956 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [93, 19911

court clerks’ offices of Salem and Cambridge, Massachusetts, and among its working-class neighborhoods and people, Getting Jurtice an- swers Conley and O’Barr’s question (Does mediation denigrate the rights of litigants?) in a probing, ambivalent affirmative.

Chapter 2 is a social history of the subtle ethnic, genealogical, and economic differences (between the hard-living poor and the settled- living poor, whose lifestyles are characterized by stable marriages and home ownership) that impact not merely who disputes with whom but what they dispute about.

Merry’s study proceeds from the dual ana- lytical bases of dispute transformation and le- gal ideology (that is, law as a dispute over the meaning of events-a symbolic struggle with powerful practical consequences). Ultimately, it is a study of the hegemony of middle-class professional discourse, “a study of the pro- cesses of cultural domination exercised by the law . . . growing out of control over cultural forms” (p. 9).

Merry characterizes the disputes she stud- ies as problems out of place. Too embedded in multiplex relationships to be amenable to arms-length adjudication, the courts regard them as “garbage” cases. The clerks shunt them to mediation. But the parties feel they can no longer solve them interpersonally: the egg-throwing and name-calling between chil- dren in a densely settled neighborhood has be- come entrenched; the minor trespass ofa next- door neighbor constitutes a fundamental af- front to one’s status as a property owner.

Where Conley and O’Barr ‘see litigants vic- timized for conceptualizing their problems in relational terms, Merry finds that her aspiring litigants conceptualize their problems in pri- marily legal terms:

The people . . . [go] . . . to court . . . out of a sense of entitlement. . . . They go with problems framed within their consciousness of law, problems presented in terms of fun- damental rights to protection from violence, in terms of defense of property, in terms of assertion of the authority of parents over children, in terms of new ideas about the rights ofwomen to security from violence by the men in their lives. [p. 1791

Although “their consciousness of legal entitle- ment conforms to fundamental categories of the law itself’ (p. 179), their ideologies are inexact folk ideas in the eyes of the hegemonic system. Thus, in chapter 5, “Problems and Cases,” Merry uses Camaroff and Roberts’s model of competing paradigms of argument to show how a dispute in which interpersonal is- sues predominate is classified as a “problem”

(for mediation) rather than a “case” (for ad- judication). The central, almost literary irony of Merry’s study-the paradox oflegal entitle- ment-is that the litigant who calls upon the power of the court loses control to the court’s power.

Chapter 6, “The Discourse of the Lower Court,” discusses the three discourses of court and mediation: law, everyday morality, and therapy. The give-and-take bargaining of me- diation with negotiated solution as the goal subtly vanquishes plaintiffs’ hopes for a vin- dication of legal rights. Theoretically designed to enable multiplex relationships to reach en- during equilibrium through negotiated solu- tions, can alternate dispute resolution func- tion as intended in a complex class-stratified society?

Disappointed litigants, she finds, “do not conclude that the court is illegitimate but that the court considers them and their problems unworthy of help. The experience is a chal- lenge less to the legitimacy of the legal system than to their sense ofentitlement” (p. 135). At the same time, however, litigants gain a grow- ing practical knowledge of how to get things done within the legal institutions.

The predicament of the poor is aptly illus- trated in Merry’s account of a case among three boarding-house residents (a would-be poet, an erstwhile Indian mechanic, and a young woman with a history of mental illness) who refuse mediation. The court feels con- strained to try the case but marginalizes it to a few minutes of time in an inappropriate courtroom corner. Merry states:

There is a fundamental paradox to the con- sciousness of legal entitlement. The use of law by those at the bottom of the social hi- erarchy empowers the individual with rela- tion to his or her neighbors and family members. . . but he or she loses control over this power. . . . Thus, the use of the courts furthers the subordination of the working class to those who manage and dispense court services. [pp. 181-1821

Famine in East Africa: Food Production and Food Policies. Ronald E. Seavoy. Contri- butions in Afro-American and African Stud- ies, No. 125. New York: Greenwood Press, 1989. 293 pp. $45.00 (cloth).

