Book reviews
General
Anderson, E.N. Everyone eats: understanding
food and culture. viii, 294 pp., illus., bibliogr.
London, New York: New York Univ. Press, 2005.
$65.00 (cloth), $20.00 (paper)
Everyone eats is an introduction to food and
culture studies in anthropology built on
Anderson’s extensive ethnographic fieldwork in
China, Mexico, and the Mediterranean and his
broad review of social science literature. He takes
a biocultural approach to address such sweeping
questions as: Why do we eat the way we do?
What is the role of biology and culture in
determining our foodways? What explains the
radically divergent food preferences and
practices that prevail in different cultures? What
and how do we communicate with food, and
how does it establish community, difference,
and enmity? What can be done about global
inequalities in access to food?
The first four chapters constitute a kind of
introduction to biological anthropology through
the lens of food. Anderson begins with a chapter
on the evolution of human food habits entitled
‘Obligatory omnivores’. He explores the human
proclivity to eat almost anything by looking at
the evolution and interconnectedness of human
dentition, digestive system, brain development,
language, sociability, and tool- and fire-use.
He surveys the diets of contemporary
hunter-gatherers to explain human cravings for
certain foods and aversions for others as well as
the growing problem of obesity.
The second chapter, ‘Human nutritional
needs’, is an intriguing discussion of basic
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human nutrition enriched by lots of interesting
ethnographic data. For example, Anderson
explains how across cultures humans attain
sufficient protein even without meat by
combining vegetables with complementary
amino acids such as dal (lentils) and rice in India,
pasta e fagioli in Italy, and tortillas and beans in
Mexico. In Mexico, he explains further, soaking
the corn in lime to produce nixtamal releases the
niacin that otherwise is inaccessible to the
human digestive tract and thus prevents the
disease of pellagra that was such a scourge to
corn-dependent populations in Italy and Spain.
Not only does nutrition take on a lively aspect
when grounded in both cross-cultural data and
human biology, but so does Anderson’s
discussion of ‘The senses’ in chapter 4.
In chapters 5-13, Anderson increasingly
widens his lens of analysis to include the
economy and environment; food as pleasure,
communication, and social marker; the role of
food in health and medicine; food, meaning,
and religion; changing culture and foodways;
cuisine as border, boundary, and ethnic identity;
and global hunger and possible solutions. While
affirming that ‘the most basic determinants of
foodways are environment and economy’
(p. 82), Anderson is no determinist, and he offers
numerous examples of how communication,
meaning, and identity trump environment in
explaining food practices. For example, he
rejects the ‘dubious ecological explanation’
(p. 93) for the Northwest Coast Indian potlatch
that said it was a means of redistributing
resources in hard times, and suggests that it is
better explained as an example of globally
widespread ‘merit feasts’ where leaders attain
power through ‘competitive generosity’ (p. 95).
Foodways, Anderson repeatedly demonstrates,
744 Book reviews
are a response not just to environmental factors,
but also to humans’ desire for novelty, our
needs to create social ties, and our efforts to
claim affiliation to some groups and distinction
from others – be they castes, classes, religions,
ethnicities, or nations. Indeed, he says, ‘food is
rather like language’ (p. 110), and it has its own
rules that vary across culture and serve to
communicate an array of meanings and
identities.
In his last chapter, ‘Feeding the world’,
Anderson takes on the thorny issue of global
hunger. He affirms that we actually have enough
food today to feed everyone, but yet
undernutrition afflicts close to a billion people.
He discusses the intertwined roles of social
injustice, population growth, agricultural
technology, environmental degradation, and
unequal global distribution of wealth and power
in causing hunger. He closes by suggesting
some political interventions to redress these
problems and the hunger they cause.
Anderson’s book is a solid introduction to the
anthropology of food for students and general
readers. It is clear, well-written, spiced with
interesting examples, and illustrated with many
evocative photographs taken by the author and
by Barbara Anderson. It has a good bibliography
that will provide a starting-point for further
inquiry. It would make an excellent text in
undergraduate courses in food and culture,
nutritional anthropology, or four-field
introductory anthropology. Beginning graduate
students will also find it a useful and
comprehensive introduction to anthropological
perspectives on food and culture. It covers a
great deal of ground and gives readers a broad
taste of the field, pointing towards many
directions for future exploration.
Carole M. Counihan Millersville University
Bauer, Elaine & Paul Thompson. Jamaican
hands across the Atlantic. 233 pp., bibliogr.
Kingston, Miami: lan Randle Publishers, 2006.
$24.95 (paper)
This book brings up some of the key issues
regarding Caribbean migrants and dispels or
at least modifies a number of problematic
assumptions that seem to have accrued over
time. The focus is on transnational families and
the evidence that these should not be regarded
simply as separated families, but rather as a new
kind of family that manages to retain many of
the forms and functions of co-residential family
life. This is partly because of the astonishing
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recent changes in communication, not the least
of which, the mobile phone, has really made a
considerable difference only in the last couple of
years. But the reasons have as much to do with
much older traditions of multiple partnering
and the common Jamaican institution of
half-siblingship, as well as the pragmatism that
was already attached, for example, to usage of
family land in Jamaica.
So both for non-migrant families previously
and for migrant families today the term ‘father’
applies more to someone who acts as a father
rather than just biological parentage. This
matters when it comes to the welfare of
immigrants, where, for example, absence of
fathers is shown not to be regarded as of itself
a significant causal explanation of migrant
problems. The research was conducted in
Britain, the US, and Canada as well as in
Jamaica, and this allows the authors to
demonstrate some quite stark differences of
experience in the various host countries. In
particular, Jamaicans in the US have been
pressured into residency and association with
almost entirely black areas, while those in
London have become largely dispersed within
the general population. This then extends to
different expectations of relationships with white
or black partners.
One chapter tries to determine how far the
original circumstances – e.g. family income
and history within Jamaica – appear to be a
determinant of subsequent success or failure as
migrants. One clear source of continuity is the
female-focused family. Another chapter deals
with the way the migrant experience leads to
a new consciousness of racism back in Jamaica
and the variable fate of those who attempt to
return to the island. What was once an issue of
parents leaving children in Jamaica has now
become an issue of parents leaving children in
the Diaspora when they return to Jamaica after
retirement. Other chapters deal with particular
details of the migration experience, issues of
racism and finding work, and the abiding sense
of important gender distinctions, whether in
patterns of leisure, experience of kinship, or
educational prospects, in all of which gender
differences remain pronounced.
Quite apart from the many different facets
of migration that receive illumination or are
effectively updated by this book, the particular
quality of the volume as a whole comes from its
style and form, which are clearly influenced by
Thompson’s lifelong association with oral history
and Bauer’s empathy with her Jamaican origins.
As a result the individuals who appear and often

speak in their own words are conveyed with a
liveliness that is rare in colder, more purely
academic accounts. Perhaps there is a slightly
‘rose-tinted’ emphasis on the positive, but
this may be merely the effect of a strongly
empathetic identification with these complex life
stories. One other significant result is that this
makes the book an enjoyable read that easily
flows between individual cases and the general
points being illustrated. Not surprisingly the
book also gives an unusually strong feeling of
the importance of memory and life trajectory.
The results are not simplified, because the
attention to individual life stories helps highlight
the range of experience without eschewing the
need for generalization. By the conclusion the
authors are quite firm in their rejection of recent
attempts effectively to blame problems of
Diaspora Jamaicans on aspects of ‘culture’ such
as family structure. That they have, by this point,
brought to bear considerable and effective
evidence to refute such common assumptions is
just one of the many significant results of this
important volume.
Daniel Miller University College London
Christie, Jessica Joyce & Patricia Joan
Sarro (eds). Palaces and power in the Americas:
from Peru to the Northwest coast. xi, 401 pp.,
maps, figs, illus., bibliogrs. Austin: Univ. Texas
Press, 2006. £29.00 (cloth)
New World readers, when confronted with the
term ‘palace’, tend to conjure up an Old World
image, Greek or Roman or Asian, possibly
Egyptian, most likely European. This volume
intends to provide those readers with New
World examples of palaces, and does so quite
successfully. However, as the title suggests, the
book is not simply a compilation of architectural
forms defined as palaces throughout the
Americas, but is instead an exploration of how
palaces have projected and embodied power in
the past. This volume adds to a growing body of
recent studies on New World elite architecture,
which includes Palaces of the ancient New World
(S. Evans & J. Pillsbury, eds, 2004), Maya palaces
and elite residences: an interdisciplinary approach
(J. Christie, ed., 2003), and Royal courts of the
ancient Maya (S. Houston & T. Inomata, eds,
2002).
The chapters in the volume are much
expanded versions of conference papers first
presented in 2000. The scope of the volume is
impressive. Six chapters are from Mesoamerica –
formative Oaxaca at Paseo de la Amada (Michael
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Blake and co-authors), Maya places at Dos Pilas,
Aguateca, and Cancuén (Arthur Demarest), El
Tajin (Patricia Sarro), Teotihuacan (William T.
Sanders and Susan Evans), Monte Alban (Sarah
Barber and Arthur Joyce), and precursors of
Aztec palaces in central Mexico (Susan Evans) –
two from the Andes – Huaca de Moche (Claude
Chapdelaine) and Wari palaces (William Isbell) –
two from North America – very late prehistoric
times from the Pacific Northwest (Colin Grier)
and the American Southwest after 800 AD
(Stephen Lekson) – and two chapters are intent
on temporal and regional comparisons – Chimu
and Inka palaces at Farfán (Carol Mackey) and
Maya and Inka palaces (Christie). Accompanying
these are a lengthy introduction by Christie and
a shorter concluding discussion by Sanders.
The chapters are arranged into four thematic
sections: ‘Identification of palaces’, ‘Palaces
as active stage sets of political ideology’,
‘Correspondences between material aspects
of elite residences and social status’, and
‘Comparisons of palaces across cultures’. In her
very useful introductory chapter, Christie
outlines the contents of each of the chapters in
these sections. Wisely and perhaps inevitably,
she and her authors avoid any consistent
attempt to develop a formal definition of New
World palaces, but in their chapters each does
address three cross-cutting themes – form,
comparisons between palaces and elite
residences, and sources of power. The result is a
remarkably consistent volume filled with
important details about specific archaeological
settings while simultaneously addressing issues
that go beyond those contexts.
The inclusion of Andean materials is
particularly welcome, because there have been
few other sustained discussions of elite
residences and palaces in this region. It is not
that Andean archaeologists have neglected
monumental architecture, but that aside from
scholars like Jerry Moore, who has published
extensively on power and architecture, few have
examined palaces and elite residences from this
perspective. However, as Christie and Mackey
note, a more robust definition of Inka palaces
continues to prove elusive.
Some readers may find three of the chapters
– those by Grier, Blake and colleagues, and
Lekson – to be tangential to the thrust of the
volume. Each of these is concerned with
comparatively simple societies, as opposed to
the bulk of the chapters, which deal with palaces
and elite residences in states and empires. This
perception certainly stems from a New World
bias about ‘when’ palaces should be found in
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the Americas (late and only in complex
societies). Indeed, Lekson’s chapter, best seen as
a polemic that will raise eyebrows in some
places, argues against this very bias. Each of the
chapters deals effectively with the central themes
of the volume, but while the structures
discussed in these chapters do reflect power
relationships, it is not self-evident that they
should be called palaces. Absent from this North
American discussion is a chapter on the
Mississippian societies of the American Southeast
and Midwest that might have shed light on this
question. The volume could also have benefited
from a contribution from a student of Old World
palaces outlining the current contours of
thinking on the roles and places of palaces in
those contexts in which they have been studied
intensively for decades.
No matter how palaces are formally defined
(or not), this volume is an important and useful
contribution to the debate. Any serious student
of power, architecture, and residence in the
Americas should find this volume a necessary
addition to their personal library.
Mark Aldenderfer University of Arizona
Dyer, Caroline (ed.). The education of
nomadic peoples: current issues, future prospects.
ix, 278 pp., maps, tables, illus., bibliogrs. Oxford,
New York: Berghahn Books, 2006. £27.00 (cloth)
The education of nomadic peoples is an edited
collection of essays dealing with various aspects
of schooling and cultural change. Inherently
anthropological in its content, the book
contains two ‘overview’ chapters and ten ‘case
study’ chapters which provide more in-depth
descriptions in particular social contexts. The
case study chapters are set in Kashmir, South
Africa, South Australia, Kenya, Israel, India, Iran,
Mongolia, Oman, and Nigeria. The introduction
and overview chapters set the scene by
describing some of the tensions involved with
schooling of nomadic peoples, and describe
the difficulties that nomadic peoples have in
coping with pressures of sedentarization and
the threats to nomadic lifestyles, values, and
identity associated with modern schooling.
Dyer describes the ‘agenda’ of formal
education as producing ‘modern citizens
that conform with the state’s notion of
contemporary development’ (p. 259). She
notes, however, that nomadic groups seem to
be ‘adroit at extracting from it [education] what
they need, and resisting what they do not’
(p. 259). The antagonistic experiences of
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schooling are therefore fused with a nuanced
and field-based perspective on how nomadic
peoples make use of schooling, and in some
contexts view it as an opportunity for wider
learning, livelihoods diversification, social status,
and engagement with modern political and
economic structures.
The case study chapters provide some
intriguing insights into these processes in relation
to a range of educational settings, from informal
learning, mobile and tent schools, to more formal
educational institutions. Many of these deal with
specialist forms of education, rather than
attempts at integrating nomadic people into
so-called ‘mainstream’ educational provision. The
chapters can be described as multi-disciplinary,
and many are written by anthropologists. There is
not space here to describe them all. Examples
include Aparna Rao’s ‘The acquisition of
manners, morals and knowledge: growing into
and out of Bakkarwal society’. Based on fieldwork
in Jammmu and Kashmir, the chapter provides an
interesting discussion of age- and gender-specific
learning linked to life-stages and personhood.
The chapter notes the poor quality of mobile and
hostel schools, and the extreme difficulty in
maintaining their lifestyle in the broader context
of Himalayan warfare. Not all of the chapters,
however, provide an entirely negative account of
nomadic education, or of the commitment of the
state in providing education for nomadic people.
Dawn Chatty’s chapter, ‘Boarding schools for
mobile peoples: the Harasiis in the Sultanate of
Oman’, describes an innovative state-sponsored
initiative to bring formal education to remote
desert areas. While she recognizes some of the
imperfections of the provision (which only
involves a minority of the population), Chatty
argues that the schools enable a degree of
economic diversification: ‘The Haima School, by
providing education from primary level to
secondary level, has become an instrument for
limited success, providing a select few youths
with potential access to well-paid and skilled jobs
in the desert’ (p. 227). Similarly, Mohammad
Shahbazi describes positive experiences of
state-sponsored ‘tent schools’ among the
Turkish-speaking Qashqa’i in the Fars province of
Iran. These examples challenge the notion of
educational provision as simply cultural
imposition.
What is perhaps the instructive aspect of
the book is the contrast between different
experiences of schooling and learning in the
range of contexts described. This point is
captured by Roy Carr-Hill, who argues that ‘the
specific context of each nomadic community is

an important determinant of what is possible and
of their likely responses to what is provided’
(p. 37). As he suggests, there is a need to
recognize the status of nomadic groups within
their society, and the cultural significance of their
lifestyles. This view contrasts with the stance
taken in the opening chapters, which describe
commonalities of experience in nomadic
communities marked by patterns of inter-cultural
antagonism and negotiation. The arguments
appear to be organized around an implicit
opposition between indigenous (nomadic)
cultures and modernity. In doing so, they appear
to frame nomadic education as distinct from the
educational experiences of other traditional
societies, or ‘non-indigenous’ migratory and
socially marginalized groups who may also have
difficulty in benefiting from educational provision
that is often of low quality and unresponsive to
their aspirations. Carr-Hill does attempt to
deconstruct the binary between nomadic
pastoralists and agriculturalists (p. 37) arguing
that: ‘Educationally, pastoralists appear to be just
an extreme example of the problem of enrolling
children from poor rural populations’ (p. 48).
This view, then, is somewhat at odds with the
argument that nomadic people have distinctive
forms of livelihood, cultural identities, and
relationships with modernity that produce
disadvantage in their encounters with
state-sponsored education. Such debates over
essentialism and ‘indigenous’ culture are of
course familiar terrain to anthropologists, and
highlight the broader discursive contexts through
which difference and identity are framed.
Bryan Maddox University of East Anglia
Giri, Ananta Kumar. Reflections and
mobilizations: dialogues with movements and
voluntary organizations. 438 pp., maps, illus.,
bibliogr. London, New Delhi: Sage Publications,
2005. £35.00 (cloth), £14.99 (paper)
Giri is an activist scholar, anthropologist, and
development practitioner, guided by a strong
spiritual commitment and concern for critical
reflective practice. His challenging and
alternative anthropology first emerged in his
co-edited book with Philip Quarles van Ufford, A
moral critique of development: in search of global
responsibility (2003), where he drew on
Habermas and others to suggest the idea of
development as a global conversation about
the quality of relationships.
The book pursues the idea of conversation
through the concept of dialogic encounters with
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social activists engaged in social movements or
in voluntary organizations, primarily but not
exclusively in India, Giri’s home country. The
chapters originated in diverse forms. Some
started life as organizational evaluations for
non-governmental organizations, such as Action
Aid, involved with preventing the involuntary
resettlement of tribals in Orissa. Other chapters
derive from visits made to different parts of the
world as part of Giri’s dialogic project. Chapter
7, ‘Pee for free with dignity’, for example,
concerns a stay with the Open Door Community
in Atlanta that supports homeless
Afro-Americans living on the streets.
In each chapter, Giri brings centre-stage the
lives and ideas of the individuals working to
transform society for greater equity and social
justice and describes and reflects on their
commentaries concerning their understanding of
what they are doing and their reflections on the
spiritual, ethical, and political context and
outcomes of their actions and the contradictions
arising from these. Referring to Tolstoy’s
comparison of life as a winding river, he writes:
A critical appreciation of life is meant to
hold our hands when we swim so that we
are not drowned, even when running
against the stream and we are not
drowned by the waves of power, ego and
our own success. The flow of life is
sustained by the wave of permanent
criticism when critics and actors hold each
other’s hands as friends (p. 86).
This book should be read in bits and pieces,
opened at any page and used to stimulate an
internal dialogue and process of spiritual and
moral reflection. The book is like Tolstoy’s river,
one wandering backwards and forwards across a
broad plain in what Giri refers to as ‘continued
journey of action, reflection and interpretation’
(p. 28). Thus, the benchmark for the reviewer is
whether the book encourages the reader to
partake in that journey. While Giri’s purpose and
method of dialogic encounter are valuable, his
discursive style of writing is difficult and leaves
the reader ignorant about Sri Aurobindo, who
appears to be the biggest influence on Giri’s
spiritual development.
More reworking should have been done with
some of the chapters, particularly those which
appeared to be the original consultancy reports
with little evidence of any change having been
made to them, something that would have
helped make this a more coherent and
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748 Book reviews
theoretically interesting book. There is a jarring
dissonance between these reports, on the one
hand, and the inclusion of a learned piece on
social movement theory, on the other hand. Giri
stresses that the book is in the tradition of
carrying out dialogues between practitioners/
activists and scholars, but as author he could
have better facilitated that dialogue rather than
leave to the reader the work of making sense
of it.
Rosalind Eyben Institute of Development Studies,
University of Sussex
Goodridge, Janet. Rhythm and timing of
movement in performance: drama, dance and
ceremony. 304 pp., illus., bibliogr. London,
Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 1999.
£17.95 (paper)
‘You are standing in the wrong rhythm!’, theatre
director Bronislav Stanislavski is reputed to have
told an actor during rehearsal (quoted on p. 111).
This statement encapsulates the significance of
rhythm in our lives: from the biological to the
socially and culturally mediated in daily actions;
and in the communal experiences of ritual,
ceremony, and theatre. To be in the wrong
rhythm is to be out of kilter. To be in the right
rhythm is to be part of – entrained with –
something greater than oneself. And to be
self-aware of the effectiveness and possibilities of
timing is to permit innovation, creativity, and
individuality.
Janet Goodridge’s Rhythm and timing of
movement in performance is a clearly written and
enjoyable explication of how rhythm produces
effects that can be said to ‘work’. As such it is an
impressive inventory of the forms of different
rhythm used in a range of social(ized) settings –
from Merce Cunningham and John Cage’s
reliance on ‘chance’ in performance, to Isadora
Duncan’s affinity for the ‘natural rhythms’ of the
ocean; from the fast heart-beat and
trance-inducing rhythms of house music in
raves, to the trembling rhythms of the Shakers.
This in itself affirms the significance(s) of rhythm
and timing in creating and shaping contexts and
experiences.
The book is structured into three sections.
The first of these outlines a range of ‘ideas and
theories’ that have sought to describe and
explain the types and roles of rhythm in what
we might think of as ‘movement events’. These
include a consideration of the inner
physiological rhythms associated with healthy
functioning of the body, and the ways in which
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rhythmic percussive sounds thus can alter states
of perception by affecting these rhythms – a
phenomenon exploited everywhere by people to
produce trance states and ecstatic experiences.
The significance of time is also reviewed as, for
example, in the importance of the correct timing
of ceremonial events, or the subtleties of timing
to produce understood or shocking effects in
theatrical performances. This section also
provides an intriguing romp through the ways
in which people have attempted to capture
movement in two-dimensional representations,
from rock art paintings of healing trance-dance
practices in southern Africa, to the highly
abstract and formalized notation system of
movement analyst Rudolf Laban.
The remaining two sections of the book
provide a review of methodologies in the
practice of movement observation, including a
detailed application of these techniques from
Goodridge’s personal study and practice of
Tai Ji, and completing with three richly
descriptive and diverse case studies: Yaqui Easter
ceremonies in Arizona and Mexico, rhythm and
timing in Maring life in Papua New Guinea, and
the trooping of the colour in the UK. These
constitute a rich resource for any student of
dance events seeking ways to structure an
exploration of movement events and practices.
Illustrations are used throughout the book to
great effect, enticing the reader to engage with
the range of examples and ideas elaborated in
the text. It might also be noted, however, that
the stasis of these two-dimensional
representations somehow also serves to
highlight the disjuncture that perhaps cannot
be avoided in attempts to convey non-verbal
movement practices and experiences in the
written (and academic) word.
The book’s impressive detail and impact is
somehow lessened by its limited engagement
with the perceptions and experiences of those
affected by these many and varied rhythms: the
performers, the dancers, the participants of a
ritual, the spectators. I kept wondering what the
movements people were engaging in felt like;
what the doing of the dances produced for the
dancers. Indeed, chapter 9, where Goodridge
speaks from her own embodied experiences of
the sensations produced by her study and
practice of Tai Ji, is where the meaning(s) of
movement begin(s) to come alive.
A related aspect of this is the lack of mention
of the possible politics of dance and rhythm; or
even a biopolitics, to use Foucault’s term. For
instance, the author omits what perhaps was the
most startling of innovations regarding rhythm

