SINGLE REVIEWS
In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of
Religion. Scott Atran. New York: Oxford University Press,
2002. 348 pp.
R O B E RT A . PA U L
Emory College
Scott Atran’s explanation of the cognitive and evolutionary
basis of religion rests on a three-part definition. Religion is
“(1) a community’s hard-to-fake commitment (2) to a coun-
terfactual and counterintuitive world of supernatural agents
(3) who master people’s existential anxieties, such as death
and deception” (p. 4). In Atran’s view, religion is not itself
an adaptation. However, it can manipulate evolved mental
modules by means of supercharged releasing mechanisms,
such as masks, rhythms, symbols, and so on. This enables
self-seeking individuals to form long-lasting cooperative so-
cial bonds. Trust is engendered through the performance of
genuinely costly sacrifices: cutting off a finger, subincising
oneself, burning one’s possessions, and so on. We are vul-
nerable to such manipulation because of the “tragedy of
cognition”; thanks to our ability to produce “metarepre-
sentations,” we can anticipate the death of ourselves and
our loved ones, the self-interested lies of our fellows, as well
as other potential calamities against which there is no real
protection.
What makes this view “evolutionary” and not merely a
rehash of what everyone knows is the idea that certain so-
cial passions, such as love, on the one hand, and vengeance,
on the other hand, are hard wired as “emotionally eruptive”
passions, which facilitate long-term commitment as the ba-
sis of social cooperation. It is these passions that, when
stirred up by religious ritual and its powerful emotional im-
pact, make having religion a different, more potent matter.
According to theory, these eruptive emotions evolved be-
cause it was essential during the era of our evolution, for
at least some of us, to be able to kill or die for our social
commitments, giving them binding force and overcoming
our selfish trends to form groups that would cooperate (and
better compete).
The key to how this trick is accomplished lies in the
mental module that prepares us to assume agency in the
world, unless it is proven not to be there, and, thus, to be-
lieve in supernatural beings, good and bad. This capacity
was adaptive in the old days. It was then more prudent to
assume that a noise or movement is a possible enemy or
predator and automatically take defensive steps; one can al-
ways correct for excessive caution later. But if we are prone
to see agency everywhere, why must it take the form of
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counterintuitive supernatural beings? The argument is that
imaginary beings, which minimally cross-evolved basic cat-
egories (bodiless but sentient beings, winged serpents, talk-
ing bushes), are attention getting, easier to remember, and
more readily transmitted than others. Atran cites experi-
ments (pp. 100–107) in which subjects can more easily re-
call a “minimally counterintuitive” image, such as a sob-
bing oak or a melting grandfather than a bizarre one, such
as a nauseating cat or a blinking pencil. “Intuitive” images,
such as a grazing cow, are recalled with the most ease. The
theory is that minimally counterintuitive ideas are more
surprising and arresting and call attention to the categories
themselves, which then do the rest of the work. Religious
ideas about supernatural agents are thus “selected” on the
basis of how readily they are noticed, transmitted, learned,
and remembered.
It seems to me that the most salient quality about a
religion is not how bizarre it is, or whether or not one is
able to remember it. Also, this analysis does not account
for real ethnographic data, nor does it make more than a
slight dent in defining the wide and deep range of religious
ideation in general. However, more attention to evolved
psychological capacities and limits will enable us to better
understand all cultural phenomena, including religion, and
so, this line of research should be encouraged. However,
for this program to get beyond rediscovering what we have
already learned from Tylor, Durkheim, Malinowski, and
countless others, it will need to come to terms with cultural
phenomena as organized, external, collective, symbolic
domains in their own right. It is to Atran’s credit that
he recognizes that culture is not something that can be
made to fit into the current version of the strict Darwinian
paradigm, as he makes clear in his criticism of mimetic
theory (pp. 236–262). Whether we can progress from that
realization to richer and more inclusive theorizing remains
to be seen.
Feminist Futures: Women, Culture and Development.
Kum-Kum Bhavnani, John Foran, and Priya Kurian, eds.
New York: Zed Books, 2003. 309 pp.
S Y LV I A C H A N T
London School of Economics and Political Science
In an age when the “en-gendering of development” is mak-
ing ever-stronger calls for bringing men on board, it is per-
haps strange to find such a spirited defense of a paradigm
that, amongst other things, seeks to put “women at its
centre” (p. 2). At first glance, I felt some antipathy to
C 2005 by the American Anthropological
142 American Anthropologist • Vol. 107, No. 1 • March 2005
what I sensed might be an overly essentialist and roman-
ticized view of how “Third World women” somehow hold
the secrets to global progress. As I read on, however, I
began to warm to the notion of “Women, Culture, and
Development” (WCD). Even if WCD arguably has more
appeal as a political strategy than as a conceptual frame-
work, and one would not necessarily recommend Feminist
Futures to students as a “core text” on gender and develop-
ment, the volume shakes up many conventional wisdoms
and mantras and provides a refreshing and original take on
future possibilities.
Given that WCD is a new and emerging paradigm, it is
no surprise that there are different perspectives on the sub-
ject. One of the coeditors, Kum-Kum Bhavnani, highlights,
inter alia, that WCD “brings women’s agency into the fore-
ground (side by side with, and within, the cultural, social,
political and economic domains) as a means for understand-
ing how inequalities are challenged and reproduced” (p. 8).
This entails accepting that it is not possible (or even desir-
able) to rigidly separate production from reproduction in
women’s lives, as well as recognizing that women’s class,
age, ethnicity, religion, and so on are integral to gender
analysis and practice. Although these notions have been
well trodden in gender scholarship to date, more novel and
interesting is Bhavnani’s slant on raising the status of “cul-
ture” (as lived experience) in research on women’s lives to
the same level as “development” (p. 8). In her view, this not
only provides for encompassing “more poignantly the ev-
eryday experience, practice, ideology and politics of Third
World women” but also may yield ideas for a more transfor-
mative development that “attends to people’s lives beyond
the economic” (p. 8).
These views are broadly consonant with those of her
coeditors, particularly Priya Kurian, who through her work
in environmental politics, concludes that indigenous cul-
tures and knowledges are necessary to make Environmental
Impact Assessment (EIA) more gender aware and sustain-
able. This, she feels, sets the WCD paradigm on a different
track to the conventional Women in Development (WID),
Women and Development (WAD), and Gender and Devel-
opment (GAD) approaches, which she contends are linear,
reductive, and guilty of portraying Third World women as
victims of oppressive cultural traditions.
Having set out their stall, the editors divide the book
into three broad sections: (1) sexuality and the gendered
body, (2) environment/technology/science, and (3) the
cultural politics of representation. These comprise chap-
ters that are interspersed with groups of short essays on
“Visions” pertaining to possibilities for WCD within the
context of three interdisciplinary areas that the approach
hopes to bring closer together: critical development stud-
ies, critical feminist studies, and cultural studies.
As might be expected given the new and unfolding
terrain, not to mention the disciplinary and geographical
spread of the book’s nearly thirty contributors, diversity
is the order of the day. Although some of the pieces left
me indifferent, five contributions were particularly impres-
sive. One was the “Visions” essay by Dana Collins, which
points up how the WCD approach provides important in-
sights into the strategies used by women to deal with the
constraints of sex and gender, and global economic sys-
tems. Another essay, by Linda Klouzal, raises the issues of
emotion and subjectivity and how these can be encapsu-
lated within WCD. Julia Shayne’s essay on feminist scholar-
ship on revolutions highlights the importance of interview-
centered fieldwork. A final “Visions” essay by Debashish
Munshi and Priya Kurian draws on women’s encounters
with cybertechnology in South Asia, including “informa-
tion villages” run by women. The authors contrast the way
in which local women tend to use computers and the In-
ternet toward “ensuring well-being and a meaningful life”
([p. 191], e.g., by sharing information on practical matters
at the community level) with the aggressive, international
masculine world of e-business and “techno lust” in which
technology is separated from the social and cultural needs of
society.
Last but not least, an exemplary piece of WCD schol-
arship is the chapter by Amy Lind and Jessica Share on
“Queering Development.” This demonstrates how deeply
heteronormativity is inscribed in development discourse
and practice. Concluding that sexuality is a survival issue,
pertinent suggestions are made regarding future directions
for LGBT (lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender) activism and
research.
With more writing of the caliber demonstrated by the
authors mentioned above, I am sure the WCD approach
will enjoy greater exposure and popularity in years to come.
The Production of Hindu–Muslim Violence in India.
Paul R. Brass. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003.
476 pp.
MANALI DESAI
University of Reading
The topic of riots in postindependence India has under-
standably become a focus for recent scholarly work. Paul
Brass’s book, the culmination of 28 years of studying poli-
tics in the city of Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh, is a superb addition
to this growing body of literature. The detailed recording
of episodes of violence and the circumstances surrounding
it over the years, through in-depth interviews, documen-
tary evidence, and considerable fieldwork in a single loca-
tion, have yielded substantial methodological advantages.
Rather than choosing a large number of cases and its atten-
dant superficiality, Brass’s analysis of a single case enables
him to sort through a number of explanations for riots.
Indeed, his comprehensive test of alternative theories leads
him to eschew the search for monocausal theories. Instead,
he treats riots as political processes—as the productions of
specific agents who are systemically aided in creating vio-
lent formations.
Brass’s emphasis on agency in the cultivation of riots
sits nested within a larger structuralist argument. Noting the

similarities between machine politics in Chicago and riots
in Indian politics, he argues that no political party has had
an interest in dismantling the nexus of criminals, riot tech-
nicians, police, politicians, and, generally, those who pro-
mote the hostility and animosity that drive riots between
Hindus and Muslims. Riots have been useful to all parties
in whipping up communal support in times of intensified
electoral competition. However, Brass does not stop there.
At another level, he presents a more dramaturgical perspec-
tive, viewing riots as “theatre” or dramatic productions in-
volving “preparation/rehearsal, activation/enactment, and
explanation/interpretation” (p. 15). From this perspective,
riots are produced in places in which preparation and re-
hearsal are continuous, ongoing activities.
Brass’s book is often forthright and angry. The most
powerful indictment, and one of his most thought-
provoking insights, is the often unwitting complicity of
scholars and other observers in the reproduction of the riot-
producing system. He is scathing in his denunciation of
currently popular theories for their implicit “blurring of re-
sponsibility.” Brass argues that the refusal to name the ac-
tors (particularly the Hindu right) involved in producing
violence is tantamount to sanctioning it. It is a sobering
and important critique of—and call for reflexivity from—a
certain genre of social scientific scholarship.
Brass’s book takes the ongoing debate on riots and
pogroms within India a big step further. He suggests that
rather than ask why riots happen (which is often ob-
vious) we should turn our attention to the question of
how they occur. His attention to process offers excellent
theoretical and methodological insights. However, despite
these major contributions, the book stops short in sev-
eral ways. First, as a growing body of methodological de-
bates within historical sociology indicates, process and cau-
sation are not alternatives, unless causation is reduced to
its most positivistic use. Second, his book demonstrates
some confusion (despite his attempt to address the prob-
lem) in using the term riot. Whether to choose the al-
ternative and, perhaps, more appropriate term pogrom is
a crucial choice that informs how one studies the phe-
nomenon. Most episodes of Hindu–Muslim violence in-
volve popular participation and considerable state com-
plicity, as well as prior “preparation and rehearsal,” thus
falling somewhere between riots and pogroms. As he clearly
shows, moreover, Muslims are overwhelmingly the vic-
tims of these episodes of violence. Yet, strangely, Brass ad-
heres to the term riot, which does not advance conceptual
clarification.
Related to this oversight is his theoretical treatment of
the state. A glaring omission in his analysis is a discussion of
how the postindependence state and civil society in India
have evolved over the past five decades, both in response
to growing conflict within the nation-state, as well as in
response to external issues (e.g., the Kashmir crisis, relations
with Pakistan, globalization, and so on).
Absent as well is the much misused but crucial term
civil society. In what ways has this sphere of nonstate
Single Reviews 143
institutions evolved through the penetration of Hindutva
organizations, religious groups, and rightist religious
organizations in general? Although Brass rightly indicts the
far-right Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) for master-
minding many of the riots, he does not analyze the effect
that the RSS and its brethren organizations have had in
transforming the discourse in civil society. Yet, today, there
seems to be greater tolerance of such violence and, with
the exception of a handful of human rights organizations
and left-wing parties, the silence that follows from civil
society is often resounding. Put differently, Brass’s analysis
is meticulously attentive to space (attending to detail at
the level of neighborhood) but not to time. This reviewer
hopes that this excellent text will open new avenues for
analysis of this deadly violence.
All Religions Are Good in Tzintzuntzan: Evangelicals
in Catholic Mexico. Peter S. Cahn. Austin: University of
Texas Press, 2003. 197 pp.
R O B E RT V. K E M P E R
Southern Methodist University
In 1948, George M. Foster published what became a classic
ethnography, Empire’s Children: The People of Tzintzuntzan,
in which he described in detail the religious practices of
a Mexican peasant community. In 1988, Foster’s student,
Stanley Brandes, published Power and Persuasion: Fiestas and
Social Control in Rural Mexico, a brilliant analysis of the sym-
bolic dimensions of religious rituals in Tzintzuntzan. Now,
Peter Cahn, a student of Brandes, offers a monograph fo-
cused on evangelical Protestants in Tzintzuntzan and the
neighboring communities around Lake Pátzcuaro.
Whereas Foster’s ethnographic description emphasized
the practice of Catholic rituals that had been introduced
to the community over four centuries, and Brandes ar-
gued that fiestas could be observed as performances of
community- and state-level powers, Cahn recognizes that
Catholic celebrations need to be reinterpreted in the light
of two new forces: evangelical Protestantism and global-
ization. Focusing on fiestas as community practice, Cahn
documents that responsibilities for them have expanded
far beyond Tzintzuntzan. For example, individuals in the
large emigrant group in Tacoma, Washington, not only
return home to Tzintzuntzan or send remittances to sup-
port the fiestas, they also have even replicated the fies-
tas in the north. Thus, fiestas provide a significant mech-
anism for building and sustaining community far beyond
Tzintzuntzan.
Emigration and wider participation in what once was
a tightly controlled cargo system have created opportuni-
ties for evangelical Protestant groups to attract adherents in
Tzintzuntzan and in other nearby communities. During his
fieldwork, Cahn visited 14 different congregations around
Lake Pátzcuaro but focused his attention on five evangeli-
cal churches geographically closest to Tzintzuntzan. In ad-
dition, he attended services and spoke with the leaders
144 American Anthropologist • Vol. 107, No. 1 • March 2005
and laity at the local Catholic parish church. His research
convinced him that men and women do not become
Protestants because of their “opposition to a domineering
majority, but rather in relation to personal or familial crises.
In particular, the affliction of alcoholism motivates men
and women to seek alternative spiritual spaces where they
can repair their lives” (p. 39). According to Cahn, this “per-
sonal approach to religious conversion . . . opens a space for
mutual tolerance” (p. 62).
To illustrate this point, Cahn offers a case study of the
experiences of a North American missionary who attempted
to establish a Protestant congregation in the nearby com-
munity of Santa Fe de la Laguna. Despite being well
funded, the missionary eventually was forced to abandon
his project. Subsequently, local evangelicals were able to
found a congregation in Santa Fe, but only after persuad-
ing authorities that the converts would continue to partici-
pate in the political and ceremonial life of the community.
According to Cahn, “the example of Santa Fe illustrates the
willingness of evangelicals and Catholics to coexist peace-
fully and suggests how they can participate in a mutual ex-
change of beliefs and practices” (p. 91).