ANNE FLEURET University of Nairobi

Much has been written in recent years on the issues of declining food production and in-

APPLIED ANTHROPOLOGY 957

creasing immiseration in many sub-Saharan African countries. Multilateral and bilateral donors, legislative bodies, government agen- cies, voluntary and humanitarian organiza- tions, policymakers, and scholars in every dis- cipline from anthropology to zoology have at- tempted to establish the causes and extent of, and solutions to, the African agrarian crisis. Cumbersome bureaucracies, corruption, pric- ing and marketing policies that discourage producers, labor constraints, land shortages, and inappropriate or unobtainable technology have all been held responsible for declining food production and increasing poverty in Af- rica.

In Famine in East A j k a , Ronald E. Seavoy identifies a new culprit: none other than the farmer (or, as Seavoy argues, “peasant”) him- self, due to his own lack of incentive, or %- dolence.” Here is a blame-the-victim argu- ment with a vengeance.

In his initial chapter, “Peasants and Devel- opment,’’ Seavoy, a professor of history at Bowling Green State University, frames his argument in terms of a distinction between subsistence and commercial production. Those who practice subsistence production are labeled peasants, not farmers, and seek only to produce enough food on which to survive, while expending a minimal output of labor. Although Stone Age Economics (Aldine-Ather- ton, 1972) is not cited in the notes or bibliog- raphy, Seavoy’s model is clearly reminiscent of Sahlins’s domestic mode of production. To Seavoy, however, the “subsistence compro- mise” is still practiced by contemporary East African agriculturalists. The minimal labor investments that these “peasants” make sub- ject them to hunger and famine, and explain the African agrarian crisis. The solution, Sea- voy argues, lies in coercive political and fiscal policies that will transform subsistence peas- ants into commercialized farmers who mea- sure their incomes in cash. Among the policies he endorses are the forceable investment of land use rights in “commercially-motivated” individuals or institutions, and compulsory extraction of “hut” and ‘‘poll’’ taxes (these terms are actually used, see p. 31) as well as taxes on agricultural produce.

In this opening chapter, Seavoy also dis- misses a number of concepts used by anthro- pologists and other social scientists in their at- tempts to understand the dynamics of African agricultural systems. Risk aversion, decision making, poverty, class, and income, he de- clares, are all inapplicable to African “peas- ants” who practice subsistence production.

Chapter 2, “East African Subsistence Cul- ture,’’ is distinguished by the selective use of

references, many of them outdated, to create an image of East African agricultural society as practicing shifting cultivation, limited use of innovations, and minimal investments of la- bor time in production. Economists and an- thropologists are criticized for failing to carry out time-allocation studies that would dem- onstrate the leisure and indolence of the peas- ant; but Seavoy himself provides no evidence to substantiate his claims, and conspicuously fails to cite published time-allocation data that show that those indolent men put in eight- or nine-hour days. Recent work on migratory wage labor, income-generating strategies, the context of African poverty, and decision-mak- ing processes is conspicuous by its absence from the notes and references.

In subsequent chapters Seavoy discusses the creation of colonial economies in East Af- rica, and the failure of the Ujamaa system in Tanzania to boost food production. In his view colonialists apparently had the right idea, in that taxation, monetization, and pri- vatization of tenure, as well as forced labor and mandatory planting were all imple- mented in one or more of the East African col- onies, and some farmers, especially Europeans in Kenya, created totally commercialized ag- ricultural enterprises. However, “No post-co- lonial government in Africa has been able to induce an indigenous peasantry to expend suf- ficient labor to produce an assured food sur- plus” (p. 163), and the biggest failure ofall has been Ujamaa in Tanzania.

Seavoy concludes the volume by reiterating the necessity for coercive taxation and politi- cal measures, and by claiming that overpopu- lation, land shortages, loss of soil fertility, and overcultivation do not exist and therefore can- not lie at the root ofAfrican agricultural prob- lems.

At several points in the book Seavoy men- tions having visited Tanzania, but there is no evidence that he has conducted any commu- nity-based research of whatever kind in East Africa. The comments he makes on pages 1 I , 18, and 216, among others, criticize in partic- ular economists for asking the wrong ques- tions, failing to do proper fieldwork, or being untrained; yet there is no evidence that Sea- voy’s own training, investigative skills, or field experience is superior to that of those whom he attacks. Indeed, for some of the sweeping as- sertions made iq the opening and concluding chapters, his own best evidence is himselc he cites his own previous work, in particular a 1986 book entitled Famine in Peasant Societies (also published by Greenwood), some 25 times.