in performance in modern Western theatre,
namely the 1913 Paris performance by the
Diaghelev Ballet Russes of The rite of spring,
choreographed by Nijinsky to Stravinsky’s
astonishingly radical score. The combination of
its dense and intricate rhythms, its sacrificial
subject-matter, and the discarding of turn-out
and pointe work in the choreography heralded a
violent artistic revolution which was not limited
to ballet. As depicted in Modris Ekstein’s
powerful book Rites of spring: the Great War and
the birth of the modern age (1990), this event –
and not least the revolutionary rhythms of its
score – was politically and culturally significant,
signalling the end of established European
hierarchies and the certainties of the nineteenth
century, and pushing Europe, via the First World
War, into the social challenges of the modern
era. In Goodridge’s text The rite of spring receives
a couple of mentions, but these are incidental
notes that surprisingly make no mention of the
rhythmic revolution that this performance
represented and embodied.
Nevertheless, this text is itself a timely
intervention, particularly given a context where
options for the publication of dance research are
limited. It is extremely relevant to the practice of
social anthropology, a discipline which has at
times been rather caught up in a postmodern
privileging of verbal expression and written
language. As noted by anthropologist Allison
Jablonko, who in the 1960s worked extensively on
movement patterns of Maring people in Papua
New Guinea, ‘anthropology will have a big
breakthrough when movement classes ... [are]
offered to anthropology students so that their
learning will not be limited to verbal-mental
channels’ (p. 183). Goodridge’s text offers an
important and inspiring resource in this direction.
Sian Sullivan University of East Anglia
Gullestad, Marianne. Plausible prejudice.
375 pp., bibliogr. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget,
2006. Kr. 349 (cloth)
Marianne Gullestad is one of the leading
anthropologists in Scandinavia and an important
figure in the Norwegian media both as an author
and commentator on contemporary nationalism.
Gullestad is known for her work on domesticity,
nationalism, and gender, and this book
represents the latest in a series of collected essays
documenting large issues through detailed
ethnographic and literary work. The chapters
cover individualization, national identification,
sameness and difference, imagined kinship and
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self-image, as well as the decolonization of
anthropology and the role of anthropologists as
public commentators. All these themes are
brought to bear on the normalization of
prejudice, and racism in particular.
Most of the essays have previously been
published in Norwegian, and have attracted
wide public attention through media coverage.
When her collection Det Norske sett med nye øyne
(Norwegian through new eyes) was published in
2002, it was launched with a presentation of the
chapter on the controversy over the use of the
word ‘Neger’ (Negro) in the Norwegian media, a
version of which appears in Plausible prejudice.
The launch attracted a broad audience of
academics, journalists, civil servants, and
activists, and hit a raw nerve in Norwegian immi-
gration debates, predictably echoing debates in
the UK and USA about the use of the word
‘nigger’ by non-blacks (‘it’s political correctness
gone mad!’). It followed a very public spat
between Gullestad and stand-up comic and
newspaper commentator Shabana Rehman on
the question of immigration and ‘integration’, a
fierce and vituperative exchange relayed through
the popular national press. Gullestad keeps
Rehman in her sights in Plausible prejudice,
unintimidated by the crass accusations of
liberalism and conservatism flung at her in
Rehman’s regular tabloid columns. Rehman is
too good a target to miss, being wildly
outspoken, attracting masses of media attention,
and serving simultaneously as a convenient
cipher for a crude positioning of nationalist
debates. Rehman, a Norwegian whose parents
migrated from Pakistan, famously posed naked
for a tabloid centrefold, body-painted in a
Norwegian flag. A cruder display of calculated
nationalism would be hard to find, and Gullestad
describes the episode in her introductory chapter
in accessible analytical terms.
As Hylland Eriksen has commented,
academics often come off badly in media
debates, whose pace rushes ahead of considered
argument, and the careful analytical response to
such debates reaches a much diminished
audience, yet Norwegian academics have
sometimes produced their most timely and
accessible work in this way. Aud Talle’s response
to a media scare about female genital mutilation
(Om kvinnelig omskjering) offered a beautifully
measured response to barely concealed
prejudice, and is referred to by Gullestad. For
Gullestad, a career exploring Norwegian
ethnography, nationalism, and concomitant
racism is reflected in a didactic ambition to
counter prejudice through education. By
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stripping away the veneer of logic which lends
plausibility to racism, she seeks to undermine its
persuasive attraction.
What is remarkable for British anthropologists
is probably the extent of media attention to
these books, and to the work and words of
anthropologists in general, in comparison to the
virtual invisibility of anthropologists in the British
media. Gullestad will be unlikely to attain the
same response from a British press more
interested in economists and political scientists,
yet her work deserves a wide readership in
Britain across the social sciences. She writes
clearly and accessibly, without sacrificing
analytical sophistication, and although
Norwegian immigration politics can sometimes
appear provincial to world-weary British
sociologists and anthropologists of ethnicity,
their apparent simplicity lends a clear focus to
complex questions. As Gullestad argues, many
social scientists see Scandinavia as peripheral,
neither metropolitan nor ‘interesting’ as a field,
yet the impossibility of clear separation between
small disciplines and the political influence of
both qualitative and quantitative social scientists
contribute to a much more public presence of
academics, from which Gullestad argues that
lessons may be learned for a wider audience. For
some, the predominance of Scandinavian
references may be unfamiliar and mostly
inaccessible (for reasons of language alone), but
Gullestad’s use of a few key international
authors ensures that her work is locatable in
broader intellectual debates about race and
ethnicity, as well as sociology and anthropology
more generally, and demonstrates the value of
exploring less commonly cited literature.
Gullestad is in no doubt that current
concepts of culture and ethnicity are
race-thinking re-covered, and this alone ought to
spark debate, being clearly defined in contrast to
other Norwegian anthropologists’ interpretations
of this approach. For those teaching introductory
courses on ‘culture’, the introduction alone is a
wonderful spark to imaginative discussion, while
the other essays are ripe fodder for more
sophisticated discussion.
Simone Abram University of Sheffield
Gup ta, Dipank ar (ed.). Caste in question:
identity or hierarchy? xxi, 255 pp., bibliogrs.
London, New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2004.
Rs 480 (cloth)
In the first edition of the journal Contributions to
Indian Sociology in 1957, Louis Dumont and David
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) , -
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Pocock famously asserted their view that ‘India is
one’. By this they meant that despite caste,
regional, and language differences, certain values
and structures had pan-Indian power. They firmly
believed that a pan-Indian ideological whole
could not be understood by studying different
castes in different places in a piecemeal fashion.
This collection challenges the assumption of the
holism of Indian society, and demonstrates that
there is great value in understanding the
phenomenology of caste in its local setting.
That the ideology of caste consists of a single
hierarchy governed by the principles of purity
and pollution is most effectively challenged by
Jodhka and Cort, who write on Punjabi Sikhs and
Gujarati Jains, respectively. They show how
dominant and powerful groups in parts of India
either ignore or reject a Brahminical theory of
caste hierarchy. Jains and others in Gujarat place
economic values over those of purity. Even when
purity is considered, Jain concepts of purity are
valued higher than Brahminical ones. Cort also
stresses the importance of looking at the local
context of caste, and of seeing it as a dynamic
concept. Factors such as whether urban residence
is valued over rural life also play a part in
generating a particular hierarchy, which may
itself change over time. In a similar vein, Jodhka
asks that we look at caste ‘not merely as a
religious or ideological phenomenon, but also
give equal importance to the historically evolved
structures of social relations and the political
economy of a given region that sustain and
reproduce caste in everyday life’ (p. 167). This
focuses our attention on how changing
economic relations, particularly decreasing
agricultural interdependence, between castes
may affect the way in which castes previously
deemed low may be able to assert their equality
through the power of separation, a point also
made by Karanth.
Several chapters (those by Michelutti, Jodhka,
and Narayan) trace the historical production
of particular caste identities through the
establishment of caste associations. While these
are essential in demonstrating the creation of
valorized identities, a consequence is that caste as
a category is naturalized at the level of analysis.
This is a problem evident in most of the chapters
in the collection. In an effort to give marginalized
groups in society some sort of agency by
describing the creation of a ‘strong caste
identity’, some important avenues of inquiry are
effectively closed off. What about the differences
within a ‘caste’, and what power relations and
struggles do the creation and propagation of
caste histories mask? Narayan seems to be

particularly uncritical in this respect, even though
his chapters shows how caste histories are being
mobilized for particular party political ends.
This collection tells us that any grand
theory of caste will result in a muddle. In his
introduction, for instance, Gupta claims that the
terms ‘low caste’ or ‘middle caste’ have little or
no meaning (p. xiii). Most castes, even those
traditionally reckoned to be low, give themselves
a value equal, if not superior, to other castes.
Michelutti shows how the Yadavs of northern
India claim that as descendents of the god
Krishna they are natural democrats and
politicians, and thus uniquely well equipped, by
virtue of their caste, to take the reins of
government. And this is not just idle tea-stall
chatter: the chapter demonstrates how the level
of Yadav political activism outstrips those of other
castes. (See also Michelutti’s article in this issue of
JRAI.)
Yet many of the chapters (particularly those
by Agrawal and Chowdhry) also explicitly and
implicitly inform us that when it comes to
marriage, caste appears at its least ambiguous
and amorphous. Kinship, then, is the hardcore of
caste: caste is what tells you whom you may
marry, and whom you may not. Despite what
groups such as the Bedia say about their Rajput
descent and caste affiliation, their marriage
choices are limited to those who identify as Bedia
themselves, as Agrawal expertly shows. There is
no reason why the study of caste should limit
itself to the assertion that each caste has its own
identity yet still places castes in hierarchical
relationships to one another. If separation is the
key, as many of the chapters suggest, then caste
endogamy needs a phenomenological
explanation too. The holism of Indian society
surely exists in this attitude to marriage and who
one’s kin can be. Perhaps one can still have a
grand theory of caste if seen through the lens of
kinship.
Amit Desai London School of Economics
and Political Science
Kreager, Philip & Elisabeth
Schröder-Butterfill. Ageing without children:
European and Asian perspectives. xii, 276 pp.,
maps, tables, bibliogrs. Oxford, New York:
Berghahn Books, 2005. £36.50 (cloth)
There is a lot of talk these days about population
ageing – the shift in a nation’s population
towards greater ages. This process is occurring in
most nations around the globe and especially
dramatically in many countries of Asia and
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Europe, which have seen fertility levels decline
towards or below replacement, and life
expectancy markedly lengthened, bringing about
significant changes in the balance of generations.
A related topic that has received relatively scant
attention is that of older persons without
children. Childless elderly have always existed
and form an important and interesting group,
and in many regions their numbers are rising
along with population ageing. The rich collection
of essays in this volume examines childlessness
among the elderly as a significant social
phenomenon in societies across Asia and Europe.
For the authors, the topic provides an
illuminating lens via which to explore complex
and diverse meanings, values, and practices
pertaining to ageing, families, personhoods, and
the significant demographic shifts under way
around the world.
The chapters contained in the volume,
produced primarily by social anthropologists and
demographers, arose from a Fertility and
Reproduction Studies Group seminar held in 2001
at Oxford University. Although these scholars had
not originally focused their research on ageing
without children, they drew from their quite
extensive earlier ethnographic and demographic
fieldwork to pull together revealing qualitative
and quantitative data on the topic. There are
seven ethnographic chapters, focusing on West
Sumatra (Edi Indrizal), South India (Penny
Vera-Sanso), rural East Java (Elisabeth
Schröder-Butterfill), urban East Java (Ruly
Marianti), British Pakistanis (Alison Shaw), East
Anglia and Normandy (Judith Okely), and Greece
(Violetta Hionidou). Two further chapters provide
an introductory overview (by Philip Kreager) and
an examination of broad demographic changes
in Europe and their implications for future family
support for older people (by Maria Evandrou and
Jane Falkingham).
Those who are ‘ageing without children’ in
this volume include both elders who have no
children (due to the infertility or single marital
status of the elders, or to child mortality) and
those who are ‘de facto’ childless, that is, with
little or no contact with their children (due to
factors such as national or transnational labour
migration, or intergenerational conflicts). In
almost all societies, children are viewed as an
important form of support and of meaningful
sociality for older persons, and so those without
children can face serious material, social, and/or
emotional problems.
Several interesting themes emerge across the
essays. One is the intricate and varied ways in
which people cross-culturally conceive of
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intergenerational relationships. Are adult children
morally obligated to support their parents? If so,
do primarily daughters take on this role, or sons,
or first-born sons, or daughters-in-law?
Alternatively, is it considered normal and ideal for
elder parents and adult children to live
independently? Or, is it the role of the state, or of
private or social institutions (such as retirement
homes or mosques), to support elders in need?
In the Asian societies examined here, some
form of intergenerational reciprocity is widely
expected. In matrilineal societies, such as the
Minangkabau of West Sumatra, it is normally a
person’s daughters or sister’s daughters who
provide the most support in late life (though in
rural West Sumatra the proportion of elderly
without daughters has recently risen to near
25 per cent) (p. 56). In patrilineal India, it is
expected that sons and daughters-in-law will
provide financial and practical support for their
elderly parents (although in practice such
support can be intermittent or negligible). In
Western Europe, even before the industrial
revolution, it was normal and valued for elders
and adult children to live quite independently.
Evandrou and Falkingham find, however, that the
proportion of elderly living alone in Europe is on
the rise: currently, over one-third of people aged
65 and over live alone in Britain, and it is likely
that this will rise to around two-fifths by 2020
(p. 195).
Elders without children, the authors find,
engage in a variety of strategies to make their
lives viable, including adopting, moving into
elder residences, working into their senior years,
and turning to charities. Although government
support for the elderly is as yet limited in most
developing countries, the trend is on the rise,
with most contemporary nations proclaiming
that some form of welfare system for the aged is
a modern necessity.
As a collection of rich case studies, the book
does not concentrate on theory-building or
engagement with a wider body of
anthropological literature. However, for those
interested in the anthropology, sociology, and
demography of ageing, the volume will provide
a welcome read and source of enlightening data.
Sarah Lamb Brandeis University
Moore, Sally Falk (ed.). Law and
anthropology: a reader. xii, 371 pp., bibliogrs.
Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. £60.00
(cloth), £19.99 (paper)
This work forms part of a series of readers in the
subdisciplines of anthropology. According to the
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publisher the purpose of such readers is to
provide ‘a selection of classic readings together
with contemporary works that underscore the
artificiality of subdisciplinary definitions and
point students, researchers, and general readers
in the new directions in which anthropology is
moving.’
Sally Falk Moore responded to this challenge
by a very brief introduction of three pages
followed by a division of the reader into three
parts: the first entitled ‘Early themes that
reappear in new forms’, the second ‘The early
classics of legal ethnography’, and the third,
‘Present thematic approaches’. These parts are of
unequal length, the first two forming together
one-third of the book and the last the other
two-thirds, divided into sections on property,
identity, rules inside and outside formal law, ‘the
large scale’, and ‘law and the future’. This very
last subsection of part III, composed of Moore’s
review article published in 2001, ‘Certainties
undone: fifty turbulent years of legal
anthropology, 1949–1999’ (JRAI, 7: 1, 2001),
serves as a conclusion.
In some fifty pages, part I attempts both to
highlight themes from what one can only term a
Western canon (Plato/Augustine/Aquinas,
Montesquieu, Maine, Morgan, Marx, Durkheim,
Weber) and to provide short snippets from more
recent work that addresses the older themes.
How well this structure could work
pedagogically is unclear. With two of the
themes/authors (Plato/Augustine/Aquinas and
Maine), no continuous text from the author/s is
reproduced beyond short quotations cited in
Moore’s introduction to the subsection; in the
case of Morgan, no new writing on the
problems he raised is given. Likewise, whereas in
some subsections anthropologists are seen as
offering the ‘new forms’, in others it is social
thinkers (Foucault, Habermas). To make sense of
such juxtapositions would require some
background from the reader. Overall, the first
part nowhere considers whether there were
relevant traditions of reflection outside the West
on the nature of law and society. Hence, and
strangely for an anthropologist, part I may serve
to reproduce in the minds of the students and
general readers targeted by the series the image
of theory as a purely Western prerogative.
Part II enjoys a single introduction by Moore
followed by short selections (three to four pages
in length) from the major works of Malinowski,
Schapera, Gluckman, Bohannan, and Pospisil; it
is closed by a one-page conclusion. The focus is
on explaining the nature of ethnographic work
on law, but the introduction to part III where

