibliogr. London, Toronto: citizens within these n
ations identify and
Univ. Toronto Press, 2009. £60.00 (cloth), distinguish themselves, a
nd how they manage
£23.95 (paper) the presentation of thems
elves in face-to-face
interactions. Davetian
illustrates several ways in
This book is a welcome contribution to research which these differences
have manifested
on ‘civility’ and ‘the civilizing process’. Weaving themselves.
together multidisciplinary research from In the nal part, Dav
etian discusses ‘civilizing
anthropology, psychology, and sociology, and recivilizing proces
ses’. He refers to ‘civility as
Davetian undertakes an impressive comparative a bilateral process inv
olving restraint on the one
historical analysis of the ‘anatomy of civility and hand and aggression and t
actical behaviour on
incivility’ in England, France, and the United the other’ (p. 355). This e
choes Robert van
States. Krieken’s assertion (in N
orbert Elias, 1998) that
Part 1 adds to, and indeed draws heavily on, we should develop a dia
lectical understanding
Norbert Elias’s seminal study, The civilizing of civilizing processes,
whereby ‘civility’ and
process (2000 [1939], revised edition), which ‘violence’ can occur alongs
ide in the form of
traced the development of manners and social ‘civilized barbarism’ (or ‘ci
vilized’ violence);
etiquette primarily in France and Germany. violence does not disap
pear with civilizing
Davetian adds to this by exploring the processes, it just chan
ges form. Davetian raises
comparative developments between France, the idea that ‘incivility
can be used as a moral
England, and the United States, covering the weapon to transform soc
ial values’ (p. 355). So,
time period from 1200 to the end of the can ‘incivility’ in the sho
rt term contribute to
nineteenth century. ‘civility’ in the long term
? This questions the
In part 2, Davetian explores the development dichotomous separation
of civilizing and
of the ‘identity movement’ in the United States decivilizing trends, and of
civility and incivility.
in the 1960s and 1970s. In particular, he is Davetian therefore disc
ards the term
concerned with how the questioning of ‘decivilizing’, preferring ‘r
ecivilizing process’. He
American patriotism has affected civility; while sees civility as ambiva
lent, where ‘too much
this movement contributed to transforming the authenticity breeds rud
eness and violence, while
United States into a more ‘socially engaged and not enough breeds hypocri
sy and passivity’
socially conscious nation’ (p. 339), Davetian (p. 501); when civility t
ends towards one of these
cautions that this shift may bring with it a extremes, we witness a
revolution where notions
weakening of American patriotism and, thereby, of civility and incivil
ity are questioned, and a
changes in the ‘anatomy of civility and incivility’ shift in civility may occur
. This shifting process is
in the United States. what Davetian means by
the ‘recivilizing
Davetian delves deeper into the roles of process’.
emotions in part 3 of the book. At the outset, he One of my few criti
cisms is that Davetian
argues that the study of emotions should inform does not engage with a
variety of Elias’s (and
all of social science research, rather than forming ‘Eliasian’) writings. In cr
itiquing Elias’s civilizing
a specialism of its own; civility research needs to processes, he primarily
focuses on The civilizing
focus on emotions, interactions, and culture, all process. When he uses t
he example of Nazi
explored from a relational, processual, Germany to critique Eli
as, he never refers to
comparative approach (to aid in the Elias’s writings from The
Germans (1996).
development of a ‘topology’ of civility). Davetian Davetian aptly points out t
he limitations of
thus develops Elias’s analysis of shame, including Elias’s The civilizing proc
ess, as it only explored
other emotions involved in civility and incivility, developments in France
and Germany. However,
such as guilt and embarrassment, as well as pain subsequent authors have
extended Elias’s work
associated with the ‘denial’ of emotional needs. to analyses of England, the
United States, and
Davetian returns to a comparative analysis of other nations. Engageme
nt with these other
England, France, and the United States in part 4 ‘Eliasian’ studies would ha
ve no doubt added
of the book, where he summarizes participant substance to Davetian’s c
ritical engagement with
observation research he undertook in order to Elias’s theory. However,
at 607 pages, Civility,
explore contemporary interpersonal interactions both in terms of its le
ngth and in the substantial
comparatively, thereby analysing aspects of ground it covers, does
not leave much space for
nstitute (N.S.) 16, 905-951
© Royal Anthro
----------------------- Page 24-----------------------
928 Book reviews
an in-depth analysis of Davetian’s own work and North American paper
s analyse the marginal
Elias’s theory of civilizing processes. Perhaps status of Metis in L
abrador in relation to the
such an in-depth discussion could be further geographically and
ethnically more distinct Inuit
developed in a subsequent piece of writing. and Innu, the Klua
ne First Nation in the Yukon,
Amanda Rohloff Brunel University and the Cayuga Nat
ion in New York State. The
last, the nal chapt
er in the book, is a
particularly usefu
l political analysis of why the
Fay, D erick & Deborah James (eds). The Cayuga claim faile
d, with advice for the more
rights and wrongs of land restitution: ‘restoring diplomatic handling
of future claims. The case
what was ours’. xx, 288 pp., maps, illus., studies from Latin A
merica juxtapose the status
bibliogrs. Abingdon, New York: of a mixed communi
ty in Brazil, in which some
Routledge-Cavendish, 2009. £75.00 (cloth) members claim descen
t from native peoples and
others descent fro
m escaped slaves, with
This volume dispels any notion that gaining land indigenous communi
ties in Peru, whom the
rights is an easy or comprehensive means to end government attempt
ed to rede ne as ‘peasants’,
the social exclusion of minority groups. None of and Mexico, where
the North American Free
the claims reported and analysed was Trade Agreement is
being used by the state to
completely successful, except perhaps the justify attempts t
o dismantle collective
Mandlazini case described in chapter 9 (the ownership of land
won through previous land
outcome of the Australian sea claim described in rights campaigns.
chapter 6 had not been determined when the Among the commo
n issues that emerge in
book went to press). different chapters
are the following. Claimants
The editors and several contributors take may not want to re
turn to a wholly traditional
Verderey’s work on post-socialist Romania as way of life, but nd t
heir own place within the
their reference-point. Verderey identi ed a current economy. The
re are also problems in
number of dif culties in implementing the appealing to an idea
lized past in which the
restitution of land which re-occur in a number of rights claimed wer
e freely exercised, when
the case studies presented here. In land claims subsequent history
has transformed the identity
the state is both making the rules and playing of claimants. The
former residents of Cape
the game, for example through its Town’s District 6, f
or example, have developed
representatives in court. Claimants may value different interest
s, according to the social
land as either a political or an economic conditions into wh
ich they were resettled. In the
resource – that is, as a material manifestation of Brazilian case, two
neighbouring villages chose,
identity versus a medium for economic gain – in one instance, to
identify with their Amerindian
and this may create con ict among claimants. ancestors, while the
other identi ed with their
Claims based on prior ownership pose the enslaved forebears
. The danger that a successful
dif culty of deciding which previous property land claim can still
be undermined where land
regime to take as a model for the management management remains
in the hands of the
of returned land. Fourthly, the outcome of a dominant community
or local government is
claim may be rendered unwieldy or illustrated in sev
eral chapters, although,
impracticable by the ambient political conditions interestingly, the
indigenous Peruvian peasants
within the state, such as corruption among ultimately bene ted
from the violence of the
low-level state of cials, or the national Shining Path guerril
la movement, despite their
dominance of an ethnically derived elite. suffering during t
he civil war. The threat (alleged
Geographical representation in the volume is or real) that a la
nd claim poses to the economic
somewhat biased, with South Africa, Anglo interests of the p
owerful, dressed up as
North America, and Latin America receiving ‘progress’ or ‘developme
nt’, occurs repeatedly,
three papers each, but only one paper on but while this inc
reased the willingness of the
Australia and one on Europe. The selective focus Canadian governmen
t to settle claims, it
on speci c continents does have the advantage destroyed any hope o
f the Cayuga regaining a
of allowing contrasting cases to be discussed reservation. The u
gly, and related, assertion by
and compared. Thus, the South African papers opponents of claim
s that giving special rights
present a claim to a nature reserve in the Eastern and land to minori
ty groups is a form of
Cape, to the site of District 6 in Cape Town by apartheid also rea
ppears. Finally, the unequal
former residents, and the restitution of land by power of governmen
t and claimant communities
two communities displaced by a harbour may invert the leg
al situation in which, although
development and White settler farmers. The the indigenous com
munity hold unextinguished
----------------------- Page 25-----------------------
Book reviews 929

rights, claimants in court nd themselves asking moment when German and Br
itish relations
for concessions from government. The potential were fraught (1912-13).
Detzner was a picaresque
role of native law, and problems of translation, character who, as Ian F
owler tells us in a
that this paradox raises are excellently portrayed well-judged explanatory
note, was to pass the
by Morphy in one of the most positive chapters. First World War in a la
rgely pretend campaign
Robert Layton University of Durham against Australian forc
es in highland New
Guinea.
The signi cance of the
German colonial
Fowler, Ian & Verkijika Fanso (eds). project in Kamerun, whi
ch established (not
Encounter, transformation and identity: peoples always by intention) so
me of the parameters of
of the Western Cameroon borderlands postcolonial contest in
Cameroon, not least the
1891-2000. Essays in honor of Shirley Ardener. division between French
- and English-speaking
xxvii, 253 pp., map, illus., bibliogr. Oxford, provinces, is evident a
lso in Peter Geschiere’s
New York: Berghahn Books, 2009. £47.50 scholarly reconstruction
of the short life, and its
(cloth) aftermath, of the ill-f
ated Karl von Gravenreuth,
born 1858, the of cer who
perished in an
This is, in effect, a golden jubilee tribute. Shirley ill-conceived attack on
Buea, the local capital, in
Ardener worked in and/or on Cameroon for 1891. Another de ning Ger
man death, in 1899, of
almost thirty years together with Edwin Ardener, the labour recruiter Gu
stav Conrau in Bangwa,
and she has continued to do so during the was previously retold i
n the genre of ‘faction’ by
twenty plus years since his death. A specialist the anthropologist Robe
rt Brain. Michael
concern to document the region of Cameroon Ndobegang and Fiona Bow
ie weave Conrau into
she and Edwin knew best has drawn together their account of Bangwa
, and their chiefship and
Cameroonian contributors and Europeans of capital, since his deat
h. Yet another set of
various nationalities. Many of the historical European deaths, this t
ime from a First World
chapters are inspired by the Buea Archive, which War battle in Ejagham c
ountry, and their derelict
she rescued twice (once at its establishment, graveyard, provides Ute
Röschenthaler her way
then again when helping revive it from the into a fascinating acco
unt of the village of
desuetude into which it had fallen during the era Nsanakang. Kamerunian c
olonial identity had
of structural adjustment). Another cluster of been internalized to a
high degree, as Verkijika
chapters presents ethnography of Western Fanso shows in the unin
terrupted stream of
Cameroonian women, making them doubly representations concern
ed with territorial
appropriate as celebrations of Shirley’s in uence, boundaries made between the
Anglo-French
to which prefatory materials by Verkijika Fanso, partition under the Lea
gue of Nations, and the
and by Dorothy Njeuma with her late husband later partition of its
British sector between
Martin Njeuma, accord generous Cameroon and Nigeria in
the era of African
acknowledgement. independence.
The rst chapter is a hitherto unpublished Several of the later p
apers are concerned
paper by Edwin Ardener that had been intended with gender and family.
An intricate paper by
as part of a volume for local publication. It offers Caroline Ifeka relates
Anyang gendered political
both a wide-ranging ethnographic survey of the symbolism to the relati
on between use and
Western Cameroonian borderlands with Nigeria exchange values. Margar
et Niger-Thomas
and an analysis of identity work done by recounts how a conversa
tion with Shirley
Cameroonian peoples on their ethnic claims that Ardener was the spur to
her documenting a
can be documented from the time of the earliest genre of memorial funer
ary sculpture for
colonial administrators (re ecting processes that high-status women in the
ndem association
presumably pre-dated them in some regards). found among Banyang and
Ejagham peoples.
Regional specialists will be drawn to different Fiona Bowie’s second cont
ribution focuses on
elements of the account, which I found valuable transnationalism throug
h the instance of a
for its discussion of the populations from which dispersed Bangwa family
and is nicely
the Tiv claim to derive (a tradition with support symmetrical with her ea
rlier co-authored chapter
from language distribution that none the less on German impact upon B
angwa.
continues to beg questions about its process, Ludovic Lado stands
apart from others in the
particularly its speed and scale). More of the volume, presenting an a
rgument from the
early colonial context is evoked by Sally Chilver’s anthropology of food to s
upport an
epitome of Hermann Detzner’s account of the inculturation of the Roma
n Catholic mass that is
demarcation of the international border at a subtly made but might e
scape specialist
nstitute (N.S.) 16, 905-951
© Royal Anthrop
----------------------- Page 26-----------------------
930 Book reviews
attention here. The volume closes by reverting to from Plains Indians
further north, whose
its dedicatee as Joyce Endeley and Nalova Lyonga calendars sometimes
go back further into the
show how individuals like Shirley Ardener can eighteenth century.
