432 American Anthropologist • Vol. 105, No.
2 • June 2003
There is an interesting juxtaposition between these two
contemporary interpretations of the experience of historical
anthropologists and the chapter by William Fenton, who re-
calls his lifelong Seneca friendships (since the 1930s). Fen-
ton's childhood memories of meals and summer outings
with family friends on the Allegany Reservation evoke an
era when an anthropologist's anecdotes did not appear in
professional writings but became part of the oral history of
the discipline. These were the stories from which students
and colleagues, if they were lucky enough to listen, took
their own lessons; they were presented, as they are in Fen-
ton's chapter, with a freshness and transparency that serves
as a counterpoint to the angst with which we now approach
our work. If Harkin reminds us to distrust any simple sense
of intimacy or other overtly expressed purpose for adoption,
Fenton's memories, as well as those recounted in a subse-
quent chapter by William and Maria Powers, remind us that
such ties may nonetheless be deep, genuine, mutual, and
multigenerational.
Lest we get too sentimental, however, other contributors
present more ambiguous and less nostalgic perspectives.
Here are stories in which the researcher did not even realize
that she had been adopted (Mary Black-Rogers), or accumu-
lated four Native names and two kinship statuses among six
tribes, each with a different level of obligation or signifi-
cance (Jay Miller). And then there's the story of Thomas
Buckley's adoption by and apprenticeship to Harry Roberts,
who himself was "for all intents and purposes white" but
had been adopted and trained by the prominent Yurok
spokesman (and consultant to Kroeber) Robert Spott, who
was, in turn, the adopted heir of a Yurok family. Anne
Straus's chapter underscores other complexities, such as the
differences between formal tribal adoption, rare because it
confers legal status as an enrolled tribal member, and the
more common, less formal, but well-acknowledged incor-
poration of outsiders (such as anthropologists) into families
through the extension of kinship terms and obligations. She
explores the way that such adoptions position one in a com-
munity, with inevitable effects on fieldwork. Kan empha-
sizes the increased access that adoption into two Tlingit
families has brought him, and the positive potential for
more sensitive and honest research relationships that results.
Ann Fienup-Riordan, who works among people for whom
adoptions and multiple naming are common, elaborates
the ongoing, creative process that characterizes such rela-
tionships and their extension to non-Yupik individuals. In a
final chapter, Raymond Fogelson synthesizes cross-cutting
themes and calls for increased investigation into this topic,
and its expansion into other areas than Native America. In
sum, Strangers to Relatives is an important book and a highly
worthwhile read.
Warless Societies and the Origin of War. Raymond C.
Kelly. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000.192 pp,
MARK W. ALLEN
California State Polytechnic University, Pomona
Raymond C. Kelly's Warless Societies and the Origin of War is
further evidence that the relative drought in the anthropo-
logical study of war has ended. The past ten or so years have
seen a marked resurgence in examinations of warfare by cul-
tural and biological anthropologists, as well as many nota-
ble archaeological studies. Anthropology thus seems poised
to make major contributions towards a multidisciplinary
understanding of warfare, past and present. Only this disci-
pline offers the opportunity to study war on a truly long-
term scale, and with the strengths of cross-cultural expertise
and a holistic perspective. It is also clear that this particular
subject will take the best efforts of anthropologists employ-
ing a wide variety of theoretical and methodological ap-
proaches. In this book, Kelly develops a concise yet power-
ful model for the origins of war.
Kelly explains in the preface that the book grew out of un-
dergraduate courses that he teaches on warfare in unstrati-
fied societies. His goal is, "to present a general model for the
initial evolution of war that is grounded in the comparative
analysis of ethnographic data and then to apply this to the
interpretation of pertinent data in the archaeological re-
cord" (p. ix). He writes for a fairly wide audience, including
both undergraduate students and a variety of specialists, His
premise is that he can use case studies from the limited set of
ethnographically identified "peaceful" or "warless" socie-
ties, as well as those from societies with frequent incidence
of warfare in order to identify key differences or thresholds
in a sociocultural context. It was this change in context, ac-
cording to Kelly, that pushed societies toward warfare in the
distant human past. He is thus interested in the ultimate ori-
gins of war and how it coevolved with other aspects of hu-
man society.