contemporary thematic approaches are
presented makes clear that for Moore today’s
data are very different from ‘the classical days
when anthropologists were observing the
cultures of colonial subjects’. In short, the
fundamental structure of the book moves from
the themes of the ‘Western canon’ to study of
‘colonial subjects’ to analysis of modern literate
legal complexity and plurality. That theory
existed in literate traditions outside ‘the West’ or
that legal orders in today’s world are not
necessarily best viewed as post-colonial are not
questions permitted by the structure of Moore’s
reader.
Again in part III no article save that by Moore
herself, which forms the conclusion, is
reproduced in its entirety; rather the flow of the
analysis of different authors is chopped apart by
Moore’s introductions to each subsection and to
each article. The subsections contain a fine
selection of contemporary work but the whole
comes across as without guiding argument. It is
unclear whether it would not have been better
to have had seven or eight articles in full rather
than fifteen ‘tasters’ plus multiple introductions.
It thus comes as a relief to read in full the
excellent concluding piece by Moore.
These reservations aside, Moore knows the
field well and her selection includes fine work
by Coombe, Cohen, Ruffini, and Bowen on
struggles over property, by Clifford,
Darian-Smith, Griffiths, and Wilson on identity,
by Merry, Winn, Coutin, and Gilboy on norms
inside and outside law, and by Eriksen, Snyder,
and Nader on ‘the large scale’. Moore
emphasizes the complex historical and legal
contextualization of such contemporary work; at
other points she notes the political tensions
inherent in the objects of study. Yet some of the
most problematic ‘definitions’ of the
subdiscipline – its relation to legal scholarship,
to policy debate, and its position within
anthropology as a whole – remain unaddressed.
Thus, the reader may find its place as an
introduction for students and general readers
but is unlikely to challenge researchers.
Martha Mundy London School of Economics and
Political Science
Pasquaretta, Paul. Gambling and survival in
native North America. xviii, 202 pp., bibliogr.
Tucson: Univ. Arizona Press, 2003. r40.00
(cloth)
This book is a welcome addition to the
burgeoning field of literature that considers
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Indian gaming. Its most valuable contribution is
that it draws upon a variety of data in order to
answer complex questions about the
‘Indianness’ of gaming and whether the
involvement of groups such as the Pequots of
southeastern Connecticut in commercial gaming
can be seen as a form of resistance. It is
unfortunate that Gambling and survival predates
a number of widely read books by journalists
including Jeff Benedict and Brett Duval Fromson
that present the identity claims of the Pequot as
more or less instrumental (and sometimes
corrupt). It would have been interesting if
Pasquaretta had been able to engage with these
arguments.
The book is divided into three parts. The first
re-examines the history of the Pequot War of
1636-7 using Puritan war chronicles and
nineteenth-century frontier romances. This part
has been criticized in a review by Michael Leroy
Oberg. The second part of the book uses
historical and contemporary Pequot advocacy
texts to examine moves towards
self-determination and the struggle for national
and regional recognition of tribal and individual
identity, and draws upon Gerald Vizenor’s
concept of ‘crossbloods’, put forward in 1990.
Part three is perhaps of most obvious interest
to anthropologists, since it discusses tension
within the Native American community produced
by the introduction of high-stakes reservation
gambling in the 1980s. Here Pasquaretta
investigates the highly controversial subject of
gaming within a particular social and historical
context, the Mohawk community of Akwesasne.
Unfortunately, the chapter is based on secondary
sources. Where individual voices occasionally
emerge, as of Leonard Prescott, former chairman
of the National Indian Gambling Association,
who is quoted from a television programme, the
value of an ethnographic approach to these
important questions becomes even more
obvious, and there is a sense that this was a
missed opportunity. The final chapter considers
the gambling motif in several Native American
novels.
Linking together these three section is an
overarching argument that Anglo-Indian
relations may be usefully understood through
the metaphor of gambling. Although
Pasquaretta offers an upbeat conclusion, that
Native Americans have learned to play the game
well despite their overwhelming political and
economic disadvantages, it may be
inappropriate to employ a metaphor that evokes
play and entertainment in order to understand a
history that is, as Pasquaretta would be the first
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754 Book reviews
to argue, characterized by violence and
inequality. In gambling, unless the game is
rigged, the chances of winning are equal for
each participant, something that cannot be said
of the Anglo-Indian encounter. Furthermore, the
rewards of a successful gamble usually outstrip
mere survival. And most profoundly, a gamble,
conventionally understood, is freely undertaken.
To what extent can Anglo-Indian relations be
interpreted as a gamble when Native Americans
had no choice but to enter into them, under
distinctly unequal terms? This argument is
employed somewhat unevenly throughout the
text in order to pull together what seems to be a
group of otherwise poorly integrated essays. The
short epilogue reveals Pasquaretta’s intentions,
but unfortunately they are unfulfilled. His book
will not, for example, help to understand the
future of Indian gaming, or the future of
indigenous–colonial relations, although these
are both important issues. The most valuable
contribution of the book is to explore gambling
metaphors and ideas of chance and risk within
Native American literature. The argument that
high-stakes gaming can offer a form of resistance
for Native Americans is a vexed one, and
warrants further investigation. Local newspapers
and television reports from states where Indian
gaming is growing suggest that identity claims
will remain a source of tension within and
between groups of Native Americans and the
wider community. It remains to be seen how an
anthropological approach to these issues might
shed light on these important dynamics. In this
regard, Jessica Cattelino’s book about the Florida
Seminole is eagerly anticipated.
Rebecca Cassidy Goldsmiths College
Puri, Rajindr a K. Deadly dances in the
Bornean rainforest: hunting knowledge of the
Penan Benalui. vii, 408 pp., maps, figs, tables,
bibliogr. Leiden: KITLV Press, 2005. €35.00
(paper)
Bourdieu, Bloch, and Ingold, among others,
have stressed the importance of tacit knowledge
in the practical engagement of people with local
environments. As Ingold argued, this knowledge
emerges in the course of long-term
apprenticeship with the outcome that the
experienced person is ultimately embedded in
the complex social and ecological fabric of
which he or she is a part and which he or she
has contributed to building.
Ethnographers working with people who
engage directly with ‘natural’ environments will
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© Royal Anthropological Institute 
appreciate that it is easier to write of such
matters than to live them. In Deadly dances in the
Bornean rainforest, Rajindra Puri writes from his
own experience as apprentice hunter to Penan
Banalui of East Kalimantan. A series of journal
extracts that introduce each chapter reveal his
passage from early ignorance and physical
awkwardness to greater acceptance and
understanding of the forest, the animals, and his
hunting companions, and the emotional charge
that came when he killed his first pig.
Two other themes recur throughout this
book. The first concerns the flexibility that
characterizes ways in which hunter-gatherers
engage with local environments and the
ever-intruding modern world. Penan move back
and forth between village and forest living,
between gardening and hunting, between
subsistence and trade, and between less or more
engagement with the paraphernalia and political
impositions of modern times. This is a theme
that has been well theorized by Bird David, who
has argued that, irrespective of the particularities
of the present, hunting by some rainforest-
dwelling people is always evident. Which
brings me to Puri’s third theme. He argues that,
among the Penan Benalui, the performance of
hunting gives expression to core values of
freedom and autonomy and, for this reason,
persists in a politico-historical context where
it is often actively discouraged or challenged
by the temptations of more materialistic
alternatives.
This book brings together an abundance of
data gathered during and following Puri’s
doctoral research in the early 1990s. Chapters 2
to 4 trace the movement of Penan Benalui from
Sarawak to Kalimantan in the late 1800s; provide
details of the local landscape by reference to
weather, geomorphology, vegetation, and
animal diversity; summarize the traditional
economic system; and report changes that have
occurred with increased sedentism, the advent
of Christianity, formal education, and
monetization. They present both outsider and
insider categorizations to show the complexity in
space and time of the environment which
hunters must come to know if they are to be
successful.
Chapters 5 and 6 draw on the preceding
material to explore Penan hunting in terms of
techniques used, success rates, scheduling,
knowledge, and performance. In the latter
chapter, through detailed exploration of five
modes of hunting, Puri reveals the intimate
relationship between the performance of hunters
and the knowledge – environmental, ecological,

technical, social, ritual, and mystical – they bring
to bear on the quest. Here, too, he writes of
ways in which children learn what must be
known to become hunters. Hunting may be with
blowpipes or with dogs; as solitary or as
communal ventures, sometimes with Dayak
companions. In some circumstances, taboos that
deflect disruptive animal spirits are observed,
and the capabilities of hunting dogs are divined
when they are pups. A specialized technique in
which hunters lure pigs to suitable killing sites is,
perhaps more than any other, aptly imagined as
a dance that may end in death: the hunters
mimic the sounds and behaviour of macaques.
The art is in deception. Hunters can smell pigs
from afar; pigs are, perhaps, even more attuned
to hunters. Success requires that the pig comes
to within a few metres of the hunter. Through
this chapter, Penan hunters emerge as deeply
engaged with the environment and with one
another. The knowledge that they bring to bear
on this engagement bespeaks the relations that
constitute an ecology of both action and mind.
The book is, perhaps, overwhelmed by the
data of early chapters and concluding
appendices. The presentation is insufficiently
distanced from the substantial doctoral thesis
that was its origin. Indeed, Puri’s intended
primary themes of engagement, flexibility and
persistence, and the explicit and implicit
knowledge that underlies these, are somewhat
lost in the mass of empirical information
presented. While chapter 6 stands out as an
important contribution to the anthropology of
hunting, the book would have benefited from
greater engagement with theoretical insights
that have consolidated since the time when the
research was done.
Peter D. Dwyer University of Melbourne
Richards, Paul (ed.). No peace no war: an
anthropology of contemporary armed conflicts. x,
214 pp., map, bibliogrs. Oxford: James Currey,
2005. £45.00 (cloth), £16.95 (paper)
Discussions of conflict in the developing world
have been centre-stage in the social sciences for
several years now. Due in part to a
ground-breaking quantitative analysis of civil
wars by the Oxford economists Paul Collier and
Anke Hoeffler from 1998 and also to the
continuation of civil conflict in the developing
world despite the end of the Cold War, much ink
has been spilt on various contemporary conflicts
in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. With a focus
on delineating the relationships between various
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causal factors and the onset and continuation of
civil wars, this bulge in research has drawn in
large numbers of economists and
quantitative-minded political scientists. As the
editor of this volume, Paul Richards, correctly
notes, some of this scholarship has done a good
job at confirming earlier ethnographic work but
at a much broader level.
However, there is still a sense in which much
of this recent work on civil conflict has been
based too much on desk-work rather than
fieldwork, and has largely failed to engage with
– or even cite – ethnographic studies of civil
wars. This book is thus aimed to fill this gap, by
drawing upon ten ethnographic case studies
across four continents. The emphasis of the
book, as Richards spells out in the introduction,
is not only to provide detailed studies of
individual conflicts, but also to contextualize war
as merely ‘one social project among many’
(p. 3). More specifically, the goal is ‘to locate
war within the precise social contexts from
which it springs’ (p. 4), and interrogate the
differences between war and peace as they are
normally understood.
Several of the chapters do a very good job at
addressing these issues within a specific context.
Ivana Maček’s semi-autobiographical discussion
of the Bosnian war did an excellent job at
understanding how war in an abstract context –
whether through ‘playing war’ as a child or
watching television of the conflict from Sweden –
is radically different from living in the midst of a
conflict. Many informants in Sarajevo who had
previously watched the war in Croatia on their
televisions initially agreed with Maček that ‘wars
happen elsewhere, to other people’ (p. 65), but
claimed to understand what they had been
watching only once the war had arrived at their
homes. Similarly, Sverker Finnström’s Acholi
informants discuss the ongoing conflict in
northern Uganda as not only a war but also a
situation of pervasive violence, which ‘will
increasingly infest the wider surroundings of the
living and the dead, and even future generations’
(p. 103). Rather than being a conflict between the
rebel Lord’s Resistance Army and the Ugandan
government, it is clear that many Acholi view
themselves as ‘living with bad surroundings’, due
in part to their continued confinement to
internally displaced people’s camps and the
geopolitical connection with the ‘war on terror.’
Other chapters address related issues of
post-war reconstruction and reconciliation, for
instance Fithen and Richard’s discussion of
demobilization in Sierra Leone and Mats Utas’s
chapter on the problems of reintegrating youth in
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Liberia. But far too many of the chapters are
tangential to the book’s theme: Björn Lindgren’s
analysis of the recreation of ethnicity in
post-independence Zimbabwe is fascinating, as is
Åsa Dahlström’s chapter on the Tibetan diasporic
community in India, but neither has much to do
with civil conflict as discussed in the Bosnian or
Ugandan contexts. Chapters on the Khmer Rouge
genocide (by Jan Ovesen) and the Guatemalan
civil war (Staffan Löfving) are similarly well
written but devote far too much time to
critiquing other literature rather than digging into
the empirical task at hand. One can always
empathize with editors of such volumes in their
attempts to keep authors from veering off on
tangential debates, but one would have hoped
that Richards could have cracked his whip a bit
more.
One final criticism is that many of the essays
in the book appear quite dated, indicative of the
long time between the book’s impetus in 1997
and its 2005 publication. I assume this delay was
tied up with the death of one of the book’s
contributors and its original co-editor, Bernhard
Helander, to whom the book is dedicated.
However, it would have been good to
compensate for this gap by encouraging more of
the authors to add epilogues (as Utas did with
his chapter on Liberia).
Despite its shortcomings, this book at least
goes some way towards addressing the
important task of using ethnographies to put
‘war’ into broader social contexts, and, while
not the final word on the subject, is none the
less commendable for its efforts.
Elliott Green London School of Economics and
Political Science
Sciama, Lidia D. A Venetian island:
environment, history and change in Burano. xxii,
250 pp., maps, tables, figs, illus., bibliogr.
Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books, 2003.
£50.00 (cloth)
In recent years, anthropologists have come to
treat the concept of ‘place’ rather cautiously. A
growing literature adopts a critical take on what
Augé has termed the ‘semi-fantasies’ sustaining
indigenous sense of place and the ‘semi-
illusions’ that underpin anthropological models
(Non-places, 1995). At the same time, as Taussig’s
work on mimesis reminds us, the insight that
places are ‘made up’ does not explain how or
why people continue to act as if they have a
material existence, and are both real and
important (Mimesis and alterity, 1993).
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With its assumption of the narrative
conventions of the classic monograph, including
chapters on environment, history, stratification,
religion, and kinship, Sciama’s absorbing study
of the Venetian island of Burano appears at first
sight to mark a return to the model of the
fine-grained ethnography, in which the spatial
ontology of ‘the field’ remains largely
unproblematized. Yet, as Sciama herself explains
in the introduction, her adoption of a
‘conventional style’ was itself a conscious
response to the challenges of engaging with a
social reality that was ‘changing, elusive, and
sometimes difficult to grasp’ (p. xvii). The
qualities Sciama sets out to capture mirror the
shifting dual morphology of Burano’s lagoon
location, between delta and sea, six miles from
the historic centre of Venice, and held in
‘dynamic equilibrium’ by the action of tides,
rivers, and human intervention. The tensions
underlying the ‘constant state of transition’
(p. 3) in which the people of Burano find
themselves are evident not only in their
enduring dependence on their lagoon
environment, with its pattern of interdependent
neighbouring islands, but also in the vagaries of
distant power centres to whom the Buranelli
have recourse in their attempts to manage the
effects of rising levels of pollution in the lagoon,
the chronic housing shortage, and the lack of
social and medical facilities on the island.
In the chapters on history, religion, and
kinship, Sciama is able to demonstrate, through
a combination of meticulous ethnographic
‘thick’ description and ingenious use of archival
material, how Buranelli identity and attachment
to place is formed in specific social contexts.
Neglected by formal historical accounts, which
have focused on the splendours of imperial
Venice, the history of Burano emerges in the
minutes of council meetings, the reports of
municipal authorities such as the Office of
Hygiene, the last will and testament of the local
priest, and the myths, memories, anecdotes, and
speculations about local origins in which the
islanders like to indulge. It is in confronting and
reworking discourses of the insignificance,
poverty, and backwardness of Burano that the
people build their sense of their actual
significance and the rights due to them. A
peripheral location at the centre of its own
world, Burano is founded, to a great extent, on
its awareness of its peripherality, combined with
a refusal to accept it.
This dialectical tension is at the heart of
Sciama’s ethnography of Burano, and forms the
basis for renewed critical engagement with some

of the hardy perennials of the anthropology of
the Mediterranean, such as urban/rural
typologies, and ‘honour and shame’ debates.
Whilst recent trends have been to dismiss the
discussion of honour and shame as sterile
cultural essentialism, Sciama’s contribution is to
explore the use and meaning of these terms for
actors in specific settings – in this case, primarily,
through the institutionalization of lace-making,
and attempts to re-establish the lace-making
school on Burano. For me, this was one of the
most fascinating sections of Sciama’s book: not
only because she vividly demonstrates, by
tracing the historic development of the craft,
how the organization of the production and
distribution of this luxury item combined rigid
surveillance and control over the lace-makers
with the reinforcement of Church teaching on
virtue and poverty; but also because of the
parallels with lace production elsewhere, such as
the embroidery known as Lefkara lace, for which
Cyprus is famous. This opens up fascinating
potential for comparative analysis.
There are too many proofreading errors, such
as the reference on page 7 to Austrian rule
lasting from 1915 to 1966, and numerous
wrongly dated bibliographic references. On a
less trivial level, Sciama’s use of the
ethnographic present is rather problematic given
that her book is based primarily on research
carried out during the 1980s. Although the
historic depth of some of the archival material
and the specificity of certain events is
acknowledged through the use of the past
tense, the flattening of the intervening period
between fieldwork in the 1980s and publication
in 2003, compounded by the lack of dates on
the photographs and illustrations that follow
each chapter, leave the reader feeling curiously
adrift – ironic, in a book that otherwise succeeds
so well in anchoring the essence of a place.
Julie Scott London Metropolitan University
Tatz, Colin. Aboriginal suicide is different: a
portrait of life and self-destruction (2nd edition).
xxv, 191 pp., tables, bibliogr. Canberra:
Aboriginal Studies Press, 2005. $34.95 (paper)
Aboriginal suicide is the second edition of a book
first published in 2001, distinguished by a new
introduction reviewing some of the key concepts
used in the analysis and recording parallels
found with the situation among the Inuit. Tatz
argues that the rapid increase in and current
prevalence of suicide among young indigenous
Australians cannot be explained through a
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medical model of causation. Studies of mental
health in traditional Aboriginal communities in
the 1960s and 1970s found few or no cases of
mental ill-health, yet Aboriginal suicide rates rose
rapidly during the 1980s. To explain this trend,
Tatz argues, one must recognize the historical
processes through which the indigenous way of
life has been destroyed, ‘resulting in a loss of
structure, cohesion and meaning’. Tatz draws
parallels with the plight of other indigenous
communities in New Zealand and Brazil and
argues: ‘Because Aboriginal suicide has unique
social and political contexts ... it must be seen as
a distinct phenomenon’.
As the hallmark of a particular social group,
Aboriginal suicide must, Tatz argues, be treated
as a social phenomenon, not an individual one.
Hanging has become a peculiarly Aboriginal way
of committing suicide; Western Samoans in New
Zealand prefer (if that is the right verb) drinking
the weed killer paraquat. Suicide has acquired a
rich symbolism evoking capital punishment,
unmet needs, and, ultimately, solidarity with
previous suicides. The common convention that
people commit suicide while their sanity is
temporarily impaired is a legal fiction, created by
lawyers to exonerate those who killed
themselves during the time when suicide was
legally treated as a crime. Psychiatrists construed
this fiction as fact, creating the concept of
suicidal ‘depression’ that could be treated by
drugs. But why, asks Tatz, do we not consider
suicide on a par with deaths from dangerous
driving?
During the 1980s and 1990s, the social
organization of many Aboriginal communities
rapidly disintegrated. Tatz regards the sudden
introduction of self-government, without
adequate training, as a contributory cause.
(Myers and Howard would argue more strongly
that local self-government creates irresolvable
conflicts with traditional Aboriginal social
obligations.) By the end of the 1990s, the
Aboriginal suicide rate was between two and five
times that in the non-Aboriginal population.
Unemployment, low esteem, drug addiction,
and so on, are contributing factors to suicide in
both populations but were much more
widespread in the indigenous community.
Aboriginal housing, legal aid, and medical
services have improved. Aboriginal art and
sporting achievements are widely admired.
Yet living conditions in many Aboriginal
communities are wretched. Proportionately,
Aboriginal people are the most arrested,
imprisoned, and convicted group in Australian
society. Government policy towards Aborigines
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758 Book reviews
reveals, in Tatz’s assessment, both insecurity and
ambivalence. Land rights are under attack. The
parenting skills of many were undermined by
adoption and enforced boarding school
education yet the government refuses to
acknowledge the consequences. All these factors
lead to a sense of alienation and frustration and
many are caused by deliberate government
policies.
There are many similarities between Tatz’s
analysis and Durkheim’s pioneering sociological
approach to suicide. Although Tatz
acknowledges Durkheim, his discussion of
Durkheim’s theory is rather superficial. In
particular, Tatz’s analysis lacks Durkheim’s
attempt to integrate individual and social forces
into a single explanation. None the less, Tatz’s
single-minded emphasis on the devastating
consequences of social disintegration in
Aboriginal communities, of which suicide is one
of several terrible consequences, is effective and
timely. To be perturbed, stressed, aggressive,
and delinquent under such conditions is, he
argues, normal rather than pathological.
Tatz concludes by suggesting several ways in
which suicide rates might be reduced, including
the rejection of hypotheses that indigenous
people are genetically predisposed to suicide or
mental ill-health. Personal empowerment,
literacy training, the highlighting of positive
Aboriginal role models, and the anchoring of
contemporary communities in an Aboriginal
history would alleviate a sense of helplessness.
Community sentencing avoids the removal of
young offenders into an alien environment and
local employment projects provide people with
more meaningful lives.
Robert Layton University of Durham
Vigh, Henrik. Navigating terrains of war: youth
and soldiering in Guinea-Bissau. ix, 258 pp.,
bibliogr. Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books,
2006. £45.00 (cloth) £15.00 (paper)
In 2006 the new European Association of Social
Anthropologists network PACSA (Peace and
Conflict Studies in Anthropology) was
inaugurated with the aim to bring together
anthropologists working on issues related to
armed conflict and peace-building. For the
increasingly numerous anthropologists with this
speciality, Henrik Vigh’s book on young
combatants in the war in Guinea-Bissau should
be compulsory reading material. In a region
troubled with armed conflict during the 1990s –
the conflicts in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and the
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Ivory Coast immediately come to mind – Vigh
focuses on a war much overshadowed by these,
if not forgotten. Moreover, he deals with a
relatively small group of combatants (about
1,000 fighters in total) – from an irregular militia
in the conflict the so-called ‘Aguentas.’ The
Aguentas were young Guineans, predominately
from Bissau and other urban areas, who
supported the government in the war, and thus
eventually found themselves on the losing side.
Despite (or perhaps because of) this
particular focus, the concepts used by Vigh to
understand and explain the Aguentas through
periods of armed conflict are highly relevant to
the study of young combatants throughout the
region. Central to his argument is the idea of
‘social navigation’, and youthful combatants as
social navigators. Social navigation refers to ‘the
complex political praxis of moving towards a
goal while at the same time being moved by a
socio-political environment’ (p. 236), termed
dubriagem by Vigh’s interlocutors. Here, the
socio-political environment is characterized by a
general and continuing decline, by conflict and
occasional eruptions of warfare. Obviously, to
navigate these muddy waters is not easy, and
the Aguentas have to live (beyond conflict) with
the wrong tactical decision of having joined the
losing side.
What if these young people had joined the
victorious junta forces? Vigh argues that
rebellions in West Africa seem to focus on
changing the internal power configuration,
rather than structures responsible for producing
widespread inequality and marginalization in the
first place (p. 69). In that case, those who fought
for the victorious junta now have the
opportunity to access a patrimonial network
with economic and political resources. However,
the majority of Guinean youth, and perhaps also
not a few who fought on the junta side, remain
locked into what Vigh terms ‘the social
moratorium of youth’. They are unable to realize
their social becoming – due to decades of
economic hardship and a continuing
gerontocratic control over resources (p. 96) –
and attain to social adulthood. The situation is
so severe that even entering a patrimonial
network on the lowest rungs – where little is
received and much invested by the client – is
almost impossible. It is only during wartime,
when patrons urgently need recruits to defend
their networks, that opportunities for new
entrants open up. So war (according to Vigh)
offers young people without patrons an
opportunity to escape the otherwise stifling
social moratorium (p. 112).