In practice, Cahn found that ways of being Catholic
or Protestant need not differ greatly. Many individuals who
join evangelical congregations continue to honor their god-
parents, to pay their contributions for fiestas, and even
honor the saints, especially the Virgin of Guadalupe. In the
process, Tzintzuntzeños “acknowledge differences between
the faiths, but agree that no single faith holds a monopoly
on divine truth. . . . As long as they promote a belief in God
to reward followers in the afterlife, all religions have their
merits” (p. 120).
Throughout his book, Cahn challenges simplistic ap-
proaches to measuring the economic, social, and political
impact of evangelicals in Latin American society. In his con-
clusion, Cahn argues that “conversion supplements rather
than supplants previous religious beliefs and practices for
many evangelicals” (p. 168). He also documents the impor-
tance of the continuity of community among the people of
Tzintzuntzan, whether Catholics or evangelicals, local resi-
dents or distant emigrants.
On June 10, 2004, on the day of the annual Corpus
Christi fiesta in Tzintzuntzan, I happened to encounter
Cahn among the crowds in the vast atrium of the Catholic
parish church. After he introduced me to his friends, two
evangelicals who had accompanied him to the fiesta, we
talked briefly and then went our separate ways—two an-
thropologists (he Jewish and I Presbyterian) both involved
in the long-term study of a Catholic community trans-
formed far beyond what anyone might have imagined when
the Tzintzuntzan project began in 1945. Now, after two
generations, we have come to the point in which Cahn
can write that “all religions are good in Tzintzuntzan.”
His excellent account of religious practices is a worthy
successor to the works by Foster and Brandes; it too will
become required reading for anthropologists and Latin
Americanists.
Shrunken Heads: Tsantsa Trophies and Human Exotica.
James L. Castner. Gainesville, FL: Feline Press, 2002. 160 pp.
MICHAEL J. HARNER
Foundation for Shamanic Studies
For about one and a half centuries, the Shuar (in prior
anthropological taxonomy, the Jı́varo proper) of eastern
Ecuador have been mainly known to the outside world for
their now-defunct practice of making “shrunken head” tro-
phies, or tsantsas, of enemies slain during raids on other
tribes. The tsantsas, of course, are not heads that have been
shrunken but simply the whole skins of heads that, through
boiling, heating, and drying, have been reduced to about
the size of a fist. Only two other tribes, the Jivaroan Huam-
bisa and the Aguaruna, are reliably known to have engaged
in the practice, although there are hints from Peruvian
coastal archaeology that it may have been more widespread
in prehistoric times.
James L. Castner’s study, in a “coffee table” book for-
mat with numerous photographs, is a relatively serious
attempt by a nonanthropologist to summarize what is
known from the literature about tsantsas. To the author’s
credit, he has generally attempted to use the most trust-
worthy ethnographic information on the meaning and
practices surrounding tsantsas. This is not an easy task,
for there is hardly any other subject on indigenous South
America that has encouraged the publication of so much
misinformation.
Even anthropologists have not been immune to the
temptation of entering into unfounded secondhand spec-
ulation about tsantsas. To take one recent example, a pair
of ethnologists who lived with an adjacent, nonheadtaking
Jivaroan tribe, the Achuar, speculated at length in print that
the peculiar nature of the tsantsas was an attempt by the
Shuar to disguise the individual identities of their victims.
In reality, nothing could be further from the facts. The ideal
with regard to headtaking was to kill a famous warrior so
as to increase the prestige of the head taker among his own
people. To advertise the head taker’s competitive prowess,
the real name of the victim was repeatedly sung during the
public celebratory dances while the trophy was brandished
by the head taker. The blackening of the tsantsa skin with
charcoal was done not to hide the identity of the victim
but, rather, to prevent the avenging soul (muisak) of the
victim from seeing out of the head. This was done to keep
the muisak from causing a fatal “accident” to anyone in its
vicinity before it was finally “sent home” during the last
of three tsantsa celebrations. For the same reason, the lips
were sealed and two large red seeds were sometimes placed
inside the eye openings of the tsantsa, to further block the
muisak’s vision. I obtained these data during my 14 months
of fieldwork among the Shuar, starting at a time (1956–57)
when they still occasionally took heads, made tsantsas, and
held the dances of celebration.
This book could have benefited from a more rigor-
ous use of citations for some of the statements, but it is

unquestionably the most comprehensive illustrated work
on tsantsas and includes an unprecedented quantity of pho-
tographs, including 150 in color. A substantial portion of
the volume is devoted to distinguishing between “true”
tsantsas, that is the indigenous ceremonial trophies, and
“nonceremonial,” or fake ones made for the tourist trade.
Fake tsantsas are commonly made from monkey heads, the
skins of various animals, and, sometimes, from unclaimed
dead in city morgues. These bogus examples constitute the
overwhelming majority in commercial circulation and can
even be found on display as legitimate tsantsas at some
museums.
This is definitely a useful reference work, particularly
for museum curators attempting to determine what they
have in their collections. Although visually the illustrations
are not for the squeamish, I suspect the book may also find
its way into museum stores to satisfy the demands of a
public that seems always fascinated by “shrunken heads.”
A liability of the publication is that it may serve as an
unintended guide for the unscrupulous on how to make
more authentic-looking fakes.
The Terminal Classic in the Maya Lowlands: Collapse,
Transition, and Transformation. Arthur Demarest,
Prudence M. Rice, and Don S. Rice, eds. Boulder: University
of Colorado Press, 2004. 676 pp.
LISA J. LUCERO
New Mexico State University
Maya archaeologists need to make room on their shelves for
another book. The title says it all. The various authors, who
cover the entire Maya lowlands, were not invited to partic-
ipate because they all agreed on the events that took place
during the Terminal Classic period (which ranges from c.
A.D. 750 to A.D. 1050). Some, as the editors state, do not
discuss causes for the Maya “collapse” at all but present up-
dated culture histories of particular centers and environs.
What we see less of, which is a good thing, is the appli-
cation of center-specific histories to the entire Maya low-
lands. What we see more of, another good thing, is archae-
ologists taking into account pan-Mesoamerican events that
affected Maya history. One problematic issue is chronology;
the Terminal Classic is a difficult period to tie down, and ar-
chaeologists use various methods—ceramics, architectural
styles, epigraphy, and radiocarbon and obsidian hydration
dating—in attempts to refine dates, sometimes successfully
and sometimes less so.
Another major issue is defining collapse, which in the
Maya case was political in nature. Classic Maya kings lost
power in the southern Maya lowlands, so there no longer
was a need for royal trappings, including palaces, temples,
public iconography, emblem glyphs, stelae, writing, and
prestige goods. How and why did this happen? This is where
scholars do not agree, and this compilation of papers is no
different. Climate change has been bandied about for sev-
eral years; increasingly, data from diverse testing programs
Single Reviews 145
show that seasonal rainfall patterns indeed changed, result-
ing in shorter rainy seasons, or, in other words, drought.
Several authors brought up key questions, such as the fol-
lowing: Why did many northern lowland areas experience
a florescence when Maya were abandoning centers in the
southern lowlands? How does one explain the fact that
some southern lowland centers lost political power before
drought (the late A.D. 700s), especially in the southwestern
lowlands?
Regarding the first question, a higher water table and
different local and regional effects to global climate changes
(as discussed in the chapter by Geoffrey E. Braswell et al.)
may explain in part the spurt in the north. Clearly, we
need to explore further the varying effects of climate
change on local patterns and histories (see Fagan 2004 for
a broad discussion of how climate change affects histo-
ries cross-culturally). Regarding the second question, Arthur
Demarest, as well as others in the volume and elsewhere,
notes that centers in the Petexbatún area were at war with
one another. For example, Ruler 4 of Dos Pilas was captured
in A.D. 761 by a king (and former subject) from Tamaran-
dito. It was soon abandoned after inhabitants, despite strip-
ping monumental architecture of its façades to build pro-
tective walls, failed in their attempt to save their homes.
Other centers were also involved in conflict, most of which
were abandoned. If drought did not cause people to aban-
don centers, warfare certainly did.
I have my own questions, though. Why was there so
much conflict? And, more significantly, why was the politi-
cal vacuum not filled at the end or after the Terminal Classic
period? Governments throughout the world fall, only to be
replaced. Why not in the southern Maya lowlands? Perhaps
increasing competition occurred because of decreasing sup-
plies of water. This would be particularly noticeable in an
area as densely settled, especially with centers, as in the
Petexbatún region. I think the major reason the political
vacuum was left vacant was because of long-term drought—
that is, increasingly longer dry seasons that lasted several
years (Lucero in press). Royal ceremonies were no longer
successful in propitiating the gods to bring forth enough
rain. As a result, the majority of Maya discontinued con-
tributing surplus to rulers, who once were able to show
that their closer ties to the supernatural world (gods and
ancestors) gave them special privileges, including exacting
tribute.
In the introduction, Prudence Rice, Arthur Demarest,
and Don Rice state: “The evidence presented here largely
argues against the concept of a uniform, chronologically
aligned collapse or catastrophe in all regions of the lowlands
or even a uniform ‘decline’ in population or political institu-
tions” (p. 10). Each center or area indeed has its own history,
as each chapter illustrates quite well. Their histories con-
join, however, in that kings, or any supracommunity polit-
ical organization, failed to take hold in the southern Maya
lowlands after the Terminal Classic. Classic Maya kingship
disappeared for good; Maya people did not. As many chap-
ters illustrate, some Maya migrated out of some areas in
146 American Anthropologist • Vol. 107, No. 1 • March 2005
all four directions, whereas others continued to farm near
centers or in the hinterlands between centers. Community
farming life continued for most Maya, as it does today.
Although many questions are left unanswered, it is not the
fault of the contributors: The subject simply awaits future
research.
REFERENCES CITED
Fagan, Brian
2004 The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization.
New York: Basic Books.
Lucero, Lisa J.
In press Water and Ritual: The Rise and Fall of Classic Maya
Rulers. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern
India. Nicholas B. Dirks. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2001. 372 pp.
K A LYA N A K R I S H N A N S I VA R A M A K R I S H N A N
University of Washington
In Castes of Mind, Nicholas Dirks suggests that caste, a cen-
tral social feature of India, took its present shape in the colo-
nial encounter. He goes on to show how that happened, and
what the consequences have been for postcolonial India
and for scholarship on caste. The argument is clear and im-
portant. It is also, inevitably, prickling with controversy.
The scholarly work on which Castes of Mind is based
has been overtaken by recent nuanced research by histori-
ans. This work sometimes straddles precolonial and colo-
nial periods with ease and reports on the intermingling
of language, caste, and gender politics in the formation
of Indian middle classes and new rural social hierarchies.
At the same time, anthropologists have noted the blurred
boundaries between fluid caste and tribe identities well into
the 20th century. In some cases, particularly in what are
now prominent adivasi (tribal) homelands like Jharkhand
and Chattisgarh, the new anthropological evidence suggests
that identity conflicts around caste, tribe, and notions of
“indigenous distinction” became more pronounced in the
period after the 1921 and 1931 censuses. In the light of such
new scholarship, it is hard to know what Dirks means when
he speaks of “caste as we know it today” (p. 5), because there
appears to be no easily unified modern view of caste in the
late colonial archive and such singularity of perception is
certainly absent in postcolonial Indian society.
Another troubling aspect of the central argument of
Caste of Mind is its resolute focus on a critique of Louis
Dumont’s account of caste as a spiritually anchored, distinc-
tively Indian example of more universal systems of social
hierarchy. The modern career of caste has received ample,
contested treatment that Dirks may have more usefully de-
bated in the current book. As Dipankar Gupta (2002) has
consistently argued, castes in different historical periods,
and in different polities, worked as discrete categories ca-
pable of producing multiple hierarchies. This enabled their
insertion, from the colonial period onward, into social con-
flicts around issues of hierarchy and issues of difference. The
latter—ideas of difference expressed by caste—became more
salient to Indian political society in the 20th century.
Queries about the central theses of the book cannot,
however, diminish the value of its vast scope, excellent writ-
ing, and attractive synthesis of key arguments that Dirks
and others inspired by Bernard Cohn have made about colo-
nial social engineering and colonial discourse in India. Dirks
covers a lot of ground and does it deftly. It is useful to be
reminded in one place of the vast documentation of social
hierarchy, and serious efforts at its maintenance, that the
colonial state undertook after the 1860s in India. Castes of
Mind, in its methods and theoretical concerns, gives inter-
esting meaning to the claim of conducting ethnography in
the archive.
But in the limited colonial ethnologists examined, and
the narrow range of writings scrutinized, Dirks appears to
overdetermine his argument. Colonial representative cate-
gories were fractured precisely because the language of rep-
resentation was discordant and constantly in the process of
redefinition. This language was partly an imperfect trans-
lation of powerful native voices and partly the product of
arguments within the edifice of colonialism. Therefore, de-
spite its sweep across the entire colonial period and all of
the 20th century, Castes of Mind remains trapped in a set of
historicist assumptions that might overestimate the power
and ingenuity of colonial states. The Marathas and Mughals
were using enumeration and shaping identities, as Sumit
Guha (2003) notes, in precolonial north and western India.
Dirks could have asked how colonial categories were shaped
by these efforts. On the other hand, he pays inadequate at-
tention to fundamental social ruptures caused by democ-
ratization in India after 1950. Sunil Khilnani (1997) is but
one of the eloquent commentators on this point, which, in-
creasingly, the systematic study of election politics in India
is revealing in all its fascinating variety.
These criticisms do not, however, stop me from highly
recommending this book. In fact, I hope my arguments with
Castes of Mind will entice many others to read the book fully
and carefully. I say this because the book will be influential
in graduate seminars and theoretical debates across anthro-
pology, history, comparative politics, and cultural studies
for many years. Scholars of South Asia and all those inter-
ested in new approaches to the study of colonial encoun-
ters will profit from reading it. We must, in the final analy-
sis, thank Dirks for finishing, so elegantly, a much delayed
book.
REFERENCES CITED
Guha, Sumit
2003 The Politics of Identity and Enumeration in India c. 1600–
1990. Comparative Studies in Society and History 45(1):148–
167.
Gupta, Dipankar
2002 Interrogating Caste: Understanding Hierarchy and Differ-
ence in Indian Society. New Delhi: Penguin.
Khilnani, Sunil
1997 The Idea of India. New Delhi: Penguin.

Witness & Memory: The Discourse of Trauma. Ana
Douglass and Thomas A. Vogler, eds. New York: Routledge,
2003. 375 pp.
K E L LY M c K I N N E Y
McGill University
In the spring of 2004, images depicting naked, hooded,
prone, stacked, and leashed Iraqi men at the hands of tri-
umphantly grinning U.S. military men and women circu-
lated across the globe, betraying the hidden violence that
is integral to U.S. participation in the “war against terror-
ism.” The global public’s exposure to these images became
the impetus for testimonies of witness from those who
experienced firsthand the events portrayed in the photos
and those who witnessed them in their various represen-
tations. Whose and what kinds of testimony to these trau-
matic events will hold the greatest truth value? What rhetor-
ical tropes form, as well as signify, witness narratives that
are credible and legitimate? Who can have victim status?
What are the contexts of the production and consumption
of these images? What will be the role of the images in con-
structing memory and history? What is the relationship of
seeing to knowing?
Although these events occurred well after the publica-
tion of Witness & Memory: The Discourse of Trauma, edited
by two literature professors, Ana Douglass and Thomas A.
Vogler, it is precisely this type of phenomenon and these
types of questions that the volume engages. The result is a
theoretically sophisticated and significant contribution to
contemporary critical inquiry devoted to trauma, memory,
and acts of witness. This collection problematizes witness-
ing, memory, and trauma in relation to a diverse range of sit-
uations, sources, and events. The authors attend to these is-
sues through several different disciplinary perspectives that
include the following: literature, philosophy, cultural stud-
ies, and anthropology. An outgrowth of two graduate semi-
nars at Rutgers University over ten years ago (20th-Century
Poetry and Anthropological Approaches to Poetry), the re-
sulting collection consists of an excellent introduction by
the editors and ten essays.
