Book Reviews

Anthrohistory: Unsettling Knowledge, Questioning Discipline. Edward Murphy, David William Cohen, Chandra D. Bhimull, Fernando Coronil, Monica Eileen Patterson, and Julie Skurski, eds., Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011. Laurent Dubois Duke University As I walked along, I kept saying, like a mantra, as the deer slid back and forth on my back, its blood seeping through my shirt, my back and neck in agony: Fuck anthropology! Fuck anthropology! With these lines, we join anthropologist Paul Eiss as he experiences the eld in the Yucatan, part of a hunting party during which his sense of his own dignity, and manhood, gets deconstructed to the great hilarity of his companions (40). Elsewhere in the piece, Eiss nds himself similarly facing a scatological deconstruction of the archive so dear to historians when, feeling an intestinal infection coming on as he reads documents, he rushes to the bathroom and discovers that the toilet paper on offer is a stack of old papers from the archives. Eiss essay, hilarious and heartfelt, is one of a series of remarkable journeys offered to us in this unruly, vital, and inspiring collection. There is a unique energy to the essays herea willingness to
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experiment, a rare combination of honesty, humor, passion, and theoretical engagement. The book is a collective memoir, a manifestoattempting to install the term Anthrohistory itself in institutional lexicon while resisting the temptation to x or sacralize itand most of all an invitation to participate in a project energized by the fragility of its own future. It would be dishonest not to note from the beginning that my reading of the work was very much a dialogue with friends: like all those whose work is presented in the volume, I have a connection to the Interdepartmental Program in Anthropology and History at the University of Michigan, where I received my Ph.D. in 1998. The book includes essays by close friends, comrades from those years in graduate school, and concludes with a brilliant essay by my mentor, Fernando Coronilhaunting and difcult to read now, several months after his death in August of this year. But I feel pretty certain that the rich provocations offered in the book will register just as deeply for those who approach it from a less personal vantage point as well. The book began as part of a conference called Trans/Formations of the Disciplines Evaluating the Project of Anthropology and History held at the University of Michigan in 2004. That event itself was an opportunity to take stock of the

The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, Vol. 17, No. 1, pp. 131192. ISSN 1935-4932, online 2012 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1935-

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experience of faculty and students involved in the Ph.D. program in Anthropology and History that had been founded in the late 1980s. David Pedersens wonderful essay in the volume tells the story of how that program emerged, out of a particular historical conguration that reaches back to the development of maize in the Americas, through a Kellogg Foundation grant that helped create the group called Comparative Studies in Social Transformation, and the political and institutional battles over diversity and the curriculum that raged at Michigan as elsewhere in the 1980s and early 1990s. The collection is, in a sense, a spiral of stories linked to that particular history, a mix of very personal essays, theoretical meditations, poetry and art, alongside exemplary expressions of what Anthrohistory can do when applied to particular situationsin Nigeria, South Africa, or Romania. Each of these works, in its way, celebrates the unsuspected ways in which might seem straightforward rarely turns out to be. Indeed an essay by Deidre de la Cruz essay is adorned with a quotation from Jorge Luis Borgeswho, in large part because of the love felt for this author by Fernando Coronil often served as laughing angel on the shoulders of many of us associated with this projectthat declares: I know of one Greek labyrinth which is a single straight line. Along that line so many philosophers have lost themselves that a mere detective might well do so, too (111). Many of the authors share with us their sense of bewilderment and pleasure at getting lost. The editors introduction sets out what ties much of this work together: imaginative thinking about the uses and valences of time and space in the interpretation of culture and history; serious