These ‘counts’ were
make a difference to the functioning of originally produced
on hide, but later the
south-north networks, including that between tradition was trans
ferred to paper and fabric,
Buea and Oxford. particularly in the
late nineteenth century, when
The contents of this volume may seem readily available l
edger books formed a
varied, but they cluster in ways appropriate to convenient medium,
the present calendar being
their subject. In this respect they are helped by of this type. In fa
ct the reservation period saw a
Ian Fowler’s introduction, which provides a owering of the Plains
Indian artistic tradition,
credible and coherent connective narrative. This with the availabili
ty of paper and pen and colour
is a volume for specialists who will be grateful mediums leading to
a tradition of ‘ledger book
such things remain possible. art’, recording histo
rical events and traditions.
Richard Fardon School of Oriental and African Other Kiowa cale
ndars are also mentioned
Studies (pp. 20-2), and Mo
oney’s calendar history of the
Kiowa Indians (1998
) records much of these and
possibly inspired o
ther Kiowas to begin
G reene, Candace S. One hundred summers: a producing calendars
.
Kiowa calendar record. xx, 263 pp., plates, Silver Horn’s cale
ndar was produced on the
illus., bibliogr. London, Lincoln: Univ. pages of a bound le
dger book 6” ¥ 15”, though
Nebraska Press, 2009. £30.99 (cloth) now the pages are loo
se. The edges of the pages
are also considerab
ly dog-eared, but in the main
This beautifully produced book is the result of the pictorial conte
nt is not obscured. Each page
the ‘rediscovery’ (p. viii) of the calendar Silver contains three entries,
which were arranged side
Horn (1860-1904), itself part of the personal by side, but runnin
g up the page, across the
collection of Mrs Nelia Mae Roberts (d. 2001), lines of the ledger
. The majority are in the order
owner of the Roberts Indian Store of Anadarko, summer, winter, sum
mer. The pages are
Oklahoma, and donated to the Sam Noble displayed in a simi
lar fashion, from bottom to
Oklahoma Museum of Natural History at her top on the even-num
bered pages, with
death by her niece Marcia Bassity. The author is the editor’s explanat
ion on the opposite
an ethnologist working in the Smithsonian and pages, directly und
er each of Silver Horn’s
has written extensively on the Plains Indian entries.
artistic tradition. This calendar co
vers the period 1828-1928,
The book contains a foreword by Ellen and, following Kiow
a tradition, but unlike that of
Chensky, a preface by Daniel Swan, a glossary some other tribes,
has two images per year, one
and guide to pronunciation of Kiowa words by for winter and one
for summer, although it is
Gus Palmer, Jr, and three appendices: ‘The Little still called a ‘winter
count’, because the Kiowa
Bluff Calendar Text’ from the papers of word for ‘winter’, sai, i
s also used for ‘year’.
Lieutenant Hugh L. Scott obtained from the Winter events are m
arked with a lea ess tree.
compiler’s nephew at Fort Sill in 1892; ‘The The reason for the incl
usion of two entries is that
Hauvahte Calendar Text’ by Mark R. Harrington the summer entry reco
rds events in camp
from circa 1909; and ‘Other Kiowa calendars’. around the time of the
Kado gathering, while
Silver Horn or Haungoaah, to give him his the winter one reco
rds events further abroad.
Kiowa name, was an esteemed artist, working in The calendar had no
written text attached
silver, bead, and feathers, and, in later years, a and the entries wer
e interpreted with the help of
religious leader. The calendar forms part of the Silver Horn’s childre
n (p. 32). Greene thinks that
Plains Indian tradition of ‘winter counts’, which it was compiled in 1905
-6 (p. 27), the earlier
were a method of recording history in an entries being copie
d from an earlier calendar. He
aide-mémoire to the oral record, by the use of a also produced a short
er calendar, covering
mnemonic pictorial event to mark each year. In 1828-1904, for Jame
s Mooney, which is in the
some well-known Lakota examples they are in Smithsonian.
the form of a spiral, with the earliest event The Kiowa were e
nemies of the neighbouring
shown in the middle and spiralling outwards Osage, Utes, Cheyen
ne, Pawnee, and Arapaho
towards the present. The events chosen were and allies of the C
omanche and Plains or Kiowa
not necessarily important, but should be Apache, and the cal
endar records involvement
memorable. Greene suggests that the Kiowa with all these trib
es, as well as rarer events such
may have acquired the idea of winter counts as a visit by a Lak
ota in 1844, Nez Perce visitors
----------------------- Page 27-----------------------
Book reviews 931

in 1883, the Leonid meteor shower of 1833, authors focus on one ques
tion within one
cholera in 1849, and smallpox in 1862. geographical context; hen
ce most chapters
There is some confusion in the pagination at present case studies abou
t one speci c island
one stage, with 105 appearing twice, but this (Jamaica, Trinidad and To
bago, Haiti, Martinique,
only results in one page calendar entry (1874-6) Cuba, or the Dominican Re
public) in relation to
being repeated. one topic (e.g. gender, w
ork, religion, or
Bruce Ingham School of Oriental and African culture). It would have b
een helpful if the editor
Studies had presented an extended
discussion about the
Caribbean in his short in
troduction instead of
just referring to Mintz’s i
mportant contribution
Scher, P hilip W. (ed.). Perspectives on the to the debate. However, h
is decision to let
Caribbean: a reader in culture, history, and authors from different di
sciplines present their
representation. ix, 302 pp., tables, bibliogrs. own view of the Caribbean
without
Oxford, New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. implementing a stringent
frame offers a wide
£19.99 (paper) range of insights into the
hybridity of Caribbean
ideas and topics.
This book presents an interesting overview about Bettina S
chmidt Bangor University
Caribbean studies, useful in particular for
teaching undergraduates because it
demonstrates the range of topics connected to
the Caribbean. The editor, Philip W. Scher, has Medical anthropology and
gathered sixteen articles and book chapters genetics
originally published between 1981 and 2002,
some of the already ‘classic’ studies for anyone
working in the Caribbean. Bentley, G illian & Rut
h Mace (eds).
Unfortunately he has missed the opportunity Substitute parents: b
iological and social
to include articles originally published in another perspectives on allop
arenting in human
Caribbean language than English. It would have societies. xviii, 354
pp., tables, gs, illus.,
presented students a wider view on Caribbean bibliogrs. Oxford, Ne
w York: Berghahn Books,
studies if the collection had included articles 2009. £58.00 (cloth)
translated from French, Spanish, or Dutch. The
language limitation is also visible in the chapters. Any edited volume that as
sumes a
Only one author, Jorge Duany, refers in his multidisciplinary approac
h inevitably faces a
chapter predominately to publications in double challenge. Editors
have to bring together
Spanish; all other chapters, even the ones about a collection of essays wh
ose connection through
Haiti or Martinique, list nearly exclusively a common theme – in the cas
e at hand, the
publications in English. This anglophone bias concept of ‘alloparenting’ – mu
st generate a
does not re ect Caribbean studies on an homogeneous piece of work.
On the other
international level. Another point of negligence hand, such an enterprise
must expect that
is the disregard of literature as an important potential readers will be
presented with
research area in Caribbean studies. Though the information from differen
t disciplinary elds and
editor quotes in his introduction Derek Walcott methodologies with which
they may not always
and refers in another paragraph to Naipaul’s be familiar, because they d
eal with different
trope ‘Mimic Islands’, he did not include a concepts, backgrounds, or ndin
gs.
contribution about the importance of literature The series ‘Studies in
the Biosocial Society’,
in the Caribbean and the Caribbean Diaspora. published by Berghahn Boo
ks, aims to meet
None the less, the book presents students a such challenges by choosi
ng works that seek to
good introduction into the Caribbean. The editor explore the combined effo
rts of natural and
has divided the chapters in ve sections, dealing social sciences. Substitute
parents – the third
with economics, identity, performance, volume of this series – is
an example of the
cosmologies, and questions about the impact of ef ciency of this approach,
whose success in
globalization. In addition to some core articles in achieving its goals must
be rst of all attributed
Caribbean studies (e.g. Sidney Mintz’s already to the competence of editor
s Gillian Bentley and
famous Caribbean transformations, 1974), Scher Ruth Mace.
selected a representation of studies from the By including such div
ersi ed perspectives as
1990s to re ect the diversity of topics that those of evolutionary ecolo
gy, anthropology,
scholars investigate in the Caribbean. Most economics, psychology, an
d sociology, this
stitute (N.S.) 16, 905-951
© Royal Anthropo
----------------------- Page 28-----------------------
932 Book reviews
collection of essays provides an encompassing gure in the upbring
ing and education of
and informed perspective on issues of family, children (the lack
of explanation for this possibly
kinship, childhood, adoption, education, and indicates that thi
s perspective is not consciously
community, crossing disciplinary and predicated) and gi
ve primacy to the concept of
methodological borders to integrate a contextual ‘allomothering’, but p
ositively dismiss the
diversity that includes incursions into Mexican, in uence of paternal
families, fathers themselves
Argentine, Southern African, British, and North included. Thus, co
nclusions such as ‘there is
American cultures. little evidence th
at male and paternal kin are
As I have already mentioned, the essays in bene cial for child
health’ (chap. 3) are not only
this volume are linked through the common arguable, but beco
me even more problematic
theme of ‘alloparenting’, which, broadly when we consider, for
instance, cases of
speaking, can be described as a set of childcare adoption, surrogac
y practices, or orphanage,
practices that range from direct parenting to vast issues that are al
so contemplated in this
networks of support, including both direct book.
family – brothers, grandparents – and Nevertheless, preci
sely because this work
neighbourhood or school networks. In the case raises so many iss
ues and interrogations,
of human alloparenting, the role of the mother crossing a wide ra
nge of themes, contexts, and
is particularly marked since, differently from disciplines, I bel
ieve this work will be very useful
other mammal species, humans have short birth to undergraduate a
nd graduate students from a
intervals. This means that besides our ability to variety of elds and
backgrounds. This book
bear multiple offspring in the course of fertile offers its readers
the possibility to gain a global
life, offspring remain strongly dependent on and integrated ins
ight into the phenomenon of
their mothers for an extended period of time ‘alloparenting’, affor
ding in-depth knowledge on
before becoming self-suf cient. Thus, regardless a number of themes w
hile effectively opening
of the form of care-giving in question, theoretical, metho
dological, and disciplinary
progenitors’ responsibility for ensuring their horizons.
child survival and upbringing – whether directly Catarin
a Frois Centre for Research in
or indirectly – is always paramount.
Anthropology, Lisbon
This book, comprising sixteen essays
preceded by a preface, is structured in two
parts, the rst part dealing with the various Satya, Laxman D.
Medicine, disease and
strategies progenitors adopt, such as relying on ecology in colo
nial India: the Deccan plateau in
direct family or neighbourhood networks, as the 19th centur
y. 310 pp., gs, tables, illus.,
described by Kramer and Gotlieb; the role of bibliogr. New D
elhi: Manohar, 2009. Rs 775
school (Mayall); the economic implications (cloth)
resulting from the birth and education of
children (Gillian Paull); and the impact of Of all the many re
gions and provinces of British
adoption and surrogate practices (Lycett). Part India, Berar appea
rs among the most historically
two places greater emphasis on the point of neglected. Formerl
y part of the domains of the
view of children, and their perceptions of the Nizam of Hyderabad
, it was annexed by the
different care-giving practices, and is concerned, British in 1853 an
d merged with the Central
for instance, with the biological impact entailed Provinces fty years
later. By Laxman D. Satya’s
by step relationships (Flinn and Leone); account, Berar was
also from the time of its
alloparenting practices in Southern Africa and takeover one of th
e most ruthlessly exploited
the implications of the AIDS virus on families and intensely impo
verished areas under British
and communities (Van Blerk and Ansell); and control. A source
of cotton, grain, and other
nally a group of chapters dedicated to issues of sought-after commodi
ties, especially once the
separation and divorce from children’s railway made it acce
ssible to outside trade, the
perspective (Bensel and Robinson, Scanlan and province endured l
evels of famine and disease,
Butler). of mortality and d
estitution which, by his
In spite of all the virtues pointed out so far – account, were hardly
matched anywhere else on
and which the following comments are not the subcontinent.
