pilgrimages and spiritual quests in japan - edited by maria rodríguez del alisal, peter ackermann...

Book reviewsjrai_1646 654..701

Archaeology and art

Byers, A. Martin. Cahokia: a world renewalcult heterarchy. xiv, 599 pp., maps, figs, illus.,bibliogr. Gainesville: Univ. Press of Florida,2006. $69.95 (cloth)

Martin Byers gives us a provocativeinterpretation of the society that createdCahokia. Rather than a society based oninstitutionalized social and political inequalitywith political (and religious) authorityconcentrated in a limited number of formalpositions, he argues that Cahokia was theproduct of sodalities, largely egalitarian socialformations. Furthermore, he argues that the sitewas a location for communal rituals of renewal,conducted under the auspices of religioussodalities. It is not possible to give Byers’sarguments the detailed attention and evaluationthey deserve here, so I will limit myself to a fewgeneral comments.

Byers writes as an outsider to the debatesabout Cahokia, and he brings a fresh perspectiveto these debates. I find much to like in hisarguments. His stress on the symbolic nature ofagency and material practice (and the materialthings that are involved in practice) is somethingthat must be in the foreground of any model ofthe Mississippian societies. We imbue withmeaning the things we make and use, thematerial world that surrounds us, and the otherpeople and living things that occupy that world.Those meanings shape our perceptions andunderstandings, which in turn shape ouractions. Therefore, in order to understand whatpeople did and why they did it, we mustconsider the meaningful worlds in which they

acted. Byers also makes important points aboutthe significance of heterarchical complexity,kinship, and religious belief in Mississippiansocieties.

The theoretical coherency of Byers’sinterpretation is impressive and should beexamined thoroughly by all archaeologistsworking in the region. I say this not because Iagree with his interpretations, but because hischallenge to traditional models of theMississippian raises questions and issues thatmust be dealt with.

While I feel that Byers makes some potentiallyimportant contributions to the archaeology ofCahokia and the broader Mississippianphenomenon, I also see some weaknesses. I feelhe makes excessive use of exclusionary,theoretically charged jargon. This languageappeals to those who subscribe to his theoreticalapproach, but, as all jargons do, it tends toevoke sentiments of affinity and estrangementbetween those who use the jargon and thosewho use other jargons. If the purpose of ourwriting is to communicate, this seemscounter-productive. At the least, it tends toobfuscate Byers’s very important arguments.

I am less convinced by some of Byer’sarguments regarding the relationship betweenworld renewal and Cahokia and between maizeand cord-marked pottery. The evidence forworld renewal ceremonialism in theMississippian seems no stronger than that forpurification and warfare or for the exultation ofelites and the chartering of elite status positions.Regarding cord-marking as an indicator of vesselfunction, I think that the direction of fibre twistis a marker that would have had very limitedvisibility and therefore limited effectiveness as acommunicator.

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 16, 654-701© Royal Anthropological Institute 2010

More importantly, I think Byers overlookssome important evidence for clear hierarchicalpolitical formations in the Mississippian world.Much of this derives from ethnohistoricalaccounts, which, of course, must be taken witha large grain of salt. Nevertheless, I feel thatthere are good, reliable accounts of secularchiefs who could command impressive amountsof labour and goods. There are alsoethnohistorical accounts that clearly point to theascriptive, hereditary nature of social status asaccess to political office. There is alsoarchaeological evidence that seems to indicatethe existence of centralized political offices andascriptive status that involved greater access tofood. That is to say, chiefs existed, were able tomobilize impressive amounts of goodsand labour, and were marked in life anddeath.

While I feel that archaeologists working onthe Mississippian societies should read Byers’swork, I do not think that it is so useful forthose who are unfamiliar with the archaeologyof the region. First, it is a position paperadvocating a particular interpretation. Hisarguments require familiarity with thearchaeology of the region to evaluate themfairly. His outsider position, which allows himto bring a fresh perspective to the archaeologyof Cahokia, is also a weakness. He ignores, forexample, much of the recent discussion ofMississippian iconography, making the bookonly really useful to those already conversantwith the data.

John Scarry University of North Carolina,Chapel Hill

Insoll, Timothy (ed.). The archaeology ofidentities: a reader. xiii, 335 pp., maps, figs,tables, illus., bibliogrs. London, New York:Routledge, 2007. £19.99 (paper)

The last two decades have witnessed escalatingdeliberation on past identities and there seemslittle indication of any drift in the intellectualclimate. Indeed, many archaeologists appear tobe even more committed to such foci. Thissourcebook, composed of seventeen previouslypublished articles arranged into five thematicsections, fills a significant gap in the market.Although certain readers may be surprised bythe inclusion of some articles and the absence ofothers, the volume remains representative ofcurrent trends.

The introduction considers some of theframeworks, politics, and ethics whichcharacterize much research into archaeologicalidentities. The transience, permanence, andculturally mediated bio-physicality of certainidentity categories are also scrutinized. The realstrength, though, is in showing how sucharchaeological endeavour might contributeto contemporary issues, especiallymulticulturalism, cultural hybridization, andglobalization.

Part I concerns ‘General perspectives,ethnicity, and nationalism’. Lynn Meskell, thepioneer of the field, explores themultidimensionality of identities and makes acompelling case that the archaeology of socialexperience is optimally approached with a focuson difference. The notion of divergence and thesense of an individuated ethnic existence arefurther explored in Sian Jones’s contribution.She notes the perpetual dynamism of groupself-identification and demonstrates how practicetheory, with its sensitivity to the re-enactmentand reconfiguration of normative structures,successfully articulates processes of ethnicinternalization. In a similar fashion MichaelRowlands’s article, concerning the ethnic andnational subjectivities of archaeologists, servesadmirably to remind us of how identities inthe present always colour interpretations ofthe past.

‘Gender and age’, with contributions fromRosemary Joyce, Joanna Sofaer, and Alison Wylie,makes up the matter of part II. Inspired by thefeminist critique of science, the archaeology ofgender has some pedigree, and it iscommendable that none of the articles merelypromulgates reverse discourses. Indeed it is thecomplex and performative dimensions ofidentities that the authors tease apart throughtheir eclectic case studies. Part III takes thecoverage seamlessly into sexual territory.Barbara Voss tackles the intersection betweengender and sex, Benjamin Alberti examinesbodily aesthetics, and Kelley Hays-Gilpindiscusses gender complementarity. Theinfluences of Judith Butler, and herappreciations of identity instability andconstitution, are most strikingly illustrated inthese articles, although they are to be foundthroughout the reader.

Part IV concerns archaeological treatments of‘The body’. In their contributions Morag Crossand Tony Waldren consider respectively theinterrelationship between archaeology anddisability and bodily manifestations ofdisadvantage. The past, of course, speaks to

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current audiences, and as such both articlesreveal that, as Insoll points out, ‘archaeologistsare not immune from social responsibilities’ nor‘removed from contemporary issues’ (p. 178).Understandings of the body are illuminated byJulian Thomas in his review of humanist andanti-humanist perspectives and the dominanceof the former, tied to the related concepts offixed individuality and free agency, in the theoryof archaeology. Through the anti-humanistagenda the possibilities of other humanitiesemerge. It could also be asserted, in this regard,that the disclosure of certain forms of ‘otherness’are reliant on purposeful cross-pollinationbetween archaeology and socio-culturalanthropology.

With five articles, part V, ‘Class, caste,ideology and religion’, is the lengthiest sectionof the volume. In relation to the others thisseems somewhat imbalanced and one gets theimpression that two sections have beencombined for want of an additional paper. Thisseems awkward despite the editor notinginterconnections between different identities tojustify the arrangement. None the less this is aminor problem and otherwise the section is areal highlight. Susan Andrews and JamesFenton explore the manifestations of classunderpinned by slave-ownership. RobinConingham and Ruth Young demonstrate howcaste and class differ and, drawing from theirarchaeological work in South Asia, that casteidentity in the past and present werearticulated dissimilarly. Hierarchy is furthermorescrutinized in Elizabeth Brumfiel’s excellentexamination of Aztec power relations. Theinterplay of ideology and religion is nextdissected by Joanna Brück in her exploration ofprehistoric rituality, which explicates not onlythe post-Enlightenment underpinning ofarchaeological categorization but also howritual extends beyond the religious/symbolic inits meaningful choreography of identities.Descriptions of the evidence for changingreligious identities in the Arabian Gulf, one ofthe most politically volatile areas of the globe,are provided in the final contribution. Fittingly,Insoll sets a challenge to regionalarchaeologists, although it resonates morewidely, to attend to the diverse manifestationsof identities in the record.

In short, as well as being a valuable teachingaid, which could be added profitably to thereading lists of most social archaeology courses,this volume serves as a springboard for futureengagement of identities.

Timothy Clack University of Oxford

Conservation and environmentalanthropology

Hoeppe, Götz. Conversations on the beach:fishermen’s knowledge, metaphor andenvironmental change in South India. xv, 208

pp., maps, figs, tables, illus., bibliogr.Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2007. £38.50 (cloth)

This book comprises Volume 2 of a currentfourteen-volume series titled ‘Studies inEnvironmental Anthropology and Ethnobiology’published by Berghahn Books and edited by RoyEllen, from the University of Kent. The book fillsa gap in its deep ethnographic analysis of localknowledge in maritime/fishing populations andhow local people adapt their ‘traditions’ orknowledge against rapidly changingenvironmental, social, and economiccircumstances. Hoeppe is able to steer us intoand through the complexity of the fishingactivities and social conceptualizations of fishingand the marine environment of the mainlyHindu, Malayalam-speaking fisherfolk fromChamakkala village located in central Kerala inSouth India. He does this through aninterdisciplinary study of local knowledge andexpression through conversations, metaphors,and figurative language, and fishermen’sperception of human-environment relations. Thestudy is contextualized within the local andregional environmental conditions and changesthat have taken place over last seventy years.Specifically, the book is based on Hoeppe’sdoctoral thesis, for which he conducted fourteenmonths of fieldwork during 1999-2000. Researchwas conducted through participant observationsfollowed up with ‘conversations on the beach’,which appear as translated narrativesthroughout the book, and set the scene for eachchapter and sub-sections.

Chapter 1 describes the research questionsand defines the key focus of local knowledge forHoeppe’s study. The research addresses issues offishermen’s conceptions of the marineenvironment, their relations to it, and how theycommunicate about it; the interaction betweenfishing skills, operations, environmentalknowledge, and human-environment relations.Hoeppe defines local environmental knowledgeas ‘the knowledge necessary for producing andreproducing a locality and an environment’. The‘community of conversationalists’ in Chamakkala(chap. 2) describes the two social groups withwhom Hoeppe worked – Hindu Arayas and

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Muslims – as well as the village economy,migration patterns of workers to Gulf States, andthe fishermen’s conceptualization of space,showing that production of locality is a relationalprocess – with the West being the sea andfishing being the ‘work of the West’. The fisher’snotion of the ‘outside in the East’ and ‘outsidein the West’ is revealed by the metaphors usedin everyday language. Chapter 3 describesfishing activities – fishing gear, the means ofproduction, division of profits, marketing of thecatch – and the social roles and organizationassociated with fishing and fishing units inChamakkala. This is one of the most interestingparts of the book, because of its richethnographic insights into many aspects offishing. Hoeppe covers in detail the processes ofdecision-making about where and what to fish,including market prices for certain species,weather and surf conditions, skippers’monitoring of sea surface and bird behaviour,and the movements of other boats. Thedecisions on where and what to fish are allpredicated on the extent of external informationavailable for decision-making, not just the ‘heat’and ‘coldness’ of the sea. Fishermen’sconceptions of the marine environment and howit is communicated are covered by presentingethnographic material relating to local conceptsof the sea, and derivatives of such discourses(chap. 4). The social relatedness of the sea isfurther considered in chapter 5, along withsymbolism associated with fishers’ relations withthe sea and the mediation of ritual experts anddeities in human-environment interactions.Chapter 6 considers the impact of the state onChamakkala fishing both in the colonial past andsince Indian independence, as well as the impacton the marine environment of trawling andmotorization of fishing vessels, infrastructuredevelopment, and the resultant perceptions ofsuch impacts, such as effect on circulationpatterns and cooling of the sea. In the finalchapter Hoeppe discusses changing localknowledge and how fishers use foreign orimported knowledge. He concludes that, for theChamakkala fishermen, ‘the old ideas are notworking now’ within this uncertain progressiveworld.

This book is recommended to anyoneunpacking the discourse on local environmentalor traditional knowledge in fishing societiesmore broadly, not only in South Asia. The bookis well presented as part of the series, containingonly a few minor typographical errors andoccasionally some awkward language. Itprovides photographs, diagrams, and maps, and

three appendices. The cross-disciplinarycoverage and content make it suitable for avariety of academic audiences. Overall, the bookmakes a significant contribution to the study offishing societies in particular and environmentalanthropology more generally.

Natasha Stacey Charles Darwin University

Hughes, David McDermott. Fromenslavement to environmentalism: politics on aSouthern African frontier. xvii, 285 pp., maps,tables, figs, illus., bibliogr. London, Seattle:Univ. Washington Press, 2006. £32.95 (cloth)

James Ferguson’s description of thedevelopment apparatus as an ‘anti-politicsmachine’ (The anti-politics machine:‘development’, depoliticization, and bureaucraticpower in Lesotho, 1990) applies in many waysjust as aptly to conservation programmes.Concerned with the protection of plants andanimals and informed primarily by naturalsciences, conservation is ostensibly far removedfrom politics, yet in practice conservationprojects often become highly political issues. Akey reason for this is that many conservationinitiatives – forest reserves, national parks,protected areas – by their very nature maketerritorial claims, and thereby both evoke newcontestations over land and become part ofongoing cadastral politics, often in unanticipatedways. This is powerfully demonstrated inHughes’s thoughtful study of environmentalconservation initiatives in two neighbouringlocalities in the Chimanimani-Sitonga region ofthe Zimbabwe-Mozambique border in the late1990s, Vhimba in Zimbabwe and Gogoi inMozambique. Hughes does so by means of anunusual but highly effective approach. Ratherthan focusing directly on the environmentalprogrammes themselves – Zimbabwe’swell-known Campfire in Vhimba, and similarcommunity conservation and eco-tourismprojects in Gogoi run largely by Campfireintelligentsia – he situates these in the twolocalities’ longer histories of control over peopleand over land, so central to changing Africanpolitics throughout the last century.

Vhimba and Gogoi share a border and haveboth been frontier regions within their owncountry, forming a ‘double hinterland’ (p. 4),yet their histories differ significantly. In Vhimba,colonial settlement following Moodie’s treks inthe 1890s led to an early emergence ofpredominantly cadastral politics, with chiefsquick to recognize the importance of control

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over territory in the face of colonial landacquisition. In Gogoi, in contrast, Portugueseattempts to encourage colonial settlement in theregion failed. With plenty of land available,control over people and labour remainedparamount for many more decades, so thatwhen Hughes conducted a mapping project inGogoi in 1997, he found that chiefs had little ideaof the size and borders of the areas they ruledover. In Vhimba, meanwhile, chiefs had becomehighly adroit at strategically placing new arrivalsin contested borderlands in order to affirm orextend their territory. Amongst these, as Hughesnotes, it was people from Gogoi, lessexperienced in land politics than Zimbabweans,who tended to have least choice in the allocationof their land parcels. In this context,environmental initiatives, too, presented a formof land-grabbing – afforestation in the 1970s/80s,and then especially eco-tourism and Campfireprojects in the 1990s. Informed by liberal ideasof development and racial equality, Campfiredeliberately sought to establish these withinblack lowlands, thereby removing the guaranteeto land that ‘native reserve’ had provided.Mozambique meanwhile also pursued a policyof investment-led development through loggingand then eco-tourism in Gogoi, withoutprotecting local land rights. Whilst Hughes’sendorsement of Rhodesian native policy mayappear somewhat controversial – surely reserveslimited as well as protected local access to land?– he nevertheless makes a powerful case that ata time of rapid investment-led land-grabbing, ofwhich eco-tourism projects were a central part,local farmers needed much stronger protectionof their land rights than a liberal policyframework provided, and that in this context theliberal tenets of emancipation, empowerment,and democracy became almost meaningless.

It is through Hughes’s tight focus oncadastral politics that his argument emerges soclearly. One feels Hughes chose to leave outmuch else he knows; there is almost nothing onlocal environmental ideas and practices, withsacred groves, for example, only mentioned inpassing. Whilst perhaps some discussion of thiswould have enriched the analysis, this bookdemonstrates how anthropology today canafford to abandon its traditional holism and beeffectively targeted; and in particular that,through subtle analysis of micro-scale processesover the longer term, it can make a significantand important contribution to ourunderstanding of land-grabbing and land rights,one of today’s most pressing issues in thedeveloping world and especially, of course, in

Zimbabwe. The country’s more recent crisis ishere only briefly touched upon, leaving onecurious about subsequent developments inVhimba and Gogoi – were migration patternsperhaps reversed, for example? The book,however, provides crucial background to ourunderstanding of the current protracted crisis,making clear that it is the latest episode in along history of disregard of the rights of themany by the few, be they colonial settlers,environmentalists and tourist companies, or,most recently, political and military elites.

Pauline von Hellerman University of York

Food and consumption

Caldwell, Melissa L. (ed.). Food andeveryday life in the post-socialist world. xiv, 231

pp., illus., bibliogrs. Bloomington: IndianaUniv. Press, 2009. $65.00 (cloth), $24.95

(paper)

Food, as Marion Nestle points out in herforeword to this exciting collection of essays,‘makes abstractions real’ (p. xi). In doing so, itprovides a concrete way into the interests,ideologies, debates, and decisions shaping theeveryday lives of people living in post-socialistsocieties. As Melissa Caldwell points out in herinformative introduction, ‘[F]ood has beencentral to both socialist and postsocialistreformist projects’ (p. 3). The introductionprovides an overview of the roles played by foodin these projects and in the popular culturesshaped by and in reaction to them.

Two central, interrelated themes in thevolume are regulation and globalization,particularly as mediated through the EuropeanUnion. As discussed in a fine afterword byElizabeth Cullen Dunn, the state regulation offoods under socialism has given way todispersed but equally pervasive forms ofstandardization. Zsuzsa Gille demonstrates howEU-mandated food safety standards underminedHungary’s national-level food safety system,while EU-imposed trade liberalization opened upthe Hungarian market to imports of spicepeppers from Spain and Brazil, includingpeppers considered toxic according to previousHungarian standards. The imports were blendedwith Hungarian Hungaricum paprika to improvecolour and bring down processors’ overheads,posing potential safety risks to Hungarianconsumers while at the same time making it

Book reviews658


impossible for producers to obtain EuropeanUnion certification to protect their uniqueHungaricum products.

While Gille highlights the constraints onEastern European consumers and producersimposed by trade liberalization and supra-statefood regulation, several of the authors exploreethnographically how actors have adapted to thechanging structures. Yuson Jung informs us thatBulgarians viewed the standardized, industrialfoods produced under state socialism with greatscepticism. More recently, however, certainbrands of jarred vegetables were deemed to beacceptable. Interestingly, Jung argues that thisshift in attitudes was not a reflection of trust inthe capitalist system, or of a desire to emulateWesterners. Instead, Bulgarians were ‘competentconsumers’, who carefully judged branded jarfoods according to criteria such as taste, price,and whether or not producers could claim tohave followed EU standards.

In contrast to Jung, Neringa Klumbyteemphasizes the significance that nationalism andpolitical attitudes can have in shapingpreferences for particular food brands. Klumbyteargues that Lithuania’s popular ‘Soviet’ brandsausages stood for ‘naturalness’ and Lithuaniantradition and that their consumption was oftenlinked to a nostalgia for the socialist era. Thepoor quality attributed to ‘Euro’ brand sausages,in contrast, was a dismissal of the ‘syntheticmodernity’ (p. 142) associated with the EU’s‘scientific’ food safety standards and ‘tasteless’foods, and their unpopularity reflectedwidespread feelings of exclusion from Lithuania’sofficially endorsed pro-European post-Sovietmodernity.

Diana Mincyte discusses the persistentstrength in Lithuania of an informal, andfemale-dominated, market in raw milk. Throughportraits of producers, vendors, and consumers,Mincyte contends that in circumventingEU-imposed food safety regimes these womenwere nourishing their own embodied sense ofautonomy in a context of increased regulationand social inequalities. In a much less optimisticaccount of women’s agency underpost-socialism, Katherine Metzo sheds light onthe growing but hidden problem of femalealcoholism in Siberia – hidden, she argues,because of the specific ways that drinkingis gendered in Russian and Buriatcultures.

Two of the chapters explore the worlds ofeating out and haute cuisine. Caldwell chartsnot only the changing spaces of public foodconsumption in Soviet-era and post-socialist

urban Russia, but also the moral debates,anxieties, behaviours, and norms that haveaccompanied these changes. Stas Shechtmanexamines the roles of cooking competitions andcookery students in the production ofpost-Soviet Russian culinary culture. LikeKlumbyte, he notes the ongoing relevance ofSoviet-era institutions in the construction ofpost-Soviet national cultures. At the same time,Shechtman draws attention to the new demandsplaced on cooks in Russia’s increasinglycompetitive food world, and points out thatparticipating in the production of Russianculinary culture provided students ‘with thesymbolic capital to construct themselves ascosmopolitan post-Soviet subjects’ (p. 182).

Some readers may be disappointed to findthat the ‘post-socialist world’ of the title doesnot include countries outside of Eastern Europeand the former Soviet Union. However, theseethnographically rich and historically sensitivestudies will be of great comparative value toscholars interested in the social aspects of foodin other post-socialist and reform-socialistcontexts. By illuminating the ways in whichpeople previously living under state socialismhave variously responded to new foodmarkets and regulatory regimes, this volumeconstitutes an important contribution topost-socialist studies and to the anthropology offood.

Jakob A. Klein School of Oriental andAfrican Studies

Gewertz, Deborah & Frederick

Errington. Cheap meat: flap food nations inthe Pacific Islands. x, 213 pp., map, fig., illus.,bibliogr. London, Berkeley: Univ. CaliforniaPress, 2010. £14.95 (paper)

Kohi kelekele is the Hawaiian term for the greasy,fatty, rich flesh food that, as Patrick Kirch andSharyn Jones O’Day have written (‘Newarchaeological insights into food and status: acase study from pre-contact Hawaii’, WorldArchaeology 34, 2003, 484-97), defined luxury inpre-contact Hawaii and throughout Polynesia.This was food so greasy that it made the lipsglisten, ran down the chin in rivulets, and glazedthe fingers – a culinary adornment and mark ofthe good life, associated with chiefship andhigh-status corpulence. Anyone who has lived,even for a short time, on the carbohydrate dieteaten by Polynesian commoners in thepre-contact period, a diet that soon generates afierce craving for fat, will understand the esteem

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in which rich, oily flesh was held. This regardwas only intensified by the envy felt bycommoners for the chiefs, whose monopoly ofkohi kelekele was safeguarded by stringent foodtaboos. These factors are part of the answer to afundamental anthropological question: whatcultural and historical predispositions, inaddition to economic considerations, made thePacific Islands so receptive to the import ofcheap fatty meat from abroad, and account forits continuing popularity there in the face ofmedical concerns, public health initiatives, andlegislation? Regrettably, it is a question that thiscuriously culture-free book does not ask.