Guineans refer to the war as a Guerra di
hermonia – a brotherly war – because it was a
war not between opposing ideologies, but
rather between opponents competing over the
control of the country’s political networks.
Without a clearly constructed enemy (‘the
Other’) post-war reintegration and reconciliation
is in some respects easier. The Aguentas have not
been subject to violent repercussions on the part
of either the junta or the population in general.
Their social reintegration takes place through a
process of ‘generational re-categorization’ by
which young men and youth are reconstructed
as children (p. 221). In fact, very few Aguentas
were under-age, but this re-categorization as
‘child soldiers’ is possible because they were
seen as the weaker party. It is thus ironic that
young men who joined and navigated the war
in order to create a chance to become adults are
turned once again into children. This is a
contradiction on which the author might have
reflected further, since it suggests that war may
be a recurrent possibility within Guinea-Bissau,
and the region more generally.
But Vigh offers something important in
pointing out that there is a general perception
among the population that ‘war is like this’,
referring to ‘an understanding of the possibility
of violence as embedded in all agents ... with
the situation determining whether violence
becomes dominant as a social modality’ (p.
228). This situationalism is resisted by Western
supporters of war tribunals, in which attempts
to localize accountability and guilt are entirely
focused on the person standing trial. Anathema
to Western human rights lawyers, situationalism,
and a willingness to consider collective guilt,
may in fact turn out to highly significant
concepts in coping with contemporary African
conflicts.
Krijn Peters University of Wales, Swansea
Watson, James L. & Rubie S. Watson.
Village life in Hong Kong: politics, gender, and
ritual in the New Territories. xx, 490 pp., maps,
tables, figs, bibliogrs. Hong Kong: Chinese Univ.
Press, 2004. $45.00 (cloth)
This is a volume that deserves attention and
appreciation. It summarizes the achievements of
two world-class scholars. Their work covers a
remarkable range of topics and ethnographic
practices. Their passionate interest in local
life-ways and their devotion to the communities
studied stand in sharp contrast to a new
generation of ethnographies that stresses global
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fluidity. With sophistication and sensitivity, James
and Rubie Watson have captured a unique
epoch of cultural experiences in Hong Kong that
should not be forgotten, and they have
highlighted intellectual issues that mark a
significant phase in Chinese anthropology.
The volume is organized along several
themes. Included in the first, on village social
organization, are six chapters based on
ethnography conducted in Ha Tsuen and San Tin
of the New Territories during the 1960s and
1970s. In the tradition of Maurice Freedman,
whose lineage paradigm greatly influenced the
study of territorial communities in South China,
the Watsons write about lineage-making,
adoption, affinal relations, and class
differentiations within and between corporate
kin groups. The chapters reach beyond kinship
and decent principles to show how local
residents improvised to meet the changing
material environments of colonial Hong Kong.
The intricate ways agnatic bonds intertwined
with social divisions among affines, tenants, and
class statuses are illustrated by rich ethnographic
details. Tapping anthropological notions of food
as codes that reflect hierarchy, inclusion and
exclusion, James Watson’s treatment of sihk puhn
as a consciously maintained form of low cuisine
to maintain village unity has deliciously defied
convention.
The second theme focuses on gender.
Gender complicated class and kin in the
domestic arrangements among wives,
concubines, and maids. The Watsons were
engaged with a generation of scholars who
viewed the experience of Chinese women,
especially in marriage, as lonely and difficult.
Brides were uprooted and transferred to their
husbands’ household and treated as potential
intruders, albeit necessary for the production of
offspring. The lack of any independent identity
for the women was highlighted in ‘The named
and the nameless’, and the tension of
disjuncture was vividly expressed in bridal
laments. I have wondered about the empirical
poignancy of such a predicament. Among the
New Territories villages, a history of
intermarriage must have allowed substantial
mediating presence of the bride’s natal kin in
the same communities. Natal kin might continue
to relate to the brides as sisters, cousins, nieces,
and aunts. Would the rituals of marking
disjuncture in marriage mask fluid realities in
village life? Moreover, as shown in the Watsons’
work and in others’, South China was known for
delayed-transfer marriage customs, sisterhoods,
and other gendered solidarities that stood in
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sharp contrast to Confucian ideals. Would a
deeper historical contextualization be useful for
understanding gender dynamics in the New
Territories? Rather than taking the Confucian
norms as given and local customs as deviations
or resistance, should one consider a long history
of mutual cultural constitution when indigenous
populations confronted and embraced late
imperial state-making?
The chapters grouped under the third theme,
‘religion, ritual, and symbolism’, have partially
answered the above questions. ‘Standardizing
the gods’ is a significant piece that illuminates
Chinese anthropology’s central concern in
cultural diversity and political integration.
Tracing the ascendance of a popular regional
cult (Tian Hou, Empress of Heaven) through
official recognition, one also detected the
downward percolation of the imperial metaphor.
The growing repertoire of ritual practices and
their negotiated meanings allowed local actors
maximum discursive agency to earn their
respective places in late imperial China. The
politics and power play behind ‘orthopraxy’
could be intense. ‘Why, one might well ask, do
hundreds of grown men care so much about a
few ounces of pork?’ (Rubie Watson, p. 350).
Rituals confirmed identity, which came with
entitlements, and in an expanding frontier of the
empire, lineage membership had meant official
recognition of settlement rights, tenancy, the use
of communal resources, the securing of
contracts, education, and upward mobility.
Maurice Freedman made the New Territories
visible among anthropologists. The Watsons, in
his tradition, brought fieldwork to bear on the
general problems which arose from his views.
They helped set the stage for the cultural
understanding of South China as a conscious
regional construct and for the ethnographic
history that followed.
Helen Siu Yale University
Weller, Robert P. Discovering nature:
globalization and environmental culture in China
and Taiwan. viii, 189 pp., illus., bibliogr.
Cambridge, New York: Cambridge Univ. Press,
2006. £40.00 (cloth), £15.99 (paper)
In contemporary China and Taiwan elements of
nature sometimes creep into social life in
apparently bizarre forms: a fish cooked yet
twitching and squirming on a banquet platter;
strangely shaped or patterned pebbles collected
from nature reserves and placed on ancestral
altars; much larger rocks resembling human
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) , -
© Royal Anthropological Institute 
figures adorning a leisure water park as the
Daoist Eight Immortals and flanking a giant
whale in concrete. On the other hand,
environmentalist actions occasionally take the
form of ‘garbage wars’ (fights over landfills),
deities speaking through spirit mediums against
industrial developments, and Buddhist nuns and
laypeople advocating the protection of not only
the environment but the ‘spiritual environment’
as well.
Combining intellectual history and
multi-sited ethnography, this rich and accessible
book reveals the intricate connections between
diverse conceptions of nature, on the one
hand, and environmental (not always
environmentalist) practices by individuals,
groups, and the state in the West, Japan, and
particularly the Chinese world, on the other.
The Chinese world here is represented by China
and Taiwan as two intimately related yet
distinct entities because of their different
historical trajectories for over a century. Weller
is to be commended for being one of very few
anthropologists today whose work engages
both China and Taiwan in explicit and focused
comparisons, while so-called Taiwan studies (a
new sub-field dominated by concerns with
up-to-date political events) and China studies
(by default focusing on the PRC) go
increasingly separate ways, risking mutual
impoverishment. In fact, Weller’s comparative
pairing is not only between China and Taiwan
but also between Western (Euro-American) and
Chinese, Western and Japanese models of
environmental practices, tracing points of
contact and forces of influence through ripples
of globalization. The globalization model Weller
explicates is a multi-centred and multi-nodal
one, with Japan serving as a crucial regional
centre, re-interpreter and exporter of
environmental ideas and practices, and Taiwan
as one of the more eager recipients of Japanese
models because, among other reasons, of
former colonial links with Japan.
The book can be read as consisting of two
substantive parts. In the first part (chapters 2-3)
Weller provides a concise history of
environmental ideas in the Chinese world from
ancient times to today. He tells us how, despite
the Daoist anthropocosmic resonance and
Buddhist compassion-towards-all-living-things
models of nature, it was the Confucian
technocratic and utilitarian model that prevailed
in traditional Chinese attitudes towards, and
actions upon, the environment. This model was
further strengthened by the import of
post-Enlightenment European conceptions of

humanity-over-nature, culminating in the
environmentally disastrous high-socialist and
high-modernist state-led industrialization
schemes. It was only in the 1980s and 1990s that
environmentalist concerns over pollution,
biodiversity, and sustainable development began
to affect policies and environmental behaviour in
China and Taiwan. The second part of the book
(chapters 4-6) examines global-local
environmental culture interactions through three
aspects: nature tourism, environmental protests,
and environmental policy implementation.
Ethnographically rich and complexly argued,
these chapters explore, among other topics, the
varieties of national parks, nature reserves, and
nature parks that, despite their original
intentions, spawn what Weller calls ‘mélange
tourism’ (where nature tourism meets traditional
forms of religious pilgrimage or/and fun-centred
family outings); the contrasting styles of
community-based environmentalist protests and
institutionalized environmentalist practices
organized by NGOs and Buddhist volunteer
groups; and the slippage and dissonance
between official environmentalist
understandings and policies and local priorities
and realities.
While the impact of Western Enlightenment
and Romanticist views on nature on modern
Chinese and Taiwanese environmental practice
has been profound, will Chinese models of
human-nature relationship (both traditional and
modern) have any significant impact on Western
or global environmental practices in the future?
Extending from his earlier argument that Chinese
style civil organizations are ‘alternate’ to Western
models of civil society (Alternate civilities:
democracy and culture in China and Taiwan,
1999), Weller proposes that we de-provincialize
our understanding of conceptions of nature and
environmentalism but take care not to fall into
the trap of exoticizing some imagined Oriental
wisdoms of nature. Indeed, one of the most
important lessons in this book is just how
unpredictable and interesting things can get
when the already diverse environmental
ideologies and cultures in different societies
(Euro-American, Chinese, or any other)
encounter one another in a thoroughly
globalized and marketized world. This book
will appeal to scholars and students (and
perhaps practitioners) in the fields of
globalization, Asian studies, environmental
studies, environmental planning, political
ecology, and tourism studies.
Adam Yuet Chau School of Oriental and African
Studies
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History and archaeology
Brumfiel, Elizabeth M. (ed.). Production and
power at Postclassic Xaltocan. 389 pp., maps,
tables, figs, illus., bibliogr. Pittsburgh: Univ.
Pittsburgh, 2005. $42.00 (paper)
Small states or city-states dominated the political
landscape of central Mexico after the break-up of
the Teotihuacan state, c.AD 650. Xaltocan is an
island in the now-desiccated Lake Xaltocan in
the northwestern Basin of Mexico that by the
Middle Postclassic (c.AD 1150-1350), if not earlier,
had become the capital of an Otomí city-state. In
1395 neighbouring Cuauhtitlan, aided by Mexica
allies, defeated Xaltocan, and in the early 1400s
it was incorporated into the Aztec empire and
became a tributary subject of both Tenochtitlan
and Texcoco.
Colonial and modern occupation obscure the
archaeological remains of most Aztec city-state
capitals in the Basin. Although Xaltocan has
been continuously occupied since the
Postclassic, except in the central part of the
modern town, much of pre-Hispanic Xaltocan is
accessible to archaeologists. Elizabeth Brumfiel
has conducted fieldwork there for nearly two
decades, and this volume (in both Spanish and
English) discusses findings of her early work at
Xaltocan, intensive surface collections in 1987,
and excavation of nineteen test units in 1990-1,
along with small ethno-archaeological (Roush)
and ethno-historical (Hicks) studies.
Geo-archaeology conducted by Frederick
et al. determined that Xaltocan island is a
cultural feature with some deposits extending to
depths of five metres. Xaltocan’s stratigraphy
and abundant amounts of Aztec I ceramics make
it a critical site to address important issues of
Postclassic chronology, another focus of this
project. Brumfiel’s excavations found deposits
containing exclusively Aztec I pottery below
layers with Aztec I and Aztec II and Aztec II
ceramics. Brumfiel used multi-dimensional
scaling to propose a four-phase site chronology
also employed by other contributors to the
volume. She assigned dates to the ceramic
phases using calibrated radiocarbon intercepts;
this is incorrect and the statistical error ranges
should have been employed. Thus her
suggestion that Aztec I was in use by AD 900
requires additional dates that it is hoped will be
forthcoming from on-going excavations. The
fourth or final phase that she dated to 1430-1521
is defined by excavation units (Table 4.3) that
contain both Aztec III and Aztec IV Black/Orange.
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However, the deposit that yielded a radiocarbon
intercept of 1415 also included a Colonial
figurine. Aztec IV Black/Orange was mostly, if
not entirely, made after the Spanish conquest,
thus Phase IV continues into the Early Colonial
period, c.1550/1600.
Brumfiel’s theoretical interests in agency and
social change from a bottom-up perspective
have guided the project. In the volume she and
her colleagues consider how structural changes
during the Postclassic, growth of tribute systems,
markets, and increasing regional population
played out on the ground at smaller centres like
Xaltocan. In her view, resource use is as much
an extension of politics as of economics and
ecology.
In chapter 1 Brumfiel lays out a model of
economic change and resource use for
Xaltocan’s development as an autonomous
regional centre and then as an imperial subject.
Subsequent chapters use data from the surface
collections and excavations to explore the model
by examining the history of occupation
(Chimonas), domestic architecture (Espejel), and
patterns of resource use from specialized studies
of ceramics (Hodge and Neff), chipped stone
(Millhauser), and botanical (McClung de Tapia
and Martínez Yrizar) and faunal (Valdez Azúa
and Rodríguez Galicia) remains. In the
concluding chapter, Brumfiel draws together
the findings to evaluate her model.
Brumfiel considers how shifting intensities in
the use of lacustrine and agricultural resources
linked to broader economic and political change.
Xaltocan maintained its autonomy from Tula to
the north, but the abundance of Chalco
polychrome and Aztec I pottery suggests strong
affiliations with the southern Basin. Although
Xaltocan made its own Aztec I pottery, it also
imported it from the western and southern
Basin. By the Middle Postclassic, Xaltocan was a
small regional centre that produced Black &
White/Red pottery, prismatic obsidian blades,
maguey and cotton fibres (and presumably
cloth), made salt using a new boiled-brine
technique, received tribute from hinterland
subjects, and imported all its Aztec II Black/
Orange serving ware. Brumfiel detects a sharp
decline in Xaltocan’s standard of living in Phase
IV that she attributes to its subjugation first by
Cuauhtitlan and then by the Triple Alliance.
Since Phase IV includes deposits from
occupations that continued after 1519, some
of the changes may also be due to Spanish
imperialism. In addition to the economic model
proposed by Brumfiel, the volume provides
valuable descriptive details (except for a site
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map) that expand our knowledge of Postclassic
centres.
Deborah L. Nichols Dartmouth College
Johnson, Kim K.P., Susan J. Torntore &
Joanne B. Eicher (eds). Fashion foundations:
early writings on fashion and dress. ix, 156 pp.,
figs, tables, illus., bibliogrs. Oxford, New York:
Berg Publishers, 2003. £50.00 (cloth), £15.99
(paper)
The last fifteen years has seen the academic
study of fashion become an established area of
study within a range of disciplines. As a result
of its previous marginalization from much
mainstream academia, it has now become a rite
of passage for the writer of fashion to outline
why it is important for academics to research
fashion. These reiterative assertions as to why
fashion matters are now so common within the
recent literature that they leave the reader with
the impression that interest in fashion is a
new one. Save for the mention of Simmel and
Veblen, it is as if academic interest in fashion
begins with Elizabeth Wilson’s book Adorned in
dreams: fashion in modernity in 1985. In light of
this, Johnson, Torntore, and Eicher’s edited
collection is a welcome reminder of the
long-standing interest in fashion, with excerpts
dating back to Montaigne in 1575, through to
Blumer in 1939. The edited collection places
familiar extracts from writers such as Simmel
alongside less well-known ones, which serves to
offer a rethinking of the key writers in the history
of fashion theory.
The articles are organized into three themes
which reflect current concerns over theorizing
dress and fashion, namely dressing the body, the
relationship to identity, and fashion and change.
Within each theme, the readings come from a
range of perspectives: philosophy, psychology,
social Darwinism, economic sociology, and
anthropology, amongst others. The juxtaposition
of different perspectives, which include both
academic analyses and the more practically
orientated concerns of dress and health
reformers, offers a thought-provoking
consideration of issues that are central to an
understanding of dress, fashion, and the body.
As these readings were written over a time-span
of 360 years, they highlight the recurrence of
certain issues and concerns over dress, such
as why fashion changes and the link it has to
individuality and selfhood. This emphasis upon
enduring theoretical and empirical questions is
not at the expense of the historical contexts. At