Central to this collection is the claim by Douglass and
Vogler that in post-poststructuralist discourses, we are see-
ing a return to the “event” from the more exclusive focus
on the “text,” but that the historical “event” has been re-
configured as the “traumatic event.” In this new discourse,
the “traumatic” is conceived as that which is unapproach-
able, elusive, and unavailable to direct observation yet at
the same time undeniably “real.” Thus, the chapters in this
volume grapple with the relationship between the signifier
and signified, or between representations and the “real” ob-
ject or event, without presupposing that the real is antici-
pated, transparent, or immediately accessible (pp. 4–5). For
anthropologists who would rather not theoretically engage
in such conversations and would prefer, instead, to proceed
in their research without questioning the status of the real
(whether that be history, experience, the body, etc.), many
Single Reviews 147
chapters in this collection might be considered irrelevant or,
worse yet, maddeningly poststructuralist or literary. I would
not fault the book on this basis except to say that the back
cover categorization of the book as cultural studies and an-
thropology is somewhat misleading: It is more informed
by literature, philosophy, and cultural studies than by
anthropology.
With that said, the introduction to Witness & Memory
(at 53 pages) is impressive for its presentation of the cur-
rent state of both popular and academic witness and trauma
discourses. Douglass and Vogler provide a comprehensive
mapping of these discourses while their original insights
and contributions take witness and trauma studies to a new
level. This introduction should become indispensable read-
ing for scholars, including anthropologists, interested in
these topics. Douglass’s chapter on Rigoberta Menchú’s testi-
monio, Joseba Zulaika’s chapter on his relationship to mem-
bers of the Basque terrorist group ETA, and Kyo MacLear’s
analysis of Hiroshima Mon Amour are not only strong but also
may hold special appeal for anthropologists, whereas Karyn
Ball’s fiercely rigorous and intelligent chapter on Auschwitz
and Lyotard, or Vogler’s accomplished chapter on poetry
and witness, may be less appealing because of their subject
matter and disciplinary approaches. Cindy Patton’s chap-
ter on the obfuscation of gender by race during the O. J.
Simpson trial analyzes a complex and difficult issue but
is off-putting because of its strident tone, repetition, and
other excesses of style. A chapter by William Douglass on
Theodore Roosevelt and Claude Lévi-Strauss, although writ-
ten by and about an anthropologist, is one of the weakest
chapters in the collection, theoretically and because the or-
ganizing themes of the volume have negligible bearing on
the discussion.
With accurate expectations about the general disci-
plinary focus of this book, anthropologists interested in its
themes or in the anthropology of literature or visual culture
will find this collection challenging and valuable.
Eight Words for the Study of Expressive Culture. Burt
Feintuch, ed. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2003.
237 pp.
K I R I N N A R AYA N
University of Wisconsin–Madison
All anthropologists interested in expressive culture will find
this book useful. This is an expansion and update of a spe-
cial issue of the Journal of American Folklore published un-
der the editorship of Burt Feintuch in 1995. That issue, like
this book, aimed to stake out common ground for ongo-
ing conversations about expressive culture by identifying
keywords. In each case, authors delve into the history of a
theoretical term while also exploring how it might be recon-
ceptualized to fit such contemporary contexts as flexible
accumulation, the movements of people, fraught identity
politics, or the expressive potentials of new technologies.
148 American Anthropologist • Vol. 107, No. 1 • March 2005
The keywords are group, art, text, genre, perfor-
mance, context, tradition, and identity. In his introduc-
tion, Feintuch points out that these words cluster together
around “creative expression in its social contexts” (p. 1) and
are variously used in academic discourse, by public sector
agencies, and also in everyday conversations. The inher-
ently interdisciplinary nature of folklore scholarship (and
the practical need for multiple disciplinary identities that
today’s folklorists must cultivate) means that the discussion
of each keyword also resonates across a range of disciplines.
The crown jewel in this collection is the opening
chapter on “group” by Dorothy Noyes. In this confident
and often playful essay, Noyes reminds us of the “classist,
racist and antimodern” associations around the category
of “folk” (p. 11) and deftly summarizes diverse arguments
that wrestle against such limiting associations in 20th-
century folklore scholarship. Folklore’s comparative tradi-
tion of tracing texts across far-flung spaces, she argues,
“presupposes a network model, with individuals and ge-
ographic communities as nexuses in a variety of relation-
ships and social ties” (p. 15). Noyes goes on to draw on
Ulf Hannerz’s theorization of social networks in the global
ecumene, showing how his delineation of segregated, in-
tegrated, and encapsulated networks provides different so-
cial grounds for the transmission of expressive practices.
In counterpoint to empirical networks, Noyes also empha-
sizes the importance of community as an imagined, shifting
construct that emerges partly from experiences of shared
performance. I found this chapter wonderfully stimulating,
opening out new ways to conceptualize complex transcul-
tural movements and varying social impacts of expressive
culture in the 21st century.
The collection closes with a masterfully wide-ranging
and bracing chapter by Roger Abrahams on identity, written
especially for this volume. Here Abrahams distills insights
gathered in the course of his long and illustrious scholarly
career; each paragraph, it seems, might almost be unpacked
into its own provocative chapter. In less than 20 pages,
Abrahams reflects on identity as mobilized in a range of dis-
ciplinary contexts, historical moments, and contemporary
political conflicts. He critiques the notion of “wholeness”
invoked by identity, calls into question the liberal tradition
of perceiving identity as choice, and exhorts scholars to be
more cognizant of how market forces manipulate identity,
as well as our own engagements with it.
Arranged between the contributions by Noyes and
Abrahams is a range of other rewarding essays. Standing
beside Abrahams as titans in the field are Jeff Todd Titon,
writing on “text” (including a fascinating, timely discus-
sion on the possibilities of hypertext) and Henry Glassie
on “tradition,” eloquently construed as “the missing piece
necessary to the success of a cultural history that would
bring anthropology and history, with folklore as the me-
diating agent, into productive alliance” (p. 181). Further
insights are articulated by Gerald Pocius on art as product,
process, and behavior and Trudier Harris-Lopez on “genre”
as “the springboard for connecting folklore studies to sev-
eral disciplines that emphasize the linguistic constructed-
ness of all forms of discourse” (p. 126). Deborah Kapchan
provides a masterful overview of “performance” in its mul-
tifaceted interdisciplinary complexity, including ethnogra-
phy itself as a performative act. Mary Hufford, in an illu-
minating discussion of “context,” points out that although
early folklorists tended to contextualize expressive culture
within narratives of the nation-state, there is a contempo-
rary urgency to look beyond the nation-state, spelling out
the contexts of expressive culture within global flows of
capital and related frameworks of power.
Whether turned to for a quick overview, like a
reference book, or mulled through for more extended
engagement with particular theoretical positions, this vol-
ume is a stimulating resource to draw from again and again.
Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice.
Michael M. J. Fischer. Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2004. 496 pp.
PA U L R A B I N O W
University of California at Berkeley
Michael M. J. Fischer’s collection of essays exuberantly cuts
a wide swath through a vast and labyrinthine literature on
cinema, pedagogy, autobiography, computers, molecular bi-
ology, museum studies, wood block prints, the AIDS epi-
demic, and much more. Fischer has clearly spent the last
decade or more assiduously and ardently reading, visiting,
looking, viewing, talking, listening, writing, lecturing (the
venue for a number of the chapters), and above all, teach-
ing. He leads us through a congeries of sites found in diverse
geographical locations, largely in the present or recent past.
Different readers will be taken by different things in this
rich collection—some by Polish cinema, others by a physi-
cian’s woodcuts and the AIDS epidemic they refract and
reflect on, others by meditations and brainstorms on cy-
berspace, and still others on debates about the Yanomami
and how anthropologists of different stripes have treated
them. As Fischer follows his unbridled curiosity where it
leads him, it is no surprise that there is no fixed position
from which he proceeds any more than there is a single
theoretical perspective—indeed, one can sense that such
an attempt would feel quite stifling or disciplining to such
a free-wheeling spirit. Fischer has been navigating adroitly
with great force and urgency through a whole set of inter-
locking discourses and practices; the interest and passion
that he brings to his very eclectic approach is tangible.
This collection of essays is not about a research agenda,
the results of his own ethnographic work, or sustained the-
oretical reflection. Rather, it soon becomes clear that Fischer
has spent the bulk of the 1990s contributing with body and
soul to the construction of an ambitious pedagogy. This
pedagogy—or the dream of pedagogy—is a very specific
one wrought for a very specific site—the Science and Tech-
nology Studies (STS) program at MIT. To my mind the col-
lection’s distinctive contribution lies there. In 1993, when

Fischer moved from Rice University, where he was an active
contributor to the anthropology department and its pi-
oneering ethnographic cultural critique and the Cultural
Studies Center, to the STS program at MIT, he had much
to learn. And learn he did. It was the voracious exploration
of a sprawling terrain of diverse and ramifying knowledge
sites (and the practitioners who created and inhabit them)
that captured Fischer’s imagination and drew his energy.
Fischer’s mode of taking up the material is rapid-paced, syn-
thetic if open-ended, and self-consciously presentational.
The challenge was how to create a new pedagogy at a place
like MIT (dominated as it is by engineers and natural sci-
entists) that would build bridges, open avenues of com-
munication, make possible new forms of interdisciplinary
work, and provide a space for unexpected hybrids: One that
could warp and weave the skills and sentiments of young
engineers with those of film studies, fledgling anthropol-
ogists with computer scientists, textual deconstructionists
with protein chemists. And perhaps, as unlikely and chal-
lenging as any of those joinings would be to bring Derridean
humanities people together with “writing culture” ethnog-
raphers and feminist historians of science.
In a long central essay, Fischer presents a series of suc-
cessive plans for a core course and a challenging series of
associated modules that explore linked topics from bacteri-
ology to cinematic cutting techniques. The chapter, as this
gives a taste of the high vernacular that Fischer prefers, is
called “Calling the Future (s): Delay Call Forwarding,” and is
divided into two parts: “I. Las Meninas and Robotic-Virtual
Surgical Systems: The Visual Thread/Fiber-Optic Carrier,”
and “II. Modules for a Science, Technology, and Society
Curriculum: STS@the Turn . . . [ ] 000.mit.edu.” These plans
could well serve as a source book for advanced curricular
projects elsewhere.
The journey is an exhilarating one, and from the
outside one must wonder how it worked out. Clearly not
everything or everybody was aboard and, the connections
made were undoubtedly often no more than partial. The
nitty-gritty of the academic politics is glided over in the
whirl of metaphoric tripping from topic to topic, field
to field, genre to genre, science to science, text to text,
image to image, and all the possible combinations one can
imagine that hold between and amongst them. Whatever
happened at MIT, there is much to learn from, and to savor,
in Fischer’s contributions to that extended moment.
An Archaeological Study of Rural Capitalism and
Material Life: The Gibbs Farmstead in Southern Ap-
palachia, 1790–1920. Mark D. Groover. New York: Kluwer
Academic/Plenum Publishers, 2003. 320 pp.
E LV I N H AT C H
University of California
Recent research on 19th-century southern Appalachia has
produced a rich body of literature with significant theoreti-
cal implications, and Groover’s book is an important addi-
Single Reviews 149
tion to the dialogue. It is the study of a farm near Knoxville,
Tennessee, which was owned by the same family for several
generations; the research focuses chiefly on the period from
1792, when the farm was established, to 1913. The study
draws on a variety of sources, including (among others) un-
published census schedules, published census data, probate
and tax records, and archaeological research. Most of the
archaeological work was conducted as part of an ongoing
field school at the University of Tennessee. The empirical
basis of the study is excellent.
Groover describes the book as a case study of rural cap-
italism: The farmers were surplus producers who were en-
gaged in the commercial sale of farm products, and they
demonstrate the penetration of the world economy into
this part of the United States. During the 19th century, the
Knoxville region was developing into a significant commer-
cial center with transportation links to both the northeast
and the south. The farm that Groover studied—the Gibbs’s
farm—marketed several agricultural products but mostly to-
bacco and wool. They did not focus exclusively on com-
mercial farming: They also produced most of what they
consumed, and their livestock were fed from the farm. The
Gibbs, like most of their rural neighbors, combined subsis-
tence and commercial farming, and Groover estimates that
the proportion was roughly 50/50. It is, however, possible
to argue that his calculations lead him to overestimate the
commercial side of the farm’s operation.
Groover’s study makes it clear that the Gibbs house-
holds were oriented toward profits, and this leads him to
the theoretical conclusions mentioned above. Historians
of the 19th-century mountain South are divided on a key
question. Some argue that, by and large, subsistence farm-
ers were interested in making money and in becoming part
of the capitalist system, but that their opportunities for do-
ing so were limited chiefly by a lack of capital and trans-
portation. By this interpretation, development in the region
came about when wealthier and more powerful owners of
capital, primarily from outside, overwhelmed the local peo-
ple. The conflicts that became so prominent in this part of
the United States at the time were a product of competing
economic interests. On the other side are those who argue
that a nonmarket orientation prevailed among subsistence
farmers, an orientation that emphasized barter and labor ex-
changes, cooperation, and a form of egalitarianism. From
this perspective, local farmers were guided by a body of
moral beliefs that placed them in opposition to the individ-
ualistic, competitive, and acquisition-driven, commercially
oriented capitalism. The conflicts that developed in the re-
gion, using this viewpoint, were as much a result of incom-
patible moral beliefs as competing economic interests. The
subsistence farmers became the object not only of economic
but also cultural domination by “progressive” elements that
sought to civilize what were perceived as backward people.
Groover’s analysis seems to support those who see sub-
sistence farmers in the 19th-century mountain South as pre-
disposed toward capitalism and acquisitiveness, but his ev-
idence offers even stronger support for the other side of the
150 American Anthropologist • Vol. 107, No. 1 • March 2005
debate. The Gibbs were interested in making money, but
were they oriented toward the accumulation of wealth as
an end in itself? Was money a measure of social and per-
sonal worth, and its pursuit a significant life goal? Groover
makes a strong case that the point of commercial trans-
actions for the Gibbs, rather, was to acquire farmland for
the next generation. These were large households, and un-
less they acquired progressively more land they would be
left without enough to provide for themselves. The Gibbs’s
pursuit of profits suggests a cultural orientation toward pre-
serving their subsistence way of life, not toward the accu-
mulation of wealth.
Put differently, the Gibbs may be viewed not as market-
oriented protocapitalists but, rather, as subsistence farm-
ers for whom market transactions were an adjunct. This
distinction is key to understanding the social, economic,
and political dynamics, including the class structure, of the
mountain South, and it is central for understanding the in-
fluence of the world system in this region. To what extent
did global market forces drive the regional economy during
most of the 19th century? Groover’s evidence suggests that
the world system was less important for many families than
he contends.
Groover presents data on the Gibbs’s consumerism,
which is relevant to this question. He shows that although
the Gibbs bought commercial goods, such as kitchenware,
they were conservative in their purchases: Their emphasis
was on the utilitarian, which again suggests a cultural
orientation toward subsistence farming rather than toward
acquisitiveness.
The Diligent: A Voyage through the Worlds of the Slave
Trade. Robert Harms. New York: Basic Books, 2002. 466 pp.
SIDNEY MINTZ
Johns Hopkins University
The immense agroindustrial systems of commodity produc-
tion that were created by Europe in the New World tropics
rested for centuries on enslaved African labor. That labor
supply was sustained by the slave trade, conducted either
through semimonopolistic commercial companies, com-
missioned and protected by the state, or through private
undertakings. Like the plantations whose labor the Africans
supplied, and like the sugar, rum, molasses, cocoa, coffee,
cotton, and other commodities that labor produced, the
slave trade was big business and, for the most part, consid-
ered quite a respectable (if somewhat deplorable) business
in its time.
