Agung toward his puputan, other Dutch officerswere fighting their way to the south coast of Timorintent on meeting, for the first time in more than150 years, the "Great Lord" whom they had pro-claimed as the "Keizer" of Timor in 1 776. Havingreached what the Tetun define as the innermostcenter, they were dismayed by its silence: theMaro-mak Oan would not speak to them and they had in-stead to listen to the irrelevant verbal pronounce-ments of his liurai. It is Wiener's argument thatwithin Klungkung "silence, manifested in differentways, was a practice constitutive of the DewaAgung's power" (p. 231). The same was true, in allrespects, of the Maromak Oan. Forcing the DewaAgung to leave his inner realm to sign an explicittreaty with the Dutch was the final denigration ofthe power of the silent center and the prelude to thepuputan.

This is too rich a book to be easily summarized oradequately discussed in a brief compass. An impor-tant aspect of Wiener's ethnography is an examina-tion of Balinese dynastic politics and its relation toDutch encroachments. She conveys well the con-tingent aspect of these political maneuvering* andtheir dependence on Klungkung. The triumphantDutch, however, are presented—perhaps too sim-ply—as powerful but unwitting agents in a strugglebetween uncomprehending cultural worlds. Thebook thus offers a valuable critique of Dutch colo-nial practice, but some of its assumptions continuethe traditions of colonial scholarship. In particular,the book upholds and embellishes a dynastic viewof Bali under unequivocal Brahmana/Satria hegem-ony, a view first put forward by the Dutch colonialgovernment officer Rudolph Friederich in 1849.That there is so much more to the religious and so-cial traditions of Bali than this courtly-priestly per-spective is now becoming clear. Many of the popu-lations that the Kapakisan dynasty claimed to havesubdued in the time of Majapahit continue to main-tain their own traditions of origin that assert alterna-tive views of the island. This book, then, serves as atribute to the "power" of a realm that has nowpassed away and no longer represents what Bali hasbecome with the demise of the Dewa Agung. It isnonetheless essential reading to understand con-temporary Bali.

Lukang: Commerce and Community in a Chi-nese City. DONALD R. DEGLOPPER. Albany:State University of New York Press, 1995. xiii +293 pp., glossary, plates, notes, bibliography,indexes.

CHARLES STAFFORDLondon School o( Economics

It is hard not to admire, at least within limits,the no-nonsense-and-damn-the-lorpedoes style ofDonald DeClopper's account of Lukang, a smallcity on the west coast of Taiwan. Based largely onfieldwork conducted almosl 30 years ago, the bookis written in the ethnographic present, not only be-cause "every ethnographic account is an account ofa no longer extant society" (p. 6), but also because ifthe analysis is unconvincing or wrong, "trying to re-

phrase it in the past tense won't help" (p. 7). Per-haps more controversially, DeGlopper has chosennot to write a substantial reformulation of his analy-sis of social life in Lukang, but instead to publish atext mostly written ten years after fieldwork—some20 years ago. In so doing, DeGlopper bypasses, forthe most part, contemporary social theory, noting,"Anyone who has been reading the productions ofacademics for a decade or two knows how quicklyintellectual fashions change and new waves aresucceeded by yet newer waves. In this work I havetaken some pains to avoid being caught in that toil"(p. 6).

In the event, some readers may find this strategydebatable. But in the context of Taiwanese ethnog-raphy the focus and content of DeGlopper's re-search is certainly worthwhile. First, he has chosento examine a city (a small one, with a population ofabout 28,000) rather than a rural community; hismonograph thus adds to the somewhat limited an-thropological understanding of Taiwanese urbansociety. Second, he examines the social relation-ships of (mostly small-) businessmen. Given the keyrole such businessmen are playing in transformingthe political-economy of Taiwan and East Asia, itmakes sense for anthropologists to conduct re-search among them (and a growing number are do-ing so). Third, in examining the relationships ofbusinessmen he focuses on those constructedaround "voluntary association"—that is, those notbased on kinship.

On this last point, DeGlopper's position is clear,and somewhat echoes Fei Xiaotong's long-standingview that kinship is not nearly so dominant in Chinaas many observers assume: "I have never quite un-derstood what statements such as 'the family is thefoundation of the social order' are supposed tomean. To be sure, most people in China belongedto families and family membership was a very sig-nificant aspect of every person's identity, but I fail tosee what is so distinctively Chinese about this"(p. 24).

He also suggests that the emphasis on kinship inChinese ethnography may have derived, initially,from a convergence between Confucian and an-thropological ways of viewing social relationships:"For China . . . the gap between the native model(i.e., Confucianism) and the outside observer's 'sci-entific' model was smaller than it sometimes is. Af-ter all, structural-functionalism was the nativemodel" (p. 22). DeGlopper suggests anthropologistsshould now move beyond kinship-based accountsof China by examining how other kinds of equallysignificant relationships are formed and sustained.

History is central to DeGlopper's account, andmuch of his book—after general discussions ofConfucianism (ch. 1), of Chinese cities and volun-tary associations (ch. 2), and of Lukang (ch. 3)—isfocused on the Taiwanese past. The historical chap-ters, based both on written sources (e.g., gazetteers)and on oral accounts, examine the interplay be-tween factors—including ethnic conflict and ad-ministrative nonrecognition—that helped shape thecommunity of Lukang. Chapter 6 outlines Lukang's"social structure" in the period before Japanesecolonization. Here DeGlopper touches upon awide range of topics: dialect and surname groups,

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neighborhoods, guilds, the festivals and rituals ofpopular religion, and the annual rock fight heldamong the clans of Lukang until the 1940s.