the back of the book a historical chronology of
writers is provided, which includes a summary
of the book from which the reading is taken.
Each article is therefore positioned in its
particular context, alongside other key writings
which are not included in the collection. This
chronology is particularly useful in re-situating
‘classic’ writers within the context of lesser
known writings to understand how they
emerge.
The first section of the book, entitled
‘Dressing the body’, addresses the issues of why
human beings dress, the physical experiences of
dressing the body, and debates over health
reform. The readings are interdisciplinary in their
scope, including writings on dress by eminent
anthropologists such as Radcliffe-Brown,
Benedict, and Crawley. The inclusion of
anthropology within the interdisciplinary
dialogue around dress and fashion is a welcome
one. There is a tendency amongst contemporary
fashion theorists to separate anthropology out as
being solely concerned with dress, culture, and
tradition. However, what Eicher et al.’s edited
collection demonstrates is that in fact the
cross-cultural literature addresses many issues
central to an understanding of fashion, the
body, and identity, such as Crawley’s (1912)
original discussion of dress as a ‘second skin’.
Crawley’s discussion of dress as an extension
of personality, as a communicative device, is
extended in Radcliffe-Brown’s (1922) discussion
of adornment amongst the Andaman Islanders
in terms of the relationship between the
individual and the social. The links between
dress and fashion are made even more explicitly
by Benedict (1931) as she discusses fashion
change. She accounts for fashion change in
terms of the changes in the wider cultural order,
which forms an important redress to the
emphasis in much fashion history which locates
change in the innovation of the genius of the
individual designer.
The second section, ‘Fashioning identity’,
draws together readings which address the
relationship that dress has to identity. In keeping
with the rest of the collection, the readings are
not separated out into ‘fashion’ readings and
‘dress’ readings, which would imply a similar
separation of disciplines. Instead, the bringing
together of writings by psychologists, dress
reformers, philosophers, and anthropologists
allows an understanding of clothing as situated
in cultural contexts, whether these are the
Andaman Islands or nineteenth-century America
(Fry 1856). It similarly allows the possibility of
thinking about clothing within a fashion context
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as a material artefact that makes sense of the
body. The historical depth of the readings allows
for the origins of particular ideas to be
understood: for example, Morton (1926), in
recognizing the role that clothing has in
transforming the person, and in the construction
of personality, is incredibly prescient in pointing
to the vocation of the clothing adviser, given the
role that the style adviser and wardrobe
consultant has in the current fashion climate.
The third section, ‘The F word’, looks at
why fashion changes from a range of different
perspectives: in terms of evolutionary theory
(George Darwin, 1872; Spencer, 1896), wider
cultural change (Simmel, 1904), the role of
economics in these changes (Smith, 1759;
Veblen, 1894) and in terms of individual
psychology (de Young, 1934). The juxtaposition
of a range of opposing, yet also complementary,
perspectives is typical of the approach of this
collection; it is not seeking to offer a definitive
answer to the question it poses, but instead
provokes new questions. It goes beyond the
basic expectation of a book in the ‘foundations’
of a discipline that provides merely an
understanding of the roots of current thought,
and instead, as it is organized through current
thematic concerns, allows a rethinking of the
issues that govern current fashion theory in a
manner that is generally interdisciplinary.
Sophie Woodward University College for the
Creative Arts/Nottingham Trent University
Kalb, Don & Herman Tak (eds). Critical
junctions: anthropology and history beyond the
cultural turn. viii, 185 pp., bibliogrs. Oxford, New
York: Berghahn Books, 2005. £42.00 (cloth)
We seem to have entered the era of a new genre
– the snarky obituary. Perhaps it began in 2004
with the New York Times entry for Jacques
Derrida that summarized his accomplishments
as apologizing for Nazis and hawking a murky
philosophy. Then there was Lionel Tiger’s
posthumous savaging of Clifford Geertz in the
Wall Street Journal. In March this year, Carlin
Romano took the trophy in this scavenger’s
bloodsport, characterizing Jean Baudrillard as a
‘screw-up’, and one of his best-known works as
‘that miserable little book’ in the 14 March
Chronicle for Higher Education.
The book here reviewed might be a long
form of academic obituary. The editors set
themselves the goal of nailing the coffin on ‘the
cultural turn’ in anthropology and history. To do
so, they make many straw men and stuff them
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inside. But this does not mean that the exercise
is without utility.
The volume has its beginnings some time
before 1996, when Don Kalb, Hans Marks, and
Herman Tak edited a special issue of Focaal –
European Journal of Anthropology with the title
‘Historical anthropology: the unwaged debate’
(no. 26/27). Follow-ups resulted in this 2005
edited volume of nine essays. All but one of the
contributors are anthropologists by training and
position, and all but one are located in European
or North American institutions.
Kalb and Tak’s introductory essay, ‘Critical
junctions – recapturing anthropology and
history’, comes across as somewhat dated,
getting bogged down in a 1980s debate about
disciplinary boundaries and setting up a false
opposition between analyses of meaning and
analyses of structural power. They move from
these abstract straw men to real ones, or at least
the effigies they create of some familiar figures
such as William Sewell, Clifford Geertz, Marshall
Sahlins, and Richard Biernacki.
In the substantive contributions, three
themes running through the volume emerge
more clearly: geography rather than culture as a
frame of analysis; the utility of attending
carefully to scale (complicating the local-global
rather than reducing the first as a microcosm or
margin of the second); and the possibilities of a
cultural Marxism that attends to the fissures
within class as well as local contingency. Eric
Wolf appears as a common ancestor linking the
authors in their emphasis on place over folk.
Otherwise, the essays parse out into two groups.
The first emphasizes questions of temporal and
spatial scale. The second group concentrates on
‘recasting class’ (from Kalb’s title).
In the first group, Don Handelman’s essay
makes some interesting methodological
observations with his ‘microhistorical
anthropology’ and ‘prospective perspective’,
suggesting that we slow the frames down to see
how the past, present, and imagined future
enter into different modes of explanation. Using
examples from Eastern European political
movements, Christian Giordano attends to
‘actualized histories’ rather than the more
narrow ‘invented traditions’. Hermann Rebel, the
only trained historian in the group, discusses the
limitations of historical narrative in explaining
perhaps the most significant event of the
twentieth century: ‘[T]he task of constructing
Holocaust narratives stretches [Hayden] White’s
possible emplotment models past their breaking
point’ (p. 73). Silverman and Gulliver’s
methodological reflection on the usefulness of
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the intensive small-scale study uses examples
from Famine-period Ireland.
The next three essays, by August Carbonella,
Don Kalb, and Patricia Musante, each offer a
subtle complication of class. Carbonella argues
that American Fordism worked in conjunction
with ‘localism’ to break apart larger labour union
networks of communication and collaboration.
Thus he warns against the temptation to set up
‘folk culture’ as resistant to modernity and
capital. Kalb’s piece shows the gender and
generational splinters within class that worked to
the advantage of the Philips Corporation in
industrial Holland. Musante shows how
indigenous politics and unionized labour became
opponents over land reform between the
Mexican Revolution and 1990s NAFTA.
Gerald Sider’s conclusion returns to the
obituary form, provocatively claiming that the
conjunction of anthropology and history
‘became a fad that is now fortunately coming to
an end’ (p. 168). He is particularly harsh with
mainstream anthropology and its Weberian
categories. He suggests that we treat culture,
kinship, and social organization not as templates
for living, but as sites of struggle, ‘constructed
as much within as against the chaos that power
routinely engenders’ (p. 174).
In sum, this volume bundles together some
very old questions in the intersection of
anthropology and history with some fresher
suggestions on how to frame analyses through
geography, scalar manipulation, and a
postmodern Marxism, but one must be willing
to see beyond some negative, boyish
grandstanding.
Shannon Lee Dawdy University of Chicago
Lewin, Roger. Human evolution: an illustrated
introduction (5th edition). 277 pp., maps, figs,
tables, illus., bibliogrs. Oxford, Malden, Mass.:
Blackwell Publishing, 2004. £19.99 (paper)
Roger Lewin is the author and co-author of
several textbooks which provide accessible and
informative introductions to human evolution
and related topics. This volume is the fifth
edition of a textbook which is geared towards
undergraduate students. The book is sectioned
in nine parts. The first two chapters introduce
novice readers to the historical development of
evolutionary thought, and the development of
human evolution and palaeo-anthropology as a
unique discipline. In chapters 3 and 4 Lewin
discusses phylogenies and parallel evolution
and continues to address natural selection, the

modern synthesis, macroevolution, and
population genetics. These key aspects are
covered in a brief and succinct manner and
provide the reader with the essential background
to evolutionary biology. The last two chapters in
the first section deal with the physical part of the
story of human evolution, changes in climate,
plate tectonics, sea-level fluctuations and
topography, which are of great relevance to
understanding patterns of speciation and
extinction.
In the second part of the book Lewin
introduces the reader to four essential aspects in
human evolution: dating methods, systematics,
taphonomy, and primate evolution. These
diverse topics are grouped in the same section
as they account for essential theoretical aspects
that underline any palaeo-anthropological study.
The third part focuses on the evolution of
changes in body and brain size and shape
and energy. It then moves on to address
co-operation and social organization in apes as a
possible proxy to the evolution of similar social
systems among our early hominin ancestors. The
final unit in this section groups these aspects
according to the three main models of early
hominins: primate models, phylogenetic models,
and behavioural ecology models.
The next four parts of the book follow the
classical hominid evolutionary chronology that
begins with the Australopithecines, and
continues to discuss the emergence of early
Homo, Homo erectus, the Neanderthals, and the
origins of anatomically modern humans. Lewin
skilfully incorporates topic-specific chapters to
highlight some of the key issues in human
evolution that are relevant to each specific epoch
and its hominid species. In part 4, which focuses
on the earliest apes and the origin of homi-
noidea, Lewin discusses the origin of bipedalism
and morphological evolution of jaws and teeth,
as these are the most relevant issues to this
specific period. Part 5 examines the evolution of
the Australopithecines and early Homo and it then
focuses on the debate on the phylogenetic
relations between the various species and on
early tool technologies. Part 6 deals with Homo
erectus, and with the corresponding evolution of
the Acheulean tool industries, and continues to
address hunting vs. scavenging and cutmarks.
Part 7 focuses on the Neanderthals, their demise,
and the origins and spread of anatomically
modern humans during the Last Glacial period.
Lewin chose to address the central issue of the
demise of the Neanderthals and the origins of
modern humans by dealing separately with the
anatomical evidence of differences between
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Neanderthals and modern humans, new
developments and findings in the fields of
molecular genetics and archaeological evidence.
This approach informs the reader about how
different methods may provide different evidence
which is often in disagreement, as in the case of
the lack of correspondence between the
morphological evidence of brain expansion and
the belated evolution of symbolic behaviour
particularly in Western Europe.
Part 8 outlines the evolution of
consciousness, symbolism, and art in the context
of the physiological evolution of the brain. A
special unit provides a brief account of
prehistoric art.
Lewin concludes with a focus on two of the
main historical events that occurred during the
late stages in our cultural and social evolution:
the colonization of the Americas and Australia
and the origins of agriculture. These are central
aspects and reflect major events in the long
course of hominid evolution.
Overall, the book offers a good but rather
brief introduction to all the major topics in
human evolution. This volume is therefore
particularly useful for first-year anthropology
and archaeology students and other
undergraduates who need a good, updated,
well-written introductory text on the topic. The
fifth edition has been thoroughly updated and
includes coverage of most of the latest
discoveries and incorporates new developments,
particularly in the field of molecular biology.
Unfortunately, the new edition does not cover
one of the most astonishing finds: the discovery
of the new species, Homo Floresiensis, on the
island of Flores. This discovery and the ways in
which it drastically challenges many of the more
orthodox views in palaeo-anthropology, remind
us how little we actually know about our
complex evolutionary history.
Ron Pinhasi Roehampton University
Lewis-Williams, David & David Pearce.
Inside the Neolithic mind: consciousness, cosmos
and the realm of the gods. 320 pp., maps, tables,
plates, figs, illus., bibliogr. London: Thames &
Hudson, 2005. £18.95 (cloth)
This book explores Neolithic conceptions of the
cosmos in the Near East, c.6500 BC and Britain,
Ireland, and Brittany, c.3000 BC. It argues that
these were manifested through art, architecture,
and ritual practices from the settlements at ’Ain
Ghazal and Çatal Höyük to the passage graves
at Newgrange and Knowth. It argues that
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similarities between these cosmologies are due
to the structures and effects of the embodied
human mind. The shared features of these
cosmologies include a tiered or tripartite cosmos
(e.g. underworld, earth, sky) and shamans or
other ritual specialists who may transcend the
planes of the cosmos during altered states of
consciousness.
The authors mould numerous studies of
Neolithic monuments and shamanic practices
into a clear and compelling synthesis on the
fundaments of Neolithic cosmology. The
discussions of the relationship between
cosmology and human interaction with animals,
plants, and places in the Near East are
fascinating. The role of relations with animals and
plants is unfortunately diminished in the second
half of the book, addressing northwest Europe. If
this was due to the authors’ focus on art and
architecture (there being few representations of
animals in megalithic art), then this lack should
have been explored as a significant difference
between the contexts in its own right. The
authors argue persuasively that similar cultural
ideas might have different material expressions,
but could say more on what effect different
cultural practices and material media have on
conceptions of the world. More could be said
about embodied experience, about what it was
like to live in that Neolithic cosmos. The book
does not discuss psychological states and
emotional experience like anxiety or loss, or the
relationship between memory and materiality.
Neolithic cosmology is interpreted from a small
number of selected sites and deposits.
As the authors acknowledge, the book takes
shape around a lacuna: the vast stretch of time
and space between Çatal Höyük and
Newgrange. The authors do not examine
cosmology in Neolithic central Europe. It is
unclear to what extent Lewis-Williams and
Pearce see the ‘Neolithic mind’ in northwest
Europe developing as a result of contact with
Neolithic things and practices, as a spreading
ideology originating in the Near East, and/or as a
pre-existing mindset which found new
expression in Neolithic media. They not only
compare Neolithic Near East and northern
Europe with one another, but with many other
cultural contexts where similar conceptions of a
tiered cosmos negotiated by religious
practitioners occur, and illustrate that certain
materials (e.g. quartz) are understood as special
in remarkably similar ways. The rich range of
insightful comparisons (including European late
Upper Palaeolithic cave art and Mayan religious
centres as well as ethnographic studies) makes
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the reader wonder about the nature of the
connection drawn between Çatal Höyük and
northern Europe. The fact that Lewis-Williams
and Pearce see the same features of this mindset
extending across the world and throughout the
human past suggests that the dimensions of the
‘Neolithic mind’ under study here are those
shared with many cultures, Neolithic or
otherwise. For instance, a tiered cosmos seems
influential throughout other periods of European
prehistory, such as the Scandinavian Bronze Age.
The extent to which the mindset under
discussion should be seen as specifically Neolithic
therefore requires further discussion.
In the preface the authors warn against
over-emphasis on cultural difference, and state
that ‘what we need is a method that will help us
to access knowledge about the universal
foundations of diversity’ (p. 9). The great
strength of the book lies in showing how certain
recurring cosmological principles are located in
the embodied human mind. The book does far
less to understand diversity. Lewis-Williams and
Pearce state that ‘[e]ach historical instance will be
a unique product of an interaction between
human neurology and culture’ (p. 46). Yet it is
unclear what they mean by culture, why differing
kinds of cosmologies exist, or why cultural
changes occurred at specific times. This begs
important questions. If domestication in the Near
East was lead by religious change, as they argue,
what brought about that change? If political
struggle brought about changes in the
monuments of the Boyne Valley, what was the
basis of that struggle? How might shifting from
using one type of monuments to others alter
people’s experiences and understandings of the
world? More could be said about the roles
different relations between humans, animals,
plants, and landscapes play in nesting cosmology
within specific spheres of activity. Lewis-Williams
and Pearce’s idea that a ‘consciousness contract’
and a ‘social contract’ frame belief, practice, and
experience is opaque, but on the whole this book
is a clearly written, provocative, and absorbing
read.
Chris Fowler Newcastle University
Roux, Valentine & Blandine Bril (eds).
Stone knapping: the necessary conditions for a
uniquely hominin behaviour. xi, 355 pp., figs,
tables, illus., bibliogrs. Cambridge: Macdonald
Institute Monographs, 2005. £35.00 (cloth)
The publication will occupy a prominent
location in my reference library. It was conceived

following a workshop by the same title held in
2001, so the information is current and cutting
edge. Though some chapters were difficult to
follow due to the complex content and technical
vocabulary, each chapter offered valuable
insights for anyone interested in the early origins
of stone tool technology.
This volume is organized into twenty-four
chapters organized into four parts. Part I
includes twelve chapters which address
tool-related activities, requisite skills, and
mechanics of tool-making both for human and
non-human primates. Part II contains seven
chapters that review skeletal/musculature and
neural requirements for toolmaking. Part III
includes four contemporary experimental
studies. Part IV includes the conclusion by the
volume editors. This volume is well organized
with papers arranged in logical groupings and
an obvious sequence. The editing is excellent,
the bibliographies are extensive, and illustrations
are included when appropriate and necessary.
Following the introduction by the volume
editors, chapter 2 by Pelegrin reviews the
variables required for percussion flaking. He
refutes that early flint-knapping was somehow
related to primate nut-cracking by distinguishing
between these two activities, which he defines as
‘simple’ and ‘elaborate’ methods. The nut-
cracking phenomenon is further discussed in
several other chapters in this volume. Chapter 3
by Roche provides detailed definitions of terms
used elsewhere in this volume. The detailed
discussion about patterned wear on
hammerstones is especially instructive. Chapters
4 by Bril, Roux, and Dietrich and Chapter 6 by
Roux and David may have fitted better near the
end of the volume, but these chapters could
also stand alone as seminal contributions. The
authors succinctly review the relationship
between knowledge of a knapping method and
skill in producing tools. The implications of this
are profound in the study of early tool
technologies. Nearly any discussion of ‘skill’ has
been highly subjective, though these chapters
provide some objective measures with potential
to be applied to other stone tool studies.
In chapter 5, by Biryukova et al., the authors
clearly differentiate flexible from inflexible arm
motions as reflected in end products. This essay
provides concise definitions and an objective
means to identify this variable from features of
stone tools. It is closely related to chapter 8 by
Ivanova, which describes the complex motions
of the arm during tool-making. The author’s
analysis indicates skilled tool-makers use much
more complex arm movements than do
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less-skilled tool-makers or primates. Chapter 7,
by Winton, discusses handaxe features, including
symmetry of form and regularity of flake pattern,
and provides analytical methods that could
easily be adapted to bifaces in general. The
author employs the comparison of several formal
variables on experimentally replicated handaxes
to determine an objective means of recognizing
tool-maker skill from replica handaxe attributes.
Chapter 9, by Smitsman, Cox, and Mongers,
offers a reminder that studies of the origins of
tool-making must also take into account the
dynamics of tool use. This relationship
necessitates a degree of planning, a concept
which is discussed in detail in several chapters in
this volume.
Chapter 10, by Foucart et al., is the first of
three chapters addressing the skills needed in
object manipulation tasks among non-human
primates. These authors describe the complex
motions employed during chimpanzee
nut-cracking. Records of these motions help
distinguish them from the motions required
during concoidal flaking. Chapter 11, by Byrne,
looks closely at hand dexterity, comparing this
feature in great apes and man. Using thumb and
finger motions required in the processing of
foods, the author describes the level of
two-handed co-ordination required for skilled
tool-making and concludes that this feature is
found only in hominids. The last chapter in this
section, by Cummins-Siebree and Fragaszy,
offers a different interpretation, proposing that
one species of monkey does indeed have the
necessary manual dexterity potentially to allow
tool-making. These authors suggest that though
Capuchin monkeys may have the requisite
manual abilities, nevertheless they lack the full
suite of skills shown by humans.
The next section includes three essays
addressing the physical requirements for
tool-making. Chapter 13, by Corbetta, specifically
reviews the requisite bi-manual dexterity. In
contrast to earlier chapters, the focus of this
chapter is on the relationship of bipedalism to
the co-ordination of both hands. The author
demonstrates that hand preference is critical to
tool-making and preference only becomes
evident once a modern infant’s posture becomes
fully upright. The author applies this reasoning
to the distinction in tool-making abilities of
Homo habilis and the Australopithecines. Chapter
14, by Holder, also concentrates on manual
dexterity. And, like the previous chapter, the
author reveals how handedness in primates is
more common in those species possessing a
stable posture. This chapter is a detailed
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summary of several years of fieldwork, providing
a robust analysis of the development of
handedness in primates. Handedness is also the
topic of chapter 15, by Steele and Uomini. In this
chapter, the fossil evidence for handedness is
reviewed, and the relative proportions of right-
vs. left-handed individuals from different time
periods are compared. The conclusions are that
the strong preference in handedness is a
relatively recent phenomenon.
The next four chapters examine interaction of
the brain and nervous system. Modern and fossil
skeletal evidence for handedness is detailed by
Marzke in chapter 16. The author suggests that
humans have few skeletal characteristics that are
unique enough in contrast to primates to
explain tool-making, but the combination of
several features may explain why humans are so
distinct in this capacity. In chapter 17, Maier
describes how thumb and forefinger
configuration in humans and other primates
contributes to a high degree of dexterity, though
this attribute is difficult to quantify so cannot be
the only condition of tool use. Chapter 18
describes studies by Stout, including one in
which a modern flint-knapper worked inside a
PET scanner so that brain functions during
tool-making could be examined. In this novel
study, it was shown that specific portions of the
brain are employed during tool-making
activities. The author speculates that complex
demands could have selected for larger brains.
Chapter 19 also considers the role of the brain in
tool-making. Jacobs, Bennis, and Roby-Brami
compare three-dimensional actions of patients
with brain disorders that prevent precise control
of tools. By comparing movements of limbs, the
authors conclude that being able to control the
location and movement of the end of a hammer
is more important than overall limb movement.
This essay contributes important methodology
useful to the understanding of the actual
mechanics of tool-making.
Chapter 20, by Bushnell, Sidman, and
Brugger, compares problem-solving skills of
chimpanzees with modern developing infants.
The authors note a change in how modern
infants learn at eight months of age. At this
time, they begin to rely on imitation which does
not require language skills, thus re-examining
the role of language in tool-making. Chapter 21,
by Lockman, complements the previous chapter
by examining the actual learning process evident
in children as it relates to tool use. The authors
contrast learning in chimpanzees with that in
humans, describing how chimp juveniles learn
by watching and imitating, whereas human
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juveniles are interactively taught by adults. This
presents an additional and intriguing reason for
advances in tool use beyond evolution in brain
capacity. In chapter 22, Stout provides an
ethnographic study of adze-makers in Indonesia.
The conclusion is that it is more difficult to
acquire the skills of tool-making than it is to
acquire the theoretical knowledge of the
process. Results also indicate that tool-making is
both social and technological, highlighting the
importance of the teaching process. The
observation that humans become proficient at
tool-making much later than apes may have
encouraged the technological evolution of tools
because of the increased opportunities for
instruction experienced by humans. The last
chapter in this section, by Marchant and
McGrew, clearly defines ‘percussion’ and breaks
it into six exclusive components. Numerous
cases of the use among mammals, including
chimpanzees, are reviewed. This chapter
provides a detailed analysis of nut-cracking in
Senegal, and the authors use these data to
propose a hypothetical progression of
percussion technological progression among
primates.
The final chapter, by Bril and Roux, the
volume editors, provides a detailed review of the
twenty-three contributions in this book. They
conclude by emphasizing the value of
employing a diversity of methodological and
theoretical approaches to the study of the
requirements for the manufacture and use of
stone tools.
James Woods College of Southern Idaho
Method and theory
Dumont, Louis (ed. & transl. Rober t
Parkin). Introduction to two theories of social
anthropology: descent groups and marriage
alliance. xxxiii, 110 pp., figs, illus., bibliogrs.
Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books, 2006.
£45.00 (cloth), £13.95 (paper)
It is remarkable that this book, published
originally in French in 1971, and later translated
into Spanish, took thirty-five years to cross the
Channel. It continues to provide an unsurpassed
and authoritative summary of descent theory,
and of the theory of marriage alliance, being
relevant not only to those interested in the study
of kinship, but also to those wishing to pursue