Satya provides a mass of
intended to diminish – as a social and cultural statistics and conte
mporary observation to show
anthropologist I cannot help but be puzzled and how bad conditions
in Berar actually were: that,
even somewhat disquieted by the fact that for instance, the
level of revenue extracted from
several essays in this collection not only choose the province in th
e late 1870s (a period of
to emphasize the role of women as the chief famine) was more t
han three times higher than
----------------------- Page 29-----------------------
Book reviews 933

in the neighbouring Central Provinces, or that cholera, when there is n
o obvious one, or when
the death rate, as recorded in mortuary statistics he fails to grasp the pr
ocess by which individuals
between 1871 and 1878, showed Berar, with acquire immunity to smal
lpox). Paradoxically,
almost thirty-six deaths per thousand of the the British are describe
d at every turn as utterly
population, as far higher than the next highest indifferent to Indian su
ffering – and yet the only
province, Bombay, with just under twenty- ve. sources he provides, the o
nly observations about
When 200 miles of railway was laid in the 1880s, the misery of Berar and
its inhabitants he
there were over 45,000 casualties, which the presents, come precisely
from British authors,
author equates to 227 deaths for every mile of mostly of cials. He claims
that the British
track: hence, the railways of British India were ordered no investigation
into the devastating
constructed ‘on the bodies, bones and skulls of famine of the late 1870s a
nd yet cites in detail
the labourers who built them’ (p. 123). The information contained in t
he 1880 Famine
conclusions to be drawn from such a wealth of Commission Report. The t
ragedy of this work is
depressing data is clear to the author from the that it reveals an enorm
ous amount of material
outset: Berar epitomizes the ‘politically and about a neglected province
, one that does
intellectually exploitative nature of [the] British appear to have been hard
-hit by colonial policies
Empire’, its ‘intense exploitation of India’s and their intended (or uninten
ded)
resources and labour to enrich itself’, and ‘the consequences. But sadly the
author is unable to
inhuman insensitivity of the European colonizers see beyond his own immed
iate sense of outrage
towards the millions of people who perished in and to process the data
he has gleaned in a
utter poverty, misery, and disease’ (p. 13). more critical way that wou
ld ultimately have
For those who think that academic discourse been more revealing and
provided more
on British India – with its talk of dialogic convincing testimony to th
e misery and suffering
exchanges and co-constituted knowledges – has of the people of Berar.
grown far too soft and has forgotten the raw David Arn
old University of Warwick
essentials and brutal facts of colonial rule,
Satya’s account of nineteenth-century Berar
might arguably serve as a salutary shock. The
problem is, however, that a work so uniformly Method and theory
and unre ectively grounded in outrage lacks any
subtlety of interpretation and distorts as much as
it informs. Satya tries to follow in the footsteps De Neve, G eert & May
a Unnithan-Kumar
of Mike Davis’s in nitely more nuanced and (eds). Critical journey
s: the making of
effective study Late Victorian holocausts (2001), anthropologists. 210
pp., bibliogrs. Aldershot:
but in doing so he baldly asserts (more than Ashgate, 2006. £50.00
(cloth)
once) that there was no difference between
famine relief camps in British India and Nazi The idea for this volume
, the editors tell us in
concentration camps and that British ideas of their preface, arose fro
m their attempts to
race and Social Darwinism were convey to Sussex student
s ‘what eldwork in
indistinguishable from the ideology of Mein anthropology is all abou
t’. This pedagogic
Kampf and the genocide of the Jews. He takes provocation led in turn
to a wish for ‘more
the ill-considered view that the British systematic re ection on di
fferent types of
deliberately adhered to a miasmatic eldwork experience’ and a c
onvened workshop
understanding of disease (which he assumes, on ‘anthropological journe
ys’ at the 2004
quite erroneously, applied to every disease, Association of Social An
thropologists conference
including smallpox) in order to spare themselves in Durham. This edited v
olume of eleven rather
the effort and expense of adopting a more different ‘critical journe
ys’ and anthropological
interventionist sanitary policy, and in pursuit of biographies is the nal ou
tcome.
their racist ideology and utter contempt for The journeys themsel
ves make good reading.
Indian lives denied the country knowledge of The chapters are persona
l and often confessional
the true causes of malaria and other diseases. affairs, full of the une
xpected twists and turns
The author’s sweeping claims not only fail to that accompany any passage
of discovery. They
recognize the complexity of colonial (and combine analytical dista
nce with emotional
Indian) attitudes to disease and its containment; rawness, allowing the re
ader to follow people’s
they also reveal a shaky knowledge of disease intellectual apprentices
hip within different
itself (as when he blames the British for failing to disciplinary sub- elds or
theoretical debates.
observe a connection between scurvy and Whether it be Henrike Do
nner’s account of the
nstitute (N.S.) 16, 905-951
© Royal Anthrop
----------------------- Page 30-----------------------
934 Book reviews
co-construction of the eld through everyday Will this volume’s
journey turn full circle, as
conversations with Calcutta women about the editors inten
d, and encourage a more
domesticity, Geert de Neve’s thoughtful hands-on and engage
d approach to teaching, or
re ections on working with research assistants, at least experienci
ng, eldwork? The book
or Elizabeth Hsu’s account of learning to be an succeeds in demonst
rating the diversity of
acupuncturist, each offers pellucid insights into anthropological p
ractice. However, for this
the craft of producing anthropological reviewer’s taste, i
t slightly dodges the question
knowledge. Tony Good’s description of the of whether ethnogra
phy can ever be taught. In
different genres of professional writing required her chapter, Unni
than Kumar powerfully insists
of anthropologists – as scholars as opposed to that, through teach
ing, the eld gains new life
development consultants or expert witnesses in and allows her to
remain ‘emotionally close’ to
asylum cases – offers a different but equally her research site,
whilst also enhancing student
revealing take on his ‘ eld’, as does Rachael learning. Yet the prefa
ce instead argues that
Goeberman-Hill’s account of learning to become ethnography is best
learned ‘through example’.
a multidisciplinary researcher. One of the aims of Does this leave u
s stuck with the fetishization of
the book is to demonstrate that there is ‘never ‘the eld’ as a space bey
ond pedagogy? The
just one way of being an anthropologist’ (p. 13), recent issue of the
on-line Anthropology Matters
and in this it succeeds. journal entitled ‘F
ield of screams’ highlights the
Beyond underscoring disciplinary diversity, emotional stakes,
and the importance of nding
what is gained by the juxtaposition of these ways of experienc
ing and practising ‘what
personal intellectual narratives? Like so many in eldwork is all abo
ut’ that go beyond narrative
the eld, the editors position the book’s retellings. For all t
he discipline’s dislike of
contribution within the long shadow of the research training
and didactic textbooks, it is
Writing culture debates on re exivity, bringing only through inhabi
ting and constructing the
this (somewhat) up to date with Gupta and eld that we can be
gin to understand the
Ferguson’s 1997 edited Anthropological locations, experience and its
generative serendipity. Books
which focuses on movement rather than place as such as this are
an important start, but until we
constituting the ‘ eld’. However, the can begin to experiment
creatively with learning
contributors to this volume tend not to follow eldwork through eld
work, prescriptive
through the epistemological implications of the methods texts and
dreary generic courses will
argument that travel re gures the eld, partly remain.
because their accounts are so richly embedded
David Mills University of Oxford
within embodied personal experience. The
embodied experience of eldwork, even if
experienced partly through travel and Enfield, N.J. T
he anatomy of meaning: speech,
retrospective reconstruction, is still a key gesture, and c
omposite utterances. xii, 252 pp.,
formative trope within ‘British’ social gs, illus., bibliog
r. Cambridge: Univ. Press,
anthropology. As this book implicitly 2009. £60.00 (cl
oth)
acknowledges, it is also an important source of
disciplinary cultural capital to be drawn on How does an inter
preter take multiple signs to
throughout academic careers. By comparison, create a coherent
whole meaning? This is the
the work of theoretical contextualization is less central question
the sociolinguist Nick En eld
developed in some chapters. addresses in his
study of ‘composite utterances’,
The editors suggest that the book’s where speech and ge
stures are woven together
importance lies in its attention to the way in to create meaning
. The central stance of the
which anthropological engagements with the book is that we s
hould not treat language as an
eld shape the discipline as well as their own isolated sphere in
which meaning is created:
understandings of it. However, despite the speech is always
grounded in a context, and
acknowledgement of Bourdieu’s call for dependent on other
signs. The aim of the
‘participant objectivation’, the discipline and its monograph is to offer
a descriptive and
institutional enactment are left relatively analytical study
of deictic (pointing) and
unexamined. Little is said about the illustrative gest
ures used in such composite
precariousness of academic career structures, the utterances. En eld
proposes the concept of
ethnographic compromises forced on contract ‘enchronic time’ to m
ake sense of the feat of
researchers, or the new forces of accountability interpreters to a
rrive at a single interpretation
and productivity that tend to prescribe and out of a multipli
city of signs: enchronic time is
constrain eldwork engagements. the local, ‘conversat
ional time’ in which signs
----------------------- Page 31-----------------------
Book reviews 935

conveyed by speech and gesture are combined attention, distributed
cognition, embodiment,
and cumulated to bring about understanding on semiotics, and even mat
eriality. For instance,
the part of an audience. The theoretical En eld’s discussion of the
interviews on sh
arguments of the book are grounded in rich and traps – where absent obje
cts are conjured
fascinating data derived from eldwork in Laos: through gestures – appealed
to my own interest
video recordings of interactions at the market, in material culture, an
d brought me to think
and interviews involving descriptions of about the relation betw
een embodiment and
traditional sh traps or kin relations. materiality.
The book is divided into two parts. Part I There are some quest
ions that are left open
explores deictic words and gestures, starting in the monograph, and I
was often left wanting
with demonstratives (chap. 2) – speci cally, Lao more information and discus
sion on a number
terms roughly equivalent to ‘this’ and ‘that’, or of facets of the research. For
instance, what
‘here’ and ‘not here’. These provide, to use elements of the gestures are cu
ltural
En eld’s term, the ‘glue that binds word to conventions, and which are th
e result of a
world’; the author argues that demonstratives process of problem-solvin
g on the part of the
are dependent not on physical space, but on the speaker? I was also lef
t wondering about
‘interactional space’ that is shared – or not – by intra-cultural differences in t
he use of gestures,
speaker and addressee. En eld follows in the since interviewees seem t
o have different
third chapter with an intriguing discussion of degrees of competence a
t describing the sh
lip-pointing – a type of gesture rarely described traps. Do these signal di
fferences in technical
in the literature – and in the fourth chapter, of expertise, relative statu
s, or communicative
hand-pointing. Lip-pointing, and what he skills? Arguably, howev
er, these unanswered
identi es as ‘big’ and ‘small’ hand-pointing, are questions are not so much lacunae
as proof of
not three equivalent gestures, but are the range of theoretica
l rami cations of the book
qualitatively different and ful l different that remain to be explore
d in research on
functions, their use depending on context, cognition and human soc
iality.
perceived degree of shared understanding Overall, the monogra
ph strikes me as an
between speaker and audience, as well as social extremely thought-provo
king and valuable
constraints and face-saving considerations. contribution to the rec
ent cross-disciplinary
The second part of the book discusses trend of research on th
e cognitive and pragmatic
illustrative gestures. Through videotaped conditions for human in
teraction.
interviews on the features of sh traps (chap. 5), Geoffrey Gowlland London
School of Economics
and kin relations and marriage rules (chaps 6
and Political Science
and 7), En eld analyses the way speakers
spontaneously ‘sketch’ objects and diagrams in
mid-air through gestures to clarify and Scott, Susie. Making s
ense of everyday life. xi,
complement speech, and comments on the 236 pp., illus., bib
liogr. Cambridge, Malden,
capacity of both speaker and audience to hold Mass.: Polity Press,
2009. £55.00 (cloth),
cognitively in the mind’s eye the structures £17.99 (paper)
being sketched. These structures are at times
effectively ‘edited’ by the speaker: for instance, Scott begins her text somew
hat abruptly by
the nodes of a kinship diagram might be pulled asking ‘what is everyday
life?’, which she rarely
forward to create space for a new part of a wavers from addressing.
The aim of the book is
diagram within arm’s reach. In the conclusion, to raise, critically, the
question of our everyday
En eld proposes that the issue of semiotic existence in the modern w
orld in a manner
uni cation – how interpreters take multiple signs accessible to undergraduate
students. Indeed,
for a coherent whole meaning – should be the text is based on an u
ndergraduate course
understood as a kind of problem-solving. taught by the author, w
hich accounts for the
What is particularly fascinating and original lively presentation of
materials.
in En eld’s monograph is the way the body is The initial posing of th
e ontological question
brought into the discussion on meaning of ‘what is everyday life
?’ gives way to the
creation, and treated as artefact and tool for epistemological and met
hodological problems of
communication – a ‘cognitive artefact’, in how everydayness can be inves
tigated and
En eld’s words. The book’s many insights have a through which means. In an at
tempt to aid the
range of implications for linguistics, the student through these d
iscussions, the author
cognitive sciences, and anthropology, including presents a ‘toolkit’ in the
second chapter for
for the understanding of intersubjectivity, joint reference throughout th
e subsequent chapters.
nstitute (N.S.) 16, 905-951
© Royal Anthrop
----------------------- Page 32-----------------------
936 Book reviews
This toolkit comprises brief but lucid accounts of by social groups
which supposedly re ect levels
major theoretical schools in the social sciences, of subordination.