958 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [93, 19911

Social scientists looking for a reasoned anal- ysis of hunger, famine, and agricultural de- cline in East Africa will not find it in Seavoy’s book. Flawed reasoning, arbitrary judgments, misinterpretation and misrepresentation of references, and errors of omission as well as commission, however, will be found in plenty.

Made in Italy: Small-Scale Industrializa- tion and Its Consequences. Michael L. Blim. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1990. 304 pp. $42.95 (cloth).

JANE CONRAD Graduate Center, C U N Y

Michael Blim’s well-researched and finely written book tells the story of the social trans- formation of a central Italian town during 1881-1988, from a society of landlords and peasants, to one of workers and petty entre- preneurs engaged in the local shoe industry. Until World War 11, San Lorenzo Marche was a slow-changing world of rural sharecrop- pers, or meuadri , with a tiny urban core of proto-industrial shoeworkers, shoekeepers, and artisans catering to the landowning elite. Yet by the time of Blim’s first visit in 1981-83, the town’s 7,000 inhabitants had enjoyed a 25- year, self-generated industrial boom. With its hundreds of interlinked small factories and workshops specialized in various phases of shoe manufacture, San Lorenzo Marche ex- emplified a new type of industrial district that had emerged in postwar, central northeastern Italy. By the early 1980s, Italian “flexible spe- cialization” was receiving attention in the United States as a desirable alternative to the rigidities of centralized factory production.

Blim’s research aim was to explore dynam- ics of this decentralized manufacturing system both in its contemporary, day-to-day manifes- tation, and in relation to the more enduring social context. His study is enriched by a wealth of archival and interview materials gathered over a period of seven years. Chap- ters 2 and 3 treat the period 188 1-1 945, focus- ing on the decline ofmeZzadria, responses of the various social classes to the new economic context, and local political behavior, includ- ing the social basis of recruitment to fascism between the wars. Chapter 4 describes the de- velopment of the contemporary labor process in San Lorenzo Marche, and profiles its par- ticipants, while chapter 5 investigates the multiple modes of labor control and remuner- ation. An analysis of postwar class structure is contained in chapter 6. Chapter 7 extends Blim’s treatment of local politics to provide a

convincing explanation for the continuing electoral success of the local Communist party since 1975.

Throughout Blim’s study, social classes- their composition, interrelations, and the way they change over time-provide the frame- work for analysis. This is not a reductionist treatment, however; in the tradition of theo- rists who seek to “Weberianize Marx,” classes “issue from the point of production,” yet “are filtered concretely and historically through the netting of the organization of primary groups” (p. 65). These primary groups, arising from kinship, coresidence, and other ties, are com- monly motivated by concern for social repro- duction and s ta tus advancement. As Blim shows, competition for status (here often mea- sured in terms of land and home ownership) can result in internal divisions within a class, can determine the types of interclass political alliances that will form, and can divert re- sources away from investments which, in the long term, are needed to maintain a group’s class position. Overall, his well-argued pre- sentation contributes one of the best accounts to date of local social stratification processes in modern Europe.

Blim’s “study within a study” of the con- temporary shoe industry offers rich case ma- terial, capturing the hectic pace and baroque, contradictory nature of social relations en- demic to a system where workers may also be entrepreneurs. His findings challenge the view of “flexible specialization,” in which the un- seen hand of the market magically rewards ef- ficiency while promoting social mobility. In- stead, Blim shows San Lorenzo Marche shoe production as socially embedded, in ways which ultimately thwart the system’s techno- logical dynamism and social equity. Firms are family owned and/or familistic in their man- agement styles; the sword of paternalism may cut two ways but most often leaves workers with the smaller share. Blim shows his bra- vura as a fieldworker in the quantitative data he elicits concerning undocumented labor (la- voro nero), revealed here as the essential guar- antor of profits and of work-force docility. Though pessimistic regarding the future of San Lorenzo Marche’s shoeworkers, Blim’s fine analysis allows us to appreciate both their achievement and the limits of the productive system that they have developed.

Methods for Social Analysis in Develop- ing Countries. Kurt Finsterbutch, Jasper Inger- soll, and Lynn Llewellyn, eds. Social Impact As- sessment Series, 17. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990. 234 pp. $34.95 (paper).

CHRISTINE OBBO-SOUTHALL Wayne State University