Cheap meat focuses on lamb ‘flaps’ or bellies,a low-cost food that can be up to 50 per centfat. Unlike many commodities that link the firstand third worlds, flaps are not produced underoppressive labour conditions, nor do theyinvolve biological/genetic or environmentalmodification. Flaps are simply very fatty, verycheap outdoor-reared grass-fed meat. Politicscome into the picture when the destination ofthis meat is considered. Disdained in theAustralian and New Zealand home markets, flapsare exported to the Pacific, where they areconsumed with alacrity by islanders to whomcopious supplies of fatty cheap meat epitomizethe good life. Yet these same Pacific islanders areamong the most overweight peoples in theworld, and suffer from a correspondingly highdegree of obesity-related conditions such asdiabetes, cardiac complaints, hypertension,strokes, kidney failure, and many related ills thatare exacerbated by the consumption of flaps. Itis this ‘ambiguous materiality’, as the authorsterm it, that makes flaps good to think with. Theauthors set out to follow their flow from NewZealand to the Pacific Islands using a multi-sitedapproach, aiming to probe the web ofcontesting choices that surround flaps: thechoices made by producers to export themknowing the health consequences for islanders;the choices of the Australian and New Zealandgovernments to restrict or not restrict theseexports; the different choices made by Pacificnations regarding the banning or restriction offlap imports; and the choice of islanders toconsume flaps, despite health and medicalconsequences. But after these promisingbeginnings, the analysis falters.

Much of the problem appears to bemethodological. There are only two primaryfieldwork locales. The first is New Zealand,among the sheep ranchers and flap processors,who do not fit the usual profile of manipulativeproducers. As the New Zealanders put it, cheap

meat finds its own market, and they are simplymaking an offcut commodity available to peoplewho want it. This suggests that consumptionand the cultural values that inform it are centralto this particular political dynamic. Yet thesecond intensive ethnographic site is Papua NewGuinea, where mass flap consumption is in itsrelatively early stages, and where morbid obesityis still rare. The authors justify its inclusion onthe grounds that they have long carried outfieldwork there. It is in the Pacific Islands that theimpact of flap consumption on obesity andhealth is most apparent, but here, ironically, theethnography is very thin, and restricted only toFiji and Tonga. In Fiji, where flap imports arebanned, it consists of interviews with publichealth and government officials and meatimporters, supplemented by consumerinformation obtained through randominterviews conducted by two graduate students.The kingdom of Tonga epitomizes thechallenges and complexities embodied in flaps.Flaps constitute 19 per cent of the foodconsumed in Tonga, and more than 60 per centof the Tongan population are obese withattendant health problems, yet here no on-siteethnography was conducted. Information wasobtained through library research and presscuttings, supplemented by interviews withhealth professionals from Tonga while they wereattending a conference in New Zealand. Theresult is an uneven study in which the local andthe global, the physical and the social bodies,and the epidemiological and anthropologicalperspectives are often conflated, and whichcompares unfavourably with the article on flapsby the same authors which appeared in thisjournal in 2008 (14: 3, 590-608).

Throughout Cheap meat, this reviewer keptwondering – ‘where’s da meat?’ With theexception of Papua New Guinea, there is nothick description in this work of the social worldor culinary life of the flap – how, when and withwhom it was consumed – nor how it wascooked, for there may be healthier ways ofcooking flaps than those employed at present.These questions and many others remain to beanswered in a future anthropological study of afascinating and important subject, one in whichthe significance of kohi kelekele and all it implieswill hopefully be addressed. For if we havelearned anything from the anthropology of foodin recent years, it is, first, as Mary Douglas put it,that ‘food is not feed’, and, second, thatglobalization makes cultural difference moreimportant, not less.

Kaori O’Connor University College London

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Holtzman, Jon. Uncertain tastes: memory,ambivalence, and the politics of eating inSamburu, Northern Kenya. ix, 285 pp., map,illus., bibliogr. London, Berkeley: Univ.California Press, 2009. £14.95 (paper)

This rich and multi-stranded ethnography ofeating practices among Samburu herders inNorthern Kenya describes the shift from anestablished pastoral diet comprising meat, milk,and blood to one in which purchasedagricultural products, including maize, tea, andsugar, have become key components. Holtzmanexamines Samburu responses to the historicalchanges introduced by colonial authorities andthe recent measures taken to counteract foodscarcity and the decline of the livestockeconomy, and considers the manner in whichincreasing commodification and availability ofnew foodstuffs challenge autochthonous systemsof exchange and distribution. Primarily,Holtzman demonstrates that Samburuexperience these transformations in deeplyambivalent and often contradictory ways, and heexplores the manner in which individualsconstruct and evaluate their past and presentthrough their changing eating practices, therebyhighlighting that food is a particularly salient sitefor memory and historical consciousness. Yet healso stresses that everyday food practices shouldnot just be regarded as a lens through which toexplore ‘the bigger picture’, but should ratherbe treated as a serious object of study in theirown right. This intention, to show that food is atopic worthy of considered ethnographic andtheoretical attention, is supported by Holtzman’sconvincing and consistent demonstration thatfood remains central to the constitution ofSamburu personhood and their socialrelations.

Uncertain tastes is at its strongest whendiscussing Samburu reactions to change, andthe arguments in part III are particularly welldeveloped, especially in chapters 8 and 9, whichaddress the themes of alcohol brewing andmoney, respectively. In this section, asthroughout the book, Holtzman is careful not tomake stark dichotomous distinctions betweentradition and development, and while heobserves the existence of two meta-narratives,one which represents the introduction of ‘gray’agricultural products as progress and the otherwhich perceives these foods as contributing tocultural decay, he is at pains to demonstrate thatthese narratives do not map neatly onto specificsocial groups. Hence, rather than emphasizingcontestation, Holtzman stresses ambivalence and

contradiction, and he shows us how Samburuindividuals dynamically combine both narrativesin their interpretation of their changing diet. Thisdoes not mean, however, that his conclusionsare essentially individualist, for he alsodemonstrates that the positive and negativeconsequences of commodification and theintroduction of new foods are sociallycontextual, and suggests that the ways in whichdietary transformations are perceived areinfluenced by age, gender, or regionaldistinctions.

In contrast to the considered conclusionsregarding the dynamism and dissonance ofcollective memory, and the emphasis on changefound in parts I and III of Uncertain tastes, part II,particularly the chapter on murranhood (maleadulthood), depicts Samburu eating practices assomewhat structured and timeless. For whileHoltzman clearly shows that food is central tothe constitution of moral personhood in thissection of the book, and stresses the role thateating plays in defining age and genderrelations, there is little to no mention of thechanges highlighted in both the opening andclosing sections. Written in the ethnographicpresent, it is thus unclear whether Holtzman’sclosely observed descriptions of the constructionof murranhood through eating and women’smanagement of milk distribution arerepresentations of ‘ideal types’ or whether theseprocesses are just more robust and less subjectto change. In some respects this representationis understandable, as the arguments made inthis section regarding the centrality of eating toself-definition provide the analytical foundationthrough which the consequences of dietarychange can be explored in the remainingsections. However, the end result is that chapters3 to 5 appear rather static in comparison to thehistorical processes and dynamism described inthe remaining chapters. Moreover, foodshortages and scarcity are cornerstones of thisethnography, yet these problematic concepts arenot expounded upon by Holtzman, who, whileemphasizing his intention to reconcile materialand mental perspectives, does not take theopportunity to reflect on the definitions of foodscarcity and adequate nutrition employed, andappears to use body mass index as anunquestionable measure. Consequently it isunclear whether the author is invoking his own,Samburu, or ‘official’ definitions of whatconstitutes an inadequate diet or shortage offood, and the possibility of exploring the ways inwhich potentially different perceptions interplayis denied.

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Yet these criticisms are diminished by theconsiderable strengths of Uncertain tastes, andthis rich ethnography with its subtle andthoughtful analysis makes a valuablecontribution, both ethnographically andtheoretically, to the anthropological fields offood and historical consciousness.

Emma-Jayne Abbots School of Oriental andAfrican Studies

Gender and sexuality

Abusharaf, Rogaia Mustafa. Transformingdisplaced women in Sudan: politics and thebody in a squatter settlement. xii, 183 pp.,tables, illus., bibliogr. London, Chicago: Univ.Chicago Press, 2009. £38.00 (cloth), £14.00

(paper)

This book is the fruit of a decade of advocacyand research in the interests of Sudanesewomen’s rights. It draws attention to thepredicaments of those displaced to the capitalcity by civil wars, and to the emergingleadership of women organizing pressuregroups to campaign for peace. Rogaia Abusharafis one of the very few Sudanese who speaks outfor what we might call the ‘progressive liberal’strand in the politics of her country, and hasbeen able to secure a good measure ofinternational sympathy in carrying out herprojects.

The main focus of the study is upon the livesof women displaced both from the south, andfrom Darfur, in one of the shantytowns whichhave grown up spontaneously on the outskirtsof Khartoum. Research in Sudanese squattersettlements has never been easy, and, in presentconditions of political uncertainty, Abusharaf hasdone very well in presenting some freshviewpoints and voices from the people of thesettlement she calls ‘Izzbba’. Stories of flightfrom the various war zones form thebackground to her observation of the ways thatwomen in the squatter settlements have begunto work together, use Arabic, share experiences,and adopt various cultural attitudes, practices,and rituals from the northern, riveraincommunities of the Sudan. Not only have manywomen from the south learned to use hennaand participate in smoke baths as a part ofpersonal grooming, for example, but anincreasing number are accepting the practice offemale cirumcision, as they seek integration

within the new urban setting and in some casesenter into marriage with northern men. Againstthe background of the ‘Civilizational Project’ ofthe current regime – which ‘indexes Islamicpower’ and, even for secular Muslims in theSudan, ‘marks a striking transition fromtolerance to jihad’ (p. 64) – such chosenadaptations by displaced women represent, forAbusharaf, active strategies for survival and‘intercultural reconciliation’ (p. 107). The visionof returning eventually to the south, or toDarfur, remains powerful, but the practicalitiesare daunting.

Abusharaf’s optimism nevertheless givesmomentum to her whole story, and fuels herchampioning of women’s independent agencyand their ability to reinvent themselvespersonally and socially. In the final chapter sheprovides a full account of the range of nationaland international women’s organizationspressing for empowerment and a proper role inongoing peace conferences, and highlights thecontribution that some Sudanese women leadersare making in these fields. She finds supportamong current writers in the social sciences andfeminist theory. However, she does not appearto find much of relevance in the olderethnographic literature, whether northern orsouthern, which is a pity; it is a little surprisingto find no reference to Janice Boddy’s work here,while also reading that a ‘portrait of femininesubmissiveness’ pervades anthropologicalstudies of southern Sudanese societies (p. 112). Itis suggested that in times of protracted war, ‘theviolence against women that is implicit in maledominance in ordinary times comes to thesurface’ (p. 113). This is too simple; it is surely thecase that protracted wars of the kind Sudanesehave created, and suffered from, actuallytransform gender relations.

I would argue rather that ‘modernity’ itself inthe economic, political, and cultural sides ofSudanese life has led to new and exaggeratedopportunities for masculine performance andindividual masculine achievement; conflict onlyheightens this effect, along with the new formsof sexual violence in war zones that are nowwell known from Darfur. The recent rise ofvisible ‘agency’ on the part of women, whichAbusharaf has documented well, is in part adirect response to this overall change. Not all‘traditional’ social life was without partnershipand constructive relations of give and takebetween men and women. On the other hand,the extreme conditions of displacement andsubjection we have seen in recent years havetheir counterparts in the ‘modernizing’ past,

Book reviews662


perhaps particularly during the days of thenineteenth-century zeribas or trading posts inthe south; the slave-camps seen there and alsoon the peripheries of the old Sultanate of Darfur;or the early malakiyas or civilian settlementswhich formed around military garrisons in manyparts of the country. These examples, though ona smaller scale, all prefigure the drastictransformations facing women in today’sshantytowns. Abusharaf’s book illuminates theways that many Sudanese women are strugglingto re-create themselves and their lives in today’scrisis settings; it also provides new ways ofimagining such crisis settings of the past.

Wendy James University of Oxford

Okano, Kaori H. Young women in Japan:transitions to adulthood. xi, 294 pp., figs,tables, illus., bibliogr. Abingdon, New York:Routledge, 2009. £80.00 (cloth)

This volume examines young Japanese women’sconceptions of and transitions to adulthood. Theyoung women at the centre of the study aredefined as urban lower class, which usefullychallenges the common perception of thedomination of middle-class housewives in urbanJapan. Furthermore, the diverse life storiesdetailed in part 1 and referred to throughout thebook illustrate the extent to which women’sunderstandings of adulthood are guided by theirurban working-class and, for some, ethnicminority status.

The study concentrates on the first two yearsafter high school, and on employment,relationships, marriage, divorce, childbirth, andcustody of children. The role played byvocational schools and the link betweencompanies in finding jobs is of interest, alongwith the observation that decisions tend tobecome more specific to class, gender, andethnic background as Okano’s informants leaveschool and lose the input of adults withmiddle-class values.

The marriage partnerships of the womendescribed include not just the commonlyperceived ‘conventional’ pattern where thehusband is the main earner with wife at home orworking part-time, but also those where the wifeis the main wage-earner, where husband andwife are joint earners, as well as single mothers.

Despite this, it would seem that ie(family/household) ideology commonly persists,in that marriage is widely considered to be arelationship not just between two individualsbut between two families, ideally of the same

social background. Arranged marriage, however,is commonly seen by the women as for those‘with assets, social status or something to showoff’ (p. 266). And, while middle-class families arewidely considered to be ‘proper families’ (p. 78),the young working-class women here show nodesire to ‘marry up’. Above all, it seems,maintaining the status quo, or attaining‘comfort’ (igokochi), is paramount.

While middle-class young women areconsidered ‘unlike us’ (uchira to chigau) (p. 142)by the author’s working-class informants, in factthey may be said to share much in common inthe workplace, where gender and education areinfluential in determining distribution of tasks,training, and promotion. Their stories clearlyillustrate why women tend to move frompermanent to non-standard jobs, fromlarge-scale companies to smaller ones, and fromwhite-collar to blue-collar jobs. The attraction ofnon-standard work, from agency (haken) tocasual (arubaito) jobs, becomes evident, as dothe consequences of not attending tertiaryeducation in excluding these working-classwomen from the career track.

Like many middle-class women, many of theinformants described here quit their first jobwithin two years due to the monotony of work,human relationship problems, lack ofpromotion, and issues of childcare, and theyrarely return to full-time permanent employmentafter childbirth. They commonly see their paidemployment as less important than that of menand do not necessarily view their limitedopportunities as deplorable. Other similaritiesinclude the wife of a fisherman who is expectedto work for her husband without remunerationand is prevented from engaging in other paidemployment. She is expected to cook and carefor her husband, supervise the housework, andmake bags for children to take to school in thesame ways described for middle-classhousewives in Japan (A.E. Imamura, UrbanJapanese housewives, 1987).

The book’s strength is its basis in long-termfieldwork, which included a year’s observation intwo high schools in Kobe and subsequentinterviews from 1989 to 2001. It enhances ourunderstandings of contemporary Japan, sincethe detailed life stories told are acted out as thecountry grapples with social and economicchanges during the period of economic decline,including the declining birth-rate and theHanshin earthquake, which, in addition tohardship, in fact brings some surprisingbenefits to the actors’ lives, such as loans forhousing.

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The volume is a welcome addition to studiesof women and gender as well as of transitions toadulthood. It will be valuable for those in allfields of social science and, through engagingwith the dynamic biographies presented, willenable undergraduates as well as generalreaders to explore contemporary Japanesesociety and young adulthood. Okano hopes tofollow her informants through the next stages oftheir lives, and such a work would be a furthervaluable contribution to these fields of study.

Ruth Martin Oxford Brookes University

Wilson, Tamar Diana. Women’s migrationnetworks in Mexico and beyond. xviii, 214 pp.,map, figs, tables, bibliogr. Albuquerque:Univ. New Mexico Press, 2009. $26.95

(paper)

People, we know, move constantly. But justwhat makes people move, where to, and howthey fare are less than arbitrary. As migrationscholars have long documented, networks areinvaluable to this process. If you do not knowsomeone, it is unlikely that you will go, and ifyou do go under those circumstances,something pretty momentous is driving youforward. In this book, Tamar Diana Wilsonfocuses on the role of women in theseprocesses: women moving, women’s use ofnetworks, and women’s role in making networkscome to life. In certain ways, Wilson begins theprocess of making networks less abstract andmore the product of social life, while also beingembedded in it.

The book begins with chapters devoted tosummarizing basic ideas and research onwomen and migration and women and work inMexico. These chapters are meant to providea backdrop to Wilson’s more detailedethnographic studies which follow. For anyonenew to these themes the chapters will be quickprimers on the most classic ideas and researchencompassing women and work in Mexico,alongside a survey on the ideological andstructural factors that have influenced the sort ofwork women do and how this has changed overtime, especially in the wake of exportindustrialization and the expansion of the borderarea and its accompanying maquiladoras, whichprovided new factory jobs for women (and men)and encouraged urban migration and expansionalong the border region. For those with priorknowledge of these topics, they may feel theyare skimming through excessive informationwith which they already are familiar.

The ethnographic work begins in chapter 4,where Wilson describes the movement ofwomen to Mexicali, the capital of Baja California,and a region that has transformed under theBorder Industrialization Program. Alongside theinflux of urban migrants, the development ofnew urban squatter settlements flourished. Byadopting various tactics common with othersocial movements, residents fought toincorporate these settlements one by one so asto gain legal status and whatever utilities andservices could be extracted from alreadyoverburdened municipal infrastructures. Womenwere often active in these movements,participating in protests, blockages, and otherforms of pressure. Wilson focuses on one ofthese urban colonias and, through basicinterviews and surveys, she documents therange of women who arrived from rural andother areas in search of work. While many camealong with their families and husbands, a good15 per cent came alone.

To rescue women from these statistics,Wilson begins to trace the migration networksout from one household, headed by theformidable Dona Consuelo, born in 1937 and themother of twelve children. Dona Consuelo’sstory is one of someone who seems condemnedto wander, each move combating poverty andresponding to unhappy relationships.Attempting to follow Consuelo’s movements canfeel like following the plot of The big sleep. Toldwith Consuelo’s words the moves go back andforward between urban and rural, and from herextended family to her husbands and partners.Along the way Dona Consuelo finds variousdifferent jobs, mostly in the informal sector andfrequently understood in the category of‘women’s work’, such as cooking and domesticlabour. The chapters continue on to themigration patterns of two of Dona Consuelo’sdaughters who marry and leave for the UnitedStates. Wilson presents their life histories, whichdescribe their migration and work lives as well asa sampling of their networks, through which shedocuments some of the continuities andchanges taking place. Unlike their mother, bothdaughters remain with their husbands, in spiteof various difficulties.

What Wilson shows in these complex lives ishow networks are necessary to mediate all thesemovements. Moreover, networks are as likely tobe generated and utilized from the wives’ asfrom the husbands’ families and households.Women, Wilson notes, are just as intrinsic togenerating transnational movements as men.After marriage, a couple might just as well reach

Book reviews664


out to a wife’s family as to a husband’s for help.Wilson also shows how in the United Statesmigrants find new networks (which she termsadaptation networks) through work, church, andplace-based contacts, and even some throughchance meetings and acquaintances. The mainpoint here is that networks are not fixed anddurable and, as she shows, they changethroughout a person’s life. Weak ties canbecome strong ties and vice versa. Individualscan use various mechanisms to solidify networks– most importantly, as Wilson shows,compradazgo (co-parenting) and reciprocity.

The question that could be posed is when isa concept being asked to do too much? Wilsonfollows an intellectual concept, social capital,which is loosely equated with a network.Networks permit social capital as ‘valuedresources embedded in and accessed throughnetworks permit members to avail themselves ofthe economic and affective goods and labour ofothers, whether through strong or weak ties’.People’s destinies, she argues, are influenced bythese strong and weak ties. Through herethnographic examples Wilson implicitly showshow maintaining ties requires work. That is,networks are embedded in social life andproduced by them. But are they always good?Social capital can feel like a somewhat steriledescription of the messiness that is humanrelations. Wilson’s ethnography at times seemsto pull against her analysis as her subjectsdescribe how networks are broken as individualsfight and disagree.

It is unclear whether the emotionallyunsatisfactory and at times physically abusivepartners of Dona Consuelo should be namedsocial capital in this context, or even adaptationnetworks. Furthermore, this seems to underlie abasic point that gets lost in many of thesediscussions: networks are not culture-free, andas such the creation of networks can replicateboth the good and the bad. Young women fromPuebla tied to the sex trade networks that bringthem to the United States to work as prostitutesmight exemplify this paradox; adaptationnetworks may not be as adaptive as we wouldhope. Networks that bring women to look aftertheir sisters’ children in the United States mightbe more constrictive then liberating. A furtherstudy might be able to consider networks fromboth their positive and negative sides, or whythey break down and what has to happen toconvert a strong to a weak and weak to a strongnetwork. If networks demand reciprocity, arethere some households that remain drainedthrough the expected exchange of resources and

wish to cut themselves away from endlessexchange? Wilson shows the complexity oftransnational social fields that tie individuals toboth sides of the border, especially when thismovement encompasses both urban and ruralmigrations, but sticking to the social capitalmodel can confine us to a world where migrantsremain undifferentiated by social class, ideology,and gender. It is possible that, sometimes, anetwork is not such a great bedfellow.

Victoria Malkin Wenner Gren Institute

History, politics, and law

Claas, Ulrike. Das Land Entlang des Sepik.Vergangenheitsdarstellung undMigrationsgeschichte im Gebiet des mittlerenSepik, Papua New Guinea. xii, 448 pp., maps,bibliogr. Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2007. (paper)

This book, defended as a Ph.D. thesis atGöttingen University (Germany) after a ten-yearperiod of analysis and writing, results from theco-operation of researchers from differentquarters of anthropology who work on theSepik area of Papua New Guinea, once part ofthe German colony Kaiser Wilhelms-Land. Itsauthor, German-speaking and -writing UlrikeClaas, profited from the very liberal support ofLawrence Bragge, a former field officer of theAustralian administration in the pre-Independence period, who had an activeinterest in local history. He went beyond hisduties in the former Ambunti Sub-District,especially, in the early 1970s in the area of theGaui Local Government Council, by collectingcomprehensive documentation on questionsrelating to land rights of villages. As these rightsare mainly rooted in local people’s visions of thepast, transmitted through ritual songs, myths,and many stories about regional and individualevents, this documentation, which originated inthe heads of people living on the Sepik river,provides precious insights into how ‘historicalnarrations’ on single events and stories linked tocreational acts are intricately interwoven.

Claas added to the Bragge documentspublished texts from all over the area of theIatmul (or river) villages and their off-riverneighbours. All these texts were dissected intotheir elements for analysis. By regrouping theelements accordingly, local categories ofthinking and local visions of the past could bemade evident. The author’s aim was not to

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illustrate anthropological theories, but toreconstruct the plurality of local views and localdiscourse structures. It turns out that local viewsseem basically bound to sub-clans (understoodto be co-resident lineages), which implies thatthey can be shown to be closely related to thelocalities of settlements, ancient orcontemporary, or to the sites of eventsmentioned in oral tradition. Within settlements,adherence to specific men’s houses (ceremonialhouses) creates some commonalities betweensub-clans. The village as a unit, let alone theethnic group, is felt to be a construct ofgeneralizing literature only.

Summing up the results of her detailedanalysis (in chap. 6), the author identifies threemain strategies of how Sepik people (or rathertheir experts) look at their past. It follows that,as a method for getting closer to these views,the evidence encapsulated in oral accountsshould be treated separately. These specifiedviews are ‘the history of the sub-clan, a set ofmigration histories that recalled the movementsand alliances of the sub-clan’; ‘the history of thesettlement, a historical construction thatrecorded the settlement’s cosmic-historic order’;and, lastly, ‘structural history’, setting ‘threeelementary, generative dichotomies in time’(p. 392). These latter dichotomies on which themain text dwells at length are (a) the place oforigin of humankind and Yamanangwa, the firstplace on the river, where human life got fullyestablished; (b) the antagonistic settlementgroups of Nyaura (upriver) and Palimbei(downriver), the members of which start fightingeach other (headhunting included); and (c) thecomplementarity in the relations between‘founder communities or settlements and theiroff-shoots’ (p. 392), with splits mainly inducedby demographic pressures, and reunifications bywar or a massive disturbance of the naturalenvironment.