attention to the worlds of people rendered outcast, subordinate, or marginal; inspired regard for connecting the material to the cultural; studied concern for the possibilities and limits of archives and sources; critical reection on the privileged position of scholar, observer, teacher, and expert; and unreticent experimentalism in the representation of lifeworlds found, understood and reconstructed (6). The tensions between such shared projects and the institutional contexts in which we seek to pursue them within the university haunt much of the work here, notably Thomas Wolfes meditations on how those trained in Anthrohistory often nd themselves institutionally alienated from some part of themselves. In his searching essay, we get a moving anthropology of life in the university itself, including a remarkable description of the ways debates about hiring and tenure become a kind of phantom battleground, in which assembled multitudes including 17th century European scientists, Chinese ofcials from the Ming dynasty, the persecuted Cambodian masses, the American public, victims of fascism, Andean peasants, Roman emperors, former slaves, American consumers, Soviet citizens are mobilized in the battle to dene what pasts are most vital to offer to the present and future (231). Setrag Manoukian, meanwhile, takes us through his meditations on the crossroads he inhabits in his work on Iran, seeking at times to provide layers of context, at others to provide an account of the bloc of sensations that make up lived reality, and whose representation poses seductive challenges (293). The transporting culmination of the collection, though, is an effervescent work of theory and poetry, a playful response to Walter Benjamin, Karl Marx, Alejo

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Carpentier, Jorge Luis Borges, and the many other thinkers and writers who played in the mind of the now-departed Fernando Coronil. In ve short pages (followed by 11 owing pages of notes), he sketches out the dream of Anthrohistory as a project of this world but not at home in it, as one that must roam in exileat least for nowpursuing the task of examining what has been recorded and uncover what has been silenced, bringing to light possible histories. In a vertiginous and stirring paragraphnumber 7 of the piecehe begins thus: Imagine a discussion about truth in a Jorge Luis Borges story written by Italo Calvino and illustrated by M.C. Esher. He then goes on to produce a map so imaginative, so distorted and unfamiliar, that it somehow brings us back, disheveled, to some kind of truth. To see how he does that, you will have to buy the book. Do. Cajones de la memoria: La historia re ciente del Peru a trav s de los retabe los andinos. Mara Eugenia Ulfe, Lima: Fondo Editorial de la Ponticia Univer sidad Catolica del Peru, 2011. 310 pp. Olga Gonz lez a Macalester College Cajones de la Memoria is a detailed ethnographic study of retablos, a well-known form of Peruvian art. Written in close conversation with the artists who created them, the main focus is on the transformations these retabloscarved and painted wooden boxes with gures made of a mixture of plaster and potatoeshave undergone in relation to their creators attempts to represent memories of Perus violence from 1980 to 2000. This textured narrative is based on 5 years of collaborative and of-

ten multisited ethnography in workshops, galleries, and shops in cities and peasant communities in Ayacucho, shantytowns, and upscale neighborhoods in Lima, and in Naples, Florida in the United States. The ethnography is divided in two parts and contains a total of eight chapters. In the rst part Ulfe pays attention to the historical processes that contributed to the transformation of the cajones of San Marcosportable altars used in cattlebranding ceremonies in the Andesinto retablos. She argues that this popular art developed in opposition to high art. Ulfe then examines the various relationships artists established with intellectuals, collectors, dealers and tourists, and concludes that the artists subvert the will of the teacher (59; all translations by the reviewer). They thus ultimately create their own artistic genre, reclaim citizenship, and gain recognition at the national level. By presenting in chapter 2 a portrait of the lives and experiences of the artists negotiating their identities, their notions of place, and their ideas on continuity and discontinuity, Ulfe stresses the importance of their agency in the artworks production and commodication. In chapters 3 and 4, she conveys how this agency takes shape and inects the social life of the retablos inside and outside the workshop. Together they offer a close examination of family workshops, divisions of labor, and dialogues with clients and intellectuals. Chapter 4 closes with a discussion of what distinguishes an artistic retablo from a commercial one, as dened by its makers. While aesthetic quality is of the utmost importance, what seems to be essential to the artists is the lived experience attached to the retablos de arte, or retablos especiales, and retablos de comentario social, other categories the artists use to

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