Although there is certainly a
from dramaturgical and ethnomethodological to strong case to be
made for a politics and power
phenomenological, structuralist and of time, I am not
too sure it is as easily accessible
post-structuralist schools of thought. This for analysis as s
tatistically marking which groups
explicitly theoretical chapter lays the ground for wait longer. This
may not be a problem with the
the later chapters, which each pick out a single book per se but
with the methods, means, and
issue in everyday life and use the early language of much
sociology. My fundamental
theoretical discussions to analyse the material problem with this
text is possibly its greatest
through different lenses. virtue to its int
ended audience(s): this is a text
The issues singled out for chapter-long not for anthropol
ogy undergraduates but for
analysis are: emotions; home; time; eating and sociology and cul
tural studies undergraduates. It
drinking; health, illness, and disability; shopping; may seem that I a
m overstating the divide
and leisure. One of the virtues of organizing the between the disci
plines, but few anthropologists
text as Scott has is to allow the student access to are referred to t
hroughout the text and rarely at
how academics use theory to investigate social any length – Lévi-Str
auss is the most referred-to
phenomena. Scott is very good at indicating the anthropologist in
the text and receives only four
strengths and weaknesses of any single mentions – so that
I cannot see the virtue of
theoretical position on a particular topic and using Scott’s enjoy
able book as a means to help
leaves enough unsaid for students to come to a undergraduate ant
hropology students come to
position on the matter. But the real strength of terms with what t
he discipline has to say about
the text lies in its ability to raise some of the everyday life. An
d as a means to broaden
unseen structures and processes of everyday students’ horizons,
I suggest that there are
existence to visibility and turn seemingly books better equi
pped to do just that.
mundane and quotidian activities such as Hayder Al-M
ohammad University of Kent at
shopping or going to the pub with a group of
Canterbury
friends into contested elds of sociality with
highly sophisticated logics and intricate rituals of
interaction. Strecker, Ivo &
Stephen Tyler (eds).
The blurb at the back of the book suggests Culture + rhe
toric. xii, 255 pp., bibliogrs.
that each chapter is organized around three Oxford, New Y
ork: Berghahn Books, 2009.
main themes: ‘rituals and routines’, ‘social £55.00 (cloth)
order’, and ‘challenging the taken-for-granted’.
This is not quite true. Each chapter has its own The essays publis
hed in this edited volume are
slightly different organization, but all treat the the result of the
sustained re ection pursued by
themes with great care. The chapter I felt a group of schola
rs engaged in the International
strongest deals with time, and does so by Rhetoric Culture
Project. At the core of this
looking at different aspects of time in social life, project is the sc
holarly interest in a rhetorical
exempli ed by reference to various studies. theory of culture.
The growing interest in such a
Initially, there is a short discussion on time and theory engendered
four international
the experience of it which then moves on to the conferences and a
new book series, entitled
social ordering of time through calendars, ‘Studies in Rhetori
c and Culture’, published by
recurring events, and time as self- and Berghahn Books. T
he aim of the present volume,
social-disciplining, which is quite reliant on some edited by Ivo Str
ecker and Stephen Tyler, is to
of Foucault’s later works for analysis. The launch the new book
series and to introduce a
discussion then moves to the sociality of time in larger audience t
o the project.
leisure and the gendering of time in our social Cultures are
not only constructs, cultures are
interactions. The chapter ends with a look at the rhetorical constr
ucts, the editors af rm in their
various ‘challenges’ to time in the form of programmatic introduc
tion. As Strecker and Tyler
Durkheimian ‘anomie’ or ‘hanging-out time’, in underscore: ‘[O]ur minds ar
e lled with images
which everyday modes of relating to time are and ideas, but th
ese remain unstable and
suspended or broken off. incomplete as lon
g as we do not manage to
As good as this chapter is, it nevertheless persuade both our
selves and others of their
highlights a problem which recurs throughout meanings’. Rhetoric
, in this view, is a human
the book. If I take the example of the discussion disposition, enab
ling actors to craft, maintain,
of the politics of time in the book, studies are and challenge mea
nings imposed on a
referred to which point to various waiting times meaningless world
. This presumably universal
----------------------- Page 33-----------------------
Book reviews 937

disposition distinctive of the human animal more generally. His unea
se concerns the
seems to constitute a crucial factor in the syntactical structure of
the programmatic phrase
‘emergence of cultural diversity past and ‘rhetoric culture’. This awkwa
rd expression,
present’. The key aim of the rhetorical paradigm which was questioned by ma
ny at the Fourth
as proposed by Strecker and Tyler is to International Rhetoric C
ulture Conference, might
reinvigorate what was formerly known as inadvertently suggest to
some readers ‘that
symbolic anthropology. there is a kind of cultu
re that is not rhetorical’.
The theoretical avant-garde comes with its This, of course, is not
the case. With Herzfeld’s
own precursors attached. In his contribution to cautionary note in mind,
one might wonder if
the edited volume, Christian Meyer identi es there really is any virtue
in creating an odd
some of the ancestors of rhetoric culture theory. terminology besides the
dubious glories of an
In a sweeping overview, the author generously academic avant-garde and
its rhetoric of the
leaps over centuries, brie y discussing the work new? Perhaps Herzfeld’s pres
umably less
of Protagoras, Critias, Prodikos, Isocrates, Cicero, appealing phrase ‘social p
oetics’ might do just
Quintilian, Vico, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, as well.
Burke, Blumenberg, Kennedy, La tau, and Among the explicit aim
s of the Rhetoric
Leenhardt. Curiously enough, no anxiety of Culture Project is the c
ritical attempt to rethink
in uence ever seems to have bothered all these and reformulate the contes
ted concept of
venerable authors. Meyer’s presentation is culture. As philosopher Pe
ter L. Oesterreich
framed in the conventional terms of a history of argues in his contributi
on, ‘[B]elonging to
ideas; it provides a standard account of rhetoric particular social and cu
ltural elds, persons act
useful only for those who are not familiar with for and against others w
ithin the context of
this distinctive tradition of philosophical competing worldviews and
interpretations of
thought. Arrived at the end of a long line of meaning, which they try
to assert through
precursors, Meyer’s conclusion might seem persuasive speech’. The cult
ural eld, in other
trivial to some readers, namely that ‘social life is words, is ever-changing, e
ver-shifting,
grounded in discourse, and that without speech ever-emerging. Contrasti
ng with this distinctive
there would be no culture’. But perhaps the understanding of the cultu
ral is the ‘presence of
insight is not so trivial after all. For if social life is diverse cultures, who
se opposing worldviews are
grounded in discourse, as the author suggests, rooted in different trad
itions’. According to
then discourse is also grounded in social life. Oesterreich, the presenc
e of these diverse
What would such an insight mean for a historical cultures ‘may be a source
of future social
account of the emergence of rhetoric in ancient unrest’. Ironically, it wa
s precisely this rei ed
Greece? notion of culture invoke
d by Oesterreich as a
The most interesting piece published in this means to justify the rhe
torical paradigm that
edited volume is perhaps Michael Herzfeld’s encouraged anthropologists
to abandon the
ethnographically grounded essay on the concept altogether.
embodied rhetorics of earnest belief. Exploring Carlo C
aduff University of Zurich
the political performances of the Italian prime
minister, Herzfeld characterizes Berlusconi’s
demonstration of political conviction as ‘a highly T rask, R.L. Why do lang
uages change? xi, 198
transparent performance of a lack of pp., gs, tables, bibl
iogr. Cambridge: Univ.
transparency’. According to the anthropologist, Press, 2009. £50.00 (clo
th), £15.99 (paper)
Berlusconi consistently aims to convey
‘earnestness’ in his political performances, but This is Larry Trask’s last boo
k, and it has been
such ‘earnestness’ represents a mode of revised by Robert McColl Mil
lar of the University
self-presentation rather than a psychological of Aberdeen after Trask’s
tragically early death
state of being: ‘[I]it is a public performance, one from motor neurone disease
in 2004. The work,
designed to lend conviction, of an attitude that though not earth-shatter
ing in its implications,
may itself be entirely false’. In the should win a deservedly la
rge audience because
‘post-Protestant world’ identi ed by Herzfeld in of the erudition and brio with
which it is written,
his stimulating essay, the expectation of sincerity and these are two qualit
ies which coexist all too
has gradually lost its traction, and what is rarely in academic writi
ng, though they abound
judged by the audience is not the personal in Trask’s œuvre. Trask’s spec
ialist eld was the
intent but the public performance. history of Basque, an is
olate which none the less
Signi cantly, Herzfeld also adds a cautionary borrowed immensely from La
tin and some of its
note regarding the theory of rhetoric culture daughter languages, and
Basque is the language
nstitute (N.S.) 16, 905-951
© Royal Anthrop
----------------------- Page 34-----------------------
938 Book reviews
which Trask cites examples from most frequently used; both print a
nd on-line versions of the OED
after English. are mentioned in t
he references.
Trask covers much in the space of eight There are a few
errors in the text: the
chapters, starting from instances of lexical reference to the w
ork of ‘James Clarkson’ should
change and expansion (such as the change from refer to the Indo-
Europeanist James Clackson.
rouge to blusher) in the rst chapter (pp. 1-18), Trask also misassign
s the time of the Feast of the
to an exploration of the essential vacuity (or at Holy Innocents, wh
ich falls on 28 December.
best the unanswerability) of the identity of the More importantly,
although he cites many forms
world’s oldest language in the eighth, which from Old English, th
e phonemically distinctive
bounds from that theme to a discussion of length of vowels a
nd diphthongs which the
pidgins, creoles, mixed languages, and sign language had is ne
ver marked on transcriptions
languages. In these chapters Trask illustrates of Old English wor
ds in this book, although this
many points by exemplifying them with the is traditional pra
ctice, for instance, in textbooks
known histories of individual words. His for learners of Ol
d English. Sometimes further
accounts of the Basque origin of silhouette and detail would have
been welcome: the etymon of
of the Carolina Algonquian source of Pimlico, on Chicago (p. 77) is
not merely Algonquian, but it
pp. 56-7 and 67-70, respectively, are especially comes from Miami-I
llinois, the ancestral
striking. Trask also explodes some tenacious but language of that a
rea. This example provides the
hollow myths such as the alleged origin of the title for Trask’s ch
apter 4, ‘Skunk-Leek – my kind
computer term ‘bug’ from a moth which of town: what’s in a nam
e?’, a discussion of
short-circuited electrical relays in the early Mark placenames and sub
stratum in uences in
II computer in 1947. (In fact, examination of language, includin
g loan words.
documents drawn up by the spreader of the Trask was adept
at introducing complex
word, Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, shows that linguistic concept
s while using easily digestible
the word had been used in the modern IT sense examples, and he c
ontinues to do so here
for some years previously.) throughout each ch
apter. This book should
Chapter 2 discusses and illustrates the social enlighten many min
ds about many aspects of
processes of prestige and power, and other historical linguis
tics (especially English historical
reasons why languages change, while the next linguistics) and w
hy people are interested in it,
chapter explores the often surprising origins of and it should enco
urage them to examine the
words. Those interested in nding out where works referred to at
the end of the book and to
English comes from should read chapter 5, learn more about a
eld to which converts are
although Trask could and should have made always welcome.
more use here of the wealth of examples made Anthon
y P. Grant Edge Hill University
possible by illustrating the comparative method
and the operation of sound-laws within and
between Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and English. The Religion and myth
discussion of Grimm’s Law (the rst Germanic
sound-shift) on p. 91 gives some illustrations of
this nature, though I was surprised that Trask did Gaudio, Rudolf P
ell. Allah made us: sexual
not point out that this law was actually rst set outlaws in an Isl
amic African city. xv, 237 pp.,
out by the Danish polyhistor Rasmus Christian maps, illus., b
ibliogr. Oxford: Wiley-
Rask. Blackwell, 2009
. £17.99 (paper)
Chapters 6 and 7 deal with topics which
appeal even to anglophone non-linguists. The Language and sexua
lity studies has become a
rst of these examines the factors which have major focus in lingu
istics research over the past
made American English varieties different from ten years, with ma
ny studies examining the
British English ones, while chapter 7 (pp. 130-53) linguistic practic
es through which subjects ‘give
looks at the reasons (including phonological voice to’ same-sex d
esires and attendant social
factors) which explain why the spelling of identities. ‘Give vo
ice to’ can be a misleading
English words seems so random. reference, of cour
se. Since the Stonewall period
The style of this book is not academic in the (1969), North Atla
ntic sexual politics has
sense that all references are fully caparisoned assumed that a ful
ly developed homosexuality is
with apposite citations from the relevant ‘out and proud’. In co
ntrast, acts of discretion
literature. Much use is made of the Oxford and/or concealment
are markers of a sexual
English Dictionary, and references therein to the consciousness that
has yet to reach its social,
dates of the rst citation of words are often political, or lingui
stic maturity. To be sure,
----------------------- Page 35-----------------------
Book reviews 939

foregrounding visibility in this fashion may have and other ‘independent wom
en’ (karuwanci)
certain bene ts in the human rights arena. Yet whose lives are not entire
ly framed in terms of
language and sexuality studies also make clear domestic duty and obliga
tion.
that too much emphasis on visibility often Second, the book exam
ines yan daudu within
overlooks the nuanced details of local linguistic the contexts of a changi
ng northern Nigeria and
practices, practices that are invoked variably and evolving notions of cult
ural citizenship within
strategically, and at times individually. that setting. This inqui
ry involves a discussion of
This is one of the important lessons to be the Islamic conquest (tw
elfth century), British
learned from a careful reading of Allah made us: colonial rule, the polit
ics of independence, and
sexual outlaws in an Islamic African city. Gaudio’s more recent resurgence of
seemingly
monograph summarizes the results of more than fundamentalist Islamic i
nterests which, by this
fteen years of research in Kano (northern narrative, are also expres
sions of resurgent, and
Nigeria), where the primary focus of inquiry masculine-centred, Hausa
rather than Nigerian
became the lived experiences of two categories civic placement. Yan da
udu were threatened with
of Hausa men: yan daudu (primarily same-sex expulsion from Kano, whe
n Shari’a (Islamic law)
identi ed, and often feminized men) and masu became the of cial basis of
the legal code in
harka (the more masculine men, sometimes Hausaland (2000). Yet ma
ny of these men
married with families, who ‘do the deed’ with remain in Kano, and the yan
daudu presence as
yan daudu). These are not public categories, in such remains a part of t
he urban scene. Gaudio
the sense that the (Western) category of gay wisely does not attempt
to explain why yan
man is public. When necessary, yan daudu and daudu remain in an envir
onment where social
masu harka employ certain linguistic and social sanctions, under certain
conditions, could
practices (and Gaudio describes many of them) become quite severe. He
gives us, instead, a
to communicate with each other in the public sense of what lived expe
rience is like in this
arena without risking full disclosure of message context: the private par
ties, the deep personal
and identity. friendships, the mediati
on between heterosexual
Ordinarily, these men meet discreetly, in a and same-sexual desire,
the linguistic practices
friend’s home, in a bar or café which supports that assist subjects as they
move within this
their presence, or in some other secluded complex terrain. Gaudio’s
monograph is not a
location; they are fully expressive only when study of language and de
sire, rendered out of
contexts are protective and secluded. Consistent context and reduced to L
acanian impulse. Allah
with that point, neither yan daudu nor masu made us keeps the discus
sion of language and
harka self-identify as ‘out gay men’ or see sexuality deeply embedded wi
thin the social
themselves as part of some transnational in ections of gender, race
/ethnicity, class,
community of men who have sex with men. The national vs regional loy
alties, and enduring
primary identity is Hausa, and often Hausa and religious commitments.