Evidently the author faced two enormoushandicaps. She had no fieldwork experiencewith people living in the landscape to which thesources refer. She was also under the formalobligation to present her thesis in German.Under both aspects she performed well, basingher arguments on a literature well read andshowing remarkable linguistic skills. However,the resulting book also demonstrates theweakness of the German and Swiss system ofpublishing an accepted Ph.D. thesis withoutrewriting it into a more condensed and thereforemore accessible book. While all readers getaccess to the unique source material by Braggequoted extensively in English, the main

argument remains in German. Reading the bookis not made easier by quotes from source textsbeing repeated unannounced in identical format different places – a way of forcing readers todiscover the shifting of perspectives on theirown.

The book ends with a fine bibliography andseries of helpful indexes, including all the namedstory-tellers. An appendix provides additionalthough rather general information on the oralaccounts collected and transcribed from TokPisin by Bragge.

Christian Kaufmann University of East Anglia

Doron, Assa. Caste, occupation and politics onthe Ganges: passages of resistance. xvi, 198

pp., maps, illus., bibliogr. Farnham,Burlington: Ashgate, 2008. £55.00 (cloth)

‘Hello! Boat?’ is the almost obsessive oraladvertisement the foreign visitor is met with assoon as he or she approaches the western banksof the river Ganges (or Ganga, as it is locallycalled), along which lies the pilgrimage city ofBenares in North India. This book unravels theintricate cultural and political economies thrivingon the above ‘riverscape’ – as Doron terms it –amongst the low-caste Mallah boatmen.

The book begins with an analysis of theboatmen’s colonial encounter with the British,who, eager to take control of the riverways,commerce, and communication, were equallyeager to bring under their control thosecommunities whose livelihoods were tied to theriver. This resulted in the Mallah being classifiedby the British as a ‘criminal tribe’, mainly on thegrounds of the perceived ‘disorderly-ness’ oftheir spatial mobility.

The Mallah were legally denominated as the‘Most Backward Class’ by the postcolonial state– and therefore entitled to reserved quotas ineducational institutions and government jobs.However, Doron argues that the boatmen, whorepresent only a section of the Mallah caste, donot meet the basic requirements to claim forthese entitlements. Instead, he portrays them asholding alternative knowledge and skills,ranging from their prowess in navigating theGanges waters, to their ability to dive into theriver to retrieve corpses, and to recoveringobjects that have fallen into wells. Their specialrelation with the river, and their intimateknowledge of its nature, have led the boatmento call themselves ‘sons of the Ganga’. Bycontrast, in protest at their neglect, they alsodescribe themselves as ‘step-sons’ of the state.

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Empowered by a river of highly religioussignificance while wrestling with the powers ofthe state, the boatmen’s ethos is best capturedby the dialectics between the above self-ascribedand opposite kin statuses.

The Ganges riverscape is a world run bycustomary rights but also one which has beentransformed by state intervention – in particularthrough the development plan to clean the river.This plan has disrupted the boatmen’straditional activities like fishing, sandmining, andthe cultivation of the river’s eastern banks. As aresult, their current activities are mainly ferryingpassengers across the water, be they pilgrims ordomestic and international tourists. The bookfinely analyses the configuration of the territorialjurisdiction of the ghats (steps leading to theriver and hosting both work and ritual activities)regulating water-related work, in juxtaposition tothe internal hierarchy and patronage systemencompassing those who hold customary rightsover this work and those who do not. Theboatmen’s agency can thus be situated within agrid made up of the power and influenceregulating business within their community andthe polymorphic action of the state, its officials,and their imperfect workings. FollowingMahmood (Politics of piety, 2005), it appears tome that the micro- and macro-politics ensuingfrom these two main axes undermine theexclusivity of the available analytical poles ofresistance and domination, bringing to the forethe in-between, which cannot be easily namedbut which the book attempts to mapethnographically. A similar considerationemerges from reading about the ritualeconomies on the ghats – largely dominated bythe Brahman priests – where the boatmenperform a number of roles. The Brahmanpriest/Mallah boatman dyad recurs in the book,with the former reiterating the status quo whilethe latter aims to challenge it. Where the booksets to dispel ‘the myth of any singulardominant principle of hierarchy ordering SouthAsia society’ (p. 3), I am reminded of theBrahman ‘ideal type’ that the boatmen aim bothto emulate and to displace, so that the resilienceof the above dominant principle is confirmed bythe very presence of such agentic practices.

Boating is an example of ‘traditional’business fostered by globalization throughburgeoning sources of revenue for Benares suchas pilgrimage and tourism. The book offers aninsightful analysis of how the boatmen cater toboth pilgrims and tourists, aptly switchingidioms of cultural mediation according to theircustomers. Despite being immersed in global

concerns such as tourism, at times theethnography appears suspended in time andspace. Attention to wider political economies, tothe rest of the Mallah caste not involved inboating, and to other low-caste communities’mobilization modes would have better situatedthe boatmen’s trajectories of marginalization andpolitics of assertion. Moreover, the boatmen’sethnographic ‘solo’ would have benefited froman analysis of their political allegiances to conveya fuller picture of their pivotal relation with thestate. All this said, this book is a valuablecontribution to the anthropology ofmarginalized communities in India, and areflexive account of their struggles for socialjustice and their life-ways’ survival in the midstof rapidly shifting socio-economic and politicalland- and riverscapes.

Manuela Ciotti University of Edinburgh

Hann, John H. The Native American worldbeyond Apalachee: West Florida and theChattahoochee Valley. xi, 250 pp., maps,tables, bibliogr. Gainesville: Univ. Press ofFlorida, 2006. $55.00 (cloth)

John H. Hann is one of the most accomplishedethnohistorians working in the US Southeast. Hismastery of the ethnography, archaeology,linguistics, and historical documentation of thetribes of the lower Southeast in the Spanishcolonial era is truly impressive. In particular, inthis book, which addresses the tribes of northernand western Florida, far removed from thecolonial capital in St Augustine on the Atlanticcoast, Hann helps to raise the curtain ofobscurity on the colonial hinterland by carefulattention to Spanish colonial documents andother lines of evidence. Although not the firstethnohistorian to do so, his use of thesedocuments is the most complete of any scholarworking in this region. Moreover, it must be saidthat unlike earlier scholars using thesedocuments, notably the great anthropologistJohn Swanton, Hann is interested much less inlinking data on native populations to the DeSoto expedition, or indeed to any Spanishincursion or contact, than to trying tounderstand these groups on their own terms ascompletely as the data will allow. This is not tosay, of course, that Spanish actions are merelyincidental. Indeed, the best documentaryevidence comes from judicial inquiries andsimilar proceedings in which the Spanish wereattempting to ‘pacify’ and exert administrativecontrol over the tribes of the hinterlands who

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were prone to attacking mission outposts. Thesedocuments cannot be understood outside thecontext of their time and yet they provethemselves valuable precisely because theyilluminate issues that are of interest tocontemporary ethnohistorians, as they were toSpanish administrators: the size and location ofIndian communities; the political, cultural, andlinguistic relations among them; the degree towhich they had accommodated themselves tothe Spanish presence or had, by contrast,actively resisted it. By the same token,missionary documents reveal a fairly goodpicture of the degree of cultural and religiousacculturation. Taken together (with therealization that in the context of Spanish Floridathe two were never entirely separate), theyprovide a rich source of information on theIndian tribes in a period of turmoil and rapidcultural, political, and of course demographicchange. Hann has mined these sources mostskilfully.

In addition to providing a contemporarypicture of a social milieu obscured by time andby distance from the colonial capital, Hann has asecond major goal, which is to link the tribesmentioned in those historical documents withgroups known (often under different names) inthe English colonial and American periods, andeven up to the present day. Although most ofthese groups were absorbed by the CreekConfederacy, which was itself very much acreation of historical circumstance, Hannstruggles to sort out the various lineages, topreserve the distinctiveness of particular groups,and, when possible, to link them tocontemporary communities. For instance, hisdiscussion of the Chisca, a group notorious tothe Spanish for their warlike nature, claims linkswith the contemporary Yuchi of Oklahoma,drawing connections based on contemporaryethnographic data on Yuchi ballgames and ritualpractice. While few readers will be qualified toassess such claims, which are based partly onlinguistic analysis of historical documents, in thiscase it seems at the very least plausible, andrepresents one of the values of this sort ofresearch both to the scholarly community and tocontemporary American Indian groups.

The culmination of the early colonial periodin the Southeast was the Yamasee War, 1715-17, inwhich the Creeks, Choctaws, Cherokees, andsmaller tribes attacked the English colony ofCarolina, attempting to overthrow it in a generalrevolt. Although initially successful, thisexistential threat to the British presence in theSoutheast was ultimately quashed, with the

result that the defeated groups retreated toFlorida and its borderlands, seeking theprotection of the Spanish crown and difficultterrain. This was the moment of ethnogenesis ofboth the Creek Confederacy and the Seminoletribe. This later history is better known to usthrough English sources. Hann’s discussion ofthis pivotal event allows us some perspectivefrom both sides of this historical horizon.

Hann’s book will be of primary interest toscholars of the Native Southeast and Spanishcolonial rule. However, its exemplary qualities asa work of ethnohistory should bring it a wideraudience. It reminds us that even the earliestperiod of European colonial rule in theSoutheast is available to us to a certain degree,and that what we can learn from it resonateswith what we know of more familiar examplesof the European colonialism, indigenouspeoples, and the dynamics of the frontier.

Michael E. Harkin University of Wyoming

Kavanagh, Thomas W. (ed.). Comancheethnography: field notes of E. Adamson Hoebel,Waldo R. Wedel, Gustav G. Carlson, and RobertH. Lowie. xiv, 542 pp., illus., bibliogr. London,Lincoln: Univ. Nebraska Press, 2008. £32.00

(cloth)

In Comanche ethnography, anthropologistThomas Kavanagh presents the previouslyunpublished field notes of E. Adamson Hoebel,Waldo R. Wedel, Gustav G. Carlson, and RobertH. Lowie. The field notes of Hoebel, Wedel, andCarlson were collected during a six-week periodin the summer of 1933 as part of the ‘FieldTraining Course in Anthropological FieldMethods’, more popularly known as the ‘FieldParty’, sponsored by the Santa Fe Laboratory ofAnthropology. Lowie’s notes were collected twodecades earlier, in 1912, during a brief period offieldwork with the Comanche. As Kavanaghpoints out, the data collected during thesesessions have become the basis for many of thepublished ethnographic accounts of traditionalComanche practices, including Hoebel’smonograph The political organization andlaw-ways of the Comanche Indians (1940) andWallace and Hoebel’s The Comanche: lords of theSouthern Plains (1952).

Much of the lengthy Comanche ethnographyis dedicated to the presentation of the fieldnotes. Because the students in the Field Party satin, and recorded, many of the same interviews,the notes of Hoebel, Wedel, and Carlson werecombined into one main chronological narrative.

Book reviews668


Following Hoebel’s field notes, the notespresented in this text are organized by subjectheadings, although, as Kavanagh points out,much of the data under one subject headingcould easily be cross-referenced with othersubject headings. In cases where the notes ofone or all of the anthropologists differed in somesignificant way from the others (whether in wordchoice or amount of detail), these differentaccounts were also included in the main text.The result is over four hundred pages of notesfrom seventeen different Comanche consults.The notes are presented in the order in whichthey took place, each divided into subjectheadings that span such topics as kinship terms,material culture, social organization, medicineand curing, life-cycle stages, marriage anddivorce, personal adornment, food, games,relations with other tribes, and stories of mythsand war deeds. Although Kavanagh providesfootnotes throughout the text, the field noteslargely stand alone without any ethnographiccontext or historical clarification.

By presenting the field notes in chronologicalorder, Kavanagh allows the reader to see howinterviewers and their consultants moved fromone subject to another, and how one subjectinspired further elaboration on the part of bothinterviewer and interviewee. Unfortunately, as anethnographic resource, this chronological formatpresents certain challenges. Even though theinterviewers did not use any pre-determinedinterview schedule, individual interviews tend tocover the same topics. The result is aconsiderable amount of repetition in subjects,and often in the data particular to each subject.With the subjects presented separately in eachconsultant’s account, however, it is difficult tograsp the diversity of cultural practices or thedegree to which different consultants correlatewith or diverge from one another. Kavanaghdoes present some footnotes when the datafrom consultants are contradictory, but largerpatterns are easily missed.

Beyond the field notes of Hoebel, Wedel,Carlson and Lowie, Comanche ethnographyincludes an introduction that details thebackgrounds of the fieldworkers as well as theseventeen Comanche men and women whoserved as their consultants, a description of themethodology used to compile and edit thenotes, and a brief discussion of some themescommon within the notes. Kavanagh alsoprovides four appendices: appendices A-Ccorrelate the sources of ethnographicinformation found in Hoebel (1940), Wallace andHoebel (1952), and Carlson and Jones (1940)

with their sources, or lack thereof, in the fieldnotes. Appendix D is a Comanche lexicon withterms found in the field notes.

Comanche ethnography is undoubtedly asignificant contribution to the study of theComanche. The presentation of these resourcesis useful not only for the data found in the fieldnotes themselves, but also in considering howethnographic research is conducted and used inthe construction of ethnographic texts. Althoughit was not explicitly intended as such, becausethe text includes many instances where datacollected from the same consultant differedbetween ethnographers, Comanche ethnographyalso provides an interesting commentary on thesubjectivity of ethnographic methods. BecauseKavanagh provides little ethnographic materialas context for the field notes, however, the bookis primarily a resource for scholars or others withsome familiarity with Comanche history andculture.

Abby Wightman Mary Baldwin College

Rey, Séverine. Des Saints nés des rêves:fabrication de la sainteté et commémorationdes néomartyrs à Lesvos (Grèce). 364 pp.,map, bibliogr. Lausanne: Éditions Antipodes,2008. €25.00 (paper)

Séverine Rey’s monograph on the Aegean islandof Lesbos (Mytilini), very much like the orthodoxreligious events on which it focuses, is amoveable feast: in the first instance a study of amodern monastery, it is at the same time anethnography about the creation of new saints or‘neomartyrs’, and a religious and political historyof the island’s troubled and protractedrelationship with the Ottoman Empire and itsunion, from 1912, to the nascent Greek state. Thered thread that binds these apparently diverseelements to one another is provided by asophisticated and fascinating theoretical excursusinto the role of social memory in an insular butnone the less diasporic community that becamehome to a population of refugees from AsiaMinor (today’s Turkey) during the infamous‘exchange of populations’ that followed the 1923

Treaty of Lausanne.Rey begins her exposé by letting us in on the

basic facts of the story. It is 1959, and a localcouple decide to build a small chapel in theirolive grove in the hills above the village ofThermi. This act of devotion will fulfil a vowmade by the woman’s now-elderly motherwhen she was escaping from Asia Minor amidstthe massacres of 1922. No sooner is work begun

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on the foundations, however, than the remainsof a medieval church are discovered, includinghuman remains. The discovery of the skeletons isimmediately of enormous significance for therefugees of the village and their children, whosee in them the bones of the massacred relativesthey were forced to leave behind unburied andunmourned in their lost homeland. The faithfulin the village – immigrant women in particular –begin to be visited in their sleep by the spirits ofthe exhumed skeletons, who inform them thatthey were priests, and died as martyrs at thehands of the Ottomans when the island wastaken in 1462. Soon, people throughout thevillage are receiving nocturnal visitations, andeven sceptics are confronted with visions ofmonks in the olive grove.

An enviably elegant set of structural parallelsthus falls into Rey’s lap: a recent history ofmassacre and displacements at the hands of theOttomans in the dying days of their empire isechoed by a massacre that announced thefalling of the island to the hands of theOttomans at the birth of their suzerainty. Thatsome of the victims were apparently churchofficiants underscores the religious dimension ofthis political conflict, and the vivid detail of thedreams and visions fills in what history and thearchaeologists have left unanswered. Throughtheir dreams, and indeed in waking life, thepeople of Thermi are able to revisit, if not toresolve, an aspect of their personal memoriesthat has haunted them for a lifetime, andreligious experience provides meaning to arealm of suffering that had till then taken theform only of loss and absence.

Where anthropologists working on socialmemory have recently struggled in the face oftheir critics to prove the connections betweencontemporary ritual, performance, or myth, onthe one hand – often moot or polyvalent in theirsignificance – and historical facts or local modelsof the past, on the other, Rey could simply haveallowed her serendipitous discoveries to speakfor themselves (indeed, for the faithful of Therminothing is serendipitous). Eloquent as they are,however, Rey does not restrict herself to a merejuxtaposition of one massacre with another, butsystematically collates interviews with the‘dreamers’ of Thermi and the local clergy as wellas details from local publications and records toprovide a very rich and detailed history of thewhole process of popular historicization as it hasunfolded from the 1950s to the present. Herinvestigation takes a bifocal approach,examining, on the one hand, the significance tothe local population of the discoveries and the

dreams they trigger, and, on the other, theOrthodox Church, which eventually recognizesthe human remains as those of saints or martyrs;a step that provides recognition to the localfaithful’s beliefs, but by the same token takesover the exegetical role from the lay seers. Theinstitutionalization of a local event by the nationtakes its final form in the construction in the1960s of a large new nunnery-cum-pilgrimagecomplex on the site that soon hosts one ofthe most important pilgrimages in modernGreece.

This ambitious ethnography takes forwardthe work of Charles Stewart and others on theethnographic significance of dreams, and ofRenée Hirschon on the social consequences ofthe ‘catastrophe’: the exile from Asia Minor andthe exchange of populations. It also representsan important contribution to the study of churchand state in modern Greece, but it is mostsignificant beyond the boundaries of Hellenicstudies for its arresting contribution to theburgeoning field of social memory inanthropology, shedding light as it does on thehalf-lives of violent conflicts that sleep uneasilyjust inches beneath the surface of publicconsciousness, awaiting the excavations thatfuture unrest will beget.

Nicolas Argenti

Smith, Benjamin R. & Frances Morphy

(eds). The social effects of native title:recognition, translation, coexistence. xi, 223

pp., maps, figs, illus., bibliogrs. Canberra:ANU E Press, 2007. $24.95 (paper)

Smith and Morphy have compiled a finecollection of essays exploring the social effects ofthe Australian Native Title Act of 1993. The editedbook developed out of a workshop wherescholars, community members, and claimantscame together to discuss the complaints aboutthe Act that have been voiced by Aboriginalcommunity members and settlers in Australia.Following the positive outcome for IndigenousAustralians in the Mabo No. 2 decision, Australiafaced its history as a nation built on landsacquired largely through the application of thedoctrine of terra nullius in British Colonial law. Atthe time of contact, Indigenous Australians wereunderstood to lack any sense of law as it appliesto occupational rights. When this was proven tobe false, Australia had to reconcile the legality ofits own status. The Native Title Act wasunderstood to be a mechanism by whichAboriginal communities could enter the

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Australian legal arena and argue theiroccupational rights.

The actual social effects of entering into thisarena are many, and each author presents a casethat offers differing glimpses of the total web ofeffects. As such, each chapter can be read as astand-alone piece (I have successfully used a fewchapters in this way for teaching), but whenthey are read in succession, the book has greatcoherence that is heightened by the editors’well-argued and helpful introduction. For a bookthat is focused entirely on one nation-state’shistorical relationship to colonialism and theIndigenous people who find themselvesencapsulated within this state, the introductorychapter does a great service to those who arenot necessarily conversant with theparticularities of Australian history andanthropology.

As the contributors to the book so powerfullyargue, the Native Title Act does notaccommodate any recognition of Indigenoussovereignty, and many of the negative socialeffects that have been felt with the application ofthe Act can be traced to this social fact. I wasconvinced that this is the central problem: theAct has led to the situation where traditional lawand custom are tested in the process of settlingclaims, but these very fundamental aspects ofthe relationship between Aboriginal people andtheir lands are not recognized as a challenge oralternative to Australian sovereignty. Within theAct, and in the process of successfully settlingthe claims, Australian sovereignty is the axiom towhich traditional law and custom musttransform. However, this transformation is notone of sub-conscious adaptation but is anoutcome of difficult decisions on the part ofIndigenous Australian claimants and also SettlerAustralians.

As the subtitle suggests, the authors haveconcluded that the social effects of the Act canbe attributed to three general transformativesocial effects: recognition, translation, andcoexistence. Recognition is explored in themanner in which the settlement process definesthose who are potential title-holders and howthe evidence required by the court does notcorrespond to traditional law or customaryrights. Translational transformations inform themyriad ways that the translations of AustralianAboriginal language and cultural practices(many of which are performative) into evidencefor the settlement process are partial and an actof what Morphy refers to as ‘enforcedcommensurability’. In a break from individualcases, Weiner’s chapter challenges the ability of

anthropology to engage with an Act thatdistinguishes between traditional and historicalpeoples, with an onus of translation placed onthe Aboriginal claimants. In transformations incoexistence, the chapters explore how the Acthas altered human relationships, including thosewithin Indigenous claimant groups, betweenIndigenous groups, and with Settler Australians.Positive and negative coexistence effects aretreated with good measure (particularly in thechapters by Smith and Redmond) and are highlyinformative in their complexity, despite the waythat perceived coexistence effects are applied ina simplistic, polemical manner in the Australianpolitical arena.

It would be fairly simple to criticize the bookfor being overly concerned with negative socialeffects while ignoring the positive, empoweringoutcomes of the Act. However, the book alsorecognizes and analyses many positive aspects,such as changing the overall power discrepancybetween settlers and Indigenous people, havinga recognition that organized law and land rightsare a human universal instead of being theparticular marker of Europeans, and the way thatthe Act has opened up new forms of Indigenouspeople’s control of their lands that exceed therecognition afforded by the Act itself. All of theseare positive transformations for all Australians.Given the choice between being stuck in anineteenth-century understanding of legaloccupation and those understandings that areevolving out of the Native Title Act, the authorsare careful to side with the latter whiledemonstrating the historical particularities ofpower that are involved in a process demandingthat Indigenous law and custom must betranslated into those of Australian law and notthe other way around. As such, I find this bookto be most useful and a welcome addition to theanthropological literature on colonial law andIndigenous rights as well as an informativetreatise on recent Australian history.

Robert Wishart University of Aberdeen

Kinship

Sneath, David. The headless state: aristocraticorders, kinship society and misrepresentations ofnomadic Inner Asia. xi, 273 pp., maps,bibliogr. New York: Columbia Univ. Press,2007. £29.50 (cloth)

This book presents itself as a bombshellcombined with a bold attempt at reconstructing

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the theoretical landscape it demolishes. DavidSneath says that his first objective is to exposelong-held conceptions of clan, tribe, and kinshipsociety as they have operated in Westernhistoriography and social science. The author’sfurther aim is to ‘rethink the traditionaldichotomy between state and nonstate society’ –which, we can accept, was perpetuated in theWestern intellectual tradition of socialevolutionism and used as a justification forcolonialism – ‘and to approach the state in adifferent way – in terms of the decentralized anddistributed power found in aristocratic orders’(p. 1). Between these two agendas is the implicitproject of focusing attention on the politicalagency of steppe aristocracies, which, if I readthe author correctly, prevailing historical modelshave ignored since these models have had littlecontrol over what lies between the notionalpoles of ‘tribal society’ and occasional ‘greatleaders’ like Chinggis Khan. The author’s maintheses deserve to be taken seriously, and thegreat range of societies and eras he cites insupport of them is in keeping with the sweep ofhis arguments. The individual chapters tend tomerge into each other in their development ofthe above ideas; this brief book is anyway mostefficiently read from start to finish.