This book is based on the journal of a second officer on a
slaving ship, although Robert Harms, historian and author,
goes far, far beyond the journal itself in crafting his story. In
the first pages of The Diligent, he describes how the journal
on which the book is based was acquired (by Yale’s Beinecke
Rare Book Library), and how its authenticity was verified.
Written by the Diligent’s second officer, it provides consid-
erable detail (and some simple sketches) of the voyage and
its circumstances. It figures among the relatively rare ship-
board eyewitness sources available for the study of slaving.
Harms is entirely aware that a single voyage, no matter how
carefully documented, cannot represent the history of slav-
ing: “The voyage of the Diligent was only one of the approx-
imately forty thousand slaving voyages that forcibly carried
off more than 11 million captives from the shores of Africa
during the course of four centuries” (p. xiv).
In his efforts to uncover the slave trade for his readers,
Harms seeks to think outward from that single voyage to
the enormous canvas on which the voyage was ultimately
painted. The story stretches from the obscure Breton coastal
town of Vannes, where the voyage begins; to Africa, where
the “ebony logs” are boarded; to Martinique, where they
are sold; and back to France, where the story ends, grimly.
The author’s larger ambitions occupy 47 brief chapters,
organized into 12 parts and an afterword. In these many
separate beginnings, the threads that link a single voyage to
the social, political, religious, and economic life of Europe,
Africa, and the New World are drawn out of the complex
fabric in which they are embedded. In this way, the reader
can see above and beyond the sailors, slave traders, and en-
slaved to the capitalists, politicians, and theologians whose
decisions modulated and informed their actions.
Nearly every chapter provides a link. When Mme.
Villeneuve brings her slave Pauline to France, where she
is to be educated at the Convent of Our Lady of Calvary,
neither of them could know that the young slave’s decision
to become a nun would one day raise important questions
for the French state concerning slavery, property, and citi-
zenship. Similarly, when the Diligent sails down the African
coast in search of its cargo, none of its officers could predict
that King Agaja’s war against the slave entrepôt of Whydah
marked the growing strength of African rulers to operate
without European sponsorship in the acquisition and sale
of others.
Harms is zealous in his pursuit of detail. When
Second Captain Durand undertakes to determine the lati-
tude of the Diligent by calculating the declination of the sun,
the reader gets a one-page course in celestial navigation.
When there are stops at Principe and São Tomé, the reader
learns about race relations, internecine religious struggles,
and the destruction of São Tomé’s sugar industry. It is as
much as anyone might wish to know about the functional
relationships of slaving commerce to the many societies in
which it flourished—and, perhaps, even a bit more.
Within the rich picture that the author provides, the
trip itself tends to lose some of its significance—not for
lack of detail, but because there is so much beyond it that
demands the reader’s attention. The aim of encompassing
the immediate and everyday in the life of captors and
captives, while linking their fates to far larger and infinitely
more powerful forces, is estimable and has the salutary
effect of making the reader lift his eyes mentally. But just
as this work makes abundantly clear the great efforts of
its author, it is not an easy task for the reader because the
back and forth of the larger chronicle requires considerable

refocussing. This is an illuminating book, and a difficult
but rewarding read. In this book, readers are provided
with a close-up view of a single slaving expedition. But
one gets to the expedition itself only after the author
enables us to see the local, regional, and national factors
at work in making such undertakings possible (and usually
profitable).
West Indian in the West: Self Representations in an
Immigrant Community. Percy C. Hintzen. New York: New
York University Press, 2001. 201 pp.
COLLEEN BALLERINO COHEN
Vassar College
With West Indian in the West: Self Representations in an Im-
migrant Community, Percy C. Hintzen adds important mate-
rial to studies of the Caribbean diaspora. Focusing princi-
pally on the individual experiences of West Indians living
in the San Francisco Bay Area, Hintzen illuminates the com-
plex means by which West Indian immigrants to northern
California build and maintain their identities. In particu-
lar, Hintzen demonstrates how racism, idealized images of
the West Indies, and their own sense of foreignness shape
the way West Indian immigrants come to understand and
represent themselves. Although most West Indian immi-
grants to the United States live in spatially defined ethnic
enclaves in New York City and Miami, the West Indians
whose lives are treated in this book are dispersed through-
out the Bay Area. This, Hintzen suggests, presents a unique
challenge. Lacking the political and social support of a co-
herent and visible ethnic community, West Indians living
in the Bay Area are impelled to seek the political and so-
cioeconomic benefits of affiliation with African Americans,
even as they strive to distinguish themselves from that com-
munity by playing up images of West Indians as a model
minority.
Hintzen’s book is based on participant observation,
intensive interviews, and his own experience as a West
Indian in the San Francisco Bay Area. The first several chap-
ters provide useful historical background on West Indian
migration and detail the central role of Caribbean festival,
music, and food in public performances and individual rep-
resentations of West Indian identity. Of particular interest
to students of Caribbean festival is Hintzen’s discussion of
the San Francisco Carnival, with its origins in white idealiza-
tions of an exotic Caribbean and its function as a conduit
for multiethnic affiliation. Although Hintzen’s discussion
of the strategic and public display of Caribbean culture em-
ployed by West Indian immigrants tends to homogenize
West Indian experience, I take this to be a factor of dealing
with a dispersed population, rather than of his scholarly
sensibility. When Hintzen turns to the discussion of the ne-
gotiations that individual West Indian immigrants under-
take to formulate their identity and status, he reveals a keen
and sensitive ethnographic eye.
Single Reviews 151
The chapters detailing individual experiences of West
Indian immigrants to the Bay Area are the heart of the book.
They are also the sections in which Hintzen makes the most
original and important contribution. In these chapters,
Hintzen uses rich and extensive interview material to
show the particular ways that individuals manage their
identities as West Indian immigrants and U.S. residents.
The individuals whose lives Hintzen describes vary by class,
gender, migration and family history, and occupation; as
a consequence, we see the multiple and complex factors
that contribute to individuals’ maintenance or rejection of
a West Indian identity. As crucially, Hintzen brings to light
the intricate and vexed relation of West Indians to African
Americans and demonstrates that it is only against the
backdrop of the racialized social order of the United States
that the nature of West Indian experiences and identities
in northern California can be fully appreciated.
A Courtship after Marriage: Sexuality and Love in Mex-
ican Transnational Families. Jennifer S. Hirsch. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2003. 376 pp.
LEIGH BINFORD
Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla
This precise, finely crafted piece of ethnography treats the
sexual and reproductive behavior of Mexican women resid-
ing either in Mexico or in the United States at the time of the
investigation. Jennifer S. Hirsch documents a generational
transformation from heterosexual relationships based on
“respect” (respeto) to those based on “trust” (confianza).
She examines in considerable detail the consequences and
complications of this transformation in the domains of
courtship, marriage, sexuality, and fertility. A considerable
strength is Hirsch’s effort to distance herself from unilineal
schemes that treat the companionate marriage ideal as in-
dicative either of the move from tradition to modernity, or
as representative of the individualist-based Western model.
Hirsch notes how many Mexican women creatively com-
bine elements of respect- and trust-based relationships in
what might be thought of as the active transformation of
“a globally available ideology into the specifically Mexican
companionate marriage” (p. 271).
Hirsch works with and through an innovative method-
ology involving the “pairing” of 13 migrant females re-
siding in Atlanta, Georgia, with nonmigrant counterparts
in Degollago, Jalisco, and El Fuerte, Michoacán, two rural
towns in Mexico’s historic migration zone. The meanings
of courtship, marriage, sexuality, and love were approached
through six semistructured life history interviews with each
of these 26 informants, ranging from discussion of “child-
hood and family” (the first interview) to “dating, mar-
riage, and sexuality” (the sixth). The pairing strategy, which
Hirsch refers to as a “more systematized version of the snow-
ball method” (p. 33), offers a degree of generalization not
usually available with small-sample research, because each
152 American Anthropologist • Vol. 107, No. 1 • March 2005
U.S.-dwelling informant had a Mexican-dwelling, nonmi-
grating counterpart close to her in age, marital and employ-
ment experience, and family background.
Hirsch’s refusal to treat migration as the “deciding fac-
tor” in the adoption or development of the companionate
marriage model, and to recognize that Mexican village
life has not been stagnating during the last three decades,
stands as one of the book’s strengths and provides an im-
portant corrective to a body of migration literature that
seeks the root of most Mexican cultural change—especially
where women are concerned—north of the border. “Mexico
is a moving target,” she notes, “and those very values that
are so often cast as traditional, in contrast to the modern
United States, are in fact highly contested and in the pro-
cess of profound transformation” (p. 208). Apart from mi-
gration, then, changes in schooling, mass media, and the
age at marriage “have had an important impact on Mexican
sexual culture” (p. 82). If (some) Mexican migrant women
in the United States have an advantage, it pertains less to
their conceptions about gendered relationships and more to
a greater potential—deriving from greater institutional pro-
tections and economic opportunities—to successfully nego-
tiate with their spouses.
Companionate marriages remains just as socially con-
structed as respect-based marriages, which is to say that
they should not be conceived as “liberating” in any gen-
eral, ahistorical sense. Rather, they represent different ways
in which women and men struggle over and perform gender
inequalities. They are forms of relations that, even as they
offer women the prospect of greater emotional pleasure,
may also be more fragile, because men who have bought
into the companionate ideal may feel justified in breaking
off a relationship that no longer provides the high level of
emotional satisfaction that they had come to expect.
I found the nuanced description and analysis of com-
panionate marriage both thoughtful and convincing. But
the book would have been better had the author provided
more than a cursory treatment of the social and historical
context of the Mexican sending communities. Given the
long history of U.S. migration from western Mexico, and
the large numbers of return migrants, migration-based and
“indigenous” changes are not easily disentangled. Although
I think that Hirsch is probably correct in most of her claims
regarding the “causes” of the development and spread of the
Mexican version of the companionate ideal, her hypotheses
merit further examination in areas where migratory move-
ments to the United States “massified” only during the last
15 years.
This minor criticism aside, A Courtship after Marriage
is an important contribution to the literature on transna-
tional families and communities, and should inspire more
people to critically examine hegemonic (heterosexual)
models of sexuality and conjugal relations. Both the care-
fully crafted methodology, as well as Hirsch’s reflections
on her social positioning and its effects on the results of
the research, will prove useful for anthropologists of all
levels.
Drugs, Labor and Colonial Expansion. William Jankowiak
and Daniel Bradburd, eds. Tucson: University of Arizona
Press, 2003. 235 pp.
PA U L G O O T E N B E R G
Stony Brook University
This engaging volume addresses the growing interest of his-
torians, anthropologists, and cultural studies scholars in
both colonialism (sparked by “post”-colonial theory and
by resurgent empire) and the increasingly respectable and
global interdisciplinary study of “drug-foods” (a field first
sown in the 1980s by anthropologist Sidney Mintz). It is
high time—all puns aside—that the history of colonialism
and drugs met. The book is a collective empirical elabo-
ration of the editors’ 1996 ethnographic survey, which ar-
gued that such substances—tobacco, alcohol, caffeine, coca,
maté, and the like—served colonialism well, in terms of en-
hancing exploitable labor practices and productivity among
newly colonized peoples. It is a needed complement to
global yet Eurocentric works that underscore the role played
by novel stimulant goods in European expansion, in the rise
of capitalist culture, state building, and long-distance com-
modity networks (especially Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s 1987
Tastes of Paradise and David Courtwright’s newer synthesis
Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World).
In this volume the impact on colonials is accented.
The book opens with a fine introduction to drugs
and labor themes, exploring the myriad ways drug-foods
smoothed the way for colonialism: They were taken for
consoling and escapism, as well as for focusing work and
combating fatigue. Subsequent case studies (tobacco in Abo-
riginal Australia or Papua New Guinea) show how these
plant commodities entered into native exchange, help-
ing to mobilize new labor forms (sometimes by debt) and
tastes (sometimes compulsively). Charles Ambler’s overview
of alcohol and the African slave trade sees the agency,
rather than duplicity, of Africans seeking hard drink; sim-
ilarly, a brief survey of spirits in the North American fur
trade contests stereotypes of destructive genetic drunk-
enness. Michael V. Angrosino’s contribution on rum and
“ganja” in Trinidad fascinates with the cultural counter-
point and conflict between these two intoxicants. An es-
say on Namibia concerns the shaping of colonial states and
identities worked by good local lager; in Botswana, a kin and
gender colonialist mixed economy was lubricated by alco-
hol. A survey on earlier colonial coca in the Andes outlines
its shift from an indirect incentive to labor (mediated by
ayllus) to a direct stimulant (in Spanish-induced commer-
cialism and wage labor). E. N. Anderson’s comparative look
at “Caffeine and Culture”—in coffee, tea, chocolate, colas,
yerba maté, guaraná—unpacks the world’s most ubiquitous
and commodified of drugs, not only its alienated side but
also caffeine’s ability to inspire sociability and culture. The
book ends on an editors’ summary of “New Directions” for
study of drugs in work and trade and on the open question
of how drugs are and are not like other commodities.

A few caveats: Readers may wonder, with so much here
on alcohol and tobacco, about other substances, such as
opium, given its pivotal role opening colonial ventures
throughout Asia. The divided voices of colonial officials
(with all their biases) are still heard over the quieter sub-
altern laborer, a perennial dilemma in colonial histories.
I was mostly perplexed by how “drugs” are conceived. At
times, contributors fall into “addiction” discourse or what
some drug specialists would critique as the “pharmococen-
tric” fallacy—commonsense notions of drugs as chemical
determinants. Biochemistry aside, historically and ethno-
graphically drugs have revealed themselves in an amaz-
ingly changeable array of uses, social meanings, and sen-
sations for body and mind, influenced by their cultural “set
and settings.” For an anthropological survey, such social or
cultural “constructivism” seems oddly downplayed for the
conventional model—that alkaloids trap their victims and
work predictable physical effects (i.e., stimulating harder la-
bor). Certainly this makes for a stronger central argument—
that drug foods proved directly “functional” to Western
colonialism—but that kind of functionalism is belied by the
complexity and nuance of the case studies themselves. How
to explain, taking an obvious example, why cannabis would
be labor inducing in one cultural setting and a worrisome
distraction from work discipline in others? It also means
we lose alternative or inner meanings of drug-food encoun-
ters and experiences. In the perennial seesaw between struc-
ture and culture, this book is mainly a Wallerstein, not a
Sahlins.
The next wave of studies will likely trace the discursive
feedback between drugs across metropole and periphery—
how 19th century colonialism ultimately helped produce
a paradoxical Western promotion, revulsion, and then re-
striction of certain drugs over others. This book, quibbles
aside, is a fine contribution to historical anthropology and
the emerging field of drug history.
REFERENCES CITED
Jankowiak, William, and Daniel Bradburd
1996 Using Drug Foods to Capture and Enhance Labor Perfor-
mance: A Cross-Cultural Perspective. Current Anthropology
37(4):717–720.
Critically Modern: Alternatives, Alterities, Anthropolo-
gies. Bruce M. Knauft, ed. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2002. 329 pp.
HARRI ENGLUND
University of Cambridge
The theoretical multiplication of modernities, conspicuous
in the sociocultural anthropology of the past decade, en-
counters refreshing irony and dissent in this volume. Bruce
Knauft describes his frustrations at the dawn of the new
millennium, when multiple, alternative, and vernacular
modernities were all the rage. Harboring a common desire
to blaze a trail, he found his efforts to organize research
proposals and conference sessions around these themes du-
Single Reviews 153
plicated, as it were, by countless peers. Donald Donham
suggests a further irony. To invoke modernity, he observes,
is to place oneself within a “supposed theoretical avant-
garde” (p. 241), a quest for newness that is itself a product
of the desire to be modern. Jonathan Friedman makes hay of
current anthropologists’ nervousness about cultural conti-
nuities and identifies in the notion of multiple modernities
a “politically correct approach to difference” (p. 302). These
and other ironies receive serious analysis in this collec-
tion of chapters on, among other things, money, commodi-
ties, evangelical Christianity, development discourses, radio
broadcasting, slave identities, capitalism, and revolution.