The "watershed" change in sociocultural context is laid
out in the introduction. Here, Kelly describes a view shared
by many: Because there is little obvious archaeological evi-
dence for warfare prior to the origins of agriculture, it is thus
doubtlessly true that war was indeed rare in early human so-
cieties. As Kelly points out, this interpretation is at odds
with the ethnography of more recent hunter-gatherer socie-
ties where warfare and other forms of violence are common.
Importantly, he attempts to distinguish hunter-gatherer
murder, violence, and capital punishment from warfare and
feuding. The crux of his argument is that there is a different
logic underlying each of these two types of conflict. War
and feuding are cognitively, conceptually, and behaviorally
between groups rather than individuals, and they are
grounded in the notion of social substitutability unlike
other kinds of violence such as murder or capital punish-
ment. In these forms of violence (wars and feuds), group
members perceive the killing of one of their own as an at-
tack on the entire group. They likewise see all members of

the killer's group as legitimate targets for revenge, and not
just the culprits who struck the blows. Kelly sees this "calcu-
lus of social substitutability" as key to the transformation of
violence into an instrument of the social group. This new
social weapon then had a profound effect on sociocultural
evolution, as it essentially changed all the rules.
Kelly devotes most of the book to his analysis of warless
and warlike ethnographic examples in order to make his
case for the prime importance of the logic of social substirut-
ability. Chapter 1 looks at a small set of known peaceful so-
cieties first compiled in an article by David Fabbro in The
Journal of Peace Research (1978), Kelly rightly points out that
it is more appropriate to refer to these cases as warless rather
than peaceful given that most of them exhibit frequent and
severe conflict, ranging from low-level conflict or violence
to homicide. Kelly dismisses several possible causal agents
for the occurrence or relative absence of violence and con-
flict. These popular explanations include child socializa-
tion, conflict resolution practices, and sexual rivalry. He
concludes that in Fabbro's sample of warless societies,
"physical violence is itself a principle vehicle of conflict
resolution, as manifested in regulated, contestlike fighting
and in the removal of a killer or sorcerer by execution" (p.
42). What these warless societies share are limits to taking
violence to the next level.
In chapter 2, Kelly compares warless and warlike hunter-
gatherer cases in order to illustrate the importance of the
logic of social substirutability. He finds a high correlation
between unsegmented hunter-gatherer societies and those
that are warless (but not necessarily peaceful). He argues
that a key reason behind this is that unsegmented societies
have bilateral kinship systems that "do not intrinsically
carry the seeds of the concept of social substirutability in the
way that descent groups do" (p. 46). Because victims are not
really seen as members of a group, there is no group seeking
to avenge their deaths. Violence does not then lead to ever-
greater levels of retribution and indiscriminant slaying.
Likewise, war is inhibited because marriages in unsegment-
ed societies are not social contracts between groups and do
not carry powerful obligations of vengeance liability when a
relative is killed. Kelly goes on to consider how some key
variables might have played out in the coevolution of soci-
ety and warfare: sedentism, food storage, fortifications, and
population density. Although Kelly acknowledges these as
important, he does not identify any of them as the causal
power of social substirutability.
Next, Kelly turns to a more in-depth analysis of a particu-
lar ethnographic case to further develop his thesis. He sees
the Andaman Islanders of precolonial and early colonial
times as transitional examples of unsegmented societies
with a relatively high population density. He aims to show
that under certain conditions, such as dense population or
the circumscription of islands, unsegmented societies may
well experience warfare. Chapter 3 documents that An-
damanese local groups lacked vengeance obligations, but
did share and defend territorial rights. Although these
groups retaliated against infringement, they generally tar-
Book Reviews 433
geted only the actual perpetrators. Women and children
were, thus, not usually viewed as legitimate targets. The
other key finding here is that within particular language
groups, different populations developed peace-making sys-
tems that quickly resolved conflicts given the absence of
vengeance obligations. In contrast, in "external war" be-
tween Andamanese who spoke mutually unintelligible lan-
guages, no such peace system was achieved, leading to never
ending cycles of violence.