Sneath meticulously traces the intellectualhistory of the concepts of tribe, clan, kinship,society, and the like back to the nineteenthcentury, when social scientists set up lineal gensand territorial state as distinct types of politicalformation on an evolutionary scale. This iscertainly the first time that such a detailedexposé of the errors and excesses of segmentarykinship theory has been put in service of ahistorical argument about Eurasian nomads. Butthe author tends to overstate the extent to whichhistorians, and in some cases even the imperialobservers they have relied on, have remained inthrall to the fallacies he exposes. Weighingcautious assertions of non-consanguinity in clans(p. 72) against ‘literary inertia’ in terminology(p. 64; pp. 81f.), Sneath misses a trend, whichbegan before V.V. Bartold and culminated inRudi P. Lindner’s exemplary study Nomads andOttomans in medieval Anatolia (1983), ofsophisticated approaches to analysing thegenealogical-ideological messages generated byand about Eurasian nomad groups. Theseapproaches should not be ignored for their lackof anti-colonialist credentials.

Then there are matters of calibration. With asmaller-bore blaster the author could havedelineated nuanced observations by the likes ofAlexei Levshin (‘Levchine’), the tsarist official

who published a ‘Description of the Kazakhordes and steppes’ (in Russian in 1832 and inFrench in 1840) that rated the Kazaks asdeserving colonial domination (pp. 72-5), butclearly depicted the Kazak polity as a top-downformation of aristocratic appanages (p. 80). Thebook’s impact on Central Asianists’understanding of the well-known socio-politicalsystem of the Kazaks, with their plebeian ‘tribes’ruled by an aristocratic lineage, remains to beseen. The White Bone, or notional descendantsof Chinggis Khan, has an extensive literature inRussian that Sneath largely ignores in favour of agrab-bag of tertiary or under-contextualizedpronouncements by Akiner (p. 78), Gellner(p. 128), Levshin, and Schuyler (p. 215) – the lasttwo being excellent observers but unreliablecompilers of historical information. Sneath’shistorical thesis – that certain ‘ “ethnic groups”were not autochthonous kinship communitiesbut politically defined categories that had beenhistorically defined by rulers’ (p. 174) haspromise but cannot go far until there is aresolution of the bearing upon it of the KazakWhite Bone-plebs structure and its analogues, orlack of them, in similar Inner Asian societies. Thebook adduces a great number of these societiesand makes a first attempt at integrating themwith the proposed theory.

Sneath backs up his challenge to ‘thetraditional dichotomy between state andnonstate society’ not by precisely defining thestate (which results in a priori shortcuts such ashis initial characterization of the Kazak Khanateas ‘a powerful state in its own right’, p. 72), butby presenting allusive case studies that highlightaspects of his counter-narrative of the headlessstate, ‘the decentralized and distributed powerfound in aristocratic orders’. The author’sshowcase example is the promulgation of theMongol-Oirat Code in 1640. This was a joint actby a council of Khalkha and Western Mongolprinces, but it was short-lived. Even before theKhalkha abandoned the Code for a separate setof regulations in 1709, there was fighting amongthe signatories. The Volga Kalmyks, however,continued under modifications of the Code longafter submission to the Tsar. Are we to credit theoriginal signatories with an alternative stateformation if their intention was not fullyrealized? Is that not the problem, more or less?

Particularly for large-scale formations in theperiod between the break-up of the MongolEmpire and the extension of Ch’ing andRomanov rule over the steppes, the author’schallenge to the usual tropes of ‘tribal’ politicsseems appropriate. Underlying the book’s critical

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stance towards outdated models of ‘kinshipsocieties’ and its novel focus on aristocraticorders lies the truth that any mention ofgenealogical relations in the sources is freightedwith their subjects’ and authors’ concept of whowere the sort of people that ‘mattered’. Atpresent the problems the book solves appear tobe balanced by the problems it raises. Theauthor presents intelligent, clearly writtenarguments, disagreement with which should callfor serious reflection. He gives expression toideas that many before have voiced while theyhave not explicitly rejected assumptions aboutkinship societies and the associated ‘tribe’terminology. The book’s achievement is toexplain rigorously why fundamental revision isdesirable. The impact of this book’s ideas onkinship societies and the ‘headless state’ is atleast matched by its implicit contributions togeneral theorizing on political agency amongEurasian nomad elites. The book opens up auseful debate on what is to be gained byre-conceiving ‘tribes’ as ‘aristocratic houses’possessed of various kinds of interests and thedependent commoners required to pursuethem.

Daniel Prior Miami University

Stasch, Rupert. Society of others: kinship andmourning in a West Papuan place. xv, 317 pp.,maps, figs, illus., bibliogr. London, Berkeley:Univ. California Press, 2009. £14.95 (paper)

Society of others is based on eighteen months offieldwork ‘in about fifty Korowai houses, locatedon thirty-five clan places and in five villages’(p. xiv) in the mountainous inland of theIndonesian province West Papua. This couldimply a rather quantitative and less qualitativeapproach, but that is not the case here. Korowaiare on constant move, oscillating betweendifferent sleeping places in different residentialareas (pp. 33, 35-6). Thus, in order to be close toone’s informants, one has to keep in motion aswell. Korowai are the ‘iconic “tribal” people’(p. 1) in the eyes of Euro-American media withtheir lack of Western products, their way ofdwelling in a rural area in spectaculartree-houses, and their attributed practice ofcannibalism (pp. 2, 213). Stasch intends not onlyto rectify this distorted image of Korowai people,but also to overcome a popular misconceptionof mental unity and uniformity of small-scalesocieties. He wants to show that ‘people of NewGuinea ... are long-standing masters of contactacross boundaries of otherness’ (p. 23). This he

accomplishes by means of the analysis ofdifferent and complex forms of relationships.Furthermore, the description of Korowai’spragmatic use of elements of Western lifestyleshows them as active contemporaries withindividual aims rather than passiverepresentatives of anachronistic life-forms incollective stagnancy.

The main topics of the book are, according toStasch, that Korowai society is built on othernessinstead of bonds (p. 11) and that all their socialrelations are lived out in action (p. 17). Otherimportant themes are indigenous pragmatics ofsocial bonds (p. 14) and, I would add, theever-important role of food in all relevantinter-subjective social acts that permeate allchapters of the book.

Stasch investigates these main topics in greatdetail in connection to several different areas ofKorowai social life in general, and then inrelation to life-steps of individual members.Starting with the larger social landscape, wherehe explains aspects of landownership and socialrelations between the different groupings(chap. 1), he then looks more closely at the partscomposing the social whole: the dual relationsof each member of the group either to kin or tospiritual entities (chap. 2). In the third chapter,Stasch picks out the role of the maternal uncle’srelationship to nephew or niece, which isconsidered one of the most importantrelationships by Korowai. In the remaining threechapters, Stasch firstly puts into focus therelationship of parents or caring relatives tochildren, which in most cases only graduallystrengthens after birth (chap. 4). Secondly, thespousal relationship after marriage is examined(chap. 5), and, finally, the forces behind socialbonds or disruptions after death are analysed(chap. 6). Stasch sees all those relationships asconstant interplays between closeness andstrangeness and thus, in varying degrees, as lociof otherness.

Stasch’s explanations are rich in linguisticdetail, which makes the book a very interestingbut, in places, difficult read, since manyvernacular terms – over 150 in the first twochapters alone – sometimes hinder a fluentreading for those who happen not to speakKorowai. A glossary would have been helpful foran overview of the large amount of vernacularterms, with compounds sometimes beinghyphenated and sometimes not (e.g. p. 41:giom-anop; p. 49: giomanop). In the presentationof the Korowai’s relational, ‘dyad-centered’(p. 76), concept of the person, I miss a mentionof the work of Maurice Leenhardt, who provided

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one of the earliest accounts of such aconceptualization in his great book Do kamo(1979 [1947]).

Sometimes, it remains unclear what kind ofreadership has been envisaged. On the onehand, knowledge of anthropological concepts istaken for granted, as when using the term‘Omaha pattern’ to describe the Korowai kinshipsystem (p. 112). On the other hand, the book’svery aim to deconstruct a notion of a unity ofconsciousness in small-scale societies (p. 1), a‘conscience collective’ as Durkheim would haveput it, is hardly necessary in anthropologicalcircles, since this antiquated concept barely playsan important role in our discipline any more.Furthermore, in Stasch’s work, Korowai in placeseven seem to have something like sharedconsciousness, as implied in phrases like ‘theKorowai pattern’ (pp. 16, 17) or ‘Korowai culturalprocess’ (p. 6).

Having said all that, I would like to stress thatSociety of others is, all in all, a remarkable book,rich in detail and close to the described Korowai.The reader gains deep and congenial insightsinto many major aspects of Korowai life andbuilds an understanding of the complexities oftheir social reality.

Alexis T. von Poser University of Heidelberg

Uhlmann, Allon J. Family, gender and kinshipin Australia: the social and cultural logic ofpractice and subjectivity. xii, 198 pp., tables,bibliogr. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. £55.00

(cloth)

Allon Uhlmann’s account of family and kinshiprelations in de-industrializing Newcastle, NewSouth Wales, represents the first publishedbook-length study of (Anglo-Celtic) Australiankinship. The book has several aims: to provide anethnographic report into kinship, family, andgender practices among the ‘shrinkingtraditional industrial working class’, based onfieldwork in the 1990s; to provide a criticalexposition of the current social scientificunderstanding; and to provide a theoretical andmethodological treatise on practice.

Based on work for a Ph.D in anthropology atthe Australian National University, the book reliesheavily on a theoretical framework drawn fromthe work of Bourdieu in order to analyse thelogic of kinship practice. The study populationwas derived mainly from Anglo-Celtic membersof what Uhlmann terms the dominant fractionsof the working class: tradesmen, semi-professionals, foremen, mid-level clerical

workers, trade unionists, and their families. Thestudy provides a useful exploration of studies offamily and kinship in Australia past and present,and of the theoretical debates about family ofthe last few decades (chap. 3), arguingconvincingly that the pervasive sense of recentcataclysmic crises and shifts in the family isunjustified. Uhlmann stresses instead thehistorical continuity and resilience of kinship andfamily practices, although there have beenimportant changes like the lengthening liminalphase of youth and deferrals of childbearing. Heanalyses the underlying logic of kinship,focusing on terminology and associatedetiquette, with reproduction and filiation seen asthe significant principle structuring relatednessand extended kin organized and mobilized associal categories of the ego-centred kindred. Hisrigorous application of Bourdieusian schemes,which may not be to the taste of everyone, leadshim to a persuasive core argument about therealized category of the prototypical nuclearfamily (chap. 4), and of the doxic, orthodox, andheterodox family. This schema works well toaccount for the variability of contemporaryfamily forms in Australia and their relationship tothe prototypical family.

The book’s lengthy exploration of the genderorder and embodied subjectivities argues thatkinship, family, and gender practices haveconditioned the very structure of capitalism,with the power relationship between home andthe marketplace being fundamental to this(p. 141). There are convincing accounts, withinthe preferred frame, of the prototypical family asa cognitive paradigm for gender practice, ofmasculinity as symbolic violence, and of theworkings of the doxic association of women withthe domestic domain, which inverts masculinedomination. There is also an interesting sectionon mateship, a prevailing theme in thesometimes nationalistic anthropology of theAustralian family, with some writers even seeingthe (male) mate as part of the family. Uhlmann,like his informants, is sceptical of the importanceof such homosociality, seeing it as an essentialbut anachronistic part of Australian mythology,rather than Australian social practice (p. 65).

While Uhlman does note, as others havebefore him, that women do much of thekin-work, the account could have returned tosome earlier feminist complexifications of thearguments about domestic labour, which tookissue with more functionalist accounts of thecapitalist system and its relationships withdomestic labour. The Bourdieusian approach,with its emphasis on reproduction, can tend to

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over-emphasize the ‘fit’ between the prevailingorder and domestic labour. French feminists, forone, were critical of Bourdieu for ignoring theirwork, and indeed there are continuing issuesaround the relationship of Bourdieusian analysisand feminist analysis, which might profitablyhave been explored a little more. Similarly,greater discussion of the many debates aboutthe highly unstable categories of ‘public’ and‘private’ and their character in modern society,as well as the role of long-term migration andtransnational family relations in shapingcontemporary Australian urban kinship patterns,would have been worthwhile.

Uhlmann’s study is none the less a verywelcome departure from what he has elsewhereconvincingly characterized as the besetting sin ofAustralian family sociology, an over-emphasis onpractical policy. His theoretically rigorous andrichly detailed analysis of the structures andlogic of Australian family and kinship within aBourdieusian frame provides an innovativeaddition to the existing literature on Australia.

Maila Stivens University of Melbourne

Medical anthropology andgenetics

Inhorn, Marcia C. (ed.). Reproductivedisruptions: gender, technology, and biopoliticsin the new millennium. xiii, 239 pp., bibliogrs.Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books, 2007.£40.00 (cloth)

This volume engages with the politics of humanreproduction and will prove an invaluableteaching resource in that field and beyond. Inthe editor’s preface, distinguished medicalanthropologist Marcia Inhorn expresses the hopethat the collection marks a moment whenreproductive studies have finally moved to thecentre of anthropological and social scientificconcern. The impressive array of contributors, allbut one anthropologists, gives substance to thatclaim. The particular focus here is on ‘disruptedreproduction’, a term borrowed from RaynaRapp and Faye Ginsburg, who themselvesprovide a chapter. As in other anthropologicaldomains, a focus on crisis and conflict gives atelling, if particular, perspective on theunthought categories of social life. The variousessays take a broad and occasionally challengingapproach to what reproductive disruption mightinclude, ranging from medical intervention in

delivery (Caroline Bledsoe and Rachel Scherrer),child loss (Linda Layne), and infertility (Inhorn),to contraception (Carolyn Sargent), pre-natalgenetic testing (C.H. Browner), and menopause(Margaret Lock), and also, less obviouslyperhaps, to disability (Rapp and Ginsburg) andadoption (Harold Grotevant).

These reproductive disruptions are explicitlyanalysed within ‘global’ frames: internationalpolicy-making, the biocapitalism ofpharmaceutical companies, ubiquitous mediastereotyping, and hegemonic biomedicalunderstandings and technologies of health,illness, and care. Despite this interest in theglobal, there is nevertheless a majoritypreoccupation with European and NorthAmerican contexts, Inhorn’s discussion ofassisted reproduction in the Middle East andLock’s of menopause in Japan excepted,although work on immigrant communities in theWest (Mexicans in the United States and WestAfricans in France) is included. Foucault’s‘biopolitics’ are invoked in the volume’s title,and stratified relations of power are the book’sespecial concern, first and foremost asinstantiated though biomedical authority. Othermodes of domination are also explored,however, such as those of linguistic exclusionand racial and religious stereotyping inSargent’s account of the contestedreproductive strategies of West African migrantsin France.

But it is the intersection between gender andpower that lies at the heart of this volume.Inhorn’s introductory essay, an indispensablesurvey of the state of play in reproductivestudies supplemented by a comprehensivebibliographical appendix, is tellingly entitled‘Defining women’s health: a dozen messagesfrom more than 150 ethnographies’, andacknowledges the heavily gendered lineamentsof the debate. Social scientific studies ofreproduction to date have, for good reasons,focused almost exclusively on women’sexperiences and concerns. It required theimpetus of the wider women’s movement,channelled through feminist scholarship withinthe academy, to bring reproduction to theforefront of academic, and indeed medical,attention. That has, however, resulted in arelative neglect of men’s role in reproduction,not to mention their reproductive health, whichwill surely have to be remedied if reproduction isto move to the centre of social analysis as theeditor and others hope. And the field has in factmoved on considerably since, with Inhornherself leading the way with several recent

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articles and a further co-edited collection,Reconceiving the second sex: men, masculinity,and reproduction (2009), also published byBerghahn in what has become an importantbook series.

This volume thus marks something of awatershed, and there are some fascinatingtensions and contrasts to be found here.Drawing on considerable personal experienceand suffering, Layne, for instance, presents acritique of the current approach to pregnancyloss in the United States, and suggestions for itsredesign from a woman-centred approach.Bledsoe and Scherrer’s chapter, on the otherhand, analyses domains within obstetrics, wherethe woman-centred approach has alreadyenjoyed considerable success. Whereobstetricians were, in the not too distant past,almost all men, the profession is now largelyfemale, in the United States at least. But itremains one of the most complained about, andsued, medical specialities. This conflict resultsfrom the very success of the medicalization ofbirth, now, in the rich West, a relativelynon-hazardous event. The normality of asuccessful outcome allows the reconstruction ofbirth as a ‘natural’ process and the peak of awoman’s personal experience. Medicalinterference, even the mere presence of a doctor,is now seen to imply failure, and middle-classwomen evolve complex ‘birth plans’ to excludethem as far as possible, contracts which are thusalso the doctors’ best legal defence in case ofdisaster. This admirable exploration of the oftensurprising intersections of different regimes ofpower and interest is typical of what is a finevolume and a valuable contribution to thefield.

Morgan Clarke University of Manchester

Lambert, Helen & Maryon McDonald

(eds). Social bodies. 188 pp., illus., bibliogrs.Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books, 2009.£30.00 (cloth)

Given the tremendous amount of scholarlyattention paid in recent decades to the socialand cultural dimensions of bodies, bodiliness,and embodied experience, one might wonderwhat more could be said on the topic. Byframing a discussion that considers whole bodiesas well as body parts, bodies of the living andfragmentary bodily remains, mindful bodies andmultiply embodied sentient forms, this collectionbrings fresh questions and insights to anow-familiar anthropological conversation.

Social bodies opens with an introduction bythe editors, followed by six ethnographic essays.The editors situate their project by tracing atheoretical arc over the past two decades: froman initial interest in ‘the body’ as an explicit butstill singular object of study; to the‘embodiment’ approach, which regards thebody as the ‘existential ground of culture andself’ (Thomas Csordas, ed., Embodiment andexperience: the existential ground of culture andself, 1994); to their proposal for a new analyticanchored in the ‘inherent sociality’ of humanbodies. Of particular concern are ‘the extent towhich bodies and their elements are themselves“social” ’ and the question of ‘what happens tosociality in the face of new types of transaction... that focus squarely on elements of thecorporeal’ (p. 2).

The collection engages the sociality of bodiesand the corporeality of the social from multipleangles, largely through familiar themes ofpersonhood, kinship and relatedness, biopolitics,intersubjectivity, and ethics. Points of focusinclude the social tensions between bodies andtheir elements (organs, tissues, skeletal remains);between individual bodies and social collectives;and between bodies as scientific ‘data’ and associally recognized ‘persons’.

In a captivating first chapter, Sharon R.Kaufman, Ann R. Russ, and Janet K. Shim showhow a new technological innovation – therelative ease with which US surgeons cantransplant kidneys from younger kin into thebodies of older relatives – has begun ‘scripting’biomedical discourse and challengingconventional notions of bodily integrity, kinobligation, and normative ethical praxis. Next, apoignant chapter by Maya Petrovic-Štegerexplores how ‘imaginary projection[s] of someshattered whole’ (p. 69) inform the painstakingwork of forensic identification and its divergentimplications for bereaved Serbian families,Serbian nationalists, and transnational scientificorganizations charged with excavating massgraves.

Laura Peers’s chapter considers howethnographic museum curators, herselfincluded, struggle with the multiplicity ofmeanings borne by indigenous human remains,which are variously regarded as raw scientificdata, sanctified communal ancestors,embarrassing colonial relics, or potent catalystsof festering postcolonial tension. John Robb’sessay on popular and scientific efforts topersonalize Ötzi, the European ‘Ice Man’, raisessimilar questions about the capacity of along-dead, accidentally mummified body to

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spark the imagination and evoke particular formsof behaviour, political sentiment, and emotionalresponse among the living.

In contrast to the first four chapters, whichexamine corporeal transactions among the livingor between the living and the dead, the finaltwo chapters challenge Euro-Americanconceptions of personhood through the lensesof Amazonian perspectivism (Aparecida Vilaça)and notions of ‘reciprocal incorporation’ and‘fractal iteration’ in Melanesia and Africa(Marilyn Strathern). These contributionsexplicitly challenge the notion of an‘incorporated personhood ... coterminous withthe boundaries of the human’ (p. 2), which theeditors critique as a deficiency of theembodiment paradigm.

Social bodies and most of its individualcontributions are compelling, well written, andthought-provoking. One impressive feature ofthe book is its juxtaposition of anthropologicalsub-fields (and related fields) that conceptualizewhat bodies and their constituent parts are, do,and represent in radically different ways. Inaddition to the ‘usual suspects’ of socio-culturaland medical anthropology, questions fromarchaeology, forensics, museum studies,bioethics, and science and technology studiesenrich the book’s consideration of ‘whether wecan identify aspects of sociality that are inherentto human bodies’ (p. 2). Overall, the volumeopens up this question prismatically rather thaninsisting upon a single answer.

A few minor weaknesses are worthy of note.In Petrovic-Šteger’s compelling chapter, aclearer discussion of Annemarie Mol’s‘praxiographic’ approach, and a clearerdemonstration of its benefit over otherapproaches, would have been welcome. InPeers’s chapter, this reader yearned for more onthe author’s habit of ‘speak[ing] to the spirits’of the Native American ancestors whoseremains she displays. Finally, in Robb’sfascinating exploration of how imagination andcreative science bring Ötzi (back) to life, theauthor’s confident assertion that ‘[d]ead bodies... exert agency’ (p. 101) leaves this readerdeeply curious, but ultimately unsatisfied.

Overall, this innovative volume is a valuablecontribution to the unfolding anthropologicalconversation about the socio-cultural, political,ethical, and epistemological complexities ofhuman bodiliness in life and in death, in‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’ settings, and inmultiple temporal modes of humaninterrelationship.

Sarah S. Willen Southern Methodist University

Lea, Tess. Bureaucrats and bleeding hearts:indigenous health in northern Australia. xviii,276 pp., map, tables, figs, illus. Sydney:UNSW Press, 2008. (paper)

As an academic invited into the policy-makingarenas of the Territory Health Service (THS) toassist with policy development, Lea offerscritically engaged insight through this edgy text,which focuses on northern Australia generally,but specifically on the Northern Territory (NT),with a focus on the Top End – or the far north ofthe NT. Through the deconstruction of thesemantics of policy discourse an intimateaccount of the governance of governmentunfolds. In this work Lea aims to returnpersonhood to technocrats in order to ask thequestions: ‘How do government officers in thehelping services shape themselves in relation tothose they set out to help? How do they becomeboth agent of government and communityadvocate? What are the contradictions and howare these resolved?’

As Lea points out, there is much researcharticulating the interdependent nature of theAboriginal/non-Aboriginal relationship, but notfrom a space recognizing the dependence of the‘bureau-professionals’ on Aboriginal people.Through a series of ‘policy-making events’ shefinds that the health policy discourse andpractice is self-perpetuating. ‘The unifyingaesthetic of failure in the cycles of argument anddebate is essential to the culture of remedialism,which – like all organic forms – is unconsciouslygeared toward its own reproduction’. By allaccounts this provocative finding has createdripples – if not tsunamis – in the NT publichealth sector; this is long overdue. ThatAboriginal people make up approximatelyone-third of the NT population with a set ofhealth statistics that will not seem to shift nomatter what the intervention requires a radicalreassessment.

The text is organized in three main parts. Thefirst outlines the bureaucratic setting in question;the second how bureau professionals learnabout and then attempt to execute their vexedresponsibilities; and the third considers howwork life is viewed once these bureaucraticmodes of apprehending the world areincorporated.