the history of social anthropology during the
twentieth century. It was translated by an
anthropologist who was aware of the potential
pitfalls of finding equivalents in English for the
technical terms cited in French (and vice versa).
Parkin provides an introduction that breaches
the divide between the initial appearance of the
book and its relevance for present-day readers in
English. En passant, he is overly categorical in
dismissing the relevance of descent in the
Amazon (p. xx). The editor delineates the figure
of the late Dumont as an author, and
contextualizes where this renowned
anthropologist stood in relation to British vs.
French anthropology.
Besides these more obvious merits of the
book, it has a further didactic potential for
students of anthropology, an unintended
consequence of the attempt to make sense of the
dialogue established between British and French
anthropologists in the mid-twentieth century.
Dumont demonstrates, though he does not
generally address the question explicitly, that
despite the possibility of communication
between speakers of different languages,
equivalent terms may sometimes be hard to find.
The English language is ambivalent about
whether or not affines are to be deemed relatives,
unlike parenté in French. Dumont explains that
there is no French equivalent to the English word
‘jural’, and he proposed the neologism ‘unifilia-
tion’ (p. 31) as a somewhat ungainly translation of
‘descent’ into French. In the light of this, it would
have been more appropriate to cite Dumont as
concluding that all kinship systems entail a
notion of filiation, rather than descent (p. 99).
Another conundrum is the translation into French
of ‘corporate groups’. Dumont (like Lévi-Strauss)
concludes that they correspond to what the
French designate as ‘personnes morales’, which
are translated by Parkin (like previous
anthropologists in Britain) as moral or jural
individuals (or persons) (p. xvi and passim), an
expression that sounds somewhat bizarre in
English. This dilemma is significant for
anthropologists because it demonstrates the
difficulty in establishing mutual understanding
between the English and the French, who are
direct neighbours whose destinies have long
been intertwined. The attempt to come to grips
with these problems in communication yields
food for thought, and should make us more
humble about glibly translating terms from more
‘exotic’ languages which share no historic roots
with our own.
Dumont is himself one of the most notable
French anthropologists of the twentieth
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century. He made a major contribution to the
understanding of hierarchy, besides having
demonstrated that in certain parts of India, and
elsewhere, affines may be inherited much in the
way that we think of our consanguineal
relatives. Dumont is thus characterized by an
intellect on a par with that of Lévi-Strauss,
enabling him to go beyond a mere exposition
of alliance theory, and its relation to the theory
of descent. He pays little attention to
Lévi-Strauss’s proposition that it was the incest
taboo that was initially responsible for having
generated society, an issue that defies
verification. Dumont focuses rather on the
variants of cross-cousin marriages, and the
implications of the global formulas of exchange
generated by them, one of the lasting
contributions of Lévi-Strauss’s development of
the structuralist method in anthropology.
Dumont’s pithy account of the two theories,
made available, belatedly, in a language
accessible to most of the world’s scholars, may
help to dispel the crass clichés levelled at
Lévi-Strauss of reducing women to objects of
transactions. And last but not least, in the advent
of the new reproductive technologies, and DNA
tests, that have resulted in a common-sense
exacerbation of the biological underpinning of
kinship, this book helps to redress the balance,
demonstrating the overriding socio-cultural
dimensions of kinship. This was an important
lesson of both French and the majority of British
anthropologists, consolidated during the course
of the twentieth century. What Dumont leaves
open to speculation is why the British have been
so obsessed with the manipulative powers of the
individual, whereas the French have been more
acutely aware of the fact that the individual is the
outcome of a historical process, and that groups
are the product of relations, rather than
substantive entities.
Vanessa Lea State University of Campinas
Ferr ar a, Nadia. Healing through art: ritualized
space and Cree identity. xiv, 167 pp., illus.,
bibliogr. London, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s
Univ. Press, 2005. £49.95 (cloth)
Healing through art is an exploration of the
therapeutic process of art therapy as it is applied
to Ferrara’s Cree patients. Ferrara examines the
way in which Cree myths and conceptualizations
of the self are brought out in the work of the
therapeutic encounter towards a healing of, in
particular, a fractured modern Cree self. Art
therapy emerged out of established
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psychotherapeutic practices as a counselling
modality which allows patients to explore the
meaning of the art that they produce. What
Ferrara has found in her extensive work with
Cree patients is that there is a strong resonance
between their art therapy sessions, their
relationship to the bush and bush activities, and
an ability to consolidate these activities with
therapeutic benefit. For many, says Ferrara, there
is a tension between the individual and collective
self such that ‘the Cree self is reciprocally
embedded in the individual, in nature (i.e. the
bush), and in the collective (i.e. the community),
and the source of tension and instability for
many Cree patients usually lies in integrating
[the three]’. Art therapy, argues Ferrara, assists in
the process of integration by allowing the
patient to build a new self in a ritualized space
where mythopoetic thought is highlighted
through art and its therapeutic interpretation.
The first three chapters of the book introduce
the reader to the Cree of Quebec, the primary
patient group for this art therapist, and set out
the fundamental structure of analysis and
healing modality, interlinked through Cree and
non-Cree myth and ritual. Ferrara presents the
Cree of Quebec through an overview of the
fairly extensive historical and contemporary
anthropological work in this area as well as
through her own travels into Cree communities.
She introduces the reader to the communication
styles and the social dynamics of her Cree
patients through her own engagement with
them. Chapter 4, ‘Cree mythopoetic thought’, is
an exploration of the way in which Cree
knowledge is experiential, inter-subjective and
rooted in mythical symbolism, especially in
relation to the connection between human,
animal, and spirit worlds. Chapter 5, ‘Ritualizing
space through art therapy’, highlights Ferrara’s
argument that the space of art therapy is
simultaneously ritualized and purposeful in that
it is liminal, transformative, and clinically
relevant. Ferrara further finds that her Cree
patients experience this space as ‘interanimative’
in that there is a connection between the art
therapy space, their own artwork, their moral
imaginations, and the landscapes, animals, and
animism that are so fundamental to Cree myths
and histories. Finally, in her conclusion, Ferrara
summarizes her study of art therapy as a
therapeutic exploration of the Cree self as ‘[t]he
sense of place experienced in both the bush
and art therapy sustains identity and provides
connections to a personal and collective
past while offering an emotional centre’
(p. 123).
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There is substantive value in her work with
Cree patients. Yet it is not clear who is her
audience. Art therapists are already familiar with
the treatment modalities but will gain additional
insights from Ferrara’s work with Cree patients.
Anthropologists may or may not be as interested
in the therapeutic processes of art therapy but
might find some interest in the way in which
Ferrara re-visions therapeutic notions of place
within the context of art therapy. Yet still, while
the study of ritual in a secular context is wholly
within the purview of anthropology, there is
not enough critical reflection as Ferrara
attempts to balance off this potentially diverse
readership.
Ferrara’s ‘ethnoprofiles’ (a mix between
clinical case study, ethnographic detail, and
personal reflections in vignette form) are
relevant but do not replace a sustained
ethnographic examination of the concepts
addressed in this book or, in particular, the social
networks and interactions in which her patients
live outside of the context of the clinical
encounter. For example, the space of art therapy
is presumed by Ferrara as a natural space of
ritual rather than an extraordinary, constructed
space of therapeutic intervention. In other
words, Ferrara does not reflect on the collapsing
of the space of ritual with clinical intervention
and hence misses an opportunity to engage
with a critical theoretical discussion of the
meaning of ritual in the contemporary context,
relying instead on traditional anthropological
tropes of place, myth, ritual, and some unsubtle,
and sometimes too simply construed, cultural
wholes as the sustaining elements of that
therapy. The clinical encounter is not only
ritualized as Ferrara describes, but also ritualized
in terms of the ways in which symbolic systems
work in the construction of the authenticity of
the clinical experience. Yet she does not explore
how the art therapy encounter can itself be
understood as an elaborate symbol system of
therapeutic ritual. Thus, while Ferrara relies so
heavily on Victor Turner’s classic symbol systems
and ritual play, she does so without any critical
reflection on the way in which ritual is enacted
in art therapy through the use of the
psychotherapeutic traditions of Western
biomedical practice by herself and her Cree
patients and thus does not examine the value or
limitations of symbolic anthropology in the way
in which she has produced this profile.
Finally, and, again, despite the points I raise
here, it is important to note Ferrara’s articulated
success as an art therapist, her deeply reflective
thoughtfulness with regard to the significance

of art therapy, her ability to meld therapeutic
practice and Cree knowledge systems, and, most
importantly, the value of her work for so many
members of the Cree communities.
Naomi Adelson York University
Lassiter, Luke Eric. The Chicago guide to
collaborative ethnography. xiv, 201 pp., bibliogr.
London, Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2005.
£8.50 (paper)
It seems that every generation of anthropologists
experiences an ethical crisis that beckons a
heated dialogue regarding the nature and
mission of the discipline. The most recent of
such crises regarding anthropological
‘interference’ in native affairs came to the
forefront with the publication of Patrick Tierney’s
Darkness in El Dorado (2000), which sparked a
spirited, if not fragmented, debate regarding the
extent to which anthropologists should engage
the publics with whom our research is
concerned. In The Chicago guide to collaborative
ethnography Lassiter consolidates this dialogue in
arguing for an ‘approach to ethnography that
deliberately and explicitly emphasizes
collaboration [with native consultants] at every
point in the ethnographic process without
veiling it – from project conceptualization, to
fieldwork, and especially, through the writing
process’ (p. 16, emphasis original). Accordingly,
Lassiter frames this argument with two
propositions: (1) that all ethnography is
‘collaborative’ to some extent, and (2) that,
admittedly, the holistic vision of collaborative
ethnography that he proposes here is not always
appropriate for all anthropological research
endeavours.
The book is divided into two parts, the first
more historiographical in tone, and the second
more praxis-orientated. In the first two chapters
Lassiter explores the concept and implications of
collaborative, or ‘reciprocal’, ethnography,
arguing that such an ethnographic practice must
challenge the metaphor of ‘reading over the
shoulders of natives’ to embrace native
consultants as ‘co-intellectuals’. By extension,
argues Lassiter, this epistemological shift often
forces the ethnographer to assume the role of an
activist – a tendency that may always be present,
but in this case is redirected to meet community
needs rather than prioritizing the pursuit of
knowledge for the sake of knowledge.
Chapters 3 and 4 are particularly important
from a historiographic standpoint, as Lassiter
provides a detailed perspective on the conditions
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that prompted early anthropologists to scrutinize
the pervasive façade of scientism that has often
restricted the discipline. Emphasizing the
experiences of early American anthropologists
(such as Franz Boas, James Mooney, and Alice
Fletcher), Lassiter points out that their initial
colonial pursuits under the auspices of the
Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE) often
challenged the consciences of these researchers,
who were confronted with the political realities
of the American Indian communities they were
to study. In chapter 4, Lassiter sets the stage for
the historical transformations that accompanied
post-Second World War political and intellectual
challenges to modernism in anthropology. He
notes that feminist and postmodern
anthropologists, although seemingly
diametrically opposed at times, offered new
perspectives on power and ethnographic
authority, thereby challenging the credibility
of anthropological interpretations rendered by
a single non-native author. These emergent
approaches to a new critical or experimental
ethnography, argues Lassiter, must be
considered in unison with earlier Americanist
applications based on community agendas to
open the anthropological canon to an approach
that truly encompasses divergent
epistemologies.
Part II, then, is devoted to describing
potential models for collaborative ethnography
according to the various ethical and practical
components prescribed by Lassiter’s definition.
In chapter 5, Lassiter contends that collaborative
ethnography is, first and foremost, a moral and
ethical pursuit, although it is often
simultaneously a political pursuit, not satisfied
with the pursuit of knowledge alone. Lassiter
substantiates this bold statement by juxtaposing
examples of his brand of collaborative
ethnography against some of anthropology’s
darkest moral/ethical moments, including the
US government’s alleged efforts to employ
anthropologists as counter-revolutionary agents
in Latin America under the auspices of Project
Camelot. Here the reader catches a detailed
glimpse at one of Lassiter’s most ambitious
and successful collaborative projects with an
African American community in Muncie,
Indiana, ultimately resulting in the publication
of The other side of Middletown (2004). This
project ultimately involved seventy-five
researchers/co-intellectuals in a long process of
negotiating the interpretation of community
realities among a population that had historically
been misrepresented in some otherwise highly
visible social scientific studies.
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While chapters 7 and 8 provide an important
methodological discussion on how to write and
interpret ethnographic material collaboratively, it
is in chapter 6, ‘Ethnographic honesty’, that
Lassiter provides some of the most critical
insights in the book. Here the author scrutinizes
many efforts of ethnographers to claim a
genuine acceptance within the cultures they
study and purport to represent, and he engages
in a deep examination of the intrinsic barriers to
accurate interpretation. Chief among these
barriers is the ethnographer’s need to impress
an audience of ‘outsiders’, usually within the
academy. Even when the ethnographer is not
pressed to meet strictly academic agendas,
deeper cultural underpinnings of individualism
may influence interpretation toward the
ethnographer’s sole authority. Here Lassiter
provides many examples from his own
experience in how, through continuous reflexive
thought, he has sought to keep his interpretative
biases in check, sometimes encountering
contradictions with his own emotions. He
suggests that experience is the focal point of
critical reflection, and that ethnographers must
not confuse their own experience within a
culture as a licence for unconditional authority.
The glue of this book is Lassiter’s frequent
juxtaposing of his own varied experiences as an
ethnographer with these specific themes of each
chapter, including his first formal ethnographic
project with recovering drug users in Narcotics
Anonymous, through his ongoing
ethnomusicological work among Kiowas. Lassiter
might have provided a greater analysis and
description of evolving collaborative
ethnographic ventures beyond the Americanist
tradition, but his choice not to was surely
influenced as much by space constraints as it
was by a need to illuminate important
contributions of certain unsung anthropologists.
While the book is not written for a popular
audience, it promises to provide essential
classroom material for budding anthropologists.
Not only does Lassiter articulate the
epistemological basis for cutting-edge
ethnography, he also provides concrete
examples of anthropological praxis that
seeks to empower real people, to address the
agendas of multiple publics whom the
ethnographer should regard as co-intellectual.
Although a number of anthropologists have
been doing this for years, Lassiter is the first to
articulate these ideas in a consolidated format
that challenges the traditional disciplinary canon
in a positive way.
Samuel R. Cook Virginia Tech
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Segal, Robert A. Myth: a very short
introduction. xi, 163 pp., illus., bibliogr. Oxford,
New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2004. £6.99
(paper)
It is good to have, in a single volume, a simple,
sophisticated sketch of the main theories of
myth. Robert Segal is an elegant writer who has
published widely on aspects of myth. Anybody
interested in the topic will find his book useful.
The book is part of Oxford’s ‘Very short
introduction’ series. Its eight chapters combine
two functions. Each chapter shows how myth
has been related to particular topics, respectively
to science, philosophy, religion, ritual, literature,
psychology, structure, and society. But each
chapter is also organized around particular
thinkers, explaining how each person has
explored myth within the chapter’s overarching
theme. Inevitably, this dual approach leads to
some repetition. Several (especially the more
influential) writers turn up in different chapters.
Nevertheless, the approach is vindicated by the
author’s boldness and clarity of exposition.
And indeed one is confronted here with a
potted introduction to some of the great names
of modern culture. Here are Tylor, Frazer, Frye,
Jung, Kenneth Burke, Propp, Malinowski,
Cassirer, Freud, Bultmann, Eliade, Lévl-Strauss –
but not just these – all refracted through the
topic of mythology.
In a swift introduction, Segal introduces the
reader to some basic ideas and also tells the
story of Venus (or Aphrodite) and Adonis, which
he uses as a recurring example throughout the
book. The first proper chapter, on myth and
science, starts energetically with the Bible and
Creationism. Are the creation stories of Genesis
as well as Noah’s flood and the plagues of Egypt
(which many think are ‘myth’) better described
as an early form of ‘science’? And, if these
stories are ‘science’, are they also true? Segal
then introduces us to E.B. Tylor. Tylor, he says,
like the Creationists, takes myths literally, but he
does this in order to oppose them. Onward to
James Frazer, who ties myth to ritual and thereby
claims that religion acts more to change events
than to explain them. Thence to Horton, Popper,
and others. Whether myth should or should not
be seen as a kind of science quickly becomes a
major theme of the book. So, too, does the
connection between myth and ritual, which is
the topic of chapter 4, but which bobs up
throughout. Another major question is whether
myth (and perhaps therefore religion) can
survive in the face of science. ‘Either myth, while
still about the world, is not an explanation, in