When he turns to social relationships and thesense of community in contemporary (i.e., 1967-68) Lukang, DeClopper notes that although anumber of formal organizations (e.g., the Farmers'Association) exist, these are relatively unimportant,"facades with form but no substance" (p. 204). Hecontrasts these with the significance of informal as-sociations, many based in pan on the ch'ing or"sentiment" between partners: "As soon as one be-gins looking at how things work, at local economicand political organization and action, one comesup against shadowy but very important personalnetworks, usually nameless ch'ing groups with sub-stance but little form" (p. 204). These kinds of hard-to-define networks, as DeClopper emphasizes, de-velop and persist in a community that is of aparticular kind: "For Lukang the point is that thebusiness relations, the extensive personal networksof ch'ing ties, the overlapping circles of rotatingcredit societies, can only operate among peoplewho believe themselves to belong to a communityof moral humans who honor their obligations"(p. 258).

This, at least, is what they appear to believe, andDeClopper frames his account of Lukang aroundcertain questions and paradoxes related to self-rep-resentation and to "native models." Why do peoplesay contradictory things about themselves and theircommunity—statements that often seem refuted byobservation? How are we to understand the com-plex "varieties of conscious models" through whichpeople in Lukang make sense of their collectivelives? Here it does seem to me that paying attentionto recent anthropological debates (e.g., on objectifi-cation, on explicit statements about culture, on the"making of history," on consciousness) might havebeen useful—fashion notwithstanding. Doing somight well have strengthened the very points thatDeGlopper hoped to make, and might also have in-creased the relevance of this interesting ethnogra-phy for current students of anthropology.

How "Natives" Think: About Captain Cook,For Example. MARSHALL SAHLINS. Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1995. x + 318 pp.,figures, bibliography, index.

JONATHAN FRIEDMANUniversity of Lund

When I opened How Natives Think, which Mar-shall Sahlins so graciously sent to me, I found at theend of his inscription, "maybe this will convinceyou." I am very happy to have been regarded assomeone to convince. One of the most importantqualities of this book is its reinstatement of publicintellectual debate in anthropology. Whether I amconvinced will have to wait to the end of this re-view. What is more important, however, is that I amimpressed, as one must be. The focus of this book islimited by the content of Obeyesekere's TheApotheosis of Captain Cook (Princeton, NJ: Prince-ton University Press and Honolulu, HI: Bishop Mu-

seum Press, 1992), a book that I reviewed positivelyfor some of the same reasons (although, as I havepreviously noted, there are also some major prob-lems with Obeyesekere's motivation and ideologi-cal stance). In a short review it is difficult to discussthe enormous detail summoned in Sahlins's mas-sive rebuttal of Obeyesekere's work. It should benoted, however, that all this provocation from oth-ers (including me) has produced ever more power-ful arguments, ever more complex discussions ofthe sources, and increasingly subtle and flexible in-terpretations than would have been forthcoming ifhe had not been so provoked.

The arguments of the book revolve around sev-eral major themes. First and foremost is the questionof whether or not Cook was understood to be thegod Lono by Hawaiians, or whether this is a modelconstructed later in the 19th century by missionary-inspired Hawaiian historians. This discussion occu-pies most of the book. The second and relatedtheme concerns the question of practical rational-ity, which is Obeyesekere's critical weapon againstwhat he sees as an imperialistic imposition of irra-tional and mechanically bound visions of the Otheras caught in the determinism of mythopractice. Thethird theme that saturates the text (and is a deduc-tion from the first two) is the question of ideology it-self—of the relation between imperialism and dis-course, of generalized native identity assumed byObeyesekere, and of what might be called the in-version of colonial hierarchy expressed in Obeye-sekere's text and its implications.

The major issue is that of the relations betweenCook and Lono, and between Hawaiians and Euro-peans. The thrust of Sahlins's massive mazeworkthrough the texts, both from the ships' logs and fromlater Hawaiian writings, is to establish that Hawai-ians did indeed understand Cook as in some wayconnected with the Hawaiian god Lono. Obeyesek-ere's argument is that Cook could not have been soconceived because Hawaiians know the differencebetween men and godson practical grounds. He ar-gues that Cook was taken as a powerful chief whomay indeed have possessed certain sacred charac-teristics related to his real power, but that his asso-ciation with Lono was established by an inventedritual, an apotheosis that was useful for the chief(king) in his expansionist ambitions (i.e., in the crea-tion of an alliance). Much of Obeyesekere's argu-ment is based on a questioning of relations: howcould Cook and his men have been seen as gods ifthey were treated so badly in certain situations? Buthe himself appears to be taken in by the distinctionbetween "godly" and "human" that is the typicalbasis of Western reasoning on this subject. Sahlins,who has previously been accused of this kind of du-alism, here lays out the full model of a world ofmultiple embodiments, or kino lau, within whichthe dualism is dissolved. Cook can indeed be a kinolau of Lono, just as can other chiefs, objects, andnatural phenomena of various sorts. The logic ofthis argument, as I understand it, is that the appear-ance of Cook—his "powerful" qualities as well ashis foreignness—is associated with an immediateinterpretation of him as godly and having extraordi-nary mana. That this godliness was also "Lono-ness" may well be a product of the political and so-

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