The style is in turn theoretically complex andcolloquial in the one sentence; it can beunsettling and reminded me of a cross betweenTaussig’s imaginative realism and Appadurai’sSocial life of things (1986), that latter translatedhere as the ‘social life of health facts’. At once

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densely descriptive and analytically laden, therewere points where I suffered from alliterativeexhaustion: ‘[W]ithin the tricky stickyentanglements of agency and obligation, withinthe internal animation wrought out of being atonce governed and governing, our compulsionis compelling’. Nevertheless, realizing theintimate practices of Foucault’s governmentalityis powerful stuff and an at times difficult readcan be forgiven. However, whereas I could notput down Peter Sutton’s recent text The politicsof suffering (2009) – because of hisno-pretension writing style (no reflection on thecontent) – I am afraid initially that I found thistext hard to pick up. The circumscription of thewriting was at times simply painful to follow,though Lea seems to settle more comfortably inthe tale as the text progresses.

The issue of style aside, this book is amust-read. Lea uncloaks the ways in which datadrive the interventions: ‘[A]s if a fetish object,data acquires magical, transformative propertiesin the professionals’ imagination – if only theinformation can be made accessible toAboriginal people then they would realize howsick they were and want to get better’. Yet, asLea reveals, health statistics are culturalconstructs – they may speak for themselves tothe professionals – but the abstract ‘culturalforms of pie charts, graphs and didactic images’rarely speak to Aboriginal people, at least in theremote regions of the north. How illness isactually lived and experienced is not somethingthat bureau-professionals consider. This issue ofthe ‘severe’ limits of bureaucratic inquisitivenessinto Aboriginal culture is keenly illustrated by theway in which the curses on various Numbulwarbuildings – store/school canteen – wereaccepted as ‘strange events’ which were simplyto be incorporated into the work routine of theTHS nutritionist. The silence surrounding theseanthropologically intriguing events simplyserved to reinstate the opacity of Aboriginalculture. Lea’s frustrated reflections at workingwithin the constraints of the lives and interests ofthe visiting health professionals sheds a brightlight on these cultural chasms.

A real strength of the analysis threadedthroughout the text is the unpacking of theirony of the THS professionals not wanting to‘blame the victim’ – going out of their wayto ensure that their language was notrace-sensitive, for instance – yet their horror inthe field of the scabies, the mangy camp dogs,the chaos ... knowing that this is what they wantto change – yet not wanting to offend, toappear even to notice. This external culture of

acceptance – where ‘professionals must tiptoearound reified traditional culture and view allbad habits as introduced’ – is an especiallyhoary issue.

The question asked at the beginning – ‘givenall the goodwill, money and effort thrown atinterventions, why do Aboriginal people die 17

years younger than their non-Aboriginalcounterparts. What will it take to “close thegap”?’ – is answered in this text, indirectly butultimately successfully, as the ethnography stripsaway at the policy jargon and its enactment toreveal and name the implicit ethnocentricitieswithin it.

Sarah Holcombe Australian National University

Shaw, Alison. Negotiating risk: British Pakistaniexperiences of genetics. 283 pp., figs, bibliogr.Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books, 2009.£45.00 (cloth)

Clinical understanding of genetic disorders isincreasing fast. In some cases underlyingmutations or chromosomal abnormalities areunderstood and testing can be offered toaffected individuals and to couplescontemplating having children, raising dilemmasabout reproductive decisions such as whether toengage with prenatal testing. In other cases,especially with rare conditions, tests are notavailable and clinical geneticists offer onlyprobabilities that children will be affected, aswell as the opportunity for families to becomeinvolved with research that may lead to thedevelopment of tests. Alison Shaw offers adetailed analysis of the way in which suchinformation is transmitted, understood, andacted on, drawing on case studies of BritishPakistani families living in High Wycombe.High-profile concern about the practice of cousinmarriage in the British Pakistani population andits impact on the prevalence of genetic diseaseprovides an important context for her analysis.

In the first part of this book, Shaw focuses onperceptions of consanguineous marriages andprovides an anthropological and historicalbackground to close-kin marriages. Outlining theevidence that cousin marriages increase the rateof congenital disorders, Shaw notes that there isan elevated risk, but that it remains small.Nevertheless, popular representations of therisks of cousin marriage amongst BritishPakistanis focus on this relatively high risk,without acknowledging that the absolutenumbers affected are low. Citing Mary Douglas’swork on risk and blame, Shaw suggests that

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these representations mark out a minoritypopulation in terms of supposedly neutral ideasabout risk.

The continuing popularity of cousinmarriages for British Pakistanis is closely tied tothe practice of transnational marriages with kinfrom Pakistan. Shaw shows how transnationalmarriages between kin often havesocio-economic benefits for the wider family,help maintain bonds between transnationallyseparated kin, and are driven by affective tiesbetween young people. Thus while families andpotential marriage partners are commonly awareof concerns linking consanguineous marriagewith the risk of genetic problems, social,cultural, and emotional motivations may meanthat such marriages are still regarded as ‘safer’than marrying outside the family.

It was the high profile of concern aboutcousin marriages amongst British Pakistanis thatinspired Shaw to work in genetics clinics, talkingto families who had been referred there foradvice, usually because they had had a geneticdisorder diagnosed in a child, sometimes inpregnancy. In the second part of the book sheconsiders the experiences of these families; theirresponses to medical surveillance and diagnosticuncertainty, to being given information aboutthe risks for future children and the ways inwhich they cope with infant death that mayhave been foretold by prenatal screening. Shealso discusses the ways in which knowledge ofgenetic risk gained by individuals may or maynot be shared with the wider family.

The overall message here is that couples’responses to reproductive risk information arestructurally and culturally shaped, but not insimple or obvious ways. Shaw emphasizes thecomplexities and variability of the responses ofpeople of British Pakistani ethnicity to thesedifficult situations, noting, for example, thatpersonal circumstances may interact withreligious beliefs in ways that are often morecomplex than might be predicted by healthprofessionals. She also shows that responses ofBritish Pakistanis to having a child with a geneticdisorder, or being told that they are at risk ofhaving a child with a genetic disorder, sharemuch with responses of the white Britishpopulation. For example, both groups mayattribute genetic disorders to fate or destiny.

Shaw has long worked with British Pakistanisin the Oxford area, and the depth of herunderstanding and the strong relationships shewas able to build up with her informants areobvious throughout the book. The clarity of herwriting and the moving nature of the family

histories she relates make for a compelling read.This is a detailed and valuable study, leadingShaw to make a number of importantrecommendations for clinical practice.

Tessa Pollard Durham University

Method and theory

Godelier, Maurice. In and out of the West:reconstructing anthropology. vi, 254 pp.,bibliogr. London, New York: Verso, 2009.£29.99 (cloth)

Rather than a reconstruction of anthropology,this collection of essays reads more like offcutsfrom a productive and long-standing intellectualworkshop. The book provides an introduction tosome key Godelier themes for any who have notread his longer works, but it is unlikely to addmuch for those who have. What we have is anintroduction and eight substantive chapters, halfof them delivered as the 2002 Page-BarbourLectures at the University of Virginia (chaps 2, 3,7, 8).

The introduction, ‘Anthropology today –what have we done and what should we do?’,responds to the discussions that took place aftereach of the Page-Barbour Lectures, whichGodelier characterizes as polarized betweenscientific defenders of anthropology and thosewho denied the West’s capacity for objectiveknowledge, however modest, of thenon-Western world. Godelier’s sympathies areclearly with the former, and he proceeds to painta broad-brush portrait of the authors of Writingculture and their supporters, part of whosetragedy was to be influenced by ‘French Theory’,which is, we are assured, an American invention,and highly intoxicating to non-native users.Although he later states that he is not ‘placing“Americans” on trial’ (p. 18), it does rather seemthat way. Godelier concludes by encouragingthe reconstruction of a reflexive anthropology,aware of its analytic powers and their limits,pragmatic but not eclectic, using tools that areuseful rather than fashionable, and is consciousof its political and ethical responsibilities(paraphrased from p. 42). If this is an attack onAmericans, then its weapons sound like Momand apple pie.

Chapter 1, a version of a keynote addressto the American Association of EconomicAnthropology in 2002, will be useful to thosewho have not read Godelier’s The enigma of the

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gift (1998, original 1996) and its rereading ofMauss’s famous essay The gift, distinguishingbetween things that are given, those that aresold or bartered, and those that must be kept. Aconcluding paragraph points particularly to theimportance of what must be kept in ‘a newfocus for economic anthropology’ that will‘explore the new linkages between the local andthe global’.

The cluster of chapters that follow leanheavily on Godelier’s own ethnography of theBaruya of New Guinea to illustrate how intenselylocal ethnography can be brought to bear onuniversal issues. Chapter 2, ‘No society has everbeen based on the family or on kinship’, drawson the untranslated Métamorphoses de la parenté(2004) to argue that kinship is at onceirreducible (‘kinship begets kinship, and neveranything else’, p. 79) and analytically distinctfrom the broader political and economicrelations that sustain social inequalities. Chapter3, ‘It always takes more than a man and awoman to make a child’, is concerned withanthropologists’ discussions of theories ofconception and what these entail more broadlyfor societies. Chapter 4, ‘Human sexuality isfundamentally a-social’, gestures towards atheory of the intertwining of the twinnedrepressions of unconscious sexual fantasies andof the wounds of social inequalities. Chapter 5,‘How an individual becomes a social subject’,continues in psychoanalytic vein, suggesting theuniversality of the need for the child toovercome the Oedipus complex as part of thesocial subordination of sexuality. Chapter 6,‘What is a society?’, examines the relativelyrecent self-conscious identity of the Baruya,asking what conditions made it possible.However, this strikes me more as an answer towhat makes a collective social identity than whatmakes a society.

The final two chapters revert to the concernsof the Introduction. Chapter 7, ‘Socialanthropology is not indissolubly tied to theWest, its birthplace’, brings a moreautobiographical tone to an argument, andsources, similar to that of the introduction.Chapter 8, ‘Excursus: combining the pleasures ofart and knowledge for the museum-goingpublics’, may seen disappointingly guarded toreaders of Sally Price’s 2007 Paris primitive(tellingly subtitled ‘Jacques Chirac’s museum onthe Quai Branly’). Godelier’s long-standinginvolvement in the new Musée du Quai Branly,designed to replace both the revered Musée del’Homme and the Musée des arts d’Afrique etd’Océanie, ended in 2000 over disagreements

about the balance between theethnographic/historical and the artisticaspirations of the museum’s exhibition space, aswell as the non-completion of an ambitiousdatabase that would have severallycontextualized non-Western art objects, anddoubtless political and personal issues. PerhapsSally Price’s later book was not available toGodelier when he submitted this volume (hehad written the introduction to the Frenchtranslation of Sally Price’s 1989 Primitive art incivilized places) since his reflections on theproject are confined to a long endnote.

Richard Fardon School of Oriental and AfricanStudies

Grenfell, Michael (ed.). Pierre Bourdieu: keyconcepts. viii, 248 pp., figs, bibliogr.Stocksfield: Acumen, 2008. £45.00 (cloth),£14.99 (paper)

Despite the constant flurry of books about, by,and utilizing the French sociologist PierreBourdieu, a truly clear understanding of hisapproach to studying the social world remainshard to capture. One reason is his notoriouslyobscure style of writing – although this may bedefended on the basis that it enabled him toavoid the pitfalls of conceptual antinomies thatso easily creep into ‘clearer’ styles. Anotherreason is the proliferation of his terminology –just when one thinks one has grasped theessence of his approach, one comes acrossanother of his writings that develops a newconcept or that highlights a concept onepreviously thought secondary. For this reason,Michael Grenfell’s edited collection of essays isvery welcome, covering as it does not onlyBourdieu’s dominant ‘thinking tools’ (habitus,field and capital; discussed respectively by KarlMaton, Patricia Thomson, and Robert Moore)but also a number of his auxiliary (but no lessnecessary) concepts: class (Nick Crossley), doxa(Cécile Deer), and hysteresis (Cheryl Hardy)(which, together with capital, are groupedwithin a section on field mechanisms, or howfields operate), and interest (Grenfell, who alsocovers the concept of illusio in this chapter),conatus (Steve Fuller), symbolic violence (J.Daniel Schubert), and reflexivity (Deer) (groupedin terms of the subjective nature of fieldconditions). In addition, there are chapters onBourdieu’s biography (Grenfell) and thedevelopment of his social theory (DerekRobbins). Overall, this book aims to be of use tosocial researchers’ own practice – several of the

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chapters explore how the particular conceptunder discussion may be utilized in research,and Grenfell’s postscript draws out threeBourdieusian methodological principles. Indeed,one of the book’s strengths lies in constantlyemphasizing the inter-connectedness betweenBourdieu’s conceptual framework, epistemology,and methodology.

Given that Bourdieu’s concepts all relyheavily upon each another, it is potentiallyproblematic to attempt to deal with one at atime. Recognizing this problem, the variouschapters successfully keep one eye focused uponthe concept in question whilst allowing thesecond to roam more freely over others. Aconsequence of this, however, is that differentinterpretations of a concept may be offered:Deer’s discussion of doxa, for example, variouslyequates it (explicitly or implicitly) withmisrecognition, habitus, and symbolic violence,and Moore treats embodied cultural capital asequivalent to habitus. As Moore himself notes,‘Bourdieu’s extensive work is obviously open tomultiple interpretations and he himself doeschange position over time. Also, his works dofrequently contain (with relative degrees ofexplicitness) alternative languages in terms ofwhich it is possible to construct coherentsystems of theoretically opposed logics’ (p. 116).

One argument in this book that may bequestioned is Grenfell’s delineation between thesubjective and the objective, as in his groupingtogether of concepts in the section on fieldconditions on the basis that they relate to theformer, and in his equation of habitus withsubjective aspects and field with objectiveaspects (p. 47). In this lies a danger that thestructure-agency antinomy, which Bourdieuaimed to transcend, may be reintroduced –although Maton’s discussion of habitussuccessfully avoids this by stressing how it isinextricably related to a field through itsstructuring generation of social practices. Thismutual constitution between field and habitusdoes not, however, preclude instances in whichthey do not fit, as discussed by Maton and(more thoroughly, through the concept ofhysteresis) Hardy. But neither considers whethera degree of such mismatch may be endemic insocial life beyond periods of rapid social changeor incidents in which an individual is temporarilyin a novel situation. This relates, in part, to theformation of habitus, but rather than beingtreated (by Bourdieu and the authors in thiscollection, with the exception of Moore) asalways ‘well-formed’ (p. 103), social research –particularly that conducted by social

anthropologists and other ethnographers – maybe aided by considering variations in suchformation within a group.

Crossley’s explication of the procedures usedto construct maps of social space employed byBourdieu and his research teams is relevant tothis issue, since it draws attention to the invisible‘clouds of individuals’ that lie around plottedsocial practices. In general, this chapter serves asan excellent introduction (for students as well asstatistically challenged established scholars) tohow these maps should be interpreted. It alsodemonstrates the collective nature of Bourdieu’swork – rather than representing the world seen‘through the eyes of one man’, as Grenfell(p. 218) states in his conclusion. Indeed, thisbook may have benefited from greater attentionto the interests and contributions of Bourdieu’sco-researchers, such as Jean-Claude Passeron andLuc Boltanski, as well as to post-Bourdieusianscholars, such as Bernard Lahire. That said, thiscollection is highly admirable for its clarity andthoroughness, and should be of great interest toanthropologists and others who are new to, orfamiliar with, Bourdieu’s oeuvre.

Matthew Wood Queen’s University Belfast

Heimer, Maria & Stig Thøgersen (eds).Doing fieldwork in China. xi, 322 pp., tables,bibliogrs. Honolulu: Univ. Hawai’i Press,2006. £28.00 (paper)

Fieldwork. For anthropologists this term raisesimages of cozy chats in natural-lit dwellings,intimacy with people from differentbackgrounds; conversion experiences; the rite ofpassage that transforms novices, students, intoauthorities. We were raised on stories ofMalinowski (who hid out reading novels whenhe was not engaging in gossip among thevillagers) and Boas (whose life was saved whenInuit picked him up, warmed him, and gave himwarm raw seal liver), or more recently on thestudies of Crapanzano with Tuhami (intricatepsychoanalytic sketches) or Abu-Lughod (whoseems to have spent her time hearing intimatestories of love, betrayal, and shame) andBourgois (who risked his and his family’swell-being by living among economicallydeprived, sometimes violent intravenous drugusers and dealers). Fieldwork, we learned andteach our students in turn, is what separatesanthropology from other social sciences that relyon more distant, lifeless ‘data sets’ or statistics.We go there. We learn, on the ground, fromother human beings.

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So goes the myth, or at least the ideal. Sincethe 1980s the mythology of romantic fieldworkhas been displaced, with more hard-headedanalyses of power imbalances, anthropologists’own predilections, representations, of intractablereal epistemological, ontological, economic, andpolitical difficulties. But still there is room formore. What about anthropologists who work inplaces unlike the isolated small-scale, relaxedsocieties in which anthropology as a disciplinewas formed? And what about non-anthropologists conducting fieldwork? Like‘culture’, fieldwork is no longer the propertysolely of anthropologists.

Doing fieldwork in China offers a frank look atfieldwork – not just by anthropologists but othersocial scientists too – in a different kind ofsetting: a long-literate culture with a richtextual tradition of its own; a technologicallyadvanced society; a bureaucratic system thatseeks to control the flow of information withboth blunt and sophisticated techniques; aneducational and scientific establishment with itsown social scientists and analysts; anincreasingly urban society with hugeagglomerations of megalopolises filled withpeople coming and going. In short, Chinapresents anthropologists with challenges toalmost every received expectation: there will beno individual scouting of appropriate fieldsettings. Rapport will require more than anindividual’s charm and empathy; little trinkets ofpens and calendars will be insufficient to gainaccess to ‘natives’; anthropologists are morelikely to feel like pawns in long-standing powerplays than like imperial overlords trying to walksoftly.

Doing fieldwork in China contributes to theunderstanding of such situations. Here readerswill see how difficult it is to convey to localauthorities the meaning of anthropologicalprojects when there are somewhat-similarenterprises already in place; China’slong-standing tradition of ‘ “going down tocheck on actual conditions’ (kaocha, p. 82) is abit like fieldwork, though it entails only briefvisits to collect reports from officials. Readers willlearn from Mette Halskov Hansen about theimportance of selecting the most appropriatepeitong, surveillance-assistant, who is likely tohave social and familial ties that can eithersabotage or enable the foreigner’s research.Such ‘choices’ are often out of the researcher’shands, however (pp. 90-3). Emily Yeh points outthe way outsiders’ surveillance, for example inthe Tibet Autonomous Region, can turn intoself-surveillance (p. 200) – surely something

common but rarely acknowledged.Self-censorship is related (p. 250).

This is not a nuts-and-bolts manual, but it ismore than just a set of stories from the field.Here are some sobering and helpful accounts ofhow other anthropologists have struggled,sometimes succeeding and sometimes failing(see Elin Sæther’s section, ‘Failures as a sourcefor learning’) to carry out the research theyenvisioned from home.

Some of the chapters that especially stoodout for me are Hansen, Yeh, Solinger, Thøgersen,Kjellgren, Thunø, but there was wisdom andinsight, warning and pragmatic solution in everychapter. (Other authors, please forgive thisimpressionistic memory of impact.) Discussionsof the relations between researcher and subject,and their mutual understanding and anticipatedusefulness, as well as subtleties in relationsbetween collaborators, were especially nuanced.Ethics are also discussed throughout. Theannotated bibliography provides a usefulcatalogue of social scientists’ (and historians’)works, and even portions of works, that discussfieldwork.

In sum, this book would be extremely helpfulfor people setting out to engage in fieldwork inChina, Iran, Saudi Arabia, or other settingswhere governments control movement of socialscientists. Students and returning academics willfind helpful hints, reassuring stories, and eventhe reminder that each field setting requirescertain kinds of problem-solving that cannot bespecified in advance – and a dollop of luck(pp. 190, 195). Take with you to the field yourcommon sense and your imagination, as well asletters of introduction. You never know exactlywhich will be the most useful!

Susan D. Blum University of Notre Dame

Waterston, Alisse & Maria D. Vesperi

(eds). Anthropology off the shelf:anthropologists on writing. xvi, 213 pp.,bibliogrs. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.£45.00 (cloth)

This is a pleasing book. And heartening, becausethe eighteen contributors understandanthropologists ‘as people who mind otherpeople’s business’ (p. xiii) and have the courageto ask an important question. Howard Zinnstarts it off in the first chapter by asking: whateffect does our writing have? ‘Does it helpchange the world?’ (p. 16). At the end, PaulFarmer, in ‘Fighting words’, insists that our‘projects – and projections – always need to be

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re-evaluated in terms of outcomes. What doesour writing do?’ (p. 182).

Zinn and Farmer answer as best they can, sodo the others. Each writes thoughtfully, withclarity and honesty about biases, ethics, andactivist research. They also write of the manifoldinstitutional constraints on writing that comewith the academic work itself. They consider toothe vicissitudes of the market, and plain badluck, which can prevent anthropologists’ writingfrom moving ‘off the shelf’.

Altogether the book is an excellent survey ofthe issues facing scholars who hope to address awider than anthropological audience throughtheir writing. It is also a ‘how-to’ manual forleaving behind what Karen Brodkin calls‘lardballs’: ‘the academic equivalent of a BigMac – too many syllables and not enoughcontent’ (p. 22); those dense, obscure, boringglops of writing we all know all too well.Brodkin suggests we produce lardballs in theface of the contradiction between the need fordepartments, journals, and book publishers topreserve disciplinary boundaries and the new,healthy impetus to describe communities incross-disciplinary terms. Maria Vesperi writes as ajournalist as well as a professor of anthropology.She goes a step further and describes ways toavoid the compromised styles which strandacademics hoping for a break-out book.

Many of the papers deal explicitly withwriting against racism and inequality frompositions of class and race privilege. Iparticularly admired Alisse Waterston’s storieswritten in love, sorrow, and rage and IrmaMcClaurin’s account of reclaiming Zora NealeHurston from the ‘shadows of anthropology’. Allthe authors approach questions of writing withhumility and deep humanism. CarolynNordstrom touches on a power most academicsare loath to name:

Every time I sit down to write, I knock a hostof academic critics off my shoulder who tellme I can’t, shouldn’t, wouldn’t write what Ibelieve in; that I must follow their guidelinesfor ‘truth,’ academic style, and that (by theway) I’m not good enough, never will be(p. 35, emphasis in original).

Her way out is modest. Part of the reason shecontinues to write what I consider some of thewisest and most moving anthropologicalaccounts of war that we have is that ‘we all, ashumans, have a responsibility to creatively offersomething to the world. Not more than oneperson can. Just our bit’ (p. 37).

This collection is important. Where else haveyou read senior scholars describing how theyhave tried to write themselves out of theacademic ghetto? The volume is made from awhole cloth woven through four panels at theAmerican Anthropological Association in 1999,2000, 2003, and 2005. This suggests that inNorth America, deep changes are moving thediscipline back towards the committed politics ofBoas.

But the process is complicated. CherylMwaria, in her brief foreword, asks ‘Whoseinterests do we serve?’, thus touching thepolitical questions which have rivenanthropology since the 1960s and 1970s. This isbrave, but these papers could have pushed theboundaries even further. First, all the contributorsare eager to stay within the discipline: ‘[T]owork seriously with form in ways that enlargeanthropologists’ potential to provide accessible,in-depth information and analysis about thingsthat are amiss in the world’ (p. 6). This is playingsafe: not least because it is easier to dodgepolitical questions if you focus on writing per se.

There is also a presumption that mostanthropologists are people of the political left.This is never argued through, and it is patentlynot true. Anthropologists need to be able toname and describe the methods, writing styles,and theories of colleagues who make up theentire political spectrum within the discipline.Historians and economists do this all the time, sowhy not anthropologists? Without such politicalhonesty, it becomes easy for other socialscientists to dismiss the work of anthropologists.Moreover, when you cross disciplinaryboundaries, and forget about being just ananthropologist, you can produce much clearerpolitical writing. These reservationsnotwithstanding, Anthropology off the shelf oughtto be on every introductory reading list, andBrodkin’s notion of ‘lardballs’ in everyundergraduate’s head.