The chapters indicate progress, to use a modernist notion,
in the study of modernities: An enhanced self-awareness
among their authors, evident in their misgivings about the
assumed equality of the world’s modernities, and in their
questioning of whether the desire to be modern is more ap-
parent than real. What such concerns reveal are intensifying
disagreements about the referents and utility of modernity
as a concept.
Despite their shared propensity to reflexivity, the con-
tributors do not write in one voice. Some seem prepared
to discard “modernity” as an analytical notion, others try
to pin it down to specific historical conjunctures, and still
others pursue the paradigm of multiple modernities with re-
newed vigor. Holly Wardlow, for example, suggests that the
gendered patterns of production and consumption among
the Huli of Papua New Guinea make women and men
“very differently modern subjects” (p. 163). Her argument,
stressing each modernity’s requirement of “internal others”
(p. 163), seems perfectly defensible within the paradigm,
and one can already foresee the next step. Further decon-
structions of “women” and “men” will make modernities
multiply like individuals; if not as individuals, then sepa-
rate entities in interaction.
Several chapters seek to make the study of modernities
more responsive to the challenges of cross-cultural compari-
son, notably Donham’s on capitalist history, Robert Foster’s
on trust relations, Lisa Rofel’s on gender, and Debra Spitul-
nik’s on language use. All these efforts are laudable, but in
some cases an unreflexive distinction between theory and
ethnography confines the authors’ insights. An example is
Foster’s use of Anthony Giddens’s concepts of “distancia-
tion,” “disembedding,” and “reembedding.” They are said
to facilitate Foster’s quest for “an explicit theory of moder-
nity” (p. 75) that would make sense of a wide range of ethno-
graphic cases. Despite a promise to “pluralize Giddens”
(p. 65), it is Papua New Guinean realities that appear as plu-
ral and particular. Thus, for example, Papua New Guineans’
interests in the moral obligations of the modern state be-
come particular instances of a metropolitan theorist’s con-
structs, not elements of an alternative theory. The theoret-
ical import of ethnography is circumscribed by its status as
illustration.
More consistent insights can be found in the gem
of this collection, Spitulnik’s thoughtful exposition of
the use and abuse of linguistic evidence in ethnography.
154 American Anthropologist • Vol. 107, No. 1 • March 2005
More irony emerges when she notes how the academic
fascination with the discourses of modernity has actually
yielded little examination of naturally occurring language.
A handful of vernacular terms have often been reified as
key concepts, their multifunctional uses thereby obscured.
Through an ethnographic and linguistic analysis of her
materials from Zambia, Spitulnik shows not only how the
idea of being modern is polyvalent but also how some
connotations cherished by social scientists, such as cultural
hybridity, may not be lexically recognized at all. Her chal-
lenge to the transparency of language demonstrates how it
is only through a proper command of relevant linguistic
practices that the actual limits of linguistic evidence can
be established. Indeed, linguistic competence used to be
a sine qua non for ethnographic fieldwork. If the notion
of multiple modernities is now implicated in reifying
vernacular terms, does it also facilitate a modernist break
with the past in ethnographers’ knowledge production?
Post-Socialist Peasant? Rural and Urban Constructions
of Identity in Eastern Europe, East Asia and the Former
Soviet Union. Pamela Leonard and Deema Kaneff, eds.
New York: Palgrave, 2002. 225 pp.
S U AVA Z B I E R S K I - S A L A M E H
Haverford College
What does peasant mean in the modern world? This is a
two-pronged question examined in this important volume
edited by Pamela Leonard and Deema Kaneff. First, the col-
lection aims to explore the formation of peasant identity
in the aftermath of the postsocialist reforms of the 1990s.
Second, based on theoretical insights gained within the
postsocialist “periphery,” the authors aim to expand con-
ceptions of peasantry within “core” peasant literature. The
book draws from countries in Eastern Europe, the former
Soviet Union, and Asia that share a socialist past and the
future objectives of constructing an economy based on mar-
kets and private property.
The editors problematize dominant conceptions of
peasantry as intellectuals’ constructions of a rural “other.”
Leonard and Kaneff assert that for both socialist and capital-
ist thinkers, the term peasant derives from their respective
macrolevel Enlightenment ideas about modernity. From
a Marxist–Leninist perspective, peasants’ small properties
constituted a major obstacle to the historic necessity of cre-
ating socialism. For Western intellectuals, the “ruralness” of
peasants was the antithesis of progress based on rationaliza-
tion and industrialization. The authors posit that these two
models of development impute backwardness to the peas-
antry, characterizing them as an inherently insular force
operating against the mainstream of history. An alternative
perspective advanced by Western political economists de-
clares peasants to be individualistic economic agents, not
distinct from other capitalist players.
Rejecting either an inherent conservatism or utilitar-
ian drive for economic gain as the peasantry’s univer-
sal attributes, the authors propose a constructivist per-
spective to analyze the postsocialist peasants. Within it,
the peasant world is explored in its totality on the mi-
crolevel, rather than being assessed against the macrolevel
blueprints of progress espoused by (urban) others. The
peasantry in this collection denotes historically specific,
proactive agents who orient their actions to complex life
circumstances.
How well does the book access the postsocialist real-
ity using this new concept of the peasantry? The collective
picture emerging from these chapters portrays vast num-
bers of rural and urban households involved in subsistence-
oriented agriculture. Humphrey terms this development
the “peasantization” of everyday life. Many of the chapters
(Czegledy, Humphrey, Perrotta) document collective mem-
bers’ resistance to postsocialist decollectivization and the
increased cultivation of auxiliary plots for personal con-
sumption. These practices run counter to the postsocialist
reformers’ objectives of privatized and commercialized agri-
culture. The picture appears less clear once the editors ex-
plore the motives for the specific practices of those engaged
in farming and their identities. Consistent with the con-
structivist perspective, people employ divergent strategies,
and their motives for specific agricultural practices cannot
be reduced to economic ones. However, the pattern of ap-
plied strategies and of identity formation appears so widely
diversified that the editors openly concede that, in the post-
socialist context, the term peasant “conceals more than it
reveals” (p. 33).
I think that we could overcome such a disappoint-
ing conclusion if we broaden the editors’ explicit analyt-
ical critique to match the collection’s descriptive analyses.
Although the editors challenge the core literature’s asser-
tions about the peasantry’s backwardness, they leave un-
examined presuppositions about objective delineation of
the peasantry by rural–urban and agricultural–industrial di-
vides. Yet, the major contribution of the chapters reveals
how the postsocialist actors engaged in farming are dis-
persed at both ends of these divides. Under the term peas-
ant, the collection includes postsocialist industrial workers,
state officials, and intellectuals cultivating their small agri-
cultural plots, in addition to the full-time members of agri-
cultural production collectives. These individuals’ diverse
links to land and to subsistence agriculture were formed
during advancing industrialization. Because of their intri-
cate and diverse ties to an urban-based industrial economy
and society, the postsocialist actors depicted in the collec-
tion are “peasants no more” (Lopreato 1967), either in their
objective characteristics or in their identities. Rather, they
are “post-peasants” (Geertz 1962:5).
Thus, the book achieves more than it claims. The au-
thors’ analytical and descriptive analyses challenge the tra-
ditional notion of peasantry in its subjective and objective
dimensions. By revealing the diverse structural locations
of the actors engaged in the postsocialist agriculture, the
book prompts the conclusion that the multiplicity of their
practices and identities is not inexplicable but must be

mediated by reference to systemic features of the real
existing socialism. With that, the book hints at a big-
ger project—an analysis of socialism as an impetus of
postsocialist transformations. This, in turn, problematizes
the postsocialist reformers and intellectuals’ claims about
the universalism of capitalist development in the modern
world.
REFERENCES CITED
Lopreato, Joseph
1967 Peasants No More: Social Class and Social Change in an
Underdeveloped Society. San Francisco: Chandler.
Geertz, Clifford
1962 Studies in Peasant Life: Community and Society. In Bien-
nial Review of Anthropology. B. Siegel, ed. Pp. 1–42. Stanford:
Stanford University Press.
Out in Theory: The Emergence of Lesbian and Gay An-
thropology. Ellen Lewin and William L. Leap, eds. Cham-
paign: University of Illinois Press, 2002. 329 pp.
TOM BOELLSTORFF
University of California, Irvine
In their introductory chapter, the editors of Out in Theory sit-
uate this compelling volume in a climate of disciplinary re-
flection. In this atmosphere, attention to the theoretical and
methodological conditions of ethnographic production is
identified as a key precondition to further advances in an-
thropological inquiry. Taken as a whole, this volume seeks
both to contribute to this ethos of disciplinary reflection
in lesbian and gay anthropology and to identify ways in
which lesbian and gay anthropology can contribute to dis-
ciplinary reflection more generally. A well organized and
rich collection, this volume should sit on every anthropol-
ogist’s shelf as an important reference and would be appro-
priate for a range of graduate and undergraduate courses,
including ones in lesbian and gay anthropology, the an-
thropology of gender and sexuality, and anthropological
theory.
A tone of productively and generously critical engage-
ment runs throughout the eleven chapters of this volume;
although the book’s subtitle refers to the emergence of “les-
bian and gay anthropology” (a moniker that, following the
editors, I will use throughout this review), this emergence is
never essentialized. The volume, thus, uses the phrase “les-
bian and gay anthropology” as a starting point for exploring
the place of nonnormative sexualities and genders in cul-
ture and in anthropology itself. Three linked themes emerge
throughout: (1) the dangers inherent in the domination
of lesbian and gay anthropology by white middle-class gay
men; (2) the fraught yet productive relationships between
feminism and lesbian/gay anthropology (often taking the
form of debates over the relationship between the categories
“gender” and “sexuality”); and (3) the foundationally inter-
sectional character of sexuality in relation to not only gen-
der but also class, race, ethnicity, HIV/AIDS, and a range of
other social variables, often appended to declarative state-
ments but not so often addressed with the care they deserve.
Single Reviews 155
As the editors note, the volume can be roughly divided
into two clusters of chapters. The first cluster of six chapters
represents, to my knowledge, the most theoretically sophis-
ticated and carefully documented overview of lesbian and
gay anthropology to date—a welcome extension of Kath
Weston’s pathbreaking 1993 Annual Review article on les-
bian and gay anthropology (frequently cited throughout
this volume). Gayle Rubin provides an important correc-
tive to the widespread assumption that work on homosex-
uality and transgenderism “began in the 1990s, is derived
almost entirely from French theory, and is primarily located
in fields such as modern languages and literature, philoso-
phy, and film studies” (p. 18). Her chapter examines earlier
insightful and theoretically sophisticated work that remains
influential and repays close rereading. Evelyn Blackwood
examines the emergence of theories of sexuality in the
1970s and 1980s, with a focus on the tensions between
mainstream work on homosexuality that was authored pri-
marily by men and focused on men’s sexual practices, versus
feminist work that focused on understanding sexuality as a
modality by which men oppress women. Blackwood also
illustrates how later attention to female same-sex relations
and transgender practices “offered new insights to . . . the
early models of sexuality” (p. 85). Elizabeth Lapovsky
Kennedy explores the history of gay and lesbian community
studies in anthropology, showing how lesbian and gay an-
thropology has been profoundly interdisciplinary since its
origins. Lewin investigates the history of what is often seen
as the “unhappy marriage” of feminist anthropology and
lesbian/gay studies, suggesting that a “feminist-inspired fo-
cus on gender” (p. 123), rather than queer theory, provides
the best hope for better relations. Chapters by William L.
Leap and Robert A. Schmidt provide excellent overviews of
lesbian and gay anthropology with reference to linguistic
anthropology and archaeology, respectively.
In the second cluster of five chapters, a series of
anthropologists provide what are in effect case studies,
drawing on their own research to ask broader questions
about the character of, and possible futures for, lesbian and
gay anthropology. It is in this set of chapters that queer
anthropology begins to appear with some frequency as a
problematized but largely embraced term for rethinking the
project of lesbian and gay anthropology. Benjamin Junge
discusses bareback-sex amongst gay men in the context
of HIV prevention, and David Valentine investigates how
the lived experience of transgendered people demands
questioning the separation of “sexuality” and “gender.”
Martin F. Manalansan IV deploys his work on Filipino
gay/queer men to investigate how questions of diaspora,
globalization, and ethnicity provide avenues of challenging
and productive inquiry for lesbian and gay anthropology.
Jeff Maskovsky questions the assumption that lesbians
and particularly gay men “reek of the commodity” by
examining the erasure of poverty in lesbian and gay
anthropology. Deborah Elliston draws on her research in
Tahiti to chart possible futures for queer anthropology
through both feminist and queer frameworks. Her call for
156 American Anthropologist • Vol. 107, No. 1 • March 2005
a “queer politics of cultural respect” (p. 307) encapsulates
the promise of queer anthropology and of this valuable
volume.
Somalia: Economy without State. Peter D. Little. Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press, 2003. 206 pp.
C AT H E R I N E B E S T E M A N
Colby College
Following the collapse of Somalia’s state structure in 1991
and the failure of the international intervention to restore
order and a legitimate government, media coverage of So-
malia has been eclipsed by events in Afghanistan and Iraq.
If the creation of more ungoverned territories draws atten-
tion back to Somalia, Peter Little’s book will be an excellent
source of information about how an economy may con-
tinue to operate in the absence of state structures. Little’s
focus is the rarely studied livestock trade linking southern
Somalia and Kenya, which has boomed since 1991. Because
Little has conducted fieldwork with transborder traders for
the past 15 years, his book offers a comparative study of pre-
and postcollapse trade.
Little shows the utter failure of the multimillion dol-
lar U.S. and World Bank attempt to reorient the southern
Somali livestock trade to the overseas export market dur-
ing the 1970s and 1980s. This spectacularly expensive dis-
aster encouraged immigration of nonlocal herders to the
region and contributed to the deterioration of grazing land
and privatization of water points by wealthy herders and
civil servants. The export trade collapsed and the “unoffi-
cial” transborder trade (which had been virtually ignored
by the Somali government and targeted for reorientation
by the World Bank project) boomed. In tracing the history
of the livestock trade, he explains the political and histori-
cal context that shaped clan hostilities and rural–urban dy-
namics in the region, shedding particular light on the on-
going violence in Kismayo. Because mobility is so critical
to herders’ success, this political and historical context ex-
plains the differential ability of herders to succeed in the
context of ongoing insecurity. For Somalia specialists, these
early chapters provide a refreshingly evenhanded and in-
formative overview of the region’s ecology and clan dy-
namics. Nonspecialists will find the discussion of pastoral
herding strategies, conflict avoidance, and rural–urban dy-
namics useful.
One of Little’s goals is to challenge popular perceptions
of anarchy and tribalism in Somalia by giving an accurate
account of how Somalis are managing in the absence of
state structures. He explains how the livestock trade has
become more clan based as a result of the ways in which
Somalia’s militias have manipulated the clan system in their
skirmishes. He clarifies why this clan emphasis has created
particular difficulties for Harti traders, whose activities have
become more limited in the Kismayo area, while creating
opportunities for Ogadeen traders, who have more easily
redirected their energies to the transborder trade.
