The Magical Body: Power, Fame and Meaning in a Melanesian Society by Richard Eves Review by: Roy Wagner

The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. 8, No. 2 (Jun., 2002), pp. 414-415 Published by: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3134524 . Accessed: 05/04/2012 20:09
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BOOK REVIEWS hand knowledge of East Africa from preindependence. He believes that it had not always been the case that communalism was strong, and things could have turned out differently if the government had not introduced restrictive legislation. Besides his disregard for the strength of'communal' difference, he also ignores caste and kinship ties with India, which were significant aspects of the lives of Indian populations there. This contrasts with the more conventional view of diaspora communities as found in Mohammed's description of the United States (p. 293), where she describes how separate organizations constituted along specific regional and religious lines followed 'the typical process of segmentation into smaller units as soon as the group becomes larger'. Thiara presents an accomplished survey of South Africa, where the Indian population was highly diverse. She skilfully incorporates information about the political vicissitudes of the twentieth century, while never underestimating the complexity of the Indian population. Another exemplary chapter is Leonard's on Hyderabadis in Pakistan, with its very clear exposition of historical, demographic, political, ethnic, and generational cleavages. MICHAELSON MAUREEN

tional rigour that they are a surprise to be seen in print. Far from meeting its aim of synthesizing historical and anthropological viewpoints, the contributions reinforce the stereotypical differences in approach. It was hoped that the book would provide a corrective to anthropological accounts which focus on internal divisions within immigrant populations without always taking into account external political events. Yet by reading between the lines in some of the more historical accounts, it can be seen that a blindness to divisions within communities can lead the authors to lose sight of important factors in their ability or otherwise to form cohesive units (e.g. Kelly, Twaddle). The conflicting accounts of Leonard and Waseem of migrants to Pakistan can perhaps be attributed precisely to this difference in focus. Kelly's 'essay in historical ethnography' (p. 46) leaves us with this dilemma - can such an exercise ever be successful? He ignores internal divisions within the Indian population, but there are tantalizing hints throughout as to their importance. It is only in a footnote (no. 7) that these are grudgingly touched upon. In this same footnote, it also emerges that the two leaders who negotiated with the government, one of whom Kelly feels 'could have changed Fiji's history radically' (p. 7()), were in fact Gujarati barristers sent by Gandhi. This begs the questions of how and why these two educated outsiders were legitimized as spokesmen for the uneducated 'native' Indo-Fijians, who supposedly did not identifv with India, whilst also being fronma disliked section of the population. A clue is in Kelly's stated 'shock' about the concept of jatis as communities of struggle (p. 64). This prompts the thought that historical accounts gloss over cultural and other differences within a population simply because this type of information would not have been written about in primary sources. The first two contributions, by Kelly and Nave, might dissuade readers from persisting with the book. Kelly's analysis of the change of identity from 'coolie' to 'Indian' in Fiji is obfuscated by excessive jargon. The chapter by Nave on Mauritius contains sweeping generalizations and highly questionable definitions of basic concepts such as culture, ethnic groups, and identity. There are too many of these to list, but the statement (p. 89) that '[e]thnic groups constitute endogamous populations' is one example. Nave also wants to locate and 'describe the basic mechanism by which ethnic relations abide' and tries to reduce this to a scientific formula. It is hard to imagine who the intended audience of this paper is. Twaddle's paper on communalism in East Africa rakes over old ground, but is useful from the perspective of his own first-

EVES, RICHARD. The mtagical body: power,fame

and meanitngin a Melanesian society. xxii, 302 pp., maps, illus., bibliogr. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic, 1998. f36.0( (cloth) Mandak speakers constitute one of New Ireland's largest pluralities, and certainly are the most frequently studied among them. The few hundred Mandak inhabiting the Lelet Plateau, subjects of this book, are New Ireland's last remaining interior population. But the question of how their practical, that is, material, political, economic, and social, circumstances are to be understood in terms of the peoples' own conceptualizations of them, what Brenda Clay has termed 'Mandak realities', poses a most compelling challenge. Most writers on the Mandak have given quite as much attention to the breakdown of that challenge into local, topical, and historical issues, as to its larger, totalizing parameters. So it should come as no surprise that the format of this book is necessarily episodic, treating an exhaustive series of conceptual issues that might be considered - each in its own way - to contribute to and potentially reflect an integral totality. Though of course the Mandak themselves, like other Melanesian peoples, might never understand it that way, and prefer to speak of 'power' or 'empowerment'. So although the book profiles a standard ethnographic organization in its chapters,