Nancy Lindisfarne School of Oriental andAfrican Studies

Religion and myth

Bailey, F.G. God-botherers and othertrue-believers: Gandhi, Hitler, and the religiousright. xi, 229 pp., bibliogr. Oxford, New York:Berghahn Books, 2008. £19.95 (cloth)

It is perhaps apropos to say that God-botherersand other true-believers is an academic meditation

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on the perversity of belief and the politics ofreligious fundamentalism. Etymologically theword ‘meditate’ derives from the Latin meditatio,meaning an intellectual or even physicalexercise, and even though Frederick G. Baileymeasures his words very carefully, his approachis anything put contemplative, which is what‘meditate’ has come to mean. In this book,which is carefully reasoned, engagingly written,and resolutely grounded in systematic thinking –as well as seething with incredulity towards thepolitics of faith – one can sense the passion ofBailey’s academic conviction: that questions arethe only true formulations of knowledge worthfighting for.

As a leading political anthropologist in thefield – I hesitate to say ‘the’ only because itintimates belief in a true ‘deus’ – Bailey has, overhalf a century, provided numerous insights onthe form and function of power, and on thestrategic manipulation of things for personalgain. God-botherers follows on a long career ofastute and extremely insightful scepticismconcerning the assumption that culture ismeaningful and coherent as a system of thoughtunto itself, and that thought structures action inthe social world.

God-botherers engages directly withfabrications of meaning at the point ofintersection, in the modern world, betweenpolitics and belief. It ‘presents a cost/benefitreckoning of what powerful and would-bepowerful people – that is, politicians – do underthe spur of, or sometimes only in the name of,one or another ideology, whether religious orsecular’ (p. 19). Although a primary concern iswith the duplicity of self-righteous moralism andthe gross politics of blind faith, Bailey’s goal is to‘write from the standpoint of atheism’ in orderto untangle larger webs of delusion and to pointout common threads in narratives that seem tobe cut from completely different cloth.

The book is divided into three parts: ‘Faithand politics’, ‘Antagonistic religions’, and‘Religion and love’. Part I deals withtelevangelism and the rhetorical use of religiousbeliefs in the politics of persuasion. It is aboutthe conjunction of power, convictions, andcommunication, in forms that are eithershamelessly opportunistic or blindly dogmatic.Fundamentally what concerns Bailey is theproblem of power manifest in proclamations ofabsolute faith. Although his analysis revolvesaround individuals engaged in the politics offaith, his ultimate concern is with the force ofpersuasion reflected in rhetoric. This is especiallyimportant in part II, where Bailey engages with

the secular ‘religion’ of National Socialismmanifest in Hitler’s rhetoric. Here he is lessconcerned with the moral opprobrium ofparticular beliefs than with the logic oftransposed, uncritical conviction. Heacknowledges that the likes of Pat Robertson, PolPot, Jerry Falwell, and Hitler come across ascaricatures since he ‘does not engage indialogue with their creeds’ (p. 145): that is, withthe relationship between Truth and their truth.Bailey’s concern is with the question of ‘how thecreed that they profess influences theirperformance as politicians and on how theymake use of it to gain power’ (p. 145). Throughan analysis of blind faith and absolute power heis making a case for a pragmatic politics ofquestioning.

In part III Bailey’s analysis of MahatmaGandhi’s blind faith in militant non-violencebased on belief in the absolute purity – orpurifiability – of individual souls is set against hisunderstanding of Hitler’s religious ideology ofexclusion, hate, and demonization. Although thecontrast is logically contrived – one could hardlyimagine a sharper juxtaposition of ‘good’ and‘evil’ – Bailey strategically uses the contrastbetween each man’s convictions to focus onsimilarities in how they articulated belief in orderto engage in politics. In doing so he makes hiscentral point most effectively: the structure ofbelief in absolute principles corrupts absolutely,even turning virtue into dogma.

Although Bailey’s outrage at sanctimony andhumbuggery is palpable, he is careful to holdthe mirror to catch his own academic reflection.But in doing so he does not so much becomereflexive as sharply make an importantdistinction – rooted in the original meaning ofphilosophy – between belief in methods ofunderstanding based on trenchant scepticism,and faith that can only result in demagoguery.

Joseph S. Alter University of Pittsburgh

Froerer, Peggy. Religious division and socialconflict: the emergence of Hindu nationalism inrural India. xx, 295 pp., maps, tables, illus.,bibliogr. New Delhi: Social Science Press,2007. £89.95 (cloth)

Peggy Froerer’s anthropological account ofreligious conflict in the eastern Indian state ofChhattisgarh, India, is an important contributionto the current scholarship and understanding ofthe Hindu nationalist movement as well asprocesses of ethnic identity formation moregenerally. Despite the wealth of literature on the

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Hindu nationalist movement, very little has beenwritten regarding the particular ways in which ithas successfully garnered support amongsttraditionally marginalized groups such as theadivasi or ‘indigenous’ communities focused onby Froerer.

The research took place over the course oftwo years in the Chhattisgarhi village ofMohanpur and focuses primarily on two primarygroups: the Hindu Ratiya Kanwars and theChristian Oraons. While the former havetraditionally comprised the dominant caste, intheir status as both the original founders of thevillage and the main landowners, the Oraoncommunity has largely been viewed as the mostinferior group, in both social and economicterms. The thrust of Froerer’s study is two-fold.Firstly, she charts the shifting economic andpolitical relations within the village as the OraonChristians have slowly gained materialdominance while remaining socially inferior totheir Hindu neighbours. A second major focus isthe role that religious nationalist groups suchas the Rastriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), oneof the arms of the larger Hindu nationalistmovement, have played in changing whatmight be otherwise seen as local tensionsinto larger conflicts between the Hindu ‘sons ofthe soil’ and the Christian ‘threatening Other’.

The book is organized into three mainsections. The first section (chaps 2 and 3)examines the ways in which adivasis, bothhistorically as well as today, are construed as‘backward’ by mainstream Indian society. Theworship of local deities, the belief in the powerof local faith healers to cure illness, and the useof possession in communicating with local godsrepresent practices which both Hindu nationalistgroups such as the RSS as well as the CatholicChurch (with the Hindu Ratiya Kanwars and theChristian Oraons, respectively) view asemblematic of adivasi ‘backwardness’ andseek to put an end to.

The second section of the monograph(chaps 4 and 5) examines the specific strategiesemployed as part of the larger ‘civilizingmission’ by both the RSS and the CatholicChurch. The sponsorship of local healthinitiatives by both groups acts as a means ofincreasing their position of influence within thevillage as well as countering local beliefs in thepower of gunias (individuals within thecommunity who are believed to have specialrelationships and knowledge of supernaturalbeings). The RSS, as an outsider to localhierarchies, has also been able to gaincross-cutting legitimacy through efforts at

countering local corruption amongst dominantpolitical and religious leaders in the village.

The last section of the book (chaps 6 and 7)details the way in which Hindu nationalistactivists have succeeded in transforming whatcould otherwise be construed as local castetensions into larger religious conflicts betweenHindu ‘sons of the soil’ and Oraon Christians.The increasing material dominance of the latterhas been strategically used to galvanize Hindusin the village against their Christian neighbours,who have been re-cast into the prototype of the‘threatening Other’ who is usurping the rightfulposition of the traditional dominant Hindus.

While the fact that notions surrounding the‘threatening Other’ are well covered in theacademic literature on ethnic and religiousconflict, very few studies actually focus on theprocesses and circumstances in which such ideasbecome accepted on a local level. Assuming thatsupporters of religious movements such asHindu nationalism are not merely passiverecipients of political ideology, studies such asFroerer’s are critical if we are better tounderstand how groups such as the RSS gainedwidespread acceptance in many parts of Indiaand, moreover, the nature of social and politicaltransformation more generally. Conflicts such asthat between the Ratiya Kanwar Hindus and theOraon Christians in Mohanpur are not motivatedby primordial enmities. Rather, Froerer arguesthat it is the failure of the Indian state inproviding its citizens with adequate health andeducation facilities along with ongoing politicaland economic corruption which allows forgroups such as the RSS to gain legitimacy. Inaddition to being of great interest to both SouthAsia specialists as well as anthropologistsworking on religious conflict, Froerer’s studycomes at a time when the conflict betweenadivasis, the state, and corporate interests ineastern India has reached alarming highs and, assuch, is particularly important in the currentpolitical climate.

Carolyn Heitmeyer University of Sussex

Makley, Charlene E. The violence ofliberation: gender and Tibetan Buddhist revivalin post-Mao China. xvii, 374 pp., maps, illus.,bibliogr. London, Berkeley: Univ. CaliforniaPress, 2007. £14.95 (paper)

Labrang is an important Tibetan monastic centreon the northeastern edge of the Tibetan plateau.Through oral histories, narratives, andobservations, well supplemented by

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documentary sources, this book explores thepost-communist history of the town, the impactof changing state policies, ideologies, and, mostimportantly, the legacy of the CulturalRevolution. Gender is used as the primarytheoretical underpinning, with extensivereference to the literature on China.

Any regional specialist will appreciate theglimpses the author provides into the lives of thecontemporary Labrang residents: their dilemmas,the norms of marriage and love, the issuesfacing government cadres, the daughters-in-lawwrestling with traditional expectations, theproblems of marital relations, and local opinionsabout gender and sex. These vignettes andviews provide a rich picture of the dilemmas ofmodern urban life and the author makes gooduse of local and Chinese sources to link themwith changing official policies.

One of the best aspects of the book is theaccount that is provided, through the words ofcontemporary residents, of the CulturalRevolution. Wisely, the author does not imposetoo much structure or coherence on their tales,and we are allowed to experience the confusionof the period and its immediate aftermath,which has continued into the present. We beginto understand that it involved far more than thesuppression of religion and persecution ofmonks: the new narratives of class and imagesof gender, the ‘speaking bitterness’ testimoniesto which the people were subject, or forced togive, and the agency of Tibetans themselves inviolent events have left a legacy of confusionand mistrust.

There are constant shifts in perspectivethroughout the book. Travellers’ perspectives onthe region are followed by a discussion of Maoistand post-Maoist ideology, Tibetanist images ofLabrang, Buddhist ideologies, and contemporarylocals’ perspectives. The author seems to wish toavoid placing too much structure on heraccounts, but the effect can be confusing.Surprisingly, there is a lack of local perspective atsome points, on the Cham Chen festival, forexample.

On the face of it, this is an account ofchange, from pre-modern to modern, frompre-Mao to post-Mao, but claims that locals areexperiencing ‘new sexual regimes’, at the heartof the book’s discussion of gender, is not whollyconvincing. How useful is gender as a means ofunderstanding religious revival and thedilemmas of modernity? Why is the power of thetrulku, the reincarnate lama, always referred to asa ‘masculine’ power? It is clear that a strongtheoretical framework has structured the whole

work, largely based upon feminist writing onChina. However, fully to understand thesignificance of gender in Labrang it would benecessary to consider a much wider range ofboth historical and contemporary, religious andlay phenomena shaping Tibetan lives in Amdo,as the region is known. Labrang is at the heart ofa large nomadic population, and the book’sdiscussion of households and tribes, includingthe local lharde, is sketchy. The author usesliterature that often relates to other parts ofTibet, rather than to Amdo. This leads to anover-emphasis on the ‘patrilineal’ nature of tribalrelations, which supports her description ofpatrifilial religious practices, but is barelyappropriate for the Tibetan tribes. Equally, thegendered religious practices of Amdo and thelocal emphasis on masculinity, which contrastwith much of the rest of Tibet, are hardlyanalysed. The author does not, for example,discuss the tradition of marriage by capture(real, rather than notional), which still representsan ideal for the nomad population; she onlybriefly refers to the Gesar epic, an importantwork replete with images of masculine prowess,which remains important for modern AmdoTibetans. There is also surprisingly littlediscussion of the nuns who live in Labrang.While a single work must, of course, beselective, the author’s emphasis on gender andon the masculine aspects of Tibetan Buddhismmakes these surprising omissions.

This book engages with an important bodyof literature on gender and, on an abstract level,may well be regarded as making a valuablecontribution to associated contemporarydebates. For the anthropologist of modernChina, the details of modern urban life, setwithin a discussion of statist policy andideologies, and, in particular, the memories andlegacy of the Cultural Revolution, make this avery valuable addition to the ethnographiccorpus. I remain unconvinced, however, that thetheoretical framework fully does justice to thisrich account, which nevertheless deserves toreach a wide audience.

Fernanda Pirie University of Oxford

Rodríguez del Alisal, Maria, Peter

Ackermann & Dolores P. Martinez

(eds). Pilgrimages and spiritual quests in Japan.xxi, 184 pp., maps, bibliogrs. London, NewYork: Routledge, 2007. £75.00 (cloth)

This book draws together sixteen papers given atthe meeting of the Japan Anthropology

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Workshop in Santiago de Compostela in 1996.The papers cover an extremely diverse range oftopics, including historical material onpilgrimage in both Japan and Spain, andreflections on the contemporary situation inboth countries, as well as research on varioustypes of quest, more broadly defined,encompassing both the personal and thosewithin an institutional context. Appropriately, Ifound that reading this book recalled theexperience of pilgrimage itself (my ownexperience of pilgrimage was of the thirty-threeKannon temples in Chichibu): a journey with aunifying theme, punctuated by unexpected andenriching discoveries.

The volume is usefully framed by anintroduction (Rodriguez del Alisal andAckermann) and an afterword (Martinez) inwhich the editors reflect on the theoreticalbackground to the study of pilgrimage, andplace the notion of pilgrimage within thecontext of the broader idea of ‘quest’. Onebenefit of this approach is that it enables anexploration of quests as journeys contributing tothe construction of a sense of self, withpilgrimages seen as one distinct type of quest.This frees the contributors to range beyond thereligious, narrowly defined, avoiding some of thedifficulties presented by attempts to define anddelineate the religious sphere in the Japanesecontext. The papers presented here deal withquests in a wide variety of domains, rangingfrom the arts (Cabañas on Takiguchi Shuzo andJoan Miró; Bermejo on Suda Kunitaro’s journeyto Spain; Santos on the film Hiroshima, monamour) to Nakamaki’s analysis of trainingprogrammes offered by the Japan InterculturalAcademy of Municipalities to local civil servantsto help them to deal with the challenges ofinternationalization, and van Bremen’sexamination of travel ethnography in Japan. Forthose with an interest in the study of Japaneseworking practices, Nakamaki’s paper isparticularly striking for the thought-provokinganalogies it draws between various aspects ofpilgrimage and the internationalization trainingdescribed.

The boundary between recreational andreligious is called into question in several of thepapers. Kouamé’s paper points out that theoverlap between the two in the context ofpilgrimage is not new: the pursuit of pleasurethrough visits to hot springs, teahouses, andshops was a feature of the Shikoku pilgrimage inthe Edo era, and, much like contemporarytourists, pilgrims brought economic benefits tothe areas they visited. Guichard-Anguis’s paper,

comparing the Ise pilgrimage in Japan with thatto Santiago de Compostela in Spain, also notesthe ludic aspects of the Ise pilgrimage. Del Alisal,in her paper ‘New forms of pilgrimage in Japan’,again underlines the continuities betweentourism and pilgrimage both in the Edo periodand in contemporary Japan, and explores somerecent developments in which tourist companiesand travel agencies, as well as bus and railwaycompanies, may promote both long-establishedpilgrimage sites and new tourist attractions witha religious theme. Among the vignettespresented by del Alisal, that of Shukyo Lando(Religion Land) is striking as a site whichcombines religious elements with atheme-park-like setting. The comparison ofpilgrimages to religious sites and visits to themeparks in general forms the focus of Hendry’spaper, where she points out both similarities andsome important differences between these twotypes of journeys. Overall, the blurring of theboundaries between recreational and religioussuggested by all these papers is neatly summedup by Martinez in her afterword, where shesuggests that ‘we need to consider ... acontinuum of travel in which the spiritual orreligious ... dominates at one end and thesecular at the other’, and further that in thevarious cases explored in this collection ‘therecreational seeps into the serious authenticspiritual quest as much as a sense of discoverycreeps into the purely selfish individual quest’(pp. 175-6).

Given the wide range of papers presentedhere, different readers will find different points ofinterest. For me, the examination of the historicalbackground of pilgrimage in Japan in the papersby Ackermann, Guichard-Anguis, Usui, Kouamé,Yoshida, and del Alisal is particularly interesting.Some highlights here are Usui’s carefulexamination of a range of foreign influences onthe development of Japanese pilgrimage,focusing on the popular and widespreadKannon pilgrimages, and Yoshida’s paper, whichextends his work on the ambiguity of themarebito, or stranger (literally, wanderingperson), in the context of village Japan withreference to pilgrims. Beillevaire’s paper on thehistorical transformation of an Okinawanpilgrimage is also noteworthy for the way inwhich the author uses an examination ofpilgrimage as a means of tracing processes ofsocial and political change in Okinawa.

If I were pushed to identify a shortcoming ofthis volume, it would perhaps be that the papersare all rather short, and at times I was lefthungry for more detail. However, this is to some

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extent inevitable in a collection of papers of thiskind, particularly given the diversity of thematerial. And the choice of the editors to adoptsuch a wide-ranging approach does offer thebenefit of challenging rigid categorizations, anddrawing often unexpected and felicitousconnections. Overall, then, a very rich collectionof papers, which has a great deal to offer.

Louella Matsunaga School of Oriental andAfrican Studies

Soares, Benjamin F. (ed.). Muslim-Christianencounters in Africa. x, 308 pp., bibliogr.Leiden: Brill, 2006. $155.00, €104 (cloth)

On Christianity in Africa, a huge literature hasamassed, ranging from traditional histories ofwhite missions to studies of independentchurches. On Islam in Africa, the scholarship issubstantial. But as Benjamin Soares points out,in his elegant introduction to this collection ofarticles, little can be found until recently whichaddresses African Muslim-Christian encounterswithin a common conceptual framework. Anotable exception, to which Soares pays tribute,is the work of the veteran historian LaminSanneh. Soares is justified in drawing attentionto an apparent bias against Islam that resultsfrom Sanneh’s own experience as an AfricanMuslim convert to Christianity (who is now aProfessor of Missions and World Christianity),and even in criticizing what he calls Sanneh’s‘romantic yearnings for an idealized Africa’(p. 7), which are at odds with what seems to begrowing intolerance in some places. But doesSanneh’s key point not chime with what someof Soares’s team of eleven are saying: that therichness of African associative life has activelygiven back, to both Christianity and Islam, asmuch of substance as was imposed upon Africaby this pair of proselytizing, originally alienreligions?

Daunted by the scope of the issues raised inthis book, both historical and urgently topical, Ican only examine how it clarifies questions thathave concerned me already. For instance, JohnVoll suggests a difference between Christian andMuslim lines of expansion among non-monotheistic people in late antiquity, in thatChristians began by converting Greco-Roman‘pagan’ town-dwellers, whereas Islam expandedin less urbanized contexts and from the outsetfaced the challenge of absorbing peoples with‘natural religions’ (pp. 21-2).

Does the book bear out I.M. Lewis’sproposed explanation, in Islam in tropical Africa

(second edition, 1980, p. 82), for the relativepaucity of Muslim separatist movements inAfrica, as opposed to the multitude of Christianseparatist churches? Lewis, while noting thatEuropean colonization was generally conducivetowards the spread of Islam, also underlined theassociation of Islam with resistance andindependence, its adaptability, and the latitude itallowed as regards the formation of anindigenous imamate – by contrast with theassociation of the colonizers with Christendom.Patrick J. Ryan, SJ, in a sophisticated chapter oncontemporary Nigeria, writes that the aladuracharismatic churches and the newer ‘gospel ofprosperity’, reacting against the staidness of thelocal Protestant traditions, borrowed the‘haberdashery’ of Catholicism, but that at amore significant level they have responded tothe misery of the vulnerable uneducated. ‘Everyvariety of Christian faith in Nigeria is radicallyindividualistic in its approach’ (pp. 205-13). Bycontrast, Islamic ideology in Nigeria has givenpriority to the need for moral social structures,and one of the main inter-Muslim tensions hasbeen between purist reformers and thoseattached to Sufism or to what is disparaged asthe ‘mixing’ of Islam with indigenous traditions.Today Muslim-Christian feelings have hardenedin Nigeria, exemplifying what Voll calls the‘religionization’ of disputes, as the oldvocabulary of anti-imperialism and nationalismgives way to the Huntingtonian caricature ofclashing civilizations (p. 7).

In a similar vein of inquiry, James F. Searingexplores a moment in the history of theSereer-Safèn, a matrilineal minority in Senegal,whose pre-colonial identity was defined inopposition to the Muslim, monarchist,slave-trading Wolof. From around 1914, youngSafèn men led a rebellion against their elders. In1885 the Catholic Church had founded a missionstation at Popenguine, now a pilgrimage sitewhere the Virgin frequently appears, and was offto a head start. Among the reasons why thebalance of conversions tipped later in favour ofIslam, isolating the Popenguine Catholics fromtheir hinterland, were the Catholic disdain forwhat they saw as Safèn superstition – thoughSearing sees the present-day cult of MariamuPopenguine as an instance of syncretism –together with the church’s monopoly onreligious knowledge. In the eyes of educatedMuslims, the Safèn were not kuffar or infidels,but merely living in jahl, ignorance of Islam.Muslim scholars accepted the Safèn’s ancestralvalues as compatible with Islam, but condemnedexpensive funerals and matrilineal inheritance.

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Éloi Ficquet, the only contributor other thanthe editor who is an anthropologist stricto sensu,presents a befittingly embodied comparison ofthe religious meat sacrifices that still demarcateEthiopian Muslims and Ethiopian Christians: thelatter invoke the Trinity rather than Allah whencutting an animal’s jugular vein. The question‘What counts as “indigenous African” whenEthiopia became a Christian state by the earlyfourth century?’ is just one of many raised inthis outstandingly rich collection.

Jonathan Benthall University College London

Social anthropology

Cox, Rupert (ed.). The culture of copying inJapan: critical and historical perspectives. xii,275 pp., tables, illus., bibliogrs. London, NewYork: Routledge, 2008, £75.00 (cloth)

Especially when threatened, the ‘West’characterizes the Japanese as uppity ‘copiers’,lacking in that creative spark evidentlyfoundational to all Western people. Thus, forinstance, in the post-Second World War period,new forms of body technique and organizationalpractice – which eventually allowed Japaneseindustrial firms to dominate the global consumerelectronics and auto industries – are explainedby the wholesale lifting of Western industrialcopyrights operationalized, in turn, by armies ofJapanese automaton workers. A glance,meanwhile, at Japan’s over 250 years of self-imposed isolation from global affairs (1603-1868)suggests that copying is of little fundamentalinterest. Once forced open, ‘Japan’ studiedWestern styles of governance but made a virtueof their innovation into systems that better fittedJapanese institutional inclinations. The successesof Japan’s project of modernity – second largesteconomy in the world, relatively evendistribution of wealth, postmodern mediadarling, etc. – challenge at its very roots theoriginating idea of the capitalist industrialnation-state as Western. So much for theproblem of copying and Japanese nationalcharacter.

Where learning and creativity are concerned,Japanologists are inclined to agree that Japanesepeople have never suffered a Western-styledivision of labour between mind and body. Itappears that learning in Japan is quintessentiallybody knowledge: the integration of form throughrigorous practising. Usually concerned with

repeating living forms (dance) or models(calligraphy) through movement, a problemmight arise in understanding ‘mindlessness’ assomething negative, rather than as anachievement. To assist here, Japanese providesthe word kata: those specific forms to whichtrainees grant their attention in traditionaldisciplines, such as the martial arts or brushpainting, but a notion fully available in theschooled acquisition of modern skills. Finally, oroccasionally, when one is performing kataproperly, one is not ‘minding’, or thinking aboutit. In Japan, it is bad form – literally – to have nokata. Once trained, however, one may enter intowhat Westerners might more commonlyunderstand as creativity by ‘breaking kata’.