which case its function differs from that of
science (Malinowski, Eliade), or myth, read
symbolically, is not even about the physical
world (Bultmann, Jonas, Camus). Or both
(Freud, Rank, Jung, Campbell)’.
Because this is such a full survey, one is
occasionally taken by surprise. It is strange, for
example, to be reminded just what an influential
figure was Lucien Lévi-Bruhl, with his
investigations into ‘primitive mentality’. Some of
Lévi-Bruhl’s successors, for example Radin, saw
mythology as the beginnings of philosophy and
other abstract thought. Cassirer at first took a
similar view, but he returned to Lévi-Bruhl’s
ideas, seeing myth and especially Nazi myth as
a resurgence of the irrationality of primitive
impulses. And, thinking of Nazi mythology, there
is here a strange omission in the person of
Richard Wagner, a major figure in the field of
mythology whose ideas, for good and ill,
overshadowed European ideas (not only Nazi
ones) until at least the Second World War. Of
course, to read such a book is no substitute for
reading the writers in the original. After reading
his discussion of Lévi-Strauss, I was moved to
re-read ‘The story of Asdiwal’, an article whose
brilliance once inspired me to become an
anthropologist and which still shines as an
exemplary piece of originality. One is unlikely to
be inspired in quite this way by Segal’s
summaries.
Nevertheless, if one wants a quick and easy
introduction to important thinkers who have
written on myth, then one can do no better than
to have this book at one’s elbow. The volume is
short and lucid and can be used as a reference
book to be approached though the index. The
bibliography, too, is worth a look as a quick and
easy path to some unfamiliar writer. And even
where one is familiar with a particular writer, it is
useful to look up Segal’s account just to get a
short but erudite opinion. It is a book for the
experienced scholar and the undergraduate alike.
Anthony D. Buckley Queen’s University of Belfast
Social anthropology
Ferguson, James. Global shadows: Africa in the
neoliberal world order. x, 257 pp., map, figs,
bibliogr. London, Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ.
Press, 2006. £56.00 (cloth), £13.95 (paper)
This book is a collection of nine essays, five of
which have appeared before. They touch on
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several issues: the idea of Africa; the extent to
which concepts like globalization and projects
like neoliberalism can help us understand
Africa’s ‘place-in the world’; and, most
importantly, how we ought to understand the
claims Africans make about the lives they want
to lead, and what these claims suggest about
the academic penchant for celebrating diversity
and pluralism. Unlike many essay collections,
Ferguson’s adds up to a coherent whole, and is
marked by his talent for providing fresh insights
into stale or stagnant discussions.
Think big: If one were to sum up the thrust of
Ferguson’s vision for anthropology, this would
be it. In Global shadows he brings this vision to
bear on the idea of Africa. Too often,
anthropologists get mired in the specificities of
their own research. For Africanists this has been
a long-standing handicap. We spend a lot of our
time arguing that there is no such thing as Africa
– that some single countries are the size of
Western Europe, that there are hundreds of
languages and cultural traditions, that the
Sahara desert splits it into two very distinct
worlds, and so on. The result, Ferguson
suggests, is a self-imposed irrelevance. ‘Refusing
the very category of “Africa” as empirically
problematic, anthropologists and other scholars
devoted to particularity have thus allowed
themselves to remain bystanders in the wider
arena of discussions’ (p. 3).
One of the most important of these
discussions is the state of Africa. Outside of
anthropology, it is difficult to find positive
characterizations of the continent. Its peoples are
(still) primitive, its rulers tyrannical and corrupt,
its economies undeveloped or backward, its
states failed, its prospects bleak. And while
Ferguson does not want to get rid of the
anthropological counter-arguments to these
characterizations, neither is he willing to accept,
for instance, that we can rest comfortably in our
knowledge that Africa is not primitive and
backward, that it is just as modern as the West,
only in a different way. Rather, Ferguson wants
us to face up to the fact some modernities are
better than others. In chapter 6, he gives us the
most compelling version of this point when he
reflects on two Guinean boys found dead in the
landing gear of a plane that touched down in
Brussels in 1998. The boys had a letter with
them, addressed to ‘members of officials of
Europe’ and expressing the wish to ‘become like
you’. As Ferguson notes, such mimicry has often
been read in the anthropological literature as a
kind of resistance to the Western hegemon.
Here, however, it has to be seen as a sincere
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desire. As he puts is, ‘what is lost in the overly
easy extension of an ideal equality to
“modernities” in the plural are the all too real
inequalities that leave most Africans today
excluded and abjected from the economic and
institutional conditions that they themselves
regard as modern’ (p. 167). Africa is not the Dark
Continent, but it not just another place in the
world.
Ferguson deploys the particular brand of
political economy that readers of his earlier work
will have come to expect, although in several
pieces, such as his treatment of the Zambian
internet magazine Chrysalis (chap. 5), he moves in
other, more ‘humanistic’ directions as well. It is
notable, then, that Ferguson ends the collection
with a previously unpublished essay written very
much in his political economy mode. As he
shows through a comparison of mineral
extraction in Angola and Zambia, good
governance and the rule of law (absent in
Angola, more or less present in Zambia) are
expendable when it comes to making money,
and producing, at least on paper, ‘economic
success’. The final chapter thus not only focuses
on the machinations of capital, but also expresses
the classic anthropological sensibility that we
cannot assume what constitutes ‘common sense’
in our understandings of the world.
Readers who have not given up on the culture
concept might find Ferguson’s conclusions and
distillations frustrating. This is not so much
because he has a different take as because his
characterizations of ‘cultural anthropology’ are
not wholly up to date. For example, he sidesteps
twenty years of work on language ideology in
cultural anthropology, most of which reinforces
his point that we cannot understand culture or
language as ‘uncomplicatedly unitary and
systemic’ (p. 67). But this is a quibble. Without
doubt, and regardless of one’s perspective,
Global shadows is a major gift to the discipline. It
is a confident, thorough, and thought-provoking
book that raises important questions not only
about the idea of Africa but also about the future
of anthropology.
Matthew Engelke London School of Economics
and Political Science
Keller, Eva. The road to clarity: Seventh-Day
Adventism in Madagascar. xvii, 286 pp., bibliogr.
Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005. £14.99 (paper)
The road to clarity is itself a model of clarity. With
lucid writing and direct argument, Keller draws
us to a small number of Seventh-Day Adventists
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in the remote town of Maroantsetra and
surrounding villages of northeastern
Madagascar. Established in the United States by
1860, Adventism has been only modestly
successful in Madagascar (slightly under 1 per
cent of the population in the district are
members; this is higher than the national
average and lower than neighbouring countries)
but reasonably effective. In particular, the
church’s ability to manage the regular
circulation of their quarterly Bible Study Guide
with its daily lessons printed in Malagasy
suggests a remarkable level of organization that
is beyond the scope of Keller’s study. It is the
written publications that account for the success
of Adventism in this part of Madagascar. They
enjoin people to read and study the Bible,
offering daily topics and questions with
associated verses from the Old and New
Testaments. Keller offers a compelling
description of the intellectual pleasure gained
from reading, studying, and conversing
together. Interpretation is collective and
democratic; Keller describes the method as
Socratic and makes an interesting comparison
with science. It is the process of study rather
than any specific results which the Adventists
enjoy, as well as the sense of potency that
promises them the complete clarity of divine
vision in the afterlife.
One could see this as a purely intellectualist
account but insofar as one accepts Keller’s
observation that ‘Bible study is not a means to
an end, but an exciting and attractive activity in
and of itself’ (p. 242), so one must also
acknowledge (at least from an Aristotelian
perspective) the ethical dimension. Indeed, a
chief strength of this book is Keller’s strong
rebuttal of the various utilitarian arguments so
frequently made to explain conversion. Keller
shows that Adventism is not practised in order to
wriggle out of obligations to kin and take the
short cut to middle-class life, and she shows the
strong and selfless commitments that continue
to be made to relatives across the
denominational boundary.
If Keller shows the moral pleasures of
Adventism, she is equally strong in
demonstrating the moral anguish it provokes.
Certain precepts are unquestionable, and these
unfortunately include the forbidding of any
communication with the dead as manifestations
of Satan’s power. Since Malagasy practice entails
ancestral blessing, sacrifice, and exhumation,
Adventists must fail to acknowledge some of the
most basic expectations of their non-Adventist
kin. Moreover, since for ordinary Malagasy

kinship and ancestral practices are intrinsically
connected, the Adventists face intellectual as
well as practical and ethical problems in
understanding their relationship to the broader
social order.
Keller is absolutely right not to take an
instrumentalist view. But she does not explain
why the Adventists are willing to live with this
manifestly oppressive demand to relinquish
obligations to kinfolk and ancestors. What is the
nature of religious authority here? Disavowal of
ancestors is particularly odd since many people
in the region are descendants of slaves, and
slavery in Madagascar was constituted in part by
a separation from ancestors and the loss of their
blessing. Thus the Adventists appear to sever the
link to ancestors newly and hard won by the
post-slavery generations immediately above
them. Moreover, what would happen if people
were offered an education in science that was as
well presented as the Adventist one? If Bloch is
correct in his characteristically incisive foreword
that the Adventists ‘don’t just want to know
science, they want to be like [sic] true scientists’,
then why give them ‘tools with which to
investigate empirical reality’ (p. xvii) – and with
what consequences for the religion?
In sum, this is a very successful book that will
stir debate about the transformations taking
place across global Christianity and about the
nature of religion more generally. It restores to
focus the intellectual pleasure religion can
provide while also being true to the ethical
dimension and the ethical quandaries in which
adherents find themselves. In forefronting the
ethical and the intellectual, it displaces the sorts
of utilitarian arguments that ‘bedevil’ the study
of religion, and indeed Keller is able to show
their failure to account for the Malagasy
Adventists quite specifically.
With its warm account of relations in the
field, its sure sense of direction and steadiness of
focus, and its sharp, and at time acerbic,
argumentation, The road to clarity makes an
excellent text for use in the classroom at all
levels.
Michael Lambek London School of Economics and
Political Science/University of Toronto
Ohnuki-Tierney, Emiko. Kamikaze diaries:
reflections of Japanese student soldiers. xviii, 227
pp., illus., bibliogr. London, Chicago: Univ.
Chicago Press, 2006. £16.00 (cloth)
Kamikaze diaries is the second of Prof.
Ohnuki-Tierney’s books on this topic. The first,
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Kamikaze, cherry blossoms and nationalisms
(2002), is the necessary backdrop to this book
since it grapples with the question of the
nation-state, its symbols, and the question of
patriotism. This book is an extension of some of
the diary extracts she presented in the first, with
the addition of new diarists, seven young men in
total: Sasaki Hachirō, Hayashi Tadao, Takushima
Norimitsu, Matsunaga Shigeo, Matsunaga
Tatsuki, Hayashi Ichizō, and Nakao Takenori.
These seven were part of the tokkōtai (Special
Attack Force), as it was known within Japan, or
the kamikaze. They also represented part of
Japan’s intellectual elite, in many cases drafted
straight from university. As Ohnuki-Tierney
notes, by virtue of their education, these young
men left reams of writing – letters, essays, and
diaries – a contrast to the young boy pilots also
drafted into the tokkōtai, whose education had
not been so extensive.
Prof. Ohnuki-Tierney has two purposes in
publishing these diaries in extended extracts
along with her commentary. The first is an
explicit attempt to counter the USA’s equating of
modern-day terrorists, especially those of 9/11,
with kamikaze. As she points out, the kamikaze
were soldiers drafted into the service of their
country, many against their will, while the
terrorists whom the USA seems to be facing
these days belong to quasi-military or sectarian
organizations and have chosen to end their lives.
Many kamikaze, it seems, were brutalized and
shamed into volunteering for the Special Attack
Force. Most knew that to resist their assignment
would end in death at the hands of their own
military and so resigned themselves to dying in
the service of their country for a war some no
longer (if they ever had) believed in. No two
groups of young men could be more different.
The book’s second, and implicit, purpose is
to humanize the Japanese. As any anthropologist
of Japan knows, since Benedict’s portrait of the
Japanese in The chrysanthemum and the sword,
Western, particularly US, stereotyping of the
Japanese has held to this sense of alienness. The
diary extracts used in Ohnuki-Tierney’s first
kamikaze book evoked such a strong reaction
from readers, who asked for more, that she felt
compelled to produce this second study. The
men in the pages of Kamikaze diaries come to life
for the most part as young, keen to devour both
Japanese and Western knowledge, fluent in
many languages, versed in the classics, loving
music, film, and their families, sweethearts and
wives – the reader is left with the overwhelming
sense of a generation wasted. There was a time
when young Japanese were intellectually
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vibrant, eager, and politically sophisticated (as
they were again in the 1960s), a marked contrast
to the youth of today. Ohnuki-Tierney’s careful
reading of their writings and nuanced
interpretation of what they must have meant (as
Japanese to English can lose something in
translation) is both sympathetic and intelligent.
For its careful historical contextualizing, this is an
important book for students of Japan to read.
It is necessary to ask, however, what does it
add to the anthropology of Japan or to
anthropology in general? Ohnuki-Tierney is an
important figure in the anthropology of history,
who has long argued for the place of historical
understanding within the discipline, and this
book could well be seen as another example of
her general theorizing on the topic. Yet there is a
lacuna in this book which must noted: in
denying any conceptual relationship between
the terrorist and the kamikaze, she does not offer
us any explicit analogy for experience of the
kamikaze at all, not even that of the Western
soldier. For, in the end, when the brutality of
military life had overwhelmed them and they
could not ignore the fact of their impending
deaths, these young men lost, little by little,
their sense of connectedness to Marxism, or
humanist philosophies, and even the sense, in
the case of Hayashi, who was a Christian, that
other ties bound them to the very people whom
they were fighting against. By the end of their
lives, the diaries and letters are full of reference
to the more immediate reality which they knew
best and for which they had the greatest
affection: their mothers, their families, their
lovers, and the very land itself. Despite these
young men’s rejection of fascism and imperial
ideology, they still died as patriots. The transition
from young men of the world to sacrificial
heroes willing in the end to die for their country
is a journey that many soldiers make. If we
better understood the processes by which this
happens, we might better understand not only
terrorism, but also the organized brutality of the
military. Perhaps that is the next book that Prof.
Ohnuki-Tierney is planning to write.
D.P. Martinez School of Oriental and
African Studies
Robotham, Don. Culture, society and economy:
bringing production back in. 189 pp., table,
bibliogr. London: Sage Publications, 2005. £60
(cloth), £19.99 (paper)
About a quarter-century ago anthropologists
decided to reject the idea of grand narratives.
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Instead, they sought agency and contingency
and an understanding of how the world looks
from the perspective of the people whom they
studied. Over the past few years there have been
signs that that this rejection is, in its turn, being
rejected. Political economy is attracting more
attention in the discipline and in adjacent
intellectual areas. Culture, society and economy is
a sign of this increased attention.
Robotham’s main concern is cultural studies,
and the people whom he discusses at length
are Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Anthony Giddens,
Scott Lash and John Urry, Manuel Castells, and
a handful of anti-globalization writers. These
are not anthropologists. However, their writings
have attracted attention in the discipline, and
the aspects of their work that unsettle
Robotham exist in much anthropology as well.
For these reasons, Culture, society and economy
deserves to be read by those within the
discipline.
Robotham urges a return not to grand
narratives, but to the broader intellectual
orientation of those narratives, one shared by
resurgent political economy. Robotham argues
that the rejection of those narratives was part of
the embrace of a concern for how the world
appears to people who live in it, which has been
a key concern of anthropology since Malinowski
enjoined us to see things from the native’s point
of view. While this injunction may help us to see
how life feels to people, Robotham says that it
does not help us to see why that life is the way
that it is.
This shift took various forms in anthropology.
One was the rise of consumption studies, often
explicitly coupled with the rejection of the
‘productionist bias’ of the social sciences. We
should pay less attention to the realm of
production and more attention to what people
did with the objects produced, to how people
thought about them, to the meaning those
objects carried and the meanings people made
with them. Another form was the decline of
social anthropology, concerned with the social
orders in which people lived, and the
appearance of the cultural turn, concerned with
how people imposed meanings and had
meanings imposed on them.
For Robotham, that shift in orientation,
especially in the study of Western societies,
meant a tendency to mystify the operation of
Western political economy. This is easiest to see
in studies of consumption. Those studies
commonly are concerned with consumer choice
in a world of goods, which is the realm of the
market. However, Robotham notes, the growing

focus on that realm meant a decreasing focus on
the realm in which objects are produced, the
realm of wage labour and capitalism. This is the
production that, the book’s subtitle says, we
need to bring back in to our field of study.
In urging that we take more cognizance of
that realm, Robotham urges social scientists to
pay more attention to the powerful political
and economic forces at work in that realm,
which shape the lives that people live. The
prime political-economic factor that concerns
him is transnational capital, the banks that send
money around the world, and the institutions
that support them, which are the concern
of the anti-globalizers whom Robotham
describes.
Culture, society and economy is not simply a
work of analysis, whether of specific writers or of
specific institutions that control the political-
economic high ground. It is also a political work,
one that not only offers an analysis of troubles in
the world but also offers suggestions about how
to deal with them: as what I have said thus far
suggests, Robotham seeks to disrupt the flow of
international capital. However, this is not a plea
for localism. On the contrary, Robotham says
that we need more globalization, in the form of
institutions that will constrain and control
international capital.
This book is a complex work, part intellectual
criticism, part political-economic analysis, part
political advocacy. It is in that sense a grand
work, self-consciously echoing the Marxist
concern not just to analyse the world, but also
to change it. The growing interest in political
economy suggests that Robotham is not alone in
his analysis or his advocacy. But whether he is
alone or not, Culture, society and economy is a
provocative description of the questions we
stopped asking a quarter-century ago, and a
persuasive argument for why we need to start
asking them once more.
James G. Carrier Indiana University/Oxford
Brookes University
Rubenstein, Steven. Alejandro Tsakimp: a
Shuar healer in the margins of history. xxv, 322 pp.,
maps, figs, illus., bibliogr. London, Lincoln: Univ.
Nebraska Press, 2003. £21.50 (paper)
This work is not a conventional ethnography.
Alejandro Tsakimp, a powerful and committed
shaman, and the equally determined
anthropologist, Steven Rubenstein, co-operate,
through Alejandro’s memories of his own life, to
unfold a poignant and compelling
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deconstruction of the exploitations created by
the discourse and pursuits of the colonialism
through which native peoples of Amazonia
today are struggling. Alejandro’s narrations,
filled with drama, hope, and despair, love and
betrayal, healing and murder, tell of one man’s
colourful and difficult engagement with the
unfolding of Ecuadorian statehood in the
Western Amazon. On his side, Rubenstein is
giving us a politically and ethically conscious
ethnography, his message is that the conflictual
situations involving Amazonian Indians today,
and their ways and means of confronting them,
should be taken seriously by anthropologists in
current academic debates. The task, he says, is to
pay close attention to the lives – as they are lived
– of our Amazonian friends. Rubenstein writes
against romanticizing Shuar (e.g. their once
warrior existence as head-shrinkers – itself
instigated by colonialist desire), and for their
rights to be themselves – human and therefore
flawed. Through his own nuanced analysis of the
dilemmas facing Shuar and their Federation, he
unpeels myths of colonialism, and the dangers
for indigenous people who are placed in the
double bind of confronting, and also accepting,
its discourse. Alejandro’s story proves to be a
potent ethnographic medium for such
unravelling. The colonial situation, too complex
to be understood in its entirely, can better be
comprehended through its effects, particularly
on individuals who, like Alejandro, have
contended with a huge number of its
challenges.
Alejandro’s life history is intimate, fascinating,
and detailed in its telling. Through it, we receive
a fuller view of more people than is usual within
ethnographies. In part this is because his identity
is complex – and often quixotic. There was
Alejandro engaging from an early age with
‘apaches’ (non-Shuar), as a young student of
Salesian priests, and teenage worker for settlers,
serving as a boss and a carpenter. Later, there
was Alejandro the teacher of literacy, a member
of the Shuar Federation, fundraiser of projects,
announcer for radio, and helper with legal
documents. There was also Alejandro as
kinsman, as peasant, owning land, a house,
selling cattle, fruit, and lumber, and Alejandro
the powerful shaman and healer. Alejandro
unfolded all these ‘roles’ through the language
of affect, not sociology. As framed by him, his
history centres on the ambiguous quality of the
personally significant relationships he had
experienced – as loving, merry, generous,
reliable, docile, or bossy, hateful, baffling,
treacherous, corrupt. Many were unstable: who
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were friends and who enemies could prove to
be a dangerous matter. Each personal
relationship carried the political and uncertain
consequences of colonialist engagements – their
contradictions, risks, and hazards. As Rubenstein
notes, such relationships were historical markers,
locations where important political and cultural
contests were being enacted. Alejandro could
not be loyal to the values of his culture without
somehow furthering some of the colonial
project. Equally, he could not resist colonialism
without betraying other Shuar and the Shuar
Federation itself.
Rubenstein’s discussions are a rich brew,
strong, and sometimes deliberately provocative.
He argues that anthropologists who work with
indigenous peoples must not be politically naïve
– for they belong to the same world. Both are
caught up in the dilemmas created by centuries
of colonialism, which has led to particular types
of engagement and discourses which are
inherently political because colonial.
Anthropological representation operates within
this field of power. Thus anthropology is by
definition politically involved, sometimes badly,
in this colonial process. As example, he
convincingly argues the political danger of our
opposition of culture and history (they have
custom, we have history), unclothing it as a
myth of colonialism. Shaur have always lived
(culturally) through history, but not always
within the one we recognize. Moreover, to now
question their ‘authenticity’, as they engage in
what we call history, is a gesture that is both
hypocritical and colonialist. As Rubenstein
unravels Alejandro’s story, the space between
history and culture unravels, and we come to
understand Alejandro as ‘just a shuar, just a
person, living the best he can’.
Rubenstein is a sophisticated, interesting
scholar with strong political scruples, and his
book is important. He understands his goal as
revitalizing Boas’s pre-structuralist project of
disclosing culture as a historical and ongoing
creative accomplishment of everyday life.
Privileging ‘critical theory’, Rubenstein takes
pains to clarify the relevance to this task of
recent developments in social theory. Thus the
volume is highly relevant to classroom use. This
is also a book that will give great enjoyment to
the general anthropological audience. It is
deeply relevant to ongoing heated disputes
among Amazonianists. Differences in opinion
there often do get at the heart of enduring
debates in Western social theory and
anthropology as a whole.
Joanna Overing University of St Andrews
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Sant Cassia, Paul. Bodies of evidence: burial,
memory and the recovery of missing persons in
Cyprus. x, 246 pp., maps, tables, illus., bibliogr.
Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books, 2005.
£50.00 (cloth)
The Cyprus Question is not just an almost
intractable international and political problem, it
possesses, as this monograph reminds us, a
serious humanitarian aspect as well. This has to
do with the effects of inter-ethnic violence in the
island but primarily with the consequences of
the Turkish invasion in 1974: 200,000 refugees,
1,619 missing persons, and a dwindling number
of enclaved persons in villages in the Karpass
peninsula. The question of the fate of these
people was entangled with politics and the
power struggle between the Greek and Turkish
Cypriot communities but also with sectional
interests arising from initiatives to handle the
relevant problems. This is the first systematic
scholarly attempt at a deeper understanding of
the tragedy of the missing of Cyprus and their
relatives. The author shows quite successfully
how the two communities of Cyprus elaborated
their respective claims on the missing, the
Turkish Cypriots juxtaposing their own list of
803 unaccounted victims of ethnic violence from
the period 1963–74 to the 1,619 Greek Cypriots
who disappeared in 1974. ‘Cultural differences’
between the two communities explain the
Turkish Cypriot perception of their missing as
‘unaccounted-for dead’ whereas the Greek
Cypriots officially do not consider their own
missing dead and demand from Turkey and from
the Turkish Cypriots their return and/or at least a
definitive report on their fate.
The study moves on several levels of analysis,
attempting in the first place to recover the basic
facts – social, geographical, and statistical – of
the tragic case from the multiple narratives in
which they have been enmeshed. The author is
nevertheless equally interested in these
narratives, trying to show how the missing, their
relatives, and their plight have been manipulated
and turned into representations, images,
monuments, public rituals, very often serving
interests quite removed from the humanitarian
substance of the case, always obeying the
political logic of the state as a ‘scripting agency’.
The author’s avowed purpose is to bring
into focus the imperative ‘to take ethics into
account’ through several testimonies, which he
quotes in his book, and which bring before the
reader’s conscience with immediacy and
urgency the human tragedy deriving from the
conflict.