Muslim, and they locate their experiences of William L.
Leap American University
sexual sameness within the Hausa cultural,
sexual, and spiritual traditions – so much so that
one mai harku (singular form), introduced to Pinxten, R ik & Lisa
Dikomitis (eds). When
Gaudio by a mutual friend, could not believe God comes to town: re
ligious traditions in
that Gaudio, a white man from the USA, could urban contexts. xiv,
151 pp., illus., bibliogrs.
also be same-sex identi ed, asking incredulously, Oxford, New York: Bergh
ahn Books, 2009.
‘White men do it too?’ £35.00 (cloth)
Allah made us addresses two goals. First, the
book introduces the details of yan daudu daily This book is a neat litt
le volume with clear
experiences, to demonstrate the texture of a localized case studies (
if not always schematically
sexual sameness that refuses to embrace the well linked by thematic
focus) showing how
North Atlantic agenda of public visibility. To be urbanization generally i
n uences the religiosity
sure, yan daudu are not closeted subjects. Their of everyday life in mode
rn urban centres. A
public presence may be noted by others and backgrounded element whi
ch could have been
those references may have uncomfortable emphasized is how global
ization and
consequences. But by Gaudio’s accounting, transnationalism exposed i
ndividuals everywhere
these responses are in line with those directed at to the vulnerabilities o
f the world stage
women who regularly ‘break the rules’ of sexual (whereby it is argued that p
eople are only bit
propriety in the northern Nigerian setting, players) and how subsequ
ently new patterns of
particularly so, the market vendors, sex workers, social strati cation, iden
tity construction,
stitute (N.S.) 16, 905-951
© Royal Anthropo
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940 Book reviews
economic polarization, and the impact of the In the mix of
various cultural sites, city-space
alleged postmodern ‘crisis’ on the modern is an assemblage that
is interlinked with the
paradigm of science explain the contemporary individual and the
wider social body. In turn
resurgence of religion. All this is sourced in each cultural site
has its own centre. This is
emergent metropolis, twentieth-century re ected in the mult
iplicity of religious practices
megacities and regional trading/commercial that have ef oresced
in recent times and which
zones, and, while not new, has intensi ed in the are embedded in wide
r systems of in uence and
past thirty years or so. Globalization (however control. The urban
Quaker House (Collins’s
de ned) has enabled popular movements to chapter) is a case i
n point. But how does
have access to resources independently of physical space det
ermine social arrangements or
hierarchies on a signi cant scale. At the same social reproduction?
Harvey and Lefebvre have
time the impacts of secularization have shown how, through
particular relations in
undermined the monopoly of orthodox physical space, ce
rtain meanings and resources
institutional religion and, hence, often its are appropriated;
in a sense, then, physical
capacity to co-opt heterodox popular religions or space thus becomes
social space. In fact, lots of
urban-based social movements. comparative work h
as been undertaken in South
There is no doubt that the social and and Southeast Asia
on understanding spatial
psychological consequences of urbanization and cosmologies and li
ved worlds through
its diverse plural landscape have, contra the temple/monastery a
nd stupa (cetiya) art and
secularization thesis, heightened the appeal and architecture.
relevance of religions as discourses of political Among other for
ces of in uence, the
resistance, whereby anxiety-coping mechanisms Charismatic Renewa
l may posit a challenge to
and networks of solidarity and community gain orthodox Catholici
sm, which has a 2,000-year
are reconstituted. These days, it may be argued tradition of accom
modating the popular within
that (post)modern urban dwellers are not less its vast purview.
In the case of Poland post-1989,
religious (even compared with rural Drweski gives a ne
overview of a church in
folk/peasantries), but in making crisis (temporaril
y?). Here the church will surely
new connections to the sacred they are reposition itself
to accommodate the
differentially religious. Movements of people also transnational forc
es of modernity even in the
show the dilemmas when rural folk migrate to face of an increas
ingly laicized Catholicism. New
urban centres and bring with them their own spatial references
are indeed needed.
distinctive set of cultural values. Movement, tran
slocalization, and ritual
Hirschon’s ne Greek case study shows boundary-crossings are
pertinent themes in a
clearly how orthodoxy might be linked to discussion of the
reformulation of urban
national identity. It demonstrates that it is not religious space, p
icked up in places in the
necessary to throw the baby out with the collection without
excessive theoretical
bathwater in the project of modernity, but rumination. The ap
propriation of social space
shows how the religious are able to change to comes out in Vozik
as’s chapter on the locality of
the needs of changing (urban) society. Coleman St Marina and its
festive rituals. The author notes
also notes ‘shifts and continuities’ (p. 33) in the shifts from traditiona
l rural understandings
diverse urban religious landscape where use of where churches and
shrines are at the centre of
the religious imagination clearly ‘has no limit’ community life. Rural
migrants need to rede ne
(p. 42). Collins, from a perspective of urban the sacred in urba
n contexts to ensure a
ecology, asks what de nes urban space. Here continuity and famil
iarity with their local
Lefebvre’s brilliant and understated (at least in traditions – seemingly
, in this case, without too
anthropology) ruminations on urban space much con ict. Simila
rly Dikomitis, shifting focus
could have been given a more centralized focus to Greek Cypriots,
emphasizes a reimagining of
in the debate: ‘To change life ... we must rst social space, reinsert
ing meaning through
change space’, says Lefebvre (The production of practice – though in t
his case moving back and
space, 1990, p. 190; see also his Writing on cities, forth between the
village and city. Informant
1996). The term ‘city’, he argued, has a present voices come out clearl
y in this chapter.
and immediate material reality that is best Theije bemoans
the lack of serious attention
de ned in terms of an architectural or physical to religion in urban
anthropology, a point which
statement. It is also a contested and needs underlining.
The use of case studies in the
contemplative site, whereby actors de ne their collection emphasize
s that ethnographic
lived worlds through an everyday bodily poetics attention can show
the ways in which religion
which he called rhythm-analysis. plays a signi cant r
ole in the everyday lives of
----------------------- Page 37-----------------------
Book reviews 941

urbanized folk, or rural folk coming to terms participant observa
tion and a religious
with conditions of urbanization and the experience in Ghana
ian churches that the author
condition of modernity. As Theije notes, in ‘the traces to her childho
od. This depth of familiarity
urban context of increasing cultural with African church
es is rare and allows the
pluralization, religion plays multiple roles’ (pp. author to range beyon
d the con nes of a single
98-9). Tensions and anxiety appear not only church to compare a
nd contrast a broad sweep
within and between religious traditions, but also of what she calls A
frican Independent Churches
among devotees caught at the intersection of (AIC). In de ance of
a large body of work on
change. Sometimes, as we have seen elsewhere, Christianity on the
continent, Sackey includes
the outcome is a mélange: a hybrid form that is Spiritual, Pentecosta
l, Charismatic, and newer
neither completely one nor the other. Pentecostal-Charism
atic Churches in the ambit of
There is not much mention of globalization AICs. The atypical
de nition of, for instance,
in the text, its imposition on national ‘neo-Pentecostal/Char
ismatic’ (p. 33) as AICs is
consciousness and its material and imaginative unfortunately not b
ased on a theoretical
trans-localizing; one such force that has engagement with the
theological and
engendered some of the religious multiplicities classi catory bases o
f current distinctions or on a
that we see today in these case studies, as found new analysis of his
torical developments but on
among Catholic devotees, for instance, in Brazil the weight of her e
xperience. This strategy
(Theije’s chapter). Then again, in a world of supports a general as
sertion that there is ‘a
increasing smooth surfaces of resistance (in the convergence in aspe
cts of worship’ (p. 26)
sense of Deleuze and Guattari), anything can between various chu
rches but does not prove the
happen; spatial trajectories of in uence ow not particular point that a
ll churches in her study are
only west to east, but east to west, and now AICs. And although
Sackey claims that the
north to south. Boundaries thus have little lumping of various
churches into a single
substance outside of the state imaginary and its (historically de ned)
category re ects an ‘emic’
persistent modalities of religious orthodoxy. perception (p. 40),
this is not borne out by other
These need to be continually reinforced by descriptions about
the ways in which churches
entrenched politico-religious conservative forces. differentiate thems
elves denominationally (e.g.
The volume as a whole provides an pp. 35-7).
interesting collection of case studies around a Particularly p
roblematic in this book is
number of selected themes: nation versus state; Sackey’s assertion
that AICs in Ghana
urban transformations; urban migration; and the evolved from the
encounter between two
impact of modernity. Case studies in the ‘religions’ (p. 7) or
‘cultures’ (p. 26): ‘African
collection include Greece, Brazil, Poland, Cyprus, Traditional Religi
ons’ and Christianity (p. 7).
and China. In the latter case, interesting as it is, a Throughout the bo
ok, the author uncritically
study on taijiquan practices in a historical and accepts the exist
ence of timeless ‘African
modern urban context seems a little awkward in Traditional Religi
ons’, which she juxtaposes
the collection. The chapters could, in some with a similarly
one-dimensional, monolithic,
instances, stand by themselves, although there and static ‘mission
Christianity’. There is no
are some useful thematic linkages existing engagement with c
urrent literature on
between the various case studies. In general, the supposed Christian
‘culture’ or traditional
book is easy to read and suitable as a student ‘religion’. The decis
ion to take mission
reader or an academic or postgraduate reference Christianity (with
out specifying denominational
text. It is high time that anthropologists consider differences) as t
he de nitive form of the religion
modern urban religiosity and its contested spatial also seems arbitr
ary. Apart from this crude
practices with the seriousness they deserve. syncretism, the s
tudy is also historically deeply
Jim Taylor University of Adelaide awed. For instance
, the author claims that
mission Christiani
ty, unlike ‘traditional religion’,
was ‘devoid of hea
ling and medicine’ (p. 37; cf.
Sackey, B rigid M. New directions in gender pp. 111-19) and t
hat spirit possession and
and religion: the changing status of women in glossolalia were
uniquely African (pp. 38-9).
African Independent Churches. viii, 219 pp., There are no his
torical or archival references
bibliogr. New York: Lexington Books, 2006. in the text to
support such statements (cf.
£46.00 (cloth) p. 23).
The same hist
orical and theoretical problems
Brigid Sackey’s New directions in gender and plague other parts
of the book. For instance,
religion is based on twenty- ve years of Sackey claims that
the increasingly assertive
Journal of the Royal Anthropologica
l Institute (N.S.) 16, 905-951
© Royal An
thropological Institute 2010
----------------------- Page 38-----------------------
942 Book reviews
leadership role that African women play in that this i
s a positive new direction for
Ghanaian churches is a continuation of the role anthropology.
and position of women in traditional African Ilana van
Wyk London School of Economics and
religion (chap. 3). Although interesting, this
Political Science
point does not follow from an analysis of the
ethnographic or historical data. Theoretically,
the author describes the growing autonomy of
women church leaders and founders as proof Science and t
echnology
that ‘Western feminism’s’ assumption of
‘universal subordination’ (p. 49) is hopelessly
ethnocentric. Sackey then contrasts the ‘holistic’ Helmreich, Stefa
n . Alien ocean:
(p. 50) and ‘spontaneous’ (p. 55) ‘gender anthropological
voyages in microbial seas. xvii,
relationships in Ghana’ and Africa more widely 403 pp., i
llus., bibliogr. London, Berkeley:
with the ‘dichotomous’ (p. 50) and ‘organized’ Univ. California
Press, 2009. £14.95 (paper)
(p. 55) views in the West. In this comparison,
African culture comes up trumps as its Stefan Helmre
ich is one of the most important
gender roles are described as more ‘ exible’, contributors to ant
hropological discussions on
complementary, and equitable (p. 51), while arti cial life.