In the concluding chapter, Kelly develops the implica-
tions of his model, and he also suggests directions for fur-
ther research on the origin of warfare. He accepts the inter-
pretation that human societies during the Upper Paleolithic
(c. 35,000 years ago) had the traits of unsegmented societies.
His model implies, then, that warfare was relatively infre-
quent until later in human history, namely when seg-
mented societies with their inherent vengeance obligations
and their logic of social substitutability started to become
common. Kelly further argues that this transition ought to
be visible in the archaeological record, and he offers up
some thoughtful archaeological correlates to look for that
are indicative of feuding and warfare rather than homicide.
These include frequent multiple burials with evidence of
trauma, the violent death of children, and forensic signa-
tures such as multiple projectile point wounds or blows
from shock weapons (the result of several individuals shar-
ing in the kill). He leaves to others an examination of the
worldwide archaeological record to identify precisely when
warfare and feuding developed, or for that matter, when
and where segmented societies first appeared. It is impor-
tant to point out that Kelly ends on a positive note about
the future conduct of warfare, as "the elaboration of peace-
making goes hand in hand with the origin and develop-
ment of warfare" (p. 161).
The book will clearly generate further thought about the
origins of warfare, and how best to study them. One weak-
ness of this study is the reliance on inductive reasoning
from a handful of ethnographic cases, each one beset with
problems of comparability, reliability, and historic circum-
stances in order to develop a universal explanation. Such ar-
guments are of course a major tool of anthropology, but cor-
relations do not always show causation. One might also ask
if it is the other way around—does warfare lead to the devel-
opment of segmented societies? Then, too, many of us who
have spent some time thinking about the archaeological
correlates of warfare will remain skeptical that we know
enough to conclude that warfare is only a product of the
fairly recent past. Finally, the argument that early Upper Pa-
leolithic human groups lacked complex kinship groups
would seem to need further examination.
The strengths of this important model are that it is of in-
terest to many disciplines, and testable. This is a good exam-
ple of how cultural anthropology and archaeology can work
back and forth over both specific cases and important theo-
retical issues. It is to be hoped that Kelly's book will stimulate
much collaboration across traditional discipline bounda-
ries. Warless Societies and the Origin of War would certainly
434 American Anthropologist • Vol. 105, No. 2 • June 2003
make an ideal text to include in a course on warfare and will
be of significant value to scholars interested in the origins
and frequency of human conflict.
Reference Cited
Fabbro, David
1978 Peaceful Societies: An Introduction. Journal of Peace Re-
search 15(l):67-83.
Daughters of Suburbia: Growing Up White, Middle
Class, and Female, Lorraine Delia Kenny. East Brunswick,
NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000. 256 pp.
K A T Y A GIBEL AZOULAY
Grinnell College
Lorraine Delia Kenny's autoethnography, Daughters of Sub-
urbia, is an exploration of self-consciousness about white
middle-class privilege and an analysis of cultural practices of
white suburban teenage girls. Her writing is engaging, but
repetitive. Kenny offers a personal insight into the ways
whiteness and class privilege are rendered invisible and nor-
mal on Long Island and the way Long Island is marked as
morally bankrupt in the media. The autobiographical ele-
ment is shrewdly propelled by a self-conscious inability to
relinquish white privilege. Kenny persistently inscribes her-
self into the lives of white girlhood as one "doomed to re-
main the wayward daughter, an insider-Other, looking to
say what cannot be said in an effort to help [white suburban
girls] say what it is they know about themselves and their fu-
tures, but are in the process of learning to silence, defer and
misrecognize" (pp. 46-47).