Little is also concerned with challenging the suggestion
by conservative commentators that the health of Somalia’s
transborder trade demonstrates the benefits of free-market
capitalism liberated from state controls. To the contrary,
Little demonstrates that although the trade is booming, pro-
ducer incomes have not increased (because of stagnating
livestock prices and rising grain prices), and herders and
traders struggle to manage without health services, wel-
fare support, security, or access to education. Importantly,
Little is careful to clarify that his findings about the health
of the transborder livestock trade are not generalizable to
other populations in Somalia, such as city dwellers, women
and children, and minority communities, whose lives have
been adversely affected by Somalia’s violence and instabil-
ity. In general, Little shows admiration for the ability of
southern Somalia’s herders and traders to manage in the
face of volatility and uncertainty but avoids overstating
their success by documenting the demands of their subsis-
tence strategy. More ethnographic description of herder’s
lifestyles would add further richness and depth to the read-
ers’ understanding of pastoral strategies.
Of particular interest is his description of the vital cur-
rency markets that continue to utilize Somali shillings in the
absence of a state treasury, and the informal banking system
that links Somalis using Somali shillings to money houses
in Kenya, markets in Ethiopia, and international currency
exchanges in dollars.
Little concludes by noting that although the col-
lapse of Somalia’s state government may have had little
effect on southern livestock herders and traders because
state institutions had been so weak (and, in some ways,
detrimental to pastoralist herding strategies), a lingering
distrust of state institutions and development projects
remains. A “radical localization” (p. 167) of politics has
replaced state authority, characterized by an array of rebuilt
customary social structures and a vibrant public discourse
about cultural practices and traditions. Nevertheless, Little
argues that Somalis need a state structure to oversee the
protection of natural resources, to negotiate on behalf of
Somali producers with overseas markets, and to balance
regional power dynamics, but he emphasizes that any new
government must support pastoral mobility.
The African Diaspora: A Musical Perspective. Ingrid
Monson, ed. New York: Routledge, 2003. 366 pp.
GREG DOWNEY
University of Notre Dame
Marked contrasts within The African Diaspora: A Musical
Perspective, edited by Ingrid Monson, reflect ethnomusicol-
ogy’s uneasy marriage of musicological, anthropological,
and performance studies perspectives. The more musicolog-
ical contributions can be off-putting to nonspecialists; long
technical discussions of recordings, for example, substitute
text for performance, and the intense biographical focus on
specific artists may grate on anthropological sensibilities.

Monson’s introduction frames the collection with Paul
Gilroy’s rubric of the Black Atlantic—Gilroy privileges music
and dance as primary spheres for elaborating transatlantic
black culture—but only two chapters specifically discuss
Gilroy’s ideas. The resulting diversity makes the collection
inconsistent but also produces some genuine surprises.
Three of the book’s chapters focus on jazz music.
Grouping jazz studies with other African diaspora musics
is unusual, but overcoming the nationalist treatment of
the genre and its internal debates proves difficult. Travis
Jackson discusses “ritual” dimensions of jazz, including the
temporal structure and social dynamics of performance.
Jackson seeks an overarching “blues aesthetic” in academic
and practitioner discourse that is a “diasporic musical trace
or awareness” (p. 53). Jerome Harris offers an “ecology”
of jazz festivals, tours, recording relations, broadcasting,
music education, and government support from various
states. He highlights crucial controversies: How the African
American jazz community serves as the “arbiter of jazz le-
gitimacy” (p.119), for example, in spite of more extensive
financial support elsewhere, and the debate between per-
formers championing a “canon” and those who prefer a
“process” approach to jazz (p. 120). Finally, Monson ana-
lyzes percussionist Art Blakey’s conflicted relationship with
Africa, contrasting his denials of African influence and his
conversion to the Ahmadiyya movement in Islam with
his compositions, which evidence strong African and Afro-
Cuban traits.
Four chapters discuss particular musical genres in
cultural–historical terms familiar to anthropologists. Lucy
Durán details how urban women singers deploy hunting
imagery in Mali. Lansiné Kaba and Eric Charry explore
the historic emergence of Mamaya music in Guinea out
of generational dynamics. Akin Euba, himself a composer
of Yoruba folk opera and a musicologist, examines crucial
compositions in the development of this neo-African musi-
cal theater. In an exploration of bèlè dance and drum style
in Martinique, Julian Gerstin asks why contemporary so-
cial movements do not ally with renewal movements of
rural folk cultures. He explains their isolation as a result
of Martinican ambivalence, simultaneously a département
of France and, yet, culturally distinct.
In contrast to the text-centered and historic focuses of
other chapters, Steven Cornelius examines how a high sta-
tus musical entrepreneur in southwest Ghana managed a
particular attempt by members of a religious cult to extort
money. As Cornelius describes, both the head of the drum-
ming school for foreigners and cult members used the hoax
to leverage “their positions by having framed their actions
in terms of divine authority” (p. 257).
Two of the more surprising chapters in the volume
defy easy categorization. Veit Erlmann describes the mu-
sical transformations worked on the song, “The Lion Sleeps
Tonight,” from its South African origin as “Mbube” by
Solomon Linda in 1939, through cover versions by Pete
Seeger’s Weavers (as “Wimoweh”) and the Tokens, to a
performance by the Mint Juleps and Ladysmith Black
Single Reviews 157
Mambazo in a Spike Lee film. As Erlmann follows the song
across time, space, and genres, he highlights shifts in aes-
thetics, the structure of musical repetition, and the song’s
significance. Gage Averill and Yuen-Ming David Yih inven-
tory military themes in Haitian music, noting how a shared
focus on war provided fertile ground for syncretism between
African and European elements. Averill and Yih show, for
example, how European military drumming techniques af-
fected features of vodun drumming (p. 279). As they explain:
“In a country where much of the traditional music draws on
African aesthetics and performance practices, the preserva-
tion of a European-derived repertory and performance prac-
tice within genres that refer to power and hierarchy is . . . a
window into the contradictions of the postcolonial experi-
ence” (p. 289).
Individual chapters will be of interest to specialists,
but, taken as a whole, the volume is inconsistent; chapters
vary widely in length, style, focus, and sophistication. The
African Diaspora rubric serves as a geographical catchall
rather than a unifying intellectual lens. The volume’s
disjunctures demonstrate, perhaps inadvertently, that no
single “musical perspective” on the African diaspora exists.
The many musical genres arising from the diaspora do not
all construct community in similar fashions, nor do they
even share an underlying understanding of what music is
or does.
Culture and Identity Politics in Northern Ireland.
Máiréad Nic Craith. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
232 pp.
W I L L I A M F. K E L L E H E R J R .
University of Illinois, Urbana–Champaign
At the dawn of the 21st century, arguments about culture
in a world of transforming nation states have proliferated.
Debates about cultural citizenship, the politics of difference
and of universalism, and contests over recognition abound.
New postsocialist states, imperialized ones, and established
nation-states dealing with histories of racial conflict or the
arrival of new immigrants have had to engage cultural di-
versity. At this historical moment, with the emerging mar-
ket tyrannies connected to neoliberal policies and the rising
status of security and capital-fostering institutions, serious
doubts about states fulfilling the pluralizing desires of a het-
erogeneous citizenry persist.
Paradoxically, these political conundrums present op-
portunities for anthropologists. Anthropology’s research
methods and theories position it as a potential evaluator
of contemporary efforts to address cultural struggles. Work-
ing from the ground up, such an anthropology could foster
the growth of a public: a group of citizens who ask them-
selves what sorts of cultural programming work to foster
belonging and who reflect on their effects.
Máiréad Nic Craith begins such work in this book. She
queries the programs, policies, and institutions of inclusion
that the British government—and, to a lesser extent, the
158 American Anthropologist • Vol. 107, No. 1 • March 2005
Irish one—have put into place to establish peace, reconcilia-
tion, and a functioning democracy in Northern Ireland. Nic
Craith analyzes state and community efforts of peacemak-
ing from the 1980s, when citizens of the two states began to
acknowledge cultural practices as a source of political divi-
sion, to the present. Her accounts of these differences pro-
vide the crucial context for understanding why the rather
ingenious peace process initiated by the Good Friday Agree-
ment, the pact signed by the governments of the United
Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland in 1998, has not pro-
duced the expected effects.
Nic Craith depicts the struggles involved in cross-
community communication in all their complexity. She
cogently reviews the literature on citizenship and cultural
recognition and pays particular heed to the debates on
the politics of universalism and of difference. Nic Craith
interprets Northern Ireland’s unionist and loyalist politi-
cal communities, those that want to remain part of the
United Kingdom, as advocating the politics of universalism,
whereas their Irish nationalist neighbors, those who desire
to belong to an island of Ireland republic, as deploying the
politics of difference. Unionists fashion their political com-
munity on questions of citizenship, whereas Irish national-
ists desire their difference as historically colonized subjects
to be recognized with programs that will build equality, not
merely assume it.
Nic Craith uses these different political–cultural under-
standings to elucidate how and why a cultural foundation
that enables communication across communities needs to
be established. The sharing of diverse historical narratives
or the ability to translate them, addressing these differences
while demonstrating civility, and the sharing of culturally
configured political values must occur before the new po-
litical institutions can function. Although Nic Craith does
not connect her work to organizational ecology, she shows
how and why Northern Ireland’s “fitness landscape” is not a
smooth but, rather, rugged one. Multiple problems charac-
terize rugged fitness landscapes, and Nic Craith shows that
citizens in Northern Ireland must scale many jagged peaks
to make the transition from a state of war to one of peace.
Nic Craith analyzes state efforts to foster intercultural
communication at a variety of sites and discusses the cul-
tural work that must be done for the political landscape
to be smoothed. She carefully outlines how Irish national-
ists and British unionists desire a parity of esteem for their
differing and often opposed institutions and cultural prac-
tices. She describes a variety of differences: the struggles over
language recognition; the conflicts between state schools,
the largely Catholic, maintained schools, and the integrated
schools that have developed since the 1980s; the differing
interpretations of religious communities; the contests that
characterize popular culture, from the state broadcasting
system to community festivals and national holiday ritu-
als; and the attempts by history and heritage associations,
particularly museums, to exhibit the array of cultural prac-
tices that exist in Northern Ireland.
Nic Craith’s book has a global reach while it offers
valuable interpretations of Northern Ireland’s cultural
specificities. Ireland has endured both early modern and
modern colonialisms while being part of developed Europe.
For these reasons, Northern Ireland provides a case that
exemplifies the contemporary cultural struggles of nation
states in the throes of decolonization and those straining
to accommodate new sets of immigrants who are in search
of economic, cultural, and political stability. Nic Craith’s
book offers insights not only for the particular historical
construction of Ireland’s dilemmas but also for a wide
variety of transforming nation-states.
Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms, and Nationalisms: The
Militarization of Aesthetics in Japanese History. Emiko
Ohnuki-Tierney. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2002. 411 pp.
M AT T T O M L I N S O N
Bowdoin College
Outside of Japan, many people think of the World War II
“kamikaze” pilots as suicidal automatons, mindless men
willing to destroy themselves in the name of the emperor.
This book by Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney debunks the stereo-
type, showing how many of the pilots were intelligent, even
brilliant, students who agonized over their fates.
Her book is more than just an ethnographic corrective,
however. She addresses several important theoretical ques-
tions, including the motivational power of signs, specifi-
cally the cherry blossom. By the time of World War II, one
expression of Japanese imperial nationalist ideology was
“You shall die like beautiful falling cherry petals for the
emperor” (p. 3). During the war, a blooming cherry blos-
som was painted on the sides of pilots’ planes; many pilots
wore cherry blossom branches on their uniforms; and as
they took off on their final flights, appreciative onlookers
waved cherry blossom branches (see pp. 165–166). Consid-
ering cherry blossoms’ prominence as symbols, and their as-
sociation with violent sacrifice, the central question arises:
To what extent did tōkkotai pilots accept the imperial ideol-
ogy (tōkkotai is shorthand for “Special Attack Forces,” and
is the term used in preference to kamikaze)? Although pi-
lots evidently acted according to the imperial design—they
did, indeed, sacrifice themselves—did they think, feel, and
believe that they were dying “like beautiful falling cherry
petals for the emperor?”
Ohnuki-Tierney’s answer is a nuanced consideration
of signs’ polysemy, aesthetics, and the ways different so-
cial actors “misrecognize” or misread the same signs (she
uses Henri Wallon’s term méconnaissance for this process).
Cherry blossoms are notably polysemous, signifying life
and rebirth as well as death, different social groups, and
Japan itself. These multiple meanings are part of the rea-
son that social actors can engage in communication while
drawing entirely different interpretations. Overlaying the

profusion of meanings is an aesthetic value of blossoms
as “beautiful,” which makes their “referents . . . equally
beautiful” (p. 286). Another factor in her complex an-
swer is the “naturalization” of aestheticized signs, wherein
a sign might “link the present directly to an imagined
primordial past” (p. 259), helping to create, for example,
visions of “pure” nations. Her discussion of aestheticiza-
tion, naturalization, and méconnaissance is detailed and
fruitful, and will be appreciated by scholars attempting to
understand the semiotic mechanisms of nationalism and
patriotism.
To repose Ohnuki-Tierney’s question in her own words:
“Was the pilots’ patriotism coterminous with the state ide-
ology” (p. 248)? Her answer is no, and her historical ev-
idence is devastating. She shows how pilots were coerced
into “volunteering” for missions (pp. 169–175). She ana-
lyzes the diaries of five tokkōtai pilots to show how they
were highly educated but idealistic young men who felt re-
sponsibility for building a “new Japan” but were desperate
and melancholy over the prospect of their deaths. As stu-
dents, some of them read an astonishing range of philo-
sophical and literary works in different languages, but it
was their intellectual breadth that helped encourage them
down their fatal paths. “They would have been able to re-
sist the naked propaganda of Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer,”
Ohnuki-Tierney writes, but “when the ‘general will,’ trans-
formed by the Nazi and Japanese states, was seen as the
general will of Rousseau and Kant, they were disarmed and
did not suspect the wicked hand of manipulation” (pp. 16–
17). In other words, the students were romantic idealists,
inspired by great philosophers and literary figures, resigned
to dying for Japan (and, sometimes, more specifically, for
mothers, lovers, and imagined women), but not for the em-
peror himself.
In her concluding chapters, Ohnuki-Tierney broadens
her theoretical scope, examining topics including national-
ism, patriotism, global–local dynamics, and the invention
of tradition. Her arguments in these chapters are useful and
will appeal to readers looking to bridge the Japanese details
with other ethnographic sites. They will probably already
be accepted by many readers—for example, that meaning is
necessarily polysemous, that local and global are interpene-
trating and mutually constructive forces, and that there are
no “pure” cultures, rendering terms such as hybrid and creole
problematic.
Her ultimate conclusion about the power of cherry
blossoms as symbols is satisfying for its combination of
boldness and subtlety: “The flower did not move [the pi-
lots] to take action, but it made them not confront the
méconnaissance between their thoughts and the state ide-
ology” (p. 303). In other words, symbols can move people
to sacrifice, but only when tangled within processes of nat-
uralization, aestheticization, and misrecognition. Ohnuki-
Tierney’s book is haunting, because one feels emotion-
ally involved with the doomed pilots and, from an an-
alytical distance, horrified at the cause and cost of their
sacrifice.
Single Reviews 159
Engaging Humor. Elliott Oring. Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 2003. 208 pp.
R O B E RT A . PA U L
Emory University
This book is a collection of ten separate chapters, quite dis-
parate in scope and approach but united around the general
theme of humor. The first three are devoted to advancing
the theory that “humor” depends on the “perception of an
appropriate incongruity; that is, the perception of an appro-
priate relationship between categories that would ordinarily
be regarded as incongruous” (p. 1). Example: a patient com-
plains to his psychiatrist, “no one believes anything I say,”
to which the doctor replies, “you’re kidding.” The joke is
humorous because the doctor’s answer is appropriate, in-
sofar as it is empathic and intended to be helpful, but at
the same time incongruous because it affirms the proposi-
tion the doctor appears to be denying in his attempt to be
understanding, and thus exacerbates the problem.