BOOK REVIEWS proceeding from considerations of the physical body and social personhood through those of colonialism and the creation of 'religion', exchange and social organization, supernatural beings, taro and the magic of gardening, it culminates with feasting, and a highly distinctive form of empowerment that Eves calls 'the creation of memory'. Otherwise familiar in the memorial art of the malanggan, this preoccupation of much New Ireland ritual acquires a new significance in Eves's treatment of'the magical body'. Although writers like Bourdieu, Foucault, and Derrida have made them focal to much of postmodern discourse, the themes of'body' and 'embodiment' are hardly new in Western thought. Ren6 Descartes was positively obsessed with them, and the only real danger would be to take them for granted. What stands as distinctive, and to my mind quite remarkable, in Eves's treatment of these ancient themes is his emphasis, following that of the Mandak, on the quality and character of motion with respect to them. The point is even more strongly emphasized in his doctoral thesis, 'Seating the taro'. One day while driving through the southern Mandak region, I was flagged down by a local gardener. 'It seems to me,' he said, with scarcely a preamble,'that there must be a point between the earth and the moon where the gravities of the two bodies are exactly equal.' I left in a daze, realizing that I had been talking to an expert in celestial mechanics. Except that the power of laram('gravity' to us; 'female fight' to the Mandak) is highly concrete for these people, and in fact gendered. It belongs, together with other conceptions, such as 'flying stones', to an unexplicated 'physics' that underlies much of what these people consider to be the power of magic and ritual. What are the earth and the moon, after all, but 'flying stones'? Nothing in the theoretical purview of the physical sciences has been more nearly taken for granted than the mystery of motion, and nothing in that of the social sciences than the mysteries of social empowerment. A conflation of the two, even in the fairly secretive practices of a Melanesian 'power' complex, betrays quite interesting possibilities. 'Embodiment', as we Americans might say,'never had it so good.' Much of the inspiration in social scientific thinking concerns the determination of societal ends and means, a tendency that quickly spills over into overdetermination when confirmation (e.g. 'evidence') is in doubt, or is conflicted. But what Eves shows us in this monograph is an underdeterminedsociality, a regime of thought and action whose goals and whose very means are deliberately understated. The fact that it might otherwise be very difficult to establish a 'pattern of culture', a central conceptual emphasis among so many,

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that might epitomize Mandak ethos may in itself be a key to what is going on here. During my own fieldwork among the Mandak's southern neighbours I became quite accustomed to cliches like 'the Mandak have no kastam [i.e. "culture"] at all; all they want is a roof over their heads'. That sort of disparagement is, of course, expectable, and very familiar to anthropologists, though if one of the secrets of power is that of its own self-concealment, the Mandak might be into something much more interesting than kastam.
ROY WAGNER

University of Virginia
STEPHEN. The anthropology of economy:community,marketand culture.viii, 189 pp., figs., bibliogr., index. Oxford, Malden: Blackwell, 2001. 550.00 (cloth), ?14.99 (paper)

GUDEMAN,

Much of the closing decades of the twentieth century looked like a celebration of a triumphal form of economy and economics in Western societies and much of the rest of the world. Given this, one would have expected an efflorescence of economic anthropology, a sub-discipline with detailed knowledge of how economic activity works.There has been some efflorescence, but little sign of models that might claim to a broad applicability, that might be an anthropological alternative to a general economic theory. Given the discipline's distrust of generalist approaches, such a work probably would have to come from a senior figure in the field, someone familiar with both Western and non-Western forms of economic activity and ways of talking about that activity. Stephen Gudeman is such a figure, and The anthropology of economy is the result. As one would expect, it draws extensively on his own work in Latin America, but it also incorporates a range of material from other parts of the world, Western and otherwise. The result is fluent, but because it is far-reaching and complex, summarizing it is beyond the scope of this review. Gudeman's model - perhaps, better said, 'approach' - has foundations that run counter to received wisdom. Economics defines economy commonly as the allocation of scare resources to alternative ends. Gudeman counters that economy is the process by which sets of people produce, circulate, and maintain the bases of their social and material lives. Many anthropologists, following Levi-Strauss, see exchange as the basic social process, generating individual and group identity and relations. Gudeman counters that the basis is the social group, which necessarily means also what he calls its 'base', the group's collective