In a pattern familiar to our contemporaryacademic practices,Toby helpfully offers acompelling example of ‘re-presentation’, orcopying/yet altering, in this volume. Hedescribes a great work painted in 1748 byHanegawa Toei, detailing how its specific subjectmatter is subsequently elaborated by a dozenhighly trained artists in a dozen new paintings.Their discourse, ‘transposition, inversion andsubversion’, is, of course, the ‘sincerest form offlattery’ to the original, as it is a means ofgenerating distinction among these artists acrosstime. Similarly, we surely believe that, whilereferencing those who have laboured before us,we are both honouring and creatively workingwith, and against, their ideas.

The culture of copying in Japan unpacksvarious arenas of learning and creativity acrosstime in Japan. The East Asianist historians,especially of Japanese arts and literature, whosechapters make up the bulk of the volume –Averbuch, Carpenter, Coaldrake, Curvelo, Law,Madeley, Pitelka, Raud, and Toby – offer greatclarity as to what is at stake in the techniquesand transmissions in their respectivespecializations. Happily, while each contributormakes a deliberate nod to the role of ‘copying’in Japanese practices, none attempts anoverarching definition. Cox, the editor, is explicitin his introduction that doing so would bemisguided. And at a minimum the historicalrecord indicates that while there may be culturesof copying in Japan, there is no one culture ofcopying there, and never has been.

The limited post-Second World War subjectmatter covered in this book – by the three Japananthropologists – would suggest itself as ofgreatest interest to readers of JRAI. Based inextensive ethnographic research, Brumannsubtly unravels the politics of altering, butmaintaining, architectural Kyoto: unmolested by

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war, Japan’s home of traditional urbanauthenticity. Clarence-Smith (née Tanaka)helpfully outlines Japanese terminology relevantto ‘learning’, yet this is juxtaposed awkwardlywith discussion of the impact on consumers ofJapanese fashion magazines. Cox injects apromising postmodern analysis into theubiquitous, and undeniably kitsch, wax andsilicone food samples that attract everyJapan-watcher’s gaze. Like a paper craneobserving the surfaces of a thousand of itsown Barthesian folds, however, ethnographicinsight into these fascinating objects is sacrificedto a somewhat heavy handed theoreticalaesthetic.

Finally, I worry that while this book is clearlyintended to debunk bias towards the Japanese as‘copiers’ – and indeed succeeds in doing so – itstitle, ‘The culture of copying ...’, pandersprecisely to that very inclination, even if theword ‘critical’ appears in the subtitle. This is anexcellent survey detailing Japanese learning andthe transmission of, especially, ‘traditional’knowledge by and for East Asianists in the artsand humanities. For general anthropology andJapan anthropology, however, the cross-over thatmight have been hoped for is perhaps lesssuccessful.Mitchell W. Sedgwick Oxford Brookes University

Gustafsson, Mai Lan. War and shadows: thehaunting of Vietnam. xiv, 206 pp., tables,bibliogr. London, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ.Press, 2009. £40.95 (cloth), £13.50 (paper)

This account of the sufferings of Vietnamesewho ascribe dire illness to the rage of thevengeful dead joins a growing literature onmemory, war, and spirituality in contemporaryVietnam. Its key concern is the legacy of massdeath, which the author found to be a deeplypainful reality for her informants, tormenting thekin of unemplaced victims of what Vietnamesecall the anti-USA War with agonizing ailmentsknown as bi benh ta or ghost-sickness. Focusingon the engagements with non-corporeal beingsthat loom large in everyday Vietnamese life,Gustafsson documents the embodied anguish ofthose preyed on by the country’s war dead, andthe covert mediumship sessions through whichthe sufferers she knew sought relief forthemselves, their families, and the soulsattacking them.

The book’s use of the ethnographic present israther problematic; its northern Vietnamfieldwork was conducted in 1996-7, when foreign

scholars were only just beginning to explore thesocial and cultural consequences of thecountry’s marketization policies. Its mainstrength is thus its detailed treatment of whatwas then a highly sensitive research topic forWestern anthropologists. Now that such ritualsare openly performed in Vietnam, it isfascinating to read of soul-calling andmediumship rites being enacted in secrecy andat some risk in specialists’ modest homes.Gustafsson thus conveys an intriguing sense ofwhat fieldwork was like at such an early point inVietnam’s ‘renovation’ process, providingstriking vignettes of informants’ reactions to herAmerasian ancestry, and to aspects of herappearance causing them to identify her as afellow spirit-illness sufferer.

Of course many other scholars havedocumented Vietnam’s ongoing re-enchantmentexperiences, with authors such as ShaunMalarney offering sophisticated insights into theresurgence of death-related ritual practices in thecontext of Vietnam’s engagements with thepost-Cold War world. It is unfortunate thatGustafsson does not cite Heonik Kwon’s works,which explore precisely the kinds of spiritencounters that Gustafsson says ethnographerswould have been unlikely to find in formerSouth Vietnam. In fact, what Kwon argues in his2008 study Ghosts of war in Vietnam is that thepain of living among the hungry wanderingdead in Vietnam’s south reflects the distress ofthose whose kin were long excluded from thenation’s official commemoration narratives,having been on the ‘wrong’ side in the bitterconflict between the Communist north and itsUS-backed counterpart.

What War and shadows shares with theseother studies is not their wide-rangingtheoretical concerns, but the vividness of itssympathetically rendered affliction narratives.The author clearly achieved productive rapportwith her informants, and while I amuncomfortable with works portraying Vietnamas a land of suffering victimhood, Gustafssondoes convince in her account of the terribleways in which some Vietnamese experience theafterlife of war as an agonizing subjugation tothe rage of dead kin and comrades. Even theirown lost children may be the source oftorments originating from the shadow worldto which a violent and premature deathcondemns those who may never be settledand provided for. It is this which distinguisheshungry ghosts from elders who have beenproperly interred and thus transformed intogratified, protective ancestors.

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Despite its considerable ethnographicinterest, the book’s limited theoretical aims maydisappoint readers familiar with the works ofthose scholars who have addressed compellingquestions about the nature of subjectivity,religious innovation, historical memory, andmoral practice within and beyond the context ofVietnam’s late-socialist religious ‘revival’. Withwork of such distinction in mind, it is hard toaccept Gustafsson’s assertion that an attempt toexplain her informants’ suffering in terms otherthan their own, or to develop a ‘new theory’ ofspirit possession, would have ‘given the lie’ towhat she had witnessed in the field (pp. ix-x).One can applaud her ethical sensitivity withoutaccepting that it is in any sense unethical foranthropologists to raise ambitious theoreticalquestions about their material, howevertroubling and painful. But while I would havewelcomed a more probingly analytical approach,the book should certainly find a readershipamong Vietnam specialists. Indeed there is muchto interest other anthropologists, notably theauthor’s exploration of the ways in which herinformants balanced their yearning forghost-sickness cures against their knowledge ofthe dangers entailed in violating theproscriptions of a coercively secular state, andher tentative but valuable suggestions aboutvalorized suffering as a complex of sentimentconnecting death experience andcommemoration with the distinctively embodiedways in which moral identity has been bothofficially prescribed and personally experiencedin post-war Vietnam.

Susan Bayly University of Cambridge

Hinkson, Melinda & Jeremy Beckett (eds).An appreciation of difference: W.E.H. Stannerand Aboriginal Australia. xviii, 293 pp., figs,table, illus., bibliogrs. Canberra: AboriginalStudies Press, 2008. $39.95 (paper)

Bill Stanner is a national treasure of Australiananthropology whose extraordinary career tookhim from the bureaucracy of the British colonialservice to the halls of academia, journalism, and,from the 1930s, remote Aboriginal bush campsin northern Australia. Despite much of hisresearch remaining unpublished, he translatedpowerful insights using an elegantlyaccessible prose that ensured his influence wentwell beyond the small world of the universitysystem.

His research reveals an ever-questioningmind in the service of a personal project to

understand and explicate the richness anddifference of Aboriginal culture, religious life,and cosmology. More than twenty years after hisdeath, this volume is a worthy testimony to theattention that Stanner’s writings continue tocommand in Australia; something the co-editorscharacterize as ‘an appreciation of difference’, aquality of ‘transcendence’ that continues tospeak to concerns that remain pressingtoday.

Co-editors Melinda Hinkson and JeremyBeckett have chosen papers from a symposiumthey convened in 2005 and which wassponsored by the Australian Institute ofAboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies tomark the centenary of Stanner’s birth.Collectively, the papers represent a sort ofcollaborative biography, revealing as muchabout the interests and persuasions of some ofthe authors as it does about Stanner. But it is anengaging and thoughtful biography perhapsbecause of this very divergence of emphases.And as a collateral benefit, it is intriguing to seehow closely the man’s career mirrored criticalturning points in Australian anthropology’s owndisciplinary development, especially during itsuneasy marital separation from British structuralfunctionalism.

Part Festschrift, part critical analysis, the bookbrings together leading Australian scholarsworking in Aboriginal Australia, several of whomwere Stanner’s colleagues or students. After anintroductory essay by the co-editors, the book isorganized into four main parts. Part I, ‘Diversefields’, sets the biographical scene with Gray,Hinkson, Mulvaney, and Dexter examiningStanner’s wide-ranging professional career andsignificant research contributions.

In part II, ‘In pursuit of transcendent value’,Beckett and Hinkson review the social context inwhich Stanner was struggling to makeanthropological sense of and translate hisinsights about Aboriginal lifeworlds and religion.Furlan, Keen, Morphy, and Sutton criticallyprobe the rich complexity of Stanner’s analysesand theoretical conceptualizations of meaning,continuity, and change in Aboriginal religion,magic, music and songs, ceremony, and artstyles. Perhaps of all the papers, Morphy’s mostdisplays the same eloquence of writing thatStanner has become known for.

In part III, ‘Land and people’, Peterson,Sutton, Taylor, and Williams critically evaluateStanner’s contribution to anthropological andpublic debates surrounding the nature ofterritorial organization, landownership, anddemography. Williams revisits the Gove land

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right case, where Stanner was one of the firstanthropologists in Australia to translateAboriginal concepts into the terms of legalargument. As she notes, Stanner again‘foreshadowed, presciently, events now thesubject of passionate debate’. Taylor draws onStanner’s data to mobilize a historical analysisof population demographics and highlightgrave implications for present-day governments.Peterson revisits Stanner’s contribution toAboriginal territorial organization and his role inopening up an ‘Australianist anthropologicalimagination’, and he calls for a reinsertion ofthe sociological (of social relations,institutions, organization, and context)into current anthropological analyses inAustralia.

Finally, in part IV, ‘A public intellectual’,Altman, Curthoys, and Rowse considerStanner’s contribution to public understandingand Aboriginal policy development. In thecontext of the Boyer Lecture series, and withthe benefit of hindsight, Rowse finds certainlimitations and hesitancies in Stanner’s publicapproach to the problem of Indigenous Affairs.Curthoys applies ‘a careful lens’ to question theaccuracy of Stanner’s criticism of earlierhistorians as contributing to a ‘great Australiansilence’ about the living conditions andhistories of Aboriginal peoples. Altmanconsiders Stanner’s role as a public intellectualand draws connections to contemporary policymatters of land rights, development, andwelfare that remain at the forefront of theAustralian state’s intervention into Aboriginalcommunities.

With collections of this kind, it is alwayspossible to discuss what might be missing. Withsome of Stanner’s own photographs scatteredthroughout the book, I would have liked to see apaper examining this visual component of hisfieldwork; for he was a photographer with agood eye, living in close proximity withAboriginal people, in remote locations, at timesof great upheaval.

Overall, Stanner comes across as a highlycomplex man – a ‘cool observer’, a ‘consideredrealist’, and ‘one of the most evocativeinterpreters of Aboriginal life and cosmology’.Dodson sums up one conclusion of the bookabout Stanner’s ongoing relevance, when hewrites in the foreword: ‘The main message to bedrawn from his writings ... is that Aboriginalpeople should be allowed to make informed andrealistic choices about their futures, not havedecisions thrust upon them’ (p. vi).

Diane Smith Australian National University

Stewart, Pamela J. & Andrew Strathern

(eds). Exchange and sacrifice. xxxvi, 257 pp.,maps, illus., bibliogrs. Durham, N.C.:Carolina Academic Press, 2008. $42.00

(paper)

The occasion for this collection of articles fromMelanesia is for celebrating the work of Danielde Coppet, who died in 2002. The articles drawon materials from Papua New Guinea, theSolomon Islands, and New Caledonia. It includesa translation of a piece by de Coppet that haspreviously not been published in English. Thevolume as a whole represents a welcomeaddition to the body of de Coppet’s work andpresents several interesting efforts to engagewith his comparative perspective. A number ofthe contributions also convey insightfulcorrections of de Coppet and his Dumontianlegacy.

As the title warns us, this is another bookfrom the Melanesian region that centres onpeople’s economic transactions with oneanother. Accordingly, one way of assessing thisnew contribution is by asking in what way thiscollection of articles manages to give us furtherinsights into this important aspect of the life ofMelanesian peoples and in what way it managesfurther to develop the understanding of gift,exchange, and sacrifice for the wideranthropological audience, at a time where wesee that the focus on exchange is beingsidestepped by interesting studies that insteaddescribe knowledge, ontology, and religion.

An important question in this regard is inwhat way Daniel de Coppet’s framework foranalysis can offer new entry points forunderstanding. Under the first subsection,‘Fundamentals of comparison’, we are madefamiliar with his approach to exchange amongthe ‘Are’are of the Solomon Islands. De Coppet’sarticle here is an exercise in what we might callcritical comparison: comparison not merelymeaning inter-cultural translation, but radicallyseeking out the meeting places betweendifferent cultural concepts. So instead ofcomparing different concepts of the humanbody per se, he tries to find the ‘Are’are conceptsand categories that would satisfy us as actuallycomparative to the Western concept of thehuman body. Rather surprisingly he discoversthat the relevant comparison would be the‘Are’are concept of shell money. He describes theWestern concept of the human body as aconcept of totality remaining from the Europeanhistory of Christianity, kingdoms, andindividualism, wherein the body emerges as an

Book reviews692


image of totality, interchangeably featuring inthe death of Jesus in the sacrifice of humankind,the body of the king as the body of the nationor society, and the indivisible individual as asupreme body. In comparison, the ‘Are’are holdno similar vision of the discrete individual body,but in the course of social process of ceremonialexchanges a comparative vision is constructed:of strings of shell money as a discrete body thatcontains ‘socio-cosmic’ relations. These shellmoney exhibitions are in fact the only instanceswherein the different features of a total beingtake shape – uniting the different aspects ofbeings into one single presence that is able, likethe human body is for the Western society, tototalize and transcend all aspects of thesocio-cosmic world. The value of this text is stillgreat for an understanding of the importance ofcritical comparison, and it is also an importantcontribution to the comprehension ofceremonial process and exchange in Melanesia.It is a challenging paper since it addressesexchange not merely as transaction andeconomy but also as the totalizing process thatconstitutes this society.

Following from this lead is a list of papersthat do not so much deal with new perspectiveson exchange or sacrifice as they present us withfresh ethnography. An issue here is that thevarious papers go in many different directions,even though they all depart from certaindirections in de Coppet’s work. In DenisMonnerie’s paper from New Caledonia we learnabout what is becoming so current inMelanesian islands, the communal pooling ofmoney in village events of lotteries, bazaars,bingo, or markets for community benefits. PierreMaranda, with his contribution from the Lau ofMalaita, in the Solomon Islands, directlyconfronts de Coppet’s bias towards‘socio-cosmic’ interpretations. Through myth headdresses the correlation between yam and fishand the corresponding relation betweensea-people and bush-people, in order toquestion the causality of these relationships:whether the myths work as a charter for themarkets of fish and yam or if the myths areinstead inspired by what people see going on inthe exchange of sea-products for bush-products.Unfortunately this chapter appears quiteunfinished, and does not manage to account foreither exchange or de Coppet’s approach in asatisfying way. In the next chapter John Liepintroduces the concept of ‘ranked exchange’ inMelanesia, which has much in common withother parts of the Austronesian-speaking world.Against the premise of Melanesian equality, Liep

argues that social relations are never equal inthis world, but they become equal through theprocess of exchange, and that is its motivatingforce. In the chapter by Edward Lipuma andBenjamin Lee, we get a useful scrutiny of deCoppet’s foundational thoughts about totality,totalization, and the social whole, and, incontrast with this, a vision of how people inMelanesia actually themselves work withcreating totality in ritual. In the chapter byMichael Scott from the Solomon Islands herecounts an origin-story for a Makira genealogythat draws in the mythical intermixing withAmerican blood as crucial for the lineage. In thenext chapter, Shankar Aswani, writing from theNew Georgia Group of the Solomon Islands,provides us with an interesting account ofvarious types of historical leaders and forms ofviolence. In Anton Ploeg’s chapter from the Daniof West Papua, we jump to yet another topic,namely the exchange currency of wealth itemsused for exchange, such as pigs, polishedstones, salt, shells, and thread, and he makes anattempt, albeit briefly, to indicate howChristianity influenced this currency. In the lastsection, called ‘Exchange and sacrifice’, attemptsare made by Andrew Strathern and Pamela J.Stewart to summarize their own work with themoka ceremonies of Mount Hagen, Papua NewGuinea, and to engage with Mauss’s, Sahlins’s,and Parry’s theories about the Maori hau. Theyarrive at the conclusion that just as the hau forthe Maori gift has to do with increment, themoka is also intent on increase more thanreciprocity as such. Here we finally get someclues about the meaning of ‘sacrifice’ in the titleof the volume. The idea about sacrifice seems tobe summed up in one of the last sentences:‘Killings are destructive, but out of them maycome exchange, which renews life’ (p. 242). Thissentence hardly justifies why sacrifice is in thetitle of the book.

This is a timely publication, especially asMelanesian anthropology is trying to find its wayout of the totalizing version of the region givenin Marilyn Strathern’s The gender of the gift(1988). It is, however, important that Melanesiananthropology does not fall back to ‘pre-gg’ waysof thinking, and this book does not reallypresent us with material or theory to advancethe discipline from the gg-point. There arecertain openings towards new understandingsof the region – such as in Lipuma’s and Lee’slengthy effort to move us towards a view of howritual and performativity instead of exchange areconstitutive of social wholes. Another opening isthat we, for once, get several contributions from

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outside of Papua New Guinea – from theSolomon Islands and New Caledonia – thatactually manage to destabilize our paradigmaticview of the region. Michael Scott’s chapter fromMakira is a highlight in this regard as it managesto place the advent of Euroamericans at the verycentre of the region’s cultural constitution.Another point to make is that a real collectiveeffort of these anthropologists into the issue ofsacrifice could actually have managed to breakus free from the predominant and problematicnarrow-sightedness when dealing with exchangeand gift in this region. That could have been theopening that we were all hoping for.

No matter how much these authors want topretend that gg never took place, this bookproves that it is not really sufficient to use deCoppet’s framework as the alternative road intoan understanding of Melanesia. It does not helpthat the contributions appear to be haphazardlyput together, with only minor editing towardsan overall purpose.

Knut Rio University of Bergen

Violence, conflict, and war

Al-haj, Majid & Rosemarie Mielke (eds).Cultural diversity and the empowerment ofminorities: perspectives from Israel andGermany. xii, 291 pp., figs, tables, bibliogrs.Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books, 2007.£37.50 (cloth)

The volume under review is certainly politicallycorrect. It deals with conflicts, ethnicity,minorities, empowerment, gender, inequalities,and civility. It straddles the disciplines of culturalstudies, social psychology, sociology, education,and, to a minor extent, anthropology. It coversIsrael, and particularly Israel’s Arab population,and Germany. It incorporates chapters byestablished professors, advocates, and students.In this pot-pourri of academic diversity arisingout of a bi-national German-Israeli project, allthe major themes are the very stuff ofanthropology, and yet a major anthropologicalcontribution is missing. Moreover, the onlychapter which one could call ‘anthropological’,based on ethnographic fieldwork, has beenpreviously published elsewhere.

Notwithstanding, the book is important sinceit deals with the emergence of internal conflictsin societies that are in the throes or haverecovered from the transition from war to peace.

These conflicts are inherently connected to therise of multiculturalism in modern society, whichis dealt with critically by most contributors tothe volume and related to social, political, andeconomic contexts. Indeed, most scholarsassociate multiculturalism with empowerment ofminorities in civil society. Several of thecontributors are thus working in the fields ofeducation; others are social psychologists whoresearch stereotyping and discrimination ofminorities; some are experts in what is known as‘intercultural studies’. The book is divided intothree parts. The first part discusses generaltopics such as transnational advocacy andeducation for democracy, relations betweenmajorities and minorities from a socialpsychological perspective, and interculturalcommunication. The second part of the bookpresents the Israeli case, as seen through theeyes of researchers at the University of Haifa. Ofthe seven chapters in this section, two discussthe teaching of history in Jewish and Arabschools in Israel, one deals with Arab-Jewishrelations, two discuss studies in xenophobia, andtwo can broadly be described as feministchapters dealing with dissatisfaction with bodyshape. There are no chapters on ethnic relationsamong Jewish populations of different origins, oreven of attitudes to new immigrants from theformer USSR or Ethiopia, or studies of migrantworkers.

The German case is the subject of the thirdpart of the book. Two chapters are devoted tobilingualism, one to Americans residing inGermany, and one to intercultural competencein management consultancies in Germany. Thereare no discussions of minority populations, suchas Turks and others, nor is there mention of therise of neo-Nazism and other politicalphenomena.

Shalva Weil Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Finnström, Sverker. Living with badsurroundings: war, history and everydaymoments in northern Uganda. xi, 349 pp.,maps, tables, illus., bibliogr. Uppsala: ActaUniversitatis Upsaliensis, 2008. £48.00

(cloth), £12.99 (paper)

The anthropology of conflict and violence is afast-growing field of study, and one to whichethnographies of northeast Africa have, sadly,made a significant contribution in recent years.Sverker Finnström’s new book is a valuableaddition to this body of work. This subtle,sensitive, and sophisticated ethnography adds

Book reviews694


enormously to our understanding ofcontemporary northern Ugandan society and,more broadly, of everyday life during‘low-intensity’ warfare. Much has been writtenabout Uganda’s ‘War in the North’; the rebelLord’s Resistance Army (LRA), its abduction anduse of ‘child soldiers’, and the intervention ofthe International Criminal Court, which hasindicted the LRA’s notorious leader, Joseph Kony.However, a lot of this material, especially thatfrom non-governmental organizations andhuman rights groups, relies on highlysensationalized (where not simply false)journalistic accounts of the rebel group and itsrelationship with the local Acholi population, aLuo-speaking group who live along theUganda/Sudan border. Now at last there is agood contemporary ethnographic study of thearea, building on the earlier work of HeikeBehrend on the LRA’s predecessor, AliceLakwena’s Holy Spirit Movement. Finnström, inthis book and elsewhere, documents in detailthe realities of local social relations, while quietlyexploding the simplistic myth of the LRA as abunch of psychopathic killer children led byreligious lunatics.