For Oring, the joke or other bit of humor need not re-
solve the incongruity at all (as suggested by a rival theory),
and, indeed, the quality of being humorous depends on the
co-presence (hence, nonresolution) of both appropriateness
and incongruity. The joke about the psychiatrist does not
resolve an incongruity but merely expresses it in a way that
also seems entirely appropriate along a different channel of
language or thought.
Oring likewise does not agree that humor necessarily
involves qualities that have been previously proposed such
as superiority (Hobbes), aggression (Freud), or mechanical
rigidity (Bergson). To test the theory attributed to Freud that
(tendentious) humor releases the inhibition of repressed im-
pulses, in the chapter “The Humor of Hate,” Oring exam-
ines the publications of a hate group, the White Aryan Re-
sistance. The idea is that here is a group that has no qualms
about expressing aggression openly, so that according to
the “repression-lifting” theory of humor, they should have
no need to resort to humor to convey their message. Or-
ing claims that an examination of this material reveals that
these hatemongers do indeed employ humor extensively
on their home page, disproving the “repression-lifting” hy-
pothesis. Oring’s argument itself suffers from several weak-
nesses, the most important being that there is very little
that is in any way funny about the material he cites. There
are drawings that have the form of cartoons or caricatures,
and things that have the appearance of riddles and jokes,
but precious little that depends on the “perception of an ap-
propriate incongruity,” aside from some wordplay in con-
structions such as “Jewnited States” or “Latrino.” (I say this,
by the way, not because I am offended by this material but
as an analytical observation. This does not, however, imply
that I am not indeed offended by it: I found the extensive
citation of it excessive and gratuitous.)
Another argument against Oring’s thesis in this chapter
lies in his conclusion that “humorous communications do
more than communicate the messages they contain. Humor
implies a community; a fellowship of laughers with whom
160 American Anthropologist • Vol. 107, No. 1 • March 2005
the humor is shared” (p. 56). The problem with this con-
clusion is that (1) it adds a new dimension to the definition
of humor that is social and, thus, goes beyond the generic
definition given in the earlier chapters and (2) it hardly rep-
resents a refutation of Freud’s actual theory, which was that
“in the case of aggressive purposes [humor] employs the
same method [bribing with a gift of pleasure in the form of
wordplay] in order to turn the hearer, who was indifferent
to begin with, into a co-hater or co-despiser, and creates for
the enemy a host of opponents where at first there was only
one” (Freud 1960:133).
Much more successful is the chapter “Humor and the
Suppression of Sentiment.” Here Oring shows that although
humor may or may not serve to release repressions on
sexuality or aggression in contemporary American culture,
it certainly does so with the affect of “sentimentality.”
Exploring the recent history of greeting cards, he shows how
the cynical and raunchy message in the genre of cards de-
signed for people one cares about on special occasions has
mushroomed at the expense of the parallel genre of “senti-
mental” cards, reflecting a taboo on the expression of naked
sentiment in at least some sectors contemporary society. A
trip to the neighborhood drugstore will provide graphic il-
lustration of the truth of this thesis.
All in all, these are for the most part provocative and
interesting chapters. As a bonus, the book also contains a
lot of funny jokes.
REFERENCES CITED
Freud, Sigmund
1960[1905] Jokes and Their Relations to the Unconscious. James
Strachey, trans. New York: W. W. Norton.
From Fanatics to Folk: Brazilian Millenarianism and
Popular Culture. Patricia R. Pessar. Durham, NC: Duke Uni-
versity Press, 2004. 274 pp.
N ATA S H A P R AVA Z
Wilfrid Laurier University
In the halls of the academy these days, it is still com-
mon to hear Gramscians heatedly defend their turf against
vulgarizations of the concept of “hegemony” incurred
by poststructuralists and postmodernists alike. Conversely,
“post”-oriented anthropologists get frustrated when politi-
cal economists include token references to their position-
ality in their otherwise highly modernist ethnographies.
Rarely do we see any serious attempts at bridging the gaps of
old and tired dichotomies that hinder more than foster cre-
ative ethnographic thinking. A welcome exception to this
rule is Patricia Pessar’s new book. Accomplishing the un-
common feat of pleasing both audiences, Pessar’s account
of popular and elite millenarianism spans over the centuries
in an extremely rich and textured narrative about the in-
terplay between apocalyptic thought, cultural practice, and
power relations in Brazil.
Beginning with an account of the role of Portuguese
messianism in legitimizing the colonial conquest, From Fa-
natics to Folk points out that the explicit eschatology of
Jesuit missions and monarchical rituals of rule largely par-
ticipated in the construction of a hegemony producing hi-
erarchy and patrimonial authority as divinely preordained.
After the ultramontane reforms of the late 1800s, however,
millenarianism carried on as a popular form that had to
defend itself from the attacks of church and state alike. In-
deed, in the context of a crisis of hegemony, in which the
emergent rural bourgeoisie and republican powers could
not sustain a patriarchal pact, poor backlanders’ resent-
ment was no longer held in check. Pessar contextualizes
the emergence of popular millenarianism as a reconstitu-
tion of “personalistic and precapitalist values and relations”
(p. 33), a form of popular culture where mystical subjectiv-
ities awaited the apocalypse under the wings of messianic
figures such as Antonio Conselheiro and Padre Cı́cero. In
fact, one of Pessar’s most original contributions is to dis-
lodge thinking on the Contestado, Juazeiro, and Canudos
movements as “case studies” by conceptualizing an inter-
textual field in which to understand the semantic links be-
tween the movements that are traced by different social
actors.
From chapter 2 on, the book centers more squarely
on a community of romeiros (pilgrims) who in 1945 settled
around the little known charismatic leader Pedro Batista
and, therefore, can be read as the original ethnography of
a contemporary messianic village in northeastern Brazil.
However, the book continually resituates the narrative spa-
tially and temporally in the context of previous movements,
regional and national politics, the media, tourism, and local
and international academic and funding connections, thus
widening “the circle of actors and institutions convention-
ally included in studies of millenarianism” (p. 227).
Pessar goes on to conceptualize what she calls the
“sacralizing process,” which includes four central activi-
ties: “the separation of the religious figure from the polit-
ical sphere by the obscuring of his family ties; the leader’s
presentation of himself to potential followers as an ideal pa-
tron; his capacity to create a performance that showcases his
divine power and teachings; and the development of mira-
cle stories by his devotees” (p. 46). Although the author uses
this analytic tool to understand how Pedro Batista became
a living saint, the framework should prove useful to other
students of messianic figures. This fascinating ethnography
explains how Pedro Bastista managed to secure a safe haven
for his community by highlighting either eschatological
thought or modern dispositions according to the context
and the times, in a complex history of accommodation and
resistance vis-à-vis state authorities, local caudillos, and the
institutional church. She does this while retaining a Turne-
rian sensibility for the symbolic motifs and ritual practices
of penitence, and a keen awareness of the multivocality of
her field site.
Another key figure in the romeiro community of Santa
Brı́gida is Dona Dodô, a charismatic leader in her own right
who complemented Batista’s role by leading the practical
aspects of traditional Catholicism, such as nightly prayers,
saint’s day celebrations, and religious organizations. Pessar
carefully evokes the difficult space Dona Dodô had to

negotiate as a woman after Batista’s death, having her legit-
imacy as rightful successor constantly challenged by male
rivals who ultimately failed in establishing widely accepted
consensus around their leadership. Yet these later leaders
came to represent traditional values in an increasingly dif-
ferentiated social field where modernity made itself present
now in the form of media presence, urban culture, religious
tourism, national interest in rescuing “folk” values, and the
dispositions of current civil leaders in the community.
I would have personally appreciated a fuller discussion
of the links between popular Catholic and Afro-Brazilian
practices of receiving saints (spirit possession), as well as
a spelling out of the role of the caboclo (person of both
indigenous and European descent) within the context of
Brazil’s discourse of mestiçagem (racial and cultural fusion)
as national identity. Nonetheless, this does not take away
from an outstanding work in which folk sensibilities are
understood in their own terms, as well as seamlessly in-
scribed within larger regional, national, and international
contexts. In short, this book is a landmark in new forms of
ethnographic writing.
Re-Imagining Rwanda: Conflict, Survival and Disinfor-
mation in the Late Twentieth Century. Johan Pottier.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 251 pp.
DANIELLE DE LAME
Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren, Belgium
This book comes as a relief to any expert on Rwanda who
would not have had the courage to force their way through
the muddy waters of flowing literature and zesty papers in
tune with the appetite of uninformed readers and ill-at-ease
politicians.
Pottier situates his reflection on the production of
knowledge on Rwanda within the wider debate on the
stakes of academic writing on Africa by Westerners, and he
asks for the same scholarly criteria to be applied to African
research published by African authors. He critically exam-
ines the literature on Rwanda and eastern Congo and scruti-
nizes the conditions of its production, taking into account
the social and political settings of the area. In tune with
some other academic works, he sets this modern conflict
and its economic and political stakes within the broader
scope of regional and international politics. His overview
of the “Build-up of War and Genocide” (p. 9) goes back
to the migrations from Rwanda to Kivu and Uganda since
colonial times and before. The interferences of contem-
porary international policies with the local conditions are
also mentioned. The analysis goes well beyond 1994, and
warns about the use of powerful narratives—rather than
history—by the current Rwandan government: “Rwanda’s
RPF-led regime has views about the past, present and fu-
ture which are being propagated via . . . intersecting chan-
nels . . . ranging from the academic world . . . down to rural
development policy” (p. 51).
The war and genocide were an outlet to conflicts
over power and wealth: a tragedy executed without af-
Single Reviews 161
terthoughts, through the rallying of frustrated and fright-
ened people around slogans based on exacerbated ethnic
feelings. The media followed suit, as the image of an Africa
bogged down in tribal feuds suited their need for easy ex-
planations. Pottier juxtaposes the realities with misrepre-
sentations spread by “observers,” journalists, aid workers,
and academics who improvised expertise in a country they
barely knew. He shows how misrepresentations contributed
to the war in Congo, which suited the new Rwandan gov-
ernment well: These misrepresentations hide the complex-
ities of the recent past and the immediate future behind
a screen of the “moral purity,” representing themselves as
the ones who “halted the genocide” (p. 3). An ignorance
close to disdain of the local country people could be dis-
cerned under colonial rule and after, which paved the way
to lethal manipulations. The current Rwandan government
appeals to these biased sources while denying any right of
opinion to outsiders (p. 207).
Re-Imagining Rwanda achieves its author’s purpose. This
analysis of disinformation, written in English, was needed
as the new Rwanda chose to rely on newcomers: Knowl-
edge is constructed “for beginners by beginners” (p. 109).
This break with the past is all the easier because the country
switched its international language. Many previous stud-
ies were written in French, whereas the “newcomers” are
mainly English speakers. This book will help bridge the
gap.
Pottier pushes his argument further than the genocide
and its immediate aftermath, as disinformation seems to be
part of the international strategies of the Kigali government.
Newly arrived benefactors are provided with a simplified
model of recent history that “obscures relevant contexts”
(p. 202), and the RPF “displays exceptional skill at convert-
ing international feelings of guilt and ineptitude into admis-
sions that the Front deserves the monopoly on knowledge
construction” (p. 202). The outcome is an influx of aid and
international support.
Pottier’s background provides him with the tools
needed for this critical analysis and allows him to include
the area of Kivu in his study. His knowledge of French and
Dutch allow him to cover the French and Belgian press. Still,
one might long for more of an account of recent franco-
phone academic literature. Pottier’s recourse to a secondary
source (p. 13) is unfortunate, as Iliffe’s interpretation of
Czekanowski seems partial. The reference to my own work
on page 191 shows the ingaligali (the custom of keeping
fields on their father’s property as an asset for repudiated
women) custom dwindling during the 1980s. Pottier missed
my point.
Finally, the author points to a recent issue on the dis-
information front—land reform. Based on a report written
in ignorance of the Rwandan populations, according to
Pottier, this project avoids taking grassroot level realities
into account. Subsistence farming has since long been
replaced by a very unequal distribution of money, with
country civil servants—or absentee landlords—being most
able to capitalize scarce land. The word survival seems ap-
propriate when wondering how the majority of Rwandans
162 American Anthropologist • Vol. 107, No. 1 • March 2005
will live through this reform. This courageous book could
be an eye-opener to the newcomers on the Rwandan field.
If they take into account the essential need for stability in
the region, they will, then, apprehend the complexity of
any moral stance on Rwanda.
African Historical Archaeologies. Andrew M. Reid and
Paul J. Lane, eds. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum,
2004. 408 pp.
NEIL L. NORMAN
University of Virginia
African Historical Archaeologies builds on recent scholarship
suggesting local and historically contingent views of the po-
litical, social, and economic processes at play on the African
continent (e.g., Stahl 2001). The 14 chapters are drawn from
archaeological research across sub-Saharan Africa and are re-
viewed in a conclusion by Peter Robertshaw.
Rather than attempting a synthetic treatment of histor-
ical archaeology, the editors, Andrew Reid and Paul Lane,
focus on the “constructive interaction” and tension that
can occur when numerous lines of evidence and disciplines
communicate. In proposing more flexibility and experi-
mentation with the sources used to interpret archaeolog-
ical data, the editors call for cooperative efforts with local
African communities, aiming to “encourage the develop-
ment of links between contemporary populations and their
past” (p. 3). Such a perspective acknowledges the inherent
construction of historical archaeologies within the politics
of modern Africa and within the contemporary power re-
lations in the world. Numerous attempts have been made
to broaden what constitutes the history of Africa; neverthe-
less, history for the continent remains synonymous with
the accounts, exploits, and consequences of Europeans’ en-
trance and interaction from the 15th century. By and large,
the historiography of African historical archaeology has in-
volved a close association with European primary sources.
Thus, the so-called historic era at once frames the temporal
boundaries of the book and presents a point of definitional
ambiguity, as the chapters cover material from the second
millennium B.C. to the present (see also Schmidt 1978). In
the introduction, the editors critically reconsider what com-
prises the historical archaeology of Africa by reviewing the
range of sources (e.g., historic documents, ethnohistoric ac-
counts, ethnographic material, oral histories and traditions)
that have been applied to archaeological data: A number of
authors in the volume engage this theme as well.
Several contributors explore untethering archaeologi-
cal sites from European sources by focusing on the explana-
tory power of other archaeological data in the face of tra-
ditional documents. Richard Helm uses regionally based
archaeological survey in concert with Mijikenda oral histo-
ries to reconstruct settlement and migration patterns along
the eastern African coast. Similarly, Innocent Pikirayi em-
ploys extensive interviews and archaeological data to re-
consider the “Refuge” archaeological period (c. late 17th to
the late 19th centuries A.D.) in the Eastern Highlands of
Zimbabwe. J. A. Van Schalkwyk and B. W. Smith explore
the Maleboho War of 1894 through poetry, ethnography,
archaeology, political cartoons, and rock paintings. They il-
lustrate convincingly that local understandings of the war
diverged from conventional published sources. Likewise,
Joanna Behrens uses landscape analysis techniques devel-
oped by Martin Hall, and artifact analysis, to bring into
focus the context in which industrialized landscapes were
experienced in South Africa.
Contextual analyses reappear in the work of Adria La
Violette, who writes about the tensions between exter-
nal historical accounts, published and newly collected oral
traditions, and archaeological data at the 15th and 16th
century palatial site of Pujini on Pemba Island, Tanzania,
and the way such tensions can be more productive than
when multiple lines of evidence neatly correspond. Jeff
Fleisher uses archaeological data to provide the local and
international context behind political and economic de-
cisions made by the 14th to 16th century sultans of
Kilwa Kisiwani, in southern Tanzania. In so doing, he re-
thinks the historiography driven largely by European ac-
counts that interpret the sultans’ “Rebellious Conduct”
vis-à-vis their own interests. Timothy Insoll questions the
reliance on Arabic literary sources for the interpretation
of archaeological material from the western Sahel and sa-
vannah. He uses archaeological evidence to demonstrate
that settlement structures at Gao were more complex and
social boundaries more permeable than Arab historians
describe.