Alien ocean: anthropological voyages
‘both genders know their rights, strengths, and in microbial se
as is his second single-authored
limitations’ (p. 52). Such timeless claims are work (his rst wa
s Silicon second nature: culturing
somewhat tempered by assertions that the arti cial life
in a digital world, 1998), and explores
‘social and religious in ltration’ of British debates about life
from the perspective of
colonialism (p. 61) led to the deterioration of oceanographer
s’ studies of water-based
Ghanaian women’s ‘resplendent’ and ‘glorious’ microbes. This work set
s a high standard for the
(p. 60) historical abilities to make decisions and anthropology
of science and technology, and
take prestigious political positions. These Helmreich sho
ws a multi-layered and complex
assertions are extraordinary not just for the grasp of the
work of microbial scientists,
breadth of ethnographic and historical explaining th
eir work with sophistication and
generalization but also for the consistency with ease (sometim
es the reader can easily forget he
which they ignore the contemporary work of is an anthrop
ologist and not a microbiological
supposedly ‘Western’ academics on gender and oceanographer) as
he describes ‘molecular
religion. Although the latest academic sources phylogenies’ (g
enealogical trees based on DNA
referred to in the book date from 2002, the and RNA) (p.
78), Prochlorococcus and
theoretical concerns and emphases of New Synechococcus
(light-eating microbes) (p. 176), or
directions in gender and religion are rmly his own involve
ment in the processes of sorting
situated in the 1970s/80s. through the m
icrobes: ‘Using a P20 Pipetman, I
Despite reservations about the book’s add 6 microlite
rs of gluteroaldehyde to the
theoretical originality, it offers a valuable record relevant caps
, and then, with a P200 Pipetman,
of the life histories of women church leaders in add 75 micro
liters of dimethyl sulfoxide to the
Ghana. It also chronicles the diversity of healing appropriate c
yrovials’ (p. 191).
practices and changing leadership patterns in In the te
xt we are introduced to microscopic
Ghanaian churches. Apart from such creatures suc
h as the hyperthermophile, which
contributions, Sackey’s book is fascinating for lives ‘in total d
arkness, bathed in the poison
the way in which it blends academic and breath of the
inner earth, at 3,500 pounds of
insider perspectives. For instance, she makes pressure per
square inch, at temperatures
the matter-of-fact ‘argument’ that ‘[f]aith melts exceeding 230 degre
es Fahrenheit’ (p. 71).
all anxieties that cause sickness in a person, Hyperthermoph
iles (lovers of heat), to
and through that makes him or her whole’ oceanographers,
hold the secrets to all life’s
(p. 122). She also concludes that ‘a religious watery heritage
. Familiar as many of us are with
experience is a personal encounter in uenced the ow of life,
from sea to land, from simple to
by a greater spiritual force, which may compel complex, Helm
reich admits that ‘some
the person to react in a certain way’ (p. 106). microbiologists
argue that this tale of the deep,
Such arguments and conclusions are not direct lineag
e cannot be so neat. Microbes have
merely, as she claims, ‘observations of the capacity to
exchange genes with their
participation’ (p. 10), but make the existence contemporaries
continually, particularly in the
and ef cacy of supernatural forces an integral uid space of the
ocean, and this may muddle
part of the analysis. I am not convinced any attempt t
o root the tree of life’ (p. 72).
----------------------- Page 39-----------------------
Book reviews 943

Gene gymnastics lead Helmreich to argue that collection, analysis, a
nd categorization of
‘the uprooting of the tree has followed, samples, to and from ‘blue-
green’ capitalism,
paradoxically, from taking the notion that DNA with which these oceano
graphers are ultimately
contains information that can be employed to entangled via often cou
nterpoising indigenous
trace lineages ... that novel modes of and state-led concerns
about property and the
conceptualizing biogenetic kinship are in the in/alienability of micr
obes that rest deep on
making, along with understanding the ow of ocean oors and in the mud-
beds of the world’s
genes as information, substance, and property’ seas. Chapter 2, ‘Dissolvin
g the tree of life: alien
(p. 73). kinship at hydrothermal
vents’, takes the tree of
Taking a multi-layered approach, Helmreich life as a gure both lite
ral and representative of
draws on commentaries from scientists, how models of relationa
lity are developed of
commentators, and decision-making agencies in microbes. Yet the ‘tree o
f life’ is less a tree, with
constructing this image of the importance of the a root and ever-complex
branches, than an
sea. He proposes a stark contrast between a interlocking, criss-cro
ssing chaotic rhizome.
wondrous and life-giving sea to one with a Oceanographer scientist
s know this and
threatening destructive capacity. Helmreich is Helmreich did not have
to draw it out from their
interested in life, its polyvalency, and how work (though they did n
ot have the
biological sciences are engaged in ‘shifting [the] philosophical rhizome gure
to explain it but
limits of life’ (p. 5, original emphasis). The developed their own compl
ex threaded
content explores origins, circuiting past human, ‘meshwork’ of representatio
ns). In fact one
plant, or animal life with the ‘ rst’ life – life that strength of the book’s analysis i
s the
may well have begun in the marine microbes presentation of these s
cientists, not as socially
that oceanographers search for on earth (and, aloof arbiters of truth
who are encoding their
we read later, perhaps on other planets too – work with rigid sexual an
d racial norms (the
chapter 5, ‘Extrarrestrial seas’, provides a presentation most de nitely p
ushed in
gripping investigation into the reframing of the Helmreich’s previous work
on computer
search for life on other planets). scientists), but as con
scientious, politically liberal
A key theme that Helmreich addresses in his thinkers who refuse to
speak on behalf of
book is the shifting meanings applied to nature indigenous peoples, who
steadfastly refuse to
and culture, and he translates this through a commit to rigid scienti c
models, whether these
native/alien narrative that runs through his be modes of representat
ion as demonstrated by
interlocutors’ representations of the oceanic, their con icts over the tre
e of life model, or
political, and symbolic landscapes with which racial ones, as illustr
ated not by the prevalence
they engage. An argument about the seas feeds of peoples of colour on
research ships or at
directly into authoritative claims about property conferences, but by the
acknowledgement
and rights, as debates about native and alien amongst the predominant
ly white
species become a vehicle for debating oceanographers that cer
tain minorities are sorely
indigenous and exogenous claims to lands, seas, under-represented in mi
crobial oceanography.
and territories. Using biology as a rubric often Helmreich’s analysis demo
nstrates the
results in contradictory statements about natives challenging complexitie
s that confront both
and aliens, how species are introduced or ethnographer and oceano
grapher.
destroyed, and what constitutes a ‘native’ or Kathleen Richardson Univ
ersity College London
‘alien’. Helmreich uses these contrasting
categories to set up problems of de nition –
does ‘native species’ (of plant, microbe, person) J ensen, Casper Bruun
& Kjetil Rödje
refer to the period before 1778 (the date Captain (eds). Deleuzian in
tersections: science,
Cook arrived in Hawai’i, an important eldsite technology, anthropolog
y. vii, 278 pp.,
for Helmreich’s investigations) or 1,500 years bibliogrs. Oxford, Ne
w York: Berghahn Books,
ago? A microbial scientist takes the view that it is 2010. £47.50 (cloth)
the former date that counts in this respect
(p. 157). Colonization is as much a process This edited collection,
divided into ten chapters,
applied to non-human life as to peoples, and seeks to explore and un
derstand how the work
reasserting control over plant species has led of Gilles Deleuze, alon
gside his collaborations
some to use this as a means to ‘return to the old with Félix Guattari, can be
used to bring fresh
Hawai’i’ (p. 158). and new insights in the are
as of anthropology
The chapters present a picture of different and science and technol
ogy studies (STS). For
elements of oceanographers’ practices, from the example, the editors sugg
est (chap. 1) that
nstitute (N.S.) 16, 905-951
© Royal Anthro
----------------------- Page 40-----------------------
944 Book reviews
Deleuze’s injunction to focus on the relation which kinship formati
ons enjoy the potential to
‘AND’ that exists between dualisms such as enable people to work i
n something like an
subjective ‘AND’ objective is useful in bringing assemblage and so engag
e in a creative process
together anthropology and STS. After all, the of becoming-other a
s opposed to being
middle term ‘AND’ is for Deleuze the zone of subjected to the hierar
chic verticality of alliances.
indeterminacy where dualisms fold into one Pickering (chap
. 7) extends these themes in
another in order to create new contingent his empirical case
study of the rise of cybernetics
assemblages, and this draws attention to how in Britain through
Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of
different heterogeneous materials within nomad sciences. For
Pickering, ‘nomad sciences
anthropology, STS, and Deleuzian studies might sweep in from the s
teppes to undermine and
experiment with one another in new and destabilize any set
tled order’ (p. 155).
innovative ways. But the book also uses Deleuze Accordingly, cybern
etics in Britain was nomadic
to rethink various dualisms within the social because it arose an
d developed outside of
sciences and humanities more generally. As normal institutiona
l support, lacked systematic
Brown notes in chapter 4, a Deleuzian approach modes of transmissi
on, and mutated in its
to social questions prompts one to see how development. And th
e ethical advantages of
social objects do not merely operate on (e.g.) choosing a Deleuzia
n approach are mapped out
subjective and/or objective grounds but in fact by Fraser (chap. 2)
, who argues that we need to
how they slide across such dualisms through rethink ethics in a
manner that goes beyond the
relative degrees of scale. Stengers (chap. 1) actual in order to
access an ethics of the virtue
suggests that what such a theoretical position or what is potentia
l.
requires is a recognition that research should call My only slight
reservation about this
forth an experimental moment where stimulating collect
ion is that an array of
commonly held conventions are instead thought Deleuzian terms are
used which might leave
about as new creations arising within some coming at Dele
uze for the rst time
qualitatively distinct events. slightly bewildered
. Perhaps this is because most
But what actually does this mean practically? of the authors seem
to have a poststructuralist
One answer is given by Escobar and Osterweil’s take on Deleuze and G
uattari and therefore read
analysis of global social movements (chap. 9). them as creating ne
w experimental ways of
They argue amongst other things that Deleuze rethinking and writ
ing about the social and
and Guattari’s notion of assemblage is a fruitful natural. This is perh
aps true of Deleuze and
way to think about global social movements Guattari’s A thousand
plateaus (1980), but when
because assemblage highlights the way in which one reads their ear
lier work, Anti-Oedipus (1972),
‘wholes’ are constituted through the exercise of it is clear that they a
re indebted to more
the capacities of its components. This is different conventional theore
tical positions, such as
from a theory that seeks to look for wholes Marxism. Giving mor
e space to such overlaps
formed by logical and necessary relations. And with conventional s
ocial theories would perhaps
so, for example, many global social movements have opened up Dele
uzian thought more
are characterized not by (dualist) centralized concisely to rst-tim
ers. Nevertheless, this is an
control and hierarchies through which necessary excellent edited co
llection that points to new
relations of command are established between lines of inquiry in
the areas explored. The editors
organizers and activists, but, rather, by must congratulate t
hemselves in pulling
decentralized decision-making, self-organization, together a ne body o
f work.
and diversity through which assemblages of John Mich
ael Roberts Brunel University
different movement activists are mobilized by
speci c contingent encounters via non-necessary
events. Therefore, and as Bowker argues in
chapter 5, a Deleuzian standpoint highlights Social anthropology
how objects fold into one another so that what
might be considered outside (a non-active
component) can also be considered as being Bourgois, P hilipp
e & Jeff Schonberg.
inside (becoming an active component and Righteous dope en
d. 359 pp., plates, bibliogr.
acquiring emergent capacities via an event). In London, Berkele
y: Univ. California Press,
respect to anthropology, as Viveiros de Castro 2009. £14.95 (pap
er)
points out in chapter 10, Deleuze and Guattari’s
thoughts on such matters are helpful because The latest in the ‘Ca
lifornia Series of Public
they help make sense, for example, of the way in Anthropology’, this b
ook is a photo-
----------------------- Page 41-----------------------
Book reviews 945

ethnographic study about homeless people popping, was more favour
ed by African-
who inhabit nooks and crannies surrounding American than white home
less men, whose
Edgewater Boulevard in San Francisco. It skin-popping practices m
eant they also suffered
is based on twelve years of involved and more frequently from abs
cesses, thereby
thorough eldwork, much of it participant con rming their feelings of
being down on
observation, undertaken by Bourgois and their luck.
Schonberg, who accompanied these socially In chapter 1 the aut
hors examine racism and
excluded people in their daily (and nightly) the ethnic tensions divi
ding the Edgewater
routines of creating relationships, making homeless who are thrown
into close physical
temporary domiciles in derelict places constantly proximity to one another
in their day-to-day lives
threatened with total destruction by local as well as competing for
the same scarce
authorities, and adapting to continually resources. Chapter 2 add
resses gender relations
changing ways of making enough money to through descriptions of
Tina and her developing
sustain addictions and thus make the ‘perpetual relationship with Carter.