‘Bureaucratization’, however, and the
enlistment of the missing and their fate in the
propaganda machinery of each side against the
other has turned the problem from a
humanitarian into a political one. But the author
manages through the various routes offered by
anthropological analysis to recover the human
and social predicament at the heart of the
problem, beneath official ‘public secrets’ and
personal agendas. He does so by shifting the
analysis from politics to the kinship of the living
with their dead. Re-creating the ethnography of
this special form of kinship constitutes perhaps
the most significant contribution of the
monograph.
The author writes with remarkable objectivity
but also with an empathy towards his subjects
and genuine sympathy for the women of the
missing, wives and mothers, who are the real
heroines of a tragedy so much reminiscent of
Antigone. He could, however, have handled more
critically some of the secondary sources on
Cyprus, and clarified his argument for a broader
audience of non-anthropologists.
Paschalis M. Kitromilides University of Athens/
Institute for Neohellenic Research (NHRF)
Sawyer, Suzana. Crude chronicles: indigenous
politics, multinational oil, and neoliberalism in
Ecuador. xii, 294 pp., maps, illus., bibliogr.
London, Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 2004.
£16.95 (paper)
Suzana Sawyer’s ethnography examines
indigenous resistance to oil exploration in
Ecuador’s Pastaza province in the 1990s as
‘opposition to globalization in its neoliberal
guise’ (p. 7). Petroleum exports provide Ecuador
with 50 per cent of its state revenue and the
United States with a third of its petroleum needs;
one could call the two countries co-dependent.
The drilling in Ecuador’s Amazon (Oriente),
however, comes at a high environmental and
human price, and indígenas in Pastaza had
reason to be worried about their territory. From
1964 to 1992, Texaco’s oil production in
Sucumbios province north of Pastaza was a
financial boon to the company but
‘environmentally and socially lethal’ (p. 101).
Texaco (called ‘Tóxico’ by activists), engaged in
practices that would have been illegal in the
United States, dumping toxic waste into more
than 600 open pits, which leaked into the land
and rivers. The pits were sometimes burned,
resulting in ‘black rain’. Texaco also flared
volatile gases into the atmosphere around the
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clock. The Texaco-operated Trans-Andean
pipeline failed regularly, spilling millions of
gallons of crude oil into the headwaters of the
Amazon. The indigenous Cofán and colonist
farmers from the Andean highlands in the
Oriente have reported alarming increases in
serious health problems.
Sawyer provides a compelling,
on-the-ground account of how the provincial
federation OPIP (Organization of Indigenous
Peoples of Pastaza) fought the plans of ARCO
(Atlantic Richfield Company), an American oil
firm, to exploit their concession (Block 10) in
Pastaza. This opposition coincided with several
historical junctures; the rise of the Ecuadorian
indigenous rights movement, which stunned the
country with a national strike in 1990, and the
government’s adoption of neoliberal economic
policies, which privatized utilities, cut subsidies
that benefited the poor, deregulated industries,
and emphasized free market capitalism. (The
latter two, one could argue, were exactly what
Ecuador did not need in light of the Texaco
disaster.)
Although the author’s close relationship with
OPIP meant she had limited access to opposing
views, including those of the indigenous
communities that disaffiliated from OPIP in 1993,
this was probably inevitable in such a polarized
situation. Sawyer’s collaboration with OPIP as a
participant observer in their organizing ‘afforded
a methodological richness that could not be
gotten any other way’ (p. 22). For example, the
author was asked by OPIP leaders to translate
from English to Spanish for them at meetings
with ARCO representatives in Quito in 1994. This
not only helped level the playing field a tiny bit
for OPIP, but also provides us with a rare look at
the machinations of multinational oil.
Sawyer was able to observe most of the
major protests and strikes by an increasingly
sophisticated and organized national indigenous
rights movement, including the 1992
anti-Quincentennial protests in Quito, and the
June 1994 mobilizations against an agrarian
reform law that threatened land rights. Highland
and lowland indígenas and their allies, including
mestizo farmers, blocked Ecuador’s major
highways and paralysed the country for ten
days. This inter-ethnic alliance opened new
possibilities for political expression.
The author was also present at the
negotiations over the reform law in Quito
between Ecuador’s President, members of
Congress, and indigenous leaders. She provides
an astute analysis of some of the surreal
behaviour of governing elites such as the
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president of the national Congress sputtering at
indigenous leader Nina Pacari that, ‘She must
respect mi patria [my country] ... as if it
belonged to him and not her’ (p. 186). OPIP’s
initial battle was over oil drilling, but it became
much more. By 1997, indigenous demands
included recognition of Ecuador as a
plurinational, multicultural nation.
The book could be read on this level alone,
as a finely observed ethnographic account of
indigenous organizing in the 1990s. An integral
part of Sawyer’s argument, however, is based on
Foucault’s concept of the art of government,
and the changing role of the state, which led
indígenas to challenge the ‘hierarchical and
exclusionary notion of the nation’ (p. 29).
Ecuador defined indigenous people as
sub-citizens, who could become truly
Ecuadorian only by abandoning their ethnic
identity. In many instances, indigenous people
were simply invisible to ruling elites. The
government, for example, had long declared
Amazonia to be ‘tierra baldía’ (unoccupied land),
and encouraged settlers from the sierra to settle
on farm land that had been occupied for
hundreds of years or longer by such groups as
the Shuar, Achuar, Quichua, Huaorani, Cofán,
and others. As Sawyer’s excellent ethnography
illustrates, by the turn of the millennium,
indígenas were anything but invisible.
Lynne A. Meisch St Mary’s College of California
Soares, Benjamin F. Islam and the prayer
economy: history and authority in a Malian town.
xii, 306 pp., maps, illus., bibliogr. Edinburgh:
Univ. Press, 2005. £50.00 (cloth), £16.99 (paper)
With this book, Benjamin Soares makes a
significant contribution to the anthropological
study of Islam, which over the last two decades,
has developed into a veritable sub-field of its
own. Soares places himself firmly in this research
context, with a view to the transregional study
of the post-colonial Muslim world. The
anthropology of Islam has been shaped in
dialogue with other disciplines, by Dale
Eickelman, Talal Asad, and others, in studies that
take overarching features of Islamic practice and
social theory as starting-points for analysis and
discussion. In this way, the social study of Islam
became situated in wider fields of contemporary
social science, in ethnographic and theoretical
respects. By focusing on ‘local contexts’ (of a
Muslim world that cannot just be split up into
an ‘Arab heartland’ and a range of peripheries),
such studies have sought to overcome simple
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dichotomies between a supposedly ‘pure’ Islam
at the centre versus lesser versions elsewhere,
‘scriptural’ versus ‘popular’, and ‘modern’
(meaning reformist) versus ‘traditional’
(meaning Sufi) Islam. Instead, researchers have
sought to understand the internal dynamics of
interpretation and practice of Islam in the
respective regions and their particular historically
grown economic and political contexts.
Benjamin Soares introduces his monograph of
Nioro, an important centre for two Sufi
brotherhoods in Mali, along these lines. Indeed,
he draws masterfully from these resources to
carve out his analytic framework and provide us
with a sensitive and meaningful yet accessible
discussion of a rich ethnography.
Soares also situates this work within the
study of West African Islam and particularly
Sufism. Notably, he makes original use of Murray
Lasts’s notion of the ‘prayer economy’ to qualify
the complex and historically established system
of exchanging gifts (of all kinds and values) for
prayers and blessings. In Nioro, this system
affects much of the social relationships, and it
links up representatives of political power and
economic wealth with those of piety and
religious authority in a mutually beneficial, yet
also uneasy and partly contested, relationship. A
local service industry of secret religious
knowledge – the ‘esoteric sciences’ as
characterized by Louis Brenner – supplied by
high-ranking sufis and small-scale marabouts (a
term that Soares is critical of) underpins and
complements the prayer economy. Further
comparative notions usefully employed for
analysis are the ‘public sphere’ (Habermas) and
the idea of a regionally distinct ‘generic Islam’
(Eickelman), linked to a temporarily established
social consensus on generally acceptable Islamic
practice.
The town of Nioro is home to two competing
regional Sufi networks (the Tijaniyya and the
Hamawiyya) with wide trans-regional links.
Historically, Islam in Nioro is based on hierarchy
and charisma, with sharifian lines of descent and
leading saints providing the dominant structure
for alliance. In terms of a long-term perspective,
Soares points out shifts and transformations, but
also continuities in the social organization of
Islam from pre-colonial through colonial to
post-colonial times. He distinguishes three
regional traditions of Islam that have evolved
consecutively but now exist at the same time
(the Sufi, the reformist, and the post-colonial) by
their attitudes to the established principles of
hierarchy and charisma. A distinct dialectic back
and forth is visible in the interrelationship within

these groups. Reformists reject ascriptions of
‘sainthood’ (a term that Soares defends) and the
corresponding social hierarchies that
characterized Islam in Mali until the colonial
period. In contrast, leading figures of the
post-colonial trend who are united in their
anti-reformist stance (but have emerged
independently from the established lines of
Muslim leadership and seek alternative social
reform) exhibit ‘saint-like’ features, as their
charismatic appeal attracts followers who also
organize themselves structurally like Sufi
brotherhoods. Thus the social behaviour of
Muslims, discursive and practical, within and
beyond the religious realm, in their orientation
towards saints and saint-like figures is a
continuous feature of Islam in the region. Soares
illustrates this convincingly, with specific
references to religious leaders who are deceased,
living, or ‘absent’, as in the intriguing example
of Shaykh Hamallah which introduces and
concludes the study. The influence of the
colonial sphere on the overall infrastructure of
Islam is judged to have been immense for all
three traditions, playing a key role in facilitating
communication and organization.
This is a theoretically lucid yet
well-grounded study of historically driven and
socially competing trends within Islam in
contemporary Mali. Africanists and
anthropologists of religion are presented with a
carefully worked documentation of Muslim life
in post-colonial West Africa, conveying a good
sense of its inherent tensions and ambiguities
as they are discussed. They may also find much
stimulation when reflecting upon the choice
and adaptation of key concepts that provide
both an analytic framework and an inherent
comparative perspective for this excellent
monograph.
Kai Kresse Zentrum Moderner Orient (Berlin)/
University of St Andrews
Stewart, Pamela J. & Andrew Str athern.
Humors and substances: ideas of the body in New
Guinea. x, 156 pp., map, illus., bibliogrs. London,
Westport Conn.: Bergin & Garvey, 2001. £41.95
(cloth)
This collection of essays on bodily ideas in New
Guinea offers several contributions to
Melanesian studies. The focus on humoral
concepts is unique – albeit somewhat
undeveloped. Some essays offer fascinating
ethnographic data – albeit, again, undeveloped.
And the book is part of a growing trend, largely
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the result of shifting Indonesian policies, to
enlarge ‘New Guinea’ beyond Papua New
Guinea in order to include the western half of
the island, Irian Jaya and West Papua. It is, all
told, an informative work.
The introduction, written by Stewart and
Strathern, highlights the use of humours –
blood, fat, liquids, etc. – and bodily substances
to make apparent the often hidden aspects of
self, relationships, and ontologies. They cursorily
survey humoral systems, including the ancient
Greek system, and stress that Melanesians often
foreground notions of hot/cold, wet/dry, and
blood/grease, among others, and, of course,
sexual substances.
In chapter 2, Oosterhout discusses the
relationship between scent (a topic that has
received little discussion in Melanesia), sweat,
skin, morality, pollution, healing, and sociality
among the Inanwatan of the Bird’s Head, Irian
Jaya. The proper flow of blood is crucial to
maintaining a proper flow of ‘life force’. A foul
odour, which is linked to death and bodily
putrefaction and blocked blood, also indexes
some sort of decay in social life.
Ethnographically, this essay is perhaps the
richest, at the very least the most novel, in the
book. But it is simply too short. In chapter 3,
Courtens sketches the role of blood as a
complex symbol in a healing rite that seeks to
cure ancestral punishment among the Ayawasi,
west Ayfat, Irian Jaya. The ceremony is
fascinating, but again, the symbolic analysis,
and the chapter itself, is exasperatingly brief.
All the other chapters in the book are by
Stewart and Strathern. Chapter 4 is a
comparative essay on witchcraft and healing
rituals across New Guinea, focusing on skin,
food, eating, and odour, while chapter 5, which
is also comparative, surveys fertility, blood,
conception, gestation, and, most interestingly,
stones. The next chapter – a few pages only,
almost an extended footnote – centres on a
1960s water fertility cult in the Mount Hagen
area. Chapter 7 probes an indigenous Highland
notion the authors translate as ‘mind substance’.
In quality, the chapter resembles fieldnotes,
consisting mainly of verbatim interview excerpts
with commentary. Chapters 7 and 8, too, read
like fragments of larger works, not coherent
literary units. They will likely appeal only to
regional specialists. The conclusion offers a
summary, equates the Hagen view of the soul
with Thomas Aquinas, raises the issue of
cannibalism, presents further ethnographic data,
and proposes correctly that Melanesians will
respond to new tragic flows, such as AIDS, on
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782 Book reviews
the basis of localized notions of the body and
humours. The final two sentences of the book
advertise the authors’ current research – and so
hint at what we should read next.
The book clearly offers new ethnographic
data, intriguing case studies, and a general
approach to Melanesia that is well worth
contemplating and easily transferable to other
locales within the region. Melanesianists will
benefit from reading it. But the book does not
make a strong case for itself outside of a regional
focus. It lacks a unifying thread, despite the
common humoral theme, which seems
somewhat pushed to the background in some
essays, and engages in dialogue with little
theory. The book also diminished its potential
since several essays, including the introduction,
do not adequately consult and engage with an
adequate breadth of relevant literature, often
within the very region the authors seek to
highlight. The bibliographies are inadequate,
and narrowly focused. The essays, too, seem
unsystematic and rushed. Still, anthropologists
can add this volume to a growing corpus of
works on the Melanesian body.
Eric Silverman Wheelock College
Uzendoski, Michael. The Napo Runa of
Amazonian Ecuador. xii, 198 pp., maps, figs, illus.,
bibliogr. Champaign: Univ. Illinois Press, 2005.
$45.00 (cloth), $20.00 (paper)
The Napo Runa of Amazonian Ecuador is a
compelling ethnographic analysis of how the
Quichua-speaking Runa produce persons and
society. In the first part Uzendoski isolates the
principles through which people relate to each
other and emerge as social beings. These
principles, he argues, serve both as an
alternative to and a critique of Western
understandings of value. In a final chapter he
treats the unprecedented rise to prominence of
Ecuador’s indigenous movement, especially in
the context of the levantamiento, or uprising, of
2001, in which a broad range of social groups
united under the rainbow-coloured banner of
the movimiento indígena to oust the nation’s
president. Here Uzendoski attempts to show
how the particular understanding of being and
relating he explores in the first chapters makes
possible a broader politics that seeks to include
not only indigenous peoples but all Ecuadorians
in the construction of a more just and equitable
society.
The book is quite effectively organized along
a continuum of ever-increasing scale. Each
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chapter treats a successively broader sphere of
sociality. The book begins with the most
intimate of human relations – those that
surround birth. It then moves to those that
inform marriage and inter-community alliance,
and culminates, in the final chapter, with
national political mobilization. Throughout, the
author stresses the roles that affect and gender
play in mediating the production of personhood
and sociality. Uzendoski never loses sight of how
this process is intimately tied to the day-to-day
business of living in the world; this is an
ethnography of eating and – especially –
drinking, hunting and harvesting, sweating and
toiling.
The book opens with an analysis of how
children are ‘humanized’, or made Runa. It
eloquently describes the everyday physical
practices, such as swaddling, through which the
‘softness and fluidity’ that characterizes babies is
‘shaped into human substance’ (p. 31). It then
proceeds to show how children are further
moulded and gendered through shaming,
joking, and punishment into conscientious and
purposive adults.
The second chapter addresses shamanism.
Uzendoski heeds the call made by other
Amazonianists, myself among them, to
recognize how shamanistic metamorphosis and
boundary-hopping – as aesthetic orientation
and political strategy – pervade Runa society
and extend well beyond the chanting, visions,
curing, and sorcery we usually associate with
shamans. Included in this chapter is a
provocative discussion of the relationship
between joking and shamanism. The shaman’s
ability to shift from one perspective to another –
to see things, say, from the point of view of a
jaguar or a spirit, and to then return to a human
point of view – is closely related in both logic
and everyday practice to the paradoxical shifts
inherent in humour.
Chapter 3, on marriage, is one of the book’s
strongest. Uzendoski draws on a wealth of
experiences, including his own Runa wedding,
which is treated with admirable restraint, to
indicate how a series of increasingly inclusive
rituals culminates in the passage of a woman
from her natal family to that of her husband’s.
Uzendoski skilfully traces how this effects a
‘transformation of all the relationships involved’
(p. 80), and, in the process, he also pays careful
attention to the emotions this transformation
produces. A subsequent chapter continues this
exploration of making kin. It treats, at a
somewhat more inclusive social scale, the classic
Amazonian topic of the interplay between

affinity and consanguinity. Of central concern
here is how others – affines or allies – come to
share substance.
Chapter 5 traces the ways in which the
production, exchange, and consumption of food
and drink create Runa sociality. Of particular
interest is the discussion of how the circulation
of fermented drink – for one only drinks with
and through others – mediates and refracts
potentially divisive and obsessive individual
desires by distributing them socially.
The final chapter turns to the broader
political context already mentioned. It gestures
to how a particular vision of the social – namely
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one that focuses on making people, kinship, and
sociality, rather than on inhabiting pre-given
roles, and one that is communitarian rather than
individualistic – might be productively harnessed
to create an ‘alternative modernity’ (p. 152).
In sum, Uzendoski’s book is an engaging and
accessible introduction to contemporary
Amazonian life-ways and would be quite suitable
as an undergraduate text. It also makes an
important contribution to the ethnography of
the Upper Amazonian Runa and should, more
generally, be read by all Amazonianists
interested in personhood, sociality, and affect.
Eduardo Kohn Cornell University
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