Kenny offers more personal information than necessary:
On her return to her hometown (the site for her ethnogra-
phy) she discovers she is pregnant, the father does not want
the responsibility, and, rather than face the scandal of being
a single mother, she secretly has an abortion. This is not an
act of discretion but, rather, of deference to a code of silence,
understood in terms of a "white" lie that associates un-
wanted pregnancy and single motherhood with black
women and women on welfare. By sharing the anxiety, am-
bivalence, and logic of choosing an abortion, Kenny testifies
to the power of the moral order of this community. Yet her
rite of passage also validates her authority as an analyst of
white suburban adolescent girls. White female privilege
here is pronounced because having shared a painfully pri-
vate event and situated it within the context of her ethno-
graphic project, Kenny anticipates and strategically inter-
cepts criticism. Long Island remains regionally and racially
marked by its unsuccessful effort to shed ethnicity—pre-
cisely because Long Island is not yet generic white (homoge-
neous) but, rather, imagined still as very "ethnic" (especially
Jewish, Italian)—despite Kenny's insistence that it is "the ar-
chetype of a U.S. suburb" (p. 61). Reading this in Iowa, a
"truly" white-bread part of the country, I found Daughters of
Suburbia both profoundly irritating and irresistible. The eth-
nography's weaknesses, however, may provoke useful dis-
cussions in courses on American culture and race/ethnicity,
class, and gender. For instance, Kenny fails to adequately
distinguish between middle-class cultural practices defined
by protocols of politeness, codes of silence, and moral mini-
malism on the one hand, and, on the other, the construc-
tion of whiteness in suburbia, which has been mediated by
legal, political, and economic policies, and social taboos.
As numerous recent studies indicate, suburbia explicitly
presupposes the centrality of race and testifies to a deliber-
ate policy of social engineering fostering generic whiteness,
promoting consumerism, and minimizing social difference.
This scholarship now needs to be followed by analyses of
suburbia that disturb the coterminous linkage of middle-
class and white in order to shelve academic paradigms and
media representations that juxtapose urban black poverty
and suburban white affluence, reproducing the false pre-
sumption that upwardly mobile, educated, or professional
blacks are emulating whiteness rather than actualizing the
material comforts that accompany class privilege. Long Is-
land may not be the best site to do this, but Kenny misses an
opportunity when she defends herself against the initial re-
action of the black principal of the overwhelmingly white
middle school where she conducted her fieldwork. He ques-
tioned the exclusions inherent in her attention to affluence
and the socialization of white, teenage girls. Kenny correctly
interprets his reaction as a reluctance to confront the norm
of racial homogeneity reproduced by the public culture of
the school district. However, she overlooks the fact that the
etiquette of propriety, avoidance of controversy and self-
centeredness have come to mark Turn of The Century mid-
dle-class/iess across color lines. In the interim, a generation
of teenagers is being weaned on a homogenized and ho-
mogenizing diet of mass consumerism and the anemic de-
politicized multiculturalism of MTV and The Real World.
Long Island is more unique than Kenny wants to admit.
Nevertheless, from Rebel without a Cause to American Beauty,
it is quite evident that suburban whiteness is neither invis-
ible nor benign but, rather, a site that fosters the generic and
arrests the development of a social consciousness and politi-
cal commitments—prerequisites for cultivating a sense of
moral and intellectual integrity. Kenny wants "us" to love
the unloveable white bad girls (the Amy Fischers, Cheryl
Piersons, Emily Heinrichses) produced in the suburban
wastelands because they unveil the myth of suburbia as safe
and conflict-free—but the real myth is that the myth still exists.
Lord of the Dance: The Mani Rimdu Festival in Tibet and
Nepal. Richard J. Kohn. Albany: State University of New
York Press, 2001. 320 pp.
DAVID N. GELLNER
University of Oxford
Richard Kohn's posthumously published book is a detailed
description of the famous—much photographed and much
misunderstood—Sherpa "dance festival" of Mani Rimdu,