In chapter 3, the
crisis’ of their lives more endurable. They physical consequences of p
overty, addiction, and
accompanied them to welfare of ces, hospitals, homelessness are analysed
within an elucidation
doctor appointments, family gatherings, of the public debates re
garding harm reduction
funerals, and on day trips. The authors’ access to versus criminalization mea
sures. The authors
of cial records as well as to relatives and friends inspect childhood socializ
ation experiences in
of the Edgewater homeless enabled them to chapter 4, detecting man
y ideological and
verify their life stories and other recollections/ cultural forces within f
amilies of origin, including
accounts and thus to expose and analyse the nuclear families, which
channelled people into
historical structural and institutional forces violence, addictions, an
d homelessness. Legal,
shaping and depleting their social relations and semi-legal, and illegal
ways of working and
their bodies. earning money are discus
sed in chapter 5, and
The text contains eldnotes (in italics) as well the trap of poverty and ho
melessness is shown
as over seventy black and white photos taken in through Carter’s vain effo
rts to earn enough
a classic documentary style which dignify the money to pay for his det
oxi cation. Parenthood
Edgewater homeless in the appearance of their is viewed in chapter 6,
where it is shown that
faces, clothes, abodes, and injuries, showing the homeless people who have
abandoned their
immense value of serious, independent children have done so pa
rtly in an effort to
photography. Even though the homeless protect them against the
ir own violence and
themselves felt they looked rather rough, they addictions. In chapter 7
, about male sexuality,
nevertheless used the pictures to decorate their homosexual relationships
amidst homophobic
makeshift homes built under freeways and other men are discussed while,
in chapter 8, Tina and
inner city spaces. Carter’s romantic relation
ship is charted.
The authors draw on conceptual equipment The last chapter describ
es the obstacle-laden
from thinkers such as Marx (‘lumpen processes homeless people
go through when
subjectivities’), Foucault (governmentality, trying to access medical c
are and the
biopower, power at the ‘capillary’ level), Primo consequences of worsening st
ates of health as
Levi (the ‘grey zone’), Bourdieu (symbolic they fail to.
violence, misrecognition, habitus) and others. The suffering that t
he Edgewater homeless
Exploring racial differences, they delineate experience in a multipli
city of ways, which nds
habituses – ‘outcast’ and ‘outlaw’ – that white expression in, inter alia, self-des
ructive
and African-American homeless people have, behaviour and interperso
nal violence, here is
which encompass styles of clothes, masculine linked to wider social/c
ultural contexts that are
dignity, personal hygiene, whether or not they less visible in everyday
life. Refusing the binary
sustain contact with family members, whether or ‘stucture/agency’, the autho
rs use the term(s)
not to beg. The ‘outcast’ habitus describes an ‘lumpen abuse/subjectivities’ to
locate the
injured passivity, feelings of failure, helplessness, class-like position occu
pied by homeless heroin
and victimhood, whereas the ‘outlaw’ habitus is users and the structural and
personal violence to
proactive and orientated towards enjoyment, which this position has
left them vulnerable,
adventure, and feeling high. For example, thus linking everyday su
bjectivity to how society
‘crack’, a drug known for its euphoric high, was is organized.
used more by African-American than white The authors note tha
t the Edgewater
homeless men; likewise, injecting directly into homeless, despite mutual
betrayals and violence
veins, producing a stronger high than skin and the danger of living
outdoors, share the
nstitute (N.S.) 16, 905-951
© Royal Anthrop
----------------------- Page 42-----------------------
946 Book reviews
identity of ‘righteous dope end’ and nd refuge include stories of one wom
an living happily with
from a hostile world in the mutual solidarity of two men, and two w
omen living unhappily with
their community. one man. In my par
ticular favourite, Maggie
Chantal Butchinsky Oxford Brookes University Wilson told how he
r aunt was marooned with
her husband on the
shore of a lake and given up
for dead. The coup
le relied on their hunting and
Cole, Sally (ed.). Rainy river lives: stories told shing skills to nd f
ood, build a good wigwam,
by Maggie Wilson. lxv, 232 pp., maps, illus., and make clothes o
ut of hides and sinew.
bibliogr. London, Lincoln: Univ. Nebraska Maggie’s aunt was pr
egnant at the time and
Press, 2009. £23.99 (paper) went into labour, sc
aring her husband, who
wept as she was ab
out to give birth. Maggie
Maggie Wilson was an Ojibwe woman who lived Wilson’s aunt stoutl
y rebuked him by saying:
on the Ontario-Minnesota border between 1879 ‘Shut up! And don’t si
t there crying. Come here
and 1940. She was a storyteller who worked and help me as muc
h as you can. It’s not you
with anthropologist Ruth Landes, who paid that is having the
pains’. The stories present a
Maggie Wilson one dollar for one day’s work. woman’s perspective be
cause, as Cole writes,
After Landes left the Ojibwe for New York, she they are the produ
ct of ‘perhaps the rst “team”
persuaded Ruth Benedict to pay Maggie Wilson of a woman anthrop
ology student [Ruth Landes]
‘ fteen cents per double-sided page’ of and a native woman consu
ltant [Maggie Wilson]
eldnotes she sent to Columbia University. in the history of an
thropology’. Cole contends
Maggie Wilson complied by telling ‘stories to that the stories rep
resent an ‘insider’s account of
her daughter, Janet, who wrote them down on a those years of dis
ruption and desolation’. In a
stenographer’s pad’. Maggie Wilson, with Janet’s footnote, she adds they
are ‘metaphors of
help, sent to Columbia University ‘more than experience and lesso
ns in living’. If so, they are
one hundred stories in forty letter-packages’. heavily mediated met
aphors because they are
Columbia University deposited the letters in the primarily in Engli
sh with a sprinkling of Ojibwe
National Anthropological Archives in the words. They are to
ld through Maggie Wilson’s
National Museum of Natural History in daughter, Janet, w
ho could write English and
Washington, D.C. may have picked up
Western conventions of
Sally Cole, who wrote a biography of Ruth storytelling in a
residential school. As the
Landes, knew about the letters and edited them combined efforts o
f a mother and a daughter,
for this book. She also provides a brief history of they draw on the m
emories of the older woman
Maggie Wilson, explaining how the story of her and present them t
hrough the newly acquired
family runs parallel to the history of the Ojibwe. literary skills of
the younger one. Nevertheless,
At that time, the Ojibwe ‘were moved onto this book has both h
istorical and ethnographic
reserves, missionized, and taken into residential value because it r
eveals more about the practices
schools’ (p. xi). Like many Native North of the North America
n anthropologist working
Americans, Maggie Wilson was a woman who under the directio
n of Franz Boas and his
knew about her world through dreams by which students to docume
nt vanishing cultures and
an elder could name and give an identity to a provides a fascina
ting insight into the world of
person, make someone fall in love, cure as well Obijwe women.
as cause illness, and make animals ee from a James M. Taggart
Franklin and Marshall College
hunter, bringing starvation.
The stories themselves provide a vivid picture
of women and men suffering but also surviving C rook, Tony. Exc
hanging skin: anthropological
great physical hardship because they could hunt knowledge, secr
ecy and Bolivip, Papua New
moose and bear, sh, harvest wild rice, collect Guinea. viii, 267
pp., maps, illus., bibliogr.
blueberries, gather maple syrup, build and Oxford: Univ. P
ress, 2007. £40.00 (cloth)
repair canoes, sew skins with sinew, and build
shelter. They contain accounts of women and Amongst the Min pe
ople of Papua New Guinea,
men, some of whom Maggie Wilson knew and ritual knowledge i
s not transferred lightly.
others whom she created out of her experience. Likened to ‘exchangi
ng skin’, knowledge transfer
The characters in her stories fall in love, deal is an intimate aff
air, creating personal bonds in a
with anger, aversion, compassion, jealousy, and slow process of di
sclosure. Being conscious of
loneliness and suffer sickness and death as they the connections be
tween village life, subsistence,
struggle to make their way through a changing and local history
is a political tool which
and dif cult world. Some of the highlights regulates power rela
tions and displays them in
----------------------- Page 43-----------------------
Book reviews 947

various initiation rituals. How, then, can somewhat within a tiny
‘mosquito room’,
anthropologists penetrate this realm? How can created new theory – Bat
esonian ecology,
they represent both the knowledge and its Meadian patterns, and
Fortunian functionalism
transmission in an ethnography? When merged into their love
lives together with their
knowledge is deemed secret, its disclosure personalities. Knowled
ge is an interpersonal
becomes unethical; when transfer is so personal, affair, gendered and c
ontextual; it is most
it resists a restructuring into a written text. This powerful when traf cked
in a constructed form.
challenge has been glossed the ‘curse of the A different construction
, male initiation ritual in
Min’, or the ‘Min problem’, a ‘graveyard of Bolivip, presents the next lev
el of descent to the
anthropological careers’ (p. 3). Crook’s ‘roots’. Using the gardening m
etaphors of this
monograph, in turn, challenges this notion by chapter, Crook provide
s fertilizing ‘water’ for
offering a novel way to understanding the Min the exchange of knowle
dge by illuminating
from ‘within their skin’. Based on intensive, more principles of fertili
ty and substance,
long-term eldwork in the village of Bolivip, this embedded in the thick de
scription of initiation
approach illuminates both the problem and the ritual.
knowledge system in question. Moving further dow
n to the base, the next
Using the device of the ‘textual person’, swing to the anthropologis
ts’ ‘grove’ discusses
Crook has created a textual rainforest in which Frederic Barth’s work am
ongst the neighbouring
the reader is introduced to the main elements of Baktaman as another ex
ample of the dynamics
Bolivip knowledge transfer in the same way as a between local history,
personalities, academic
real person would learn. The book begins with schools, ethnographic
data, and resulting theory.
everyday perception of Min life, sketchy and By critically analysin
g Barth’s portrayal of
associative, deeply observed and yet on the very Baktaman knowledge as
peeling onion skins,
surface, climbing in the tree-tops of Crook’s Crook argues that ‘Barth’s o
ntological gaze
analogy, where knowledge ‘appear[s] as an keeps knowers and unknow
ers separate’
activity of the body and a circulating nurturant (p. 207), establishing
dichotomous boundaries
bodily substance’ (p. 24, emphasis removed). A that were en vogue at hi
s time but do not hold in
glimpse of the table of contents reveals very the complexities of re
al life and lived experience.
little of the book; it is as if one is in an At this point, the rea
der has reached the end of
aeroplane looking down on an endless rainforest the journey, stands at
the base of the tree, and –
canopy. hopefully – has exchange
d skin with Crook and
The monograph, shaped as a textual person, the people of Bolivip.
The epilogue can be read
alternates between two kinds of ‘groves’: from as an account of the journ
ey through the textual
Bolivip’s everyday life, we swing to the theories person; nally, the acknow
ledgements provide
of James Weiner and Marilyn Strathern, who its ultimate roots.
used Melanesian principles as structuring The enigma of t
he Min, well represented in
devices for their texts. Crook discloses his this monograph, does
not easily dissolve in a
ancestors, he takes us into the tree-tops of his reader’s mind. ‘Exchangi
ng skin’ with a textual
academic world – in Western imagery, this person is an intense
and at times confusing
would be his ‘roots’, but the reader is process, an acrobatic e
xercise of the mind.
encouraged to experience it as the While Crook has suc
cessfully provided a path
‘decomposition of two interpretative persons from the top to the
bottom, he could have
into their constituent parts’ (p. 33). made the journey easi
er by using the
Swinging back to Bolivip, we learn about author-year citation
style instead of acronyms
subsistence and some of the principles of order: and by cutting down
on the 350-word glossary,
key metaphors like ‘base/root’ are introduced which an attentive read
er frequently needs to
and eshed out in villagers’ explanations as the consult as a dictionary
. As in the Min’s slow, at
dogma and pragma of knowledge transfer are times painful and e
xhausting initiation rituals,
analysed. The terms for skin (kal) and knowledge the reader is requi
red to swing in the tree-tops,
(kàl) are brought together, explaining the title of slowly nding the desce
nt to the base while
the book (p. 112). At this point, the reader is collecting pieces of
an enigmatic jigsaw. At the
again pushed along to swing across to a end, it depends on
the individual reader’s own
different grove: the complicated personal history, personality,
and overall context as
relationships of Margaret Mead and her knowledge is never
complete without a
colleagues during their eldwork amongst the recognition of the so
cial relationships that it
Iatmul people of Papua New Guinea. Different eclipses.
academic traditions, forced to melt down Susanne Ku
ehling University of Regina
Institute (N.S.) 16, 905-951
© Royal Anthr
opological Institute 2010
----------------------- Page 44-----------------------
948 Book reviews
Fischer, Johan. Proper Islamic consumption: The state ther
efore transformed Al-Arqam’s
shopping among the Malays in modern form of millennia
l capitalism into a national
Malaysia. xix, 258 pp., illus., bibliogr. project. This bec
ame part and parcel of the
Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2008. £40.00 ‘nationalization of I
slam’, which in turn
(cloth), £17.99 (paper) accelerated the hal
alization of the (moral)
economy. ‘Halalizat
ion is an example of
Set against the backdrop of 9/11, the author’s embedding Islam in
a series of everyday
eldwork in 2001 and 2002 straddles the practices that nece
ssitate reference to
political, social, and cultural milieu of coming to fundamental princ
iples or a moral codex’
terms with Muslim Malay modernity and a (p. 63), remarks
Fischer. The internalization of
radical shift in world politics, especially the role this process fost
ers good citizens, who ‘shop for
of Islam and Islamic politics. Fischer is not the the state’ (p. 34).