Finnström begins by discussing the historicalcontext of the conflict, looking at the position ofthe Acholi during colonial and postcolonialUgandan regimes, before moving on to eventsduring his fieldwork between 1997 and 2006,when Ugandan troops were carrying out amajor counter-insurgency operation against therebels. He carefully analyses the published andunpublished statements of the LRA, as well aswhat local people say about them, and aboutthe actions of the Ugandan government and itsarmed forces. This is all placed in the context ofeveryday life during wartime, and its consequentmultiple displacement, violence, and confusion.Finnström is sensitive to gender, age, and otherdifferences between the people he writes about.Taking an ‘existential anthropology’ approach,influenced by the work of Michael Jackson andultimately by the phenomenology of MauriceMerleau-Ponty, he displays an acute ear for localidioms (e.g. in the mode of gossip or rumourknown as ‘Radio Kabi’), as well as demonstratingthe reflexive, self-critical attitude so necessary inan anthropology of conflict and violence. Thebook is also very well written and can be readwith ease and pleasure despite its potentiallydepressing topic.

The overall effect, as Finnström rightly claims,is to ‘repoliticize’ Uganda’s ‘War in the North’,in opposition to the pious inaccuracies of theanti-child-soldier organizations. While

maintaining a careful academic detachment, hemakes, in effect, a quietly devastating indictmentof the regime of Ugandan President Museveni,who has long been the darling of Westerngovernments. This is done without in any wayignoring or downplaying the many crimes of theLRA. What will stick in the mind of the reader,though, are the stories of the ways in whichlocal ‘people engage and try to comprehend thelived surroundings of unrest and war, and bywhich they continuously struggle to build hopefor the future’ (p. 243). In traditional Acholisociety, unnatural deaths are settled andreconciled by the survivors ‘drinking the bitterroot’, a spritually healing but unpleasant potion,and Finnström shows how the people ofnorthern Uganda have drunk a great deal ofboth real and metaphorical bitter roots over thepast couple of decades. At the same time, hemanages to maintain a cautious optimism aboutthe continuing ability of local people to surviveand transcend the experience of ‘living with badsurroundings’.

I could have wished for a bit more depth tothe analysis of the relationship between past andpresent in the Acholi context (rather than theroutine invocation of the invention of tradition),and the account of colonial and postcolonialhistory is, perhaps inevitably, rather selective.There are also still a few traces of the doctoralthesis this book once was, such as a little toomuch citation of eminent but not terriblyrelevant anthropologists and philosophers. Butthese are minor complaints. This book is verygood indeed and should find a wide readershipamong social anthropologists, Africanists, andstudents of conflict and violence.

Mark Leopold University of Sussex

Knudsen, Are. Violence and belonging: land,love and lethal conflict in the North-WestFrontier province of Pakistan. xxviii, 224 pp.,map, figs, tables, bibliogr. Copenhagen: NiasPress, 2009. £50.00 (cloth), £18.99 (paper)

Violence and belonging focuses on Kohistanis andtheir feuds; with the exception of Barth’s briefbut characteristically detailed Indus and SwatKohistan: an ethnographic survey (1956), it is theonly in-depth ethnography of Kohistani society.

The book focuses on District Kohistan – amountainous district of Pakistan’s North-WestFrontier province that incorporates spaces bothto the east and to the west of the Indus.Linguistically, those on the west bank speakPashto, on the east a variation of Shina: Kostyõ

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Shina. Knudsen’s research focused on the Palasvalley on the east bank. It explores withimmaculate sensitivity Kohistani practices offeuding and violence in the context of theregion’s ecology, the changing relationship tothe Pakistan state, as well as the wesh, thecyclical redistribution and division of land firstdocumented and analysed anthropologically byBarth. As such it manages to explore a criticaldimension of these people’s lives (violence)without sensationalizing it by focusing oncultural matters of honour and shame outside ofthe social, ecological, and political contextswithin which these come to have force.

The most interesting of all the chapters isKnudsen’s discussion of the experience offeuding by Kohistani people. Feuding involvesnot only homicide, but also the destruction ofcrops and the agricultural resources upon whichthe livelihood of one’s enemy depends. Corncrops are destroyed and men left with no otherchoice but to retreat to their homes and stayput, sometimes for years: the building of awatchtower signals that a man is there to stay.Knudsen explains fluctuating levels of feuding inPalas in relationship to changing ecologicalregimes, the breakdown of old modes of disputeresolution, and the availability of arms. At thesame time, the book also argues that feuding isnot culturally just about honour and shame, butabout different dimensions of people’s identities,notably their attachment to locality and theirsense of belonging to place. Knudsen’s focus onthe importance of belonging to a place isimportant beyond his ethnographic case study.In the early days of the neo-Taliban insurgencyin Afghanistan, Taliban commanders interviewedby Western journalists would often refer to theirunderstanding of the war as it being about ‘ourplace’. Other anthropologists, notably PaulDresch, have emphasized the importance ofgeography and place to understanding ‘thetribe’, yet Knudsen’s in-depth ethnography andindividual case studies enrich this body of workby giving a palpable sense of how individualsand their families talk about being of and evictedfrom a place.

The book deals, too, with changing culturaldimensions of life in Kohistan, challengingsimplistic suggestions that increasing level ofvengeance disputes are a result of the increasingimportance of Islam to people’s personal andcollective identities. The Palas valley in recentyears has come under the influence ofmovements of Islamic purification, such as thethe Tabligh-i Jaamaat. The movement’s presencein Palas has led to old traditions of music and

dance being effectively wiped out. Yet theiractivities have also produced significant changesin local attitudes towards women’s education –Jaamaatis tend to favour the education of girls,argues Knudsen. At the same time, despite thepreaching activities of such Muslims, illicit loveunions and their very often bloody aftermathscontinue to be an important dimension of thelife narratives of Palas people.

It is worth also mentioning themethodological techniques deployed byKnudsen to execute this research. Conductinglong-term fieldwork in Palas itself posednumerous problems to him, bothmethodological and ethical. So, instead, hemade several research visits and made his unit ofanalysis the valley rather than the village. Inaddition, he interviewed Palas people living inwhat he calls the Palas ‘diaspora’ elsewhere inPakistan, although especially in Rawalpindi.Given the current political situation in northernPakistan, it is likely that new ethnographic workon the region will have to be asmethodologically flexible as was Knudsen’s.

Inevitably there are places where the bookcould have been improved, most especiallythrough further analytical reflection on some ofthe key concepts it deploys and argues out of. Itinsists, for example, on framing Palas society ascharacterized by its egalitarianism and distancefrom the state without engaging with debatesraging in the discipline about the simplisticpairing of egalitarian and stateless societies. Allin all, however, this is an excellent volume. It isan important addition to the bookshelves ofscholars and students of Pakistan, as well asthose interested in the anthropology of violence,especially in the Middle East. Equallyimportantly, it should be read by a broaderreadership concerned with the identityformations of Afghanistan and Pakistan’s Frontierpeople, and the importance of place to these.

Magnus Marsden School of Oriental andAfrican Studies

Kroslak, Daniela. The role of France in theRwandan genocide. xvi, 330 pp., bibliogr.London: Hurst & Company, 2007. £16.99

(paper)

France’s culpability in the Rwandan genocide of1994 has already received some treatment in theliterature, but is deserving of a morecomprehensive study, especially since France hastried to attribute blame to the rebel RwandanPatriotic Front (RPF). Kroslak uses archival

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material, published reports, and interviews toproduce an accessible and well-argued text thatprovides the much-needed details of France’sinvolvement in Rwanda, before and after thegenocide.

The text is divided into ten chapters. Fromthe start Kroslak does not hide the fact that shesees France as being complicit in the genocide.What is then important is whether she will bringnew evidence to support her contention.Chapter 2 provides a brief, but not unfamiliar,background history to the Rwandan state and toevents leading up to the Rwanda genocide.Chapter 3, entitled ‘The complexity of Frenchpolicy in Africa’, examines France’s economicand political relationship with its former Africancolonies; its dependence on Africa for marketsand to maintain its world power status; itswillingness to intervene to prop up its allies inAfrica, even in the face of internal criticism andrebellion; and its Anglophobia, popularly knownas the ‘Fashoda syndrome’.

It is clear from this wider discussion thathistorically the plight of African peoples hasbeen of little interest to the French, so long astheir interests are served by puppet leaders.Kroslak refers to France’s hostility towardsdemocratization in Africa, as democracy wasbound to dislodge their elites. Thus France’s callfor democratization at the 1990 La BauleFranco-African summit was a half-hearted one tostem popular uprising and to engineer thedemocratic process to keep their men in power.

An important point that Kroslak makes is thedifference in the positions and decision-makingpowers of France’s Foreign Affairs Department,the Elysée Palace, and the Ministry of Defence.France’s Africa policy was directed from thePresident’s office and, under PresidentMitterrand, was the responsibility of his son:Jean-Christophe Mitterrand. It was apersonalized form of international relations,closely supported by the Ministry of Defence. AsKroslak notes: ‘[P]ersonal friendships andfavouritism formed the basis of political andmilitary decisions concerning FrancophoneAfrica’ (p. 60), with African leaders personallybenefiting from the protection of the Frenchmilitary and assured of asylum in their chateauxin France – when ousted from power. Kroslakalso notes that African leaders were greatupholders of the Francophone culture – thushelping to maintain France’s global status. Thisbackground lays the foundation for France’scomplicity in the genocide.

Chapter 4 discusses France’s knowledge ofthe preparation for genocide and chapter 5

examines its role during and after the massacres.Kroslak provides convincing evidence to showFrance’s complicity in supplying military advisersand arms to the Habyrimana regime,denouncing the RPF as ‘foreigners’. Sheconcludes:

The French advised the Rwandangovernment and the Chief of Staff on howto fight the war against the RPF and how todeal with internal policing matters. It is evensuspected that France, arguing that the warwas a foreign aggression led by Ugandainvaders, participated directly in the wareffort ... it is certain that France took a vitalpart in the training of Rwandan police andarmy officers. They trained the PresidentialGuard, a key force in the genocide. TheFrench took part in other assignments, suchas ID control at check points and theinterrogation of RPF prisoners (p. 125).

Here, France’s Anglophobia prevented it fromseeking a peaceful resolution to the conflictbefore the genocide. Kroslak notes the French’shostility to the RPF, whom they saw asEnglish-speaking Ugandans, and, as aconsequence, they worked behind the scenes todisrupt the peace-making and theimplementation of the Arusha peace agreement.France went to the extreme of finding leaders ofthe RPF guilty of genocide, claiming that theyshot down Habyarimana’s plane, which sparkedthe genocide.

Chapter 6 discusses whether prevention waspossible, and chapter 7 considers why, with theknowledge of the genocide taking place, Francedecided not to act. Kroslak exposes France’ssupposedly humanitarian intervention(Operation Turquoise) during the genocide forwhat it was: a vehicle to facilitate the escape ofmembers of a genocidal regime. Two of thechapters (6 and 9) examine whether preventionwas possible and what the French could havedone. Kroslak argues that France had thepolitical and military capabilities to end thegenocide, through its influence with theRwandan elite and its seat on the UN SecurityCouncil, and by combining its militaryinterventions with that of the UN. Instead, itcontinued to support the genocidal regime evenin exile; giving sanctuary to Mme Habyarimanaand her coterie, and resources for theex-Rwandan army fugitives (genocidairies) in theCongo. With the weight of evidence againstFrance, it is quite clear that in an equitableworld, France’s leaders would have been

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indicted by the International Criminal Court forRwanda, along with representatives of theUnited Nations. However, what Kroslak, ratherrealistically, seeks is a critical evaluation of ‘therole of outsiders in the prevention andsuppression of genocide’, and of ‘the currentmechanisms and structures which might preventgenocide’ (p. 279).

As a postscript, it is worth noting that underthe presidency of Nicholas Sarkozy, France isattempting to repair its relationship with the RPF,as exemplified by the arrest and release of MajorRose Kabuye in December 2008. Sarkozy’swillingness to do business with the RPF could berelated to their political and economic exclusionfrom Rwanda and the general contempt thatpeople in the region have of the French state,combined with ‘Anglophone encroachment’,especially as Rwanda has introduced English asthe language of instruction in schools. Plus çachange!

Patricia Daley University of Oxford

Ott, Sandra. War, judgment, and memory inthe Basque borderlands 1914-1945. xxv, 252

pp., maps, illus., bibliogr. Reno: Univ.Nevada Press, 2008. $39.95 (cloth)

Collaboration and resistance are not easy:neither for those who lived it, nor for thoseliving in a once-occupied area. When Jersey wasliberated, Churchill ordered that all record offraternization be kept secret, to preserve nationalmorale. During its Occupation, the rate ofillegitimacy had gone up. In the late 1980s acolleague of mine was considerably embarrassedwhen his German academic host joyouslyrecounted his times with Jersey women. Anothercolleague, brought up in Holland, told me howattractive her mother had found the strapping,self-confident Germans compared to localyouths.

Several years ago many French were madevery indignant by a compatriot historian whoclaimed his trawl of German military archivesdemonstrated that the Resistance had hadno discernible effect on German strategy.Woe betide the researcher of such trickyterrain!

But the time has long come for thesehistories to be told, and analysed. When Ott’swork on this period in French Basquelandbecame known, locals began to approach herand to suggest others she should speak with.They wanted to keep the past alive, especiallytheir version of it.

Ott takes four suitably different Basquecommunities as her case studies andinvestigates their evolving social structures,divisions, and tensions from the beginning ofthe First World War to the end of the Second.These were communities long used toexercising ancient rights of self-determinationas well as unique forms of familial andneighbourly interdependence. On top of that,they did not automatically accept the dictatesand laws of the French state. Rather, theytended to interpret in their own way whatconstituted legitimate private and publicbehaviour. They often preferred to rely on theirown forms of judgement, justice, andreconciliation to preserve their understandingof social order.

Of course, war can divide as much as itunites. Every community will have its quislingsand betrayers. Ott demonstrates how locals werefrequently reluctant to denounce thedenouncers to the external authorities. Insteadthey chose to maintain a self-bounded moralcommunity, though its morality was inconsequence somewhat altered in the process.For similar reasons, they also kept mum aboutthe treacherous mountain guide who, afterpocketing his fee, turned his escapee clients overto the Germans.

Some chose to exploit their occupierspublicly for their own ends, and hang thebroader consequences. Ott details how a pair offemale rivals manipulated their German lovers towin advantages over the other. Playing withverbal fire, one was prepared to run the gauntletof public opinion in order to relish her agencyand independence. Manoeuvring against eachother, this pair’s denunciations andcounter-denunciations became the unwantedorder of the local day.

What conflict sunders, ritual may bring backtogether. After the war, Ott shows, maintainingthe ceremonial exchange of blessed bread fromhouse to house in a circular manner helped torepair the damage done by denunciations andenabled some kind of reconciliation, howevermeagre. Today, new collective ceremonies andadaptations of long-established popular theatreserve to keep the memory of those timesalive, even if some of those memories areopposed.

Ott has worked hard in a variety of archives.The long list of her interviewees, most of themrepeatedly visited, is exemplary. Her tale is awell-told, at times moving, story, written in anunpretentious prose. For Basque and modernFrench studies, it is a valuable addition to an

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understandably, but undeservedly, neglectedtopic. It will also be a very useful example forlectures on social control.

Jeremy MacClancy Oxford Brookes University

Oushakine, Serguei Alex. The patriotism ofdespair: nation, war, and loss in Russia. xi, 299

pp., illus., bibliogr. New York: Cornell Univ.Press, 2009. £41.50 (cloth), £13.95 (paper)

The collapse of the Soviet Union was, like itscreation, an unprecedented event which threwup a multitude of practical and conceptualquestions for all involved, from the politicianswhose actions created and unmade states to thesovkhoz workers whose ideological andeconomic centre of gravity ceased to exist.Anthropologists have responded to theseupheavals with nuanced considerations of theimpact of these changes on the people wholived and continue to live through them.Humphrey’s The unmaking of Soviet life (2002),Ledeneva’s How Russia really works (2006), andRies’s Russian talk: culture and conversationduring perestroika (1997) are among the keytexts that have framed our understanding bothof the nature of post-Soviet life and of thehuman responses to significant, if peaceful,change.

Serguei Oushakine’s The patriotism of despairis a further contribution to this genre. He setsout to examine how post-Soviet changes wereperceived in a remote provincial city in Altai,southwestern Siberia, focusing on his childhoodhome of Barnaul. As a member of ‘the lastSoviet generation’ (Alexei Yurchak, Everythingwas forever until it was no more: the last Sovietgeneration, 2006), he provides access tosubtleties which non-native anthropologistsmay have missed. His elucidation of Soviet andpost-Soviet theories of etnos and the emergenceof ‘vitalist sociology’, for example, are usefulcontributions to understanding how our globaldiscipline continues to develop; and his hints atracism in 1990s and 2000s Russian socialsciences illustrate the potential ethicalimplications of such developments.

Oushakine examines Russians’ search for acentral narrative in their lives in the aftermath ofthe collapse of the narrative. He focuses on‘communities of loss’ which sprung up in theaftermath of the USSR’s dissolution, arguing thatsuch communities attempt to restore the senseof collectivity felt prior to 1991. For some – theyoung neocommunists; intellectuals assertingRussia’s geographical predestination for

struggle; and the academics lamenting theRussian ethnic tragedy – their discourse isexplicitly political and patriotic. For others,particularly the mothers of soldiers killed inChechnya, the communities of loss that developare personal and largely apolitical. For all,however, Oushakine argues that it is collectivenarratives of despair that enabled people torestore their sense of belonging once the SovietMotherland had gone.

The patriotism of despair is not primarily acomprehensive ethnography of the responses ofBarnaul residents to post-Soviet change. Indeedsome of the arguments draw heavily on analysisof texts emanating from Moscow, albeitgrounded by interviews with Altai intellectualsand examination of their responses to theseconcepts. Rather, Barnaul serves as an anchoragefor a series of intellectual vignettes focusing onthe experience of specialized groups.Occasionally the work might also benefit frommore detailed ethnography of the lives of hisinformants, and a little less analytical narrative. Itis at times unclear whether the ‘incessantcompulsion to keep describing the feeling of agap’ (p. 115) is an artefact of the nature ofOushakine’s written sources or the interactionsof interviewees with a researcher examining astate of loss, or whether the need forcommunities built around loss is indeed thedriving force in most Russians’ lives. In somecases, there are other causes or explanations forbehaviours, which might be further explored.For example, the experiences of Chechen warveterans are said to show ‘what happens tostrong state-oriented identities when statesuddenly removes its legal, economic andsymbolic support’ (p. 132). Yet former soldiersacross the world often struggle economicallyand psychological once their fighting days areover; it may not be necessary to raise the spectreof the collapsed state to explain Russian soldiers’hardships. Similarly objectifications of loss by themothers of dead soldiers undoubtedly haveparallels with memorialization undertaken byother relatives of the deceased, and indeed drawon ‘positive symbolic frameworks’ from theSoviet past.

Oushakine has successfully captured a senseof the malaise felt by his informants at the turnof the twenty-first century, and provided anuanced insight into many of the intellectualdiscourses circulating throughout the Russianstate as its citizens continue to grapple withone of the biggest social, political, economic,and conceptual upheavals of our time. It isinteresting to ponder when Russians, or indeed

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anthropologists of Russia, will no longer lookto the Soviet past to create the Russian future.

Kathryn Tomlinson

Schwenkel, Christina. The American war incontemporary Vietnam: transnationalremembrance and representation. xi, 264 pp.,illus., bibliogr. Bloomington: Indiana Univ.Press, 2009. $65.00 (cloth), $24.95 (paper)

This compelling ethnography of history-makingin contemporary Vietnam has ambitionssignificantly beyond those of conventional warand memory studies, providing a novelapproach to issues of memory andrepresentation by addressing challengingquestions about transnationality and theinequalities of free-market information andknowledge exchanges in a context of worldwideneoliberal ‘empire’.

The book’s breadth and scope are thus awelcome contrast to many other works onwhat the West calls the Vietnam War, andVietnamese the anti-US War. It is emphaticallynot a study of exclusively American traumasand remembrance initiatives, building insteadon imaginative fieldwork in a wide variety ofVietnamese sites and settings. These includemuseums, war cemeteries, and state-sponsored‘martyr temples’ (den liet si), as well as theRamboesque battlefield theme parks whichhave grown out of the country’s turbulentmarketization process, and its search for sourcesof mass-market tourism revenue throughprojects both exalting and subtlyreconceptualizing its epic history of war andrevolutionary nationhood.

Schwenkel discerns extraordinarycomplexities and ironies in these initiatives, as inthe development of two parallel reconstructionsof Vietnam’s famous wartime guerrilla tunnelcomplexes. One of these caters for foreignerswith a taste for ‘authenticity’, providing themwith so-called ‘guerrilla food’ and reconditionedguns to shoot, while making the tunnels theyvisit pest-free and specially enlarged toaccommodate corpulent Western bodies. Ofequal interest is Schwenkel’s account of thesecond complex, adjoining a site of solemn statecommemoration rites but aimed nevertheless atthe growing population of newly prosperousVietnamese leisure tourists. Its design recognizesa demand for escapist entertainment at suchvenues, so that while in other contexts Vietnam’svillagers and city-dwellers take a deeply seriousand even assertively undeferential view of the

country’s rapidly changing memorializingpractices, these visitors expect to be providedwith what are coyly known as hug-cafés forromantic trysting, rather than recapitulations ofnarratives familiar from childhood throughschool museum trips and other encounters withstate remembrance regimens.

Despite the fascinating ways in whichSchwenkel documents such divergencesbetween what Vietnamese and outsidersunderstand and relate to in the presentation andcommercialization of the country’s warexperiences, her key concern is with theintertwinings and dynamics of what she calls‘recombinant’ histories. This is her term for themany forms of knowledge production she hasfound being mutually if inharmoniously enactedin both the sanctified and the crasslycommercialized spaces where Vietnamesecitizens and international actors engage oneanother’s war-related truths and counter-truths.Things done and said by Americans (including,importantly, those of Vietnamese expatriatedescent) do matter in Schwenkel’s story, as inher exploration of the debate about rival claimsof entitlement to display the world-renowned1972 image of the napalmed child Phan Thi KimPhuc, and the battles over whether imprisonedUS pilots’ treatment at the hands of theirVietnamese captors should be represented as‘torture’ or compassionate ‘care’. There are alsointriguing vignettes of such things as theinterpenetration (rather than opposition ordisconnection) of familial veneration rites andofficial remembrance practices at shrines to theVietnamese war dead, and of the ways in whichelderly US combat veterans have been revisitingthe country to play out contrasting scripts ofguilt, redemption, and macho self-glorificationthrough such activities as reconciliation ‘peaceprojects’, recasting the former Communistenemy as eager recipients of American aid andtutelage.

Yet what is even more striking in Schwenkel’swork is her delineation of the terms in whichsomething dialogic, dynamic, and open-ended –a process she defines as one of historicalco-production occurring both within and acrossthe boundaries of nation-states – can be seen inthese painfully experienced cases of ‘knowledgefriction’ arising from such sensitive questions ashow to re-caption Vietnamese museum displaysso US tourists do not find their formerservicemen referred to as ‘enemies’ and ‘warcriminals’. She is thus highly persuasive in herinsistence that even at its most apparentlycoercive in its demands that those it deals with

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conform to its own scriptings and standards offree-market trading and knowledge practices, theUS-dominated neoliberal ‘empire’ gives rise toforms of truth production that are inevitably‘relational and uneven’ (p. 205), yet still shared,dynamic, and interpenetrative rather thanone-sided and decisively disempowering.

This is a lucid, original, and extremelywell-written book, further enriched by its many

arresting illustrations of Vietnam’s remarkablememorializing aesthetics. What Schwenkel hasachieved is both a sophisticated addition to ourrapidly growing ethnographic literature on‘late-socialist’ Vietnam and a majorcontribution to the anthropology of memory,globalization, and postcolonial cultural powerrelations.

Susan Bayly University of Cambridge

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pilgrimages and spiritual quests in japan - edited by maria rodríguez del alisal, peter ackermann...

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