rst to study the Malay Muslim middle class in The co-option of
people, ideas, and
Malaysia, which has a fertile history of scholars, modalities of bei
ng remains the state’s principal
both from Malaysia and outside it, explaining modus operandi an
d it would have been
the seeming contradiction of an increased interesting to se
e who owns and operates other
Islamic religiosity along with increased major halal-certi e
d corporations that are
materialism or consumption of all things pro ting from the g
eneral halalization of the
modern. However, his rich ethnography provides marketplace. The
growing Islamic nance market
vital clues as to how the state and individual and the introduct
ion of Middle Eastern banks is
consumers operate within the Islamic largely absent, b
ut could have provided a
marketplace on a local level. He deconstructs the backdrop to the w
ay consumption is nanced.
everyday consumer choices and decisions Fischer does
highlight alternative economic
against a backdrop of the Islamization of society activities such a
s multi-level marketing and direct
and the market. His eldsite of Taman Tun Dr selling that circum
vent the perceived Chinese
Ismail, a suburb of Kuala Lumpur, thus becomes stranglehold on t
he economy. These lightly
a microcosm of the larger Malaysian politico- veiled pyramid sc
hemes become an ethnic duty,
religious landscape as situated ‘between mosque which goes some way
to explain their
and market’ (p. 8). persistence and suc
cess, making this an
The major shift Fischer writes about is in especially nefari
ous interrelationship.
what the middle class consumes. Since the The book does
not include Badawi’s failed
Melayu Baru or New Malays’ spending spree and attempt at an Islam
ized pragmatic approach to
conspicuous consumption was slowed down by fusing Islam with
modernity, moderation and
the 1997 nancial meltdown, consumption consumption. Fische
r’s eldwork predated
patterns have shifted. Fischer argues that with Badawi and his Is
lamization (and halalization)
the government’s shutting down of Al-Arqam, a project of ‘Islam Had
hari’, but its inclusion
sect that was charged with deviant teachings would have moved
the debate beyond
after it had grown in size and clout to become a Mahathir’s more pra
ctical outlook and into the
threat to the government in the early 1990s and brave new world o
f a more comprehensive
in the post 9/11 world, Muslim Malay consumers (maybe even more
authentic) vision of an
shifted at least part of their consumption to Islamic Malaysia.
Islamic and Islamicized products. This shift was The ethnograph
y nicely predicts and traces
initially consumer-led but soon the government the development o
f the heightened Islamic
took over the reins (albeit with private capital visions and conce
ptualizations the government
injections and private ownership). The key word uses to Islamize
and halalize society, the
the author introduces into this debate is economy, and the
state in response to
‘halalization’, to describe the way the economy Westernization, commo
di cation, and the
and subsequently society were transformed. The associated social
ills. Thus Fischer argues:
government learned the lessons of small-scale ‘[A]ssumptions abou
t the empty core of
halalization from Al-Arqam and made it into a commodities may p
rovide the impetus for the
national project, with the certi cation of entire process of h
alalization. Central to these
products and the places of consumption, that is, ideas is the urge
to make Islam control and ll
restaurants and fast-food outlets. Al-Arqam was these empty vesse
ls properly’ (p. 194).
closed down but allowed to trade under The greatest a
chievement of this monograph
different names within the growing Islamic lies in the way i
t weaves together a convincing
marketplace, so long as it focused on the narrative of the
competing and con icting
economic and not the religious or political. ontologies of con
sumption and the different
----------------------- Page 45-----------------------
Book reviews 949

modes of being a middle-class Malay Muslim. It political claims, Gandolf
o argues that the
is a useful addition to the canon of research on transgressive character o
f such acts is at once the
the middle class(es) in Malaysia and of Islamic reason why they are effec
tive and the reason
consumption in general. why they often fail to ef
fect lasting change. This
Gerhard Hoffstaedter La Trobe University is not an original argume
nt, but becomes more
interesting when related
to how the
beauti cation of Lima’s centr
e was based on an
Gandolfo, Daniella . The city at its limits: idyllic image of Lima’s pas
t, and how the city’s
taboo, transgression, and urban renewal in convulsive history is con
tinually recon gured
Lima. xv, 269 pp., illus., bibliogr. London, into a version that under
-communicates racial
Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2009. £41.50 and sexual violence and cla
ss con ict. Such an
(cloth), £15.00 (paper) idyllic image – holding in ma
gical balance its
tendency towards excess – c
an be seen as part
Drawing on theories of transgression and taboo of a modern process of id
entity-making
in the exploration of modern public and political dependent on the public d
emonstration of
life in Lima, this book represents an original beauty and power.
approach to the understanding of urban space Gandolfo’s exploration
of urban boundaries
and boundaries. It consists of an interweaving of through an emphasis on af
fect and the senses is
theoretical essays and eld diary entries based characterized by an eloquen
t and visual
on the author’s eldwork (between 1997 and language. Despite the author’s n
e-tuned
2005) in Lima, the city where Gandolfo grew up observations and often mi
nd-tangling theoretical
and later returned to after years abroad. Rather re ections, however, many a
spects of her
than focusing primarily on questions of urban analysis remain scattered
and somewhat
migration and growth that have characterized fragmented. Empirical des
criptions and analysis
many previous studies of urban change in this are often not integrated
and her argumentation
context, Gandolfo is concerned with is rather implicit. Some
of the questions
understanding the dynamics of limits. She takes Gandolfo poses are both w
onderfully put and
as her point of departure the protests among highly intriguing – for ins
tance, whether the
Lima’s street sweepers against the privatization ‘sovereign’ is really a mother –
but she does not
of the city’s cleaning services during the always follow these questio
ns to their
government of Alberto Fujimori, and the project consequences. The more or
less direct use of the
of beauti cation and modernization of the city eld diary – often closely link
ed to the author’s
centre by Lima’s mayor. A central theme is an own experiences and family
relationships –
incident when female street cleaners stripped makes parts of the text u
nnecessarily detailed
during a protest in 1996, inspiring other and anecdotal, although c
ontributing to bring
demonstrators to do the same and putting an her own position closer t
o the reader and
end to the police interference. making her procedures of
discovery extremely
In her explorations of this and other transparent. Gandolfo is
inspired by the Peruvian
moments – past and present – in which the novelist and anthropologist L
uis Arguedas
boundaries regarding nakedness, beauty, and regarding the use of the
diary and the stress on
lth become unsettled, Gandolfo draws on the subjectivity and arti ce in t
he creation of realist
work of Georges Bataille in addition to historical effects as ‘absolutely true
and absolutely
sources on the changing meanings of imagined’. In many ways, Ga
ndolfo makes
bureaucracy, architecture, and art in the city. The herself into the key info
rmant of her own study,
project of beauti cation of Lima’s historical and the book thus illustrates
central questions
centre reveals the discrepancies between about ethnographic eldwork
, the signi cance of
representations of the city and its reality, as well subjectivity, and the ext
ent to which we all use
as the contemporary and historical denial of ourselves as the key info
rmant of our studies.
social inequalities. Through the act of stripping However, this stress
on the author’s own
in a situation of ‘pure despair’, the women experience of Lima after year
s abroad – in
conveyed these discrepancies by their crossing of combination with a rather
limited use of
limits. This act also demonstrated the interviews – gives an impre
ssion that the book
interrelationship between the city and the primarily represents the
perspective of the
human body which represents a central concern cosmopolitan middle class
. Therefore the notion
in the book. Seeing the stripping in a of ‘limits’ is given much of
its meaning through
comparative framework regarding women’s use the author’s own positioning,
while generally
of motherhood – and nakedness – to make excluding the perspectives of
people who
stitute (N.S.) 16, 905-951
© Royal Anthropol
ogical Institute 2010
----------------------- Page 46-----------------------
950 Book reviews
experience these limits from other positions. As a In order to unde
rstand dance movement
result, the experiences and perspectives of through her own body
, Hughes-Freeland
people who are differently positioned are treated invested extensive t
ime and effort in learning
as given, and therefore as somehow determined. how to dance, which
she confesses to having
It is particularly in connection to this and related found extremely dif cu
lt, as the Javanese dancer
challenges that the book makes an interesting has to balance conce
ntration with ease, and
contribution – not only to understandings of the strength with grace. S
he gradually realized that
dynamics of taboo and transgression, but also to learning Javanese da
nce is ‘to learn how to
discussions about subjectivity and the assert presence by r
estraining movements within
relationship between ethnography and the limits of one’s ow
n body space’ (p. 94). This
autobiography. personal involvement
allowed her to t into the
Cecilie Vindal Ødegaard University of Bergen local social scene. In
so doing, she experienced
for herself how the
embodiment of Javanese
values in court danc
e form endows practitioners
Hughes-F reeland, F elicia. Embodied with skills and insi
ghts relevant for appropriate
communities: dance traditions and change in behaviour in social
interactions. In Java, dancing
Java. xv, 286 pp., gs, tables, illus., bibliogr. is an empowering compe
tence, as court dance
Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books, 2009. movement is valued n
ot only for itself, but also
£45.00 (cloth) for its instrumental p
ower to produce effects in
the social world.
This book is at once a superb ethnography, However, the eff
ects produced by Javanese
grounded in a long-term case study conducted dance have changed s
ince the founding of the
between 1982 and 1999 into the dance traditions court of Yogyakarta
in the eighteenth century.
of the Sultan’s court in Yogyakarta, and a Javanese court dance h
as become an Indonesian
signi cant contribution to the theorization of art form, integrated i
nto the national policies
culture, society, and the body during a period of dealing with cultura
l development and
far-reaching change. education. Hughes-Fr
eeland investigates the
Felicia Hughes-Freeland addresses two resulting relationsh
ip between the court’s
prevalent themes in dance anthropology: the performance traditio
ns and national cultural
politics of dance and the cultural interpretation politics. While poin
ting the tensions between
of movement. The result is a captivating national policies to
preserve traditions and to
investigation, densely packed with acute promote tourism, she
maintains that the
ethnographic observations and sensitive personal commoditization of J
avanese court dance on the
impressions, as much as with theoretical market as a tourist
attraction has not obliterated
considerations and academic references. the former relations
hip between expression and
Although she makes use of a Western conceptual spirituality.
apparatus to discuss the theorization of the body The court repert
oire came out of the court
while referring to scholarly debates about dance walls in 1918 with t
he foundation, on the Sultan’s
in Java, her analytical framework is shaped by instructions, of a d
ance school for the purpose of
emic categories of the person and local promoting court danc
e as a form of education.
interpretations of dance forms and movement. The new school initi
ated practices that would
Dance matters to anthropology because shape court dance an
d allow it to survive as
communities use it to represent themselves to classical dance afte
r independence, including
themselves and to others. It is both a standardizing dance
movement, nomenclature,
representational system and an embodied and choreography, an
d its innovations fed back
practice. Accordingly, Hughes-Freeland into court practice.
Later on, in the 1970s, as the
approaches dance from a double perspective: as court troupe was lea
ving for a tour of Europe, a
movement that relates to the performance of select team of court
retainers and dance masters
everyday action, and as formal choreographic formulated the basic
principles of the art of
conventions associated with power centres. dancing in Yogyakart
a. With a view to giving a
There are thus two main issues in her study of consistent account o
f court dance to foreign
court dance in Yogyakarta. One is a ne-grained journalists and other
outsiders, they converted an
exploration of the inner world of Javanese oral tradition into
a written one, drawing on
dancing, while the other deals with its erstwhile practices
to create a modern aesthetic.
transformation from a court heirloom to an The de nition of Javan
ese court dance as an
Indonesian national art form and further to a Indonesian classical
tradition that could be
tourist commodity. separated from its o
riginal context and developed
----------------------- Page 47-----------------------
Book reviews 951

accordingly made it possible to commercialize it Even if it is rather d
emanding,
on the tourist maket. By the 1980s the court no Hughes-Freeland’s study make
s for highly
longer had a monopoly on its own traditions. The rewarding reading. Yet, it
is unfortunate that she
patronage of the court dance had extended to did not take into account
the social and political
dance associations and academies, as well as to resurgence of Islam which
shook Indonesia in
hotels and other commercial venues. Although the 1990s, and particularl
y since President
the changes of patronage and context for Suharto’s resignation in 199
8. Regrettably, for a
performance of Yogya-style classical dance have book published in 2008, he
r investigation stops
at times led to tourist art, in most other cases in 1999, just as this coun
try was undergoing a
they result in abbreviated restagings that tremendous upheaval.
replicate traditional forms for non-traditional Michel Picard
Centre Asie du Sud-Est,
audiences.
CNRS-EHESS
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Ins
titute (N.S.) 16, 905-951
© Royal Anthropolo
gical Institute 2010

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