In the review and conclusion, Peter Robertshaw places
the chapters within larger debates over the definition of and
methodology for historical archaeology. He offers one of the
most provocative propositions of the volume by suggesting
that storytelling be employed by archaeologists to engage
local communities in archaeological debates. His call for re-
thinking not only the theories and methodologies applied
to historical archaeological material in Africa but also the
media through which they are presented to the communi-
ties involved is laudable.
This volume presents an eclectic and lucid collection of
chapters that explore different paths for the construction
of historical archaeologies. It pushes the conceptual and
methodological bounds of the subdiscipline of historical
archaeology on the African continent and, by implication,
beyond. Anthropologists, historians, and archaeologists in-
terested in the method and theory involved in engaging
multiple sources and perspectives, as well as the resulting
political implications of these efforts, will read this book
with great interest.
REFERENCES CITED
Schmidt, Peter R.
1978 Historical Archaeology: A Structural Approach in an
African Culture. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Stahl, Ann B.
2001 Making History in Banda: Anthropological Visions of
Africa’s Past. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Total Confinement: Madness and Reason in the Maxi-
mum Security Prison. Lorna A. Rhodes. Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 2004. 315 pp.
D Y L A N R O D R Í G U E Z
University of California, Riverside
Total Confinement focuses on local practices of power, dom-
ination, (psychiatric) “treatment,” and governmentality at
the conjoined and overlapping sites of the “control prison”
(known variously as “supermaximum or supermax prisons,”
“maximum security prisons,” and “security housing units”)
and prison “mental health units.” Although the prose is
sharp and the overall shape of the text holds up well, there
are a few theoretical and methodological problems with To-
tal Confinement that require some elaboration, especially in
light of its ambition as a broad theorization of the emer-
gent control prison regime. Perhaps most crucial, consider-
ing Lorna Rhodes’s focus on technologies of bodily domi-
nation, resistance, and “treatment,” is her failure to address
the centrality of race, political subjectivity/affiliation, and
gender to the state’s articulations of the unassimilable or
incorrigible prisoner (that is, the categories of people who
are particularly targeted for incarceration in control units).
Although, to her credit, Rhodes does assert in the book’s
introduction that “historically, and in many prison sys-
tems in the United States, [the prison’s ‘potentially abso-
lute social exclusion’] is correlated with and profoundly
linked to race” (p. 7), she does not theorize from this al-
leged correlation and profundity. This absence is stunning,
especially considering that the inscription of racial, ethnic,
and regional “gang affiliation” penal policies have become
a central facet of control prison expansion, as well as a pri-
mary discursive element of its sustenance in the face of
widespread criticism from a variety of progressive civil and
human rights organizations, as well as from radical aboli-
tionist campaigns and movements.
Although it may be beyond the scope of Rhodes’s study
to offer a rigorous or sufficient historical genealogy of the
control prison, a peek into the specificity of its recent
(post-1970s) prototype forms would have been useful. It is
Rhodes’s focus on the formation of the control prison’s par-
ticular bureaucratic and bodily technologies of power and
domination that ought to have situated her study within a
genealogy of racialized and gendered punitive practices. Per-
haps, she could have begun with the earliest articulations
of protosupermax penal practices in the state’s criminal-
ization, discursive constitution, and penal torture of Black
and Third World activists, radicals, and liberationists during
and beyond the 1970s. There are inextricable connections
between the control prison as a material institution, penal
logic, and the recent history of U.S. state repression and its
resident state-sanctioned racist and white supremacist mili-
tarizations (mediated through the apparatuses of the police,
FBI, and judicial system).
Total Confinement is further delimited by the author’s
narration of the Washington State prison system’s atyp-
Single Reviews 163
icality in relation to broader regional and local articula-
tions of (racialized) imprisonment technologies: “Because
of the relatively small size of Washington State, its largely
white prison population, and its progressive history, some
of what I describe here may not be typical of other states”
(p. 12). Yet it is precisely this atypicality—carceral white-
ness and civic progressivisim—which might have provided
a new trajectory of theorization for the significance of race
and state-mediated white supremacy in studies of prison
regimes across geographies and (racialized) localities. Thus,
Rhodes’s qualification of Washington’s (racial and politi-
cal) abnormality does not suffice as a reason to exclude or
marginalize a critical theorization of race and gender from
her larger examination.
Finally, it is worth emphasizing that the author wrote
the bulk of this account as a professional affiliate of
the Washington State prison system, sanctioned by a
ten-year (1993–2002) institutional collaboration between
the University of Washington and the Washington State
Department of Corrections. As a situated research prac-
tice, Rhodes’s ethnography of imprisoned people (she in-
terviewed over 90 “randomly chosen” maximum security
prisoners) remains relatively, and rather conspicuously, un-
troubled and undertheorized when considered in relation to
her everyday interaction, professional–institutional bond,
and putative affective and personal connections with prison
guards, administrators, and mental health workers (she
spoke with 40 prison staff for the study). The nuanced inter-
actions that Rhodes narrates having shared with prison staff
and colleagues blatantly contrast with the enforced and
coercive distance that she is forced to take from her im-
prisoned interlocutors. Structuring and shadowing the un-
folding of Rhodes’s study, then, is her own embodied (and
insufficiently self-reflexive) allegiance to the institutional
sanctity and security of the prison in relation to the “socially
isolated” prisoners with whom she is critically engaged.
Despite these limitations, the book admirably navigates
its primary theoretical problematics and is perhaps most
productively read alongside Terry Kupers’s study Prison Mad-
ness: The Mental Health Crisis behind Bars and What We Must
Do about It (1999). Rhodes’s book makes a productive con-
tribution to the budding critical discourse around the ex-
ponential expansion of the U.S. prison apparatus.
REFERENCES CITED
Kupers, Terry
1999 Prison Madness: The Mental Health Crisis behind Bars and
What We Must Do about It. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Frontiers and Ghettos: State Violence in Serbia and
Israel. James Ron. Berkeley: University of California Press,
2003. 262 pp.
AV R A M B O R N S T E I N
John Jay College, City University of New York
Acts of state violence are not only structured by the level of
threat, the regime type, and the culture but also by “clearly
164 American Anthropologist • Vol. 107, No. 1 • March 2005
defined social or geographic space where organizational ac-
tion is shaped by notions of appropriate and legitimate
behavior” (p. 8). In settings like ethnic ghettos controlled
largely through bureaucratic means, states prefer to deploy
police-style methods. But in frontiers, where administrative
mechanisms do not control a population, more destructive
tactics are unleashed. This is the primary thesis of James
Ron’s Frontiers and Ghettos: State Violence in Serbia and Israel.
Based largely on interviews and an array of secondary
sources, part 1 of the book depicts how ghetto versus
frontier status played a role in the breakup of Yugoslavia.
In April 1992, Bosnia seceded and received recognition
from European powers but was not backed by military assis-
tance. Bosnia became a frontier to the Serbia-Montenegro
remainder of Yugoslavia: Serbian-based paramilitaries, local
Bosnian Serb crisis committees, and clandestine cross-
border agents began committing massacres and other acts
of “ethnic cleansing” against Bosnian Muslims. The Serbian
regime in Belgrade supported those activities, but that same
regime stopped short of ethnic cleansing against Bosnian
communities inside Serbia, such as those in Sandzak,
Vojvodina, and Kosovo in the early 1990s. These were ghet-
tos, not frontiers, and the people in them were subject
to ethnic harassment, beatings, bombings, and discrimina-
tion, but not bombardment and annihilation. Furthermore,
it was when Kosovo slipped from Serbian hands and became
a frontier that the worst atrocities and ethnic cleansing
occurred.
In part 2, Ron describes how the frontier–ghetto frame-
work manifests in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. With
great clarity Ron describes the written and unwritten rules
of Israeli violence in the Occupied Territories and the pro-
cedural aspects of checkpoints, beatings, arrests, torturous
interrogations, rubber bullets, and punctuated use of live
rounds. But as violent as policing of the Palestinian ghetto
appears, it is fundamentally different than the air and ar-
tillery assaults the Israeli army made in the frontier of
Lebanon, which caused far more deaths and hundreds of
thousands of internally displaced people.
The frontier–ghetto comparison is very simple, but it is
an effective way to illustrate the broader question of how
culpability and deniability play a role in state violence.
Belgrade pursued plausible deniability among their own
citizens and international observers for events in Bosnia.
Israel, too, denied any direct responsibilities for the mas-
sacres of Palestinians by Christian Lebanese militias in
Beirut, even though they were orchestrated by Israeli forces
(p. 185).
Limits on violence in the ghettos and deniability of
atrocities in the frontiers are evidence for Ron’s broader, as-
sumed argument that contemporary nation-states are sensi-
tive to the increased salience of international human rights
norms because of an explosion of international activism
in human rights, driven by bodies such as the United
Nations (UN), Greenpeace, and Human Rights Watch.
While making this generalization, the author has many
caveats and exceptions, including the observation that Ser-
bian actions in Bosnia were harshly condemned and, even-
tually, punished, whereas Israel’s occupation of the West
Bank, Gaza, and Lebanon has brought more muted forms of
criticism.
Ron’s descriptions lead to an ironic observation: Far
from being an oppressed people’s redemption, receiving in-
ternational recognition without troops on the ground to
defend independence can change a ghetto into a frontier,
inviting greater assaults and destruction. Although not fo-
cused on the current al-Aqsa uprising, Ron suggests that
Israel’s recent escalation of military tactics in the Occupied
Territories is caused largely by the region’s slide from Israeli
state power. Like Kosovo, as the West Bank and Gaza be-
come increasingly peripheral, they experience a more vio-
lent regime of domination (p. xiv).
The book worked well in my master-level seminar
on comparative studies of violence. Area specialists, too,
will benefit from Ron’s rich descriptions of the specific
organizational and institutional components of state
violence. Without other supporting material, most un-
dergraduates will find this book too focused on state
violence to serve as an adequate introduction to the two
conflicts. Of course, it is not intended as a comprehensive
description or explanation of the history of the former
Yugoslavia or Israel–Palestine. It claims only to illuminate
how important bureaucratic inclusion or exclusion can be
in times of violent crisis (p. 196), and it accomplishes this
goal. Ron’s book is a solid contribution to both area studies
and violence studies.
Race: The Reality of Human Differences. Vincent Sarich
and Frank Miele. Boulder: Westview Press, 2004. 287 pp.
LEONARD LIEBERMAN
Central Michigan University
The coauthors promise to scientifically prove that the race
concept and races are valid entities. Vincent Sarich is a phys-
ical anthropologist, professor emeritus of anthropology at
the University of California, Berkeley, and a longtime sup-
porter of the race concept. Coauthor Frank Miele is senior
editor of Skeptic magazine and a supporter of Arthur Jensen’s
work linking race and intelligence.
Yes, human biological variations are real, but the race
concept is not a useful way to conceptualize these varia-
tions. Given the title and purpose of their book, the reader
is likely to expect the book to begin with a definition of
race, one that will serve as a guide to what is to follow.
That definition does not come until the penultimate chap-
ter when the coauthors state that “Races are populations
or groups of populations, within a species, that are sepa-
rated geographically from other such populations or groups
of populations and distinguishable from them on the ba-
sis of heritable features” (p. 207). Early in the book the
coauthors present illustrations to show that “all cultures
that have been studied have categorized people into es-
sentially the same set of races recognized by the average

person” (p. 33). The coauthors wish to demonstrate that
race is an ancient idea. For example, there is an illustration
of a Greco-Roman jug with “the face of a Caucasoid on one
side and that of a black African on the other” (p. 41). Did
the creators of this and other illustrations have in mind
the definition of races as “populations” within a “species,”
“separated geographically” on the basis of “heritable
features”?
The central flaw in the argument for the reality of race
is that despite acknowledgment of variation, their compar-
ison of races is based on averages: “Variation, both body
and behavior, both within races and between, is the norm,
not the exception. However, recognition of average race
differences, in our opinion, does not inevitably lead to racist
attitudes or polices” (p. 223, emphasis added). I agree that
it is not inevitable, but racism is made much easier by us-
ing averages. Moreover, it is almost always possible to find
differences between populations based on averages, then
call them races, and deemphasize the variations. By this ap-
proach all populations become races.
Sarich and Miele place considerable emphasis for the re-
ality of race on comparisons with the alleged greater range
of morphological differences among humans than among
chimpanzees or gorillas. But earlier they wrote that “the
very small genetic differences present today among hu-
man populations tell us it wasn’t all that long ago that
they were, in effect, one” (p. 126). So which is it, small
genetic differences or much greater than among African
great apes? Answer: H. S. Kaessman and Savante Pääbo re-
port that “humans are unique in having little genetic varia-
tion” in comparison to great apes (2002:1). Also, the coau-
thors incorrectly report Richard Lewontin’s classic study,
which is said to show that “15 percent of the varia-
tion within our species is between races” (p. 161). In fact
Lewontin reported only about 6.3 percent between “races”
(1995:123).
In their effort to demonstrate the reality of races as
valid, the coauthors ignore clinal variation and environ-
mental influences. An example concerns the track record
of the Kalenjin in Kenya. The coauthors write that “there
are major differences in performances by race, and real data
should make the case for race differences in sports perfor-
mances obvious to all” (p. 124). Although Sarich and Miele
give only brief lip service to environmental factors, Kenyan
Running (1996) by John Balard and Joe Sang presents the
complex of sociocultural factors, which interact with alti-
tude and relate to the high rate of medal winning among
Kenyans. Another illustration of Sarich and Miele’s racial
determinism involves hypertension:
taking account of race is the best way to determine which
differences are genetic and which are not. For example,
African Americans have a higher rate of hypertension
than do whites. This could be a genetic difference (part of
Rushton’s matrix of race and life-history traits). It could
also be the result of the socioeconomic differences among
them. And, of course, it could be a mixture of the two.
[pp. 190–191]
Single Reviews 165
Lip service is given to environment but genetic determinism
is favored. Oddly, Sarich and Miele do not tell the reader that
Richard Cooper, Charles Rotimi, and Ryk Ward examined
hypertension in seven populations and found it highest in
Chicago, intermediate in the Caribbean Islands, and lowest
in the world in West Africa, where it should be the highest if
genetics determine the differences. A leaner diet and more
exercise in West Africa contrast with Chicago’s fatty diet,
less exercise, and greater stress from racism.
The book concludes with scenarios about how the
United States and the world might live with race: The coau-
thors prefer a meritocracy in which the “best and the bright-
est move to the top—and to the United States” (p. 240). And
so they join the ranks of the race and IQ defenders such as
Arthur Jensen, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, and
J. Philippe Rushton. The book is characterized by erroneous
scholarship and will appeal to those convinced of the real-
ity of races and who, like the coauthors, “reject the need for
policies to right past wrongs” (p. 7).
REFERENCES CITED
Balard, John, and Joe Sang
1996 Kenyan Running: Movement, Culture, Geography and
Global Change. London: Frank Cass.
Cooper, Richard S., Charles N. Rotimi, and Ryk Ward
1999 The Puzzle of Hypertension in African-Americans. Scien-
tific American (February):56–63.
Kaessman, H. S., and Savante Paabo
2002 The Genetical History of Great Apes. Journal of Internal
Medicine 251:1–18.
Lewontin, Richard
1995 Human Diversity. New York: Scientific American Library.
Trans-Status Subjects: Gender in the Globalization of
South and South East Asia. Sonita Sarkar and Esha Niyogi
De, eds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. 344 pp.
K A M A L A V I S W E S WA R A N
University of Texas, Austin
Trans-Status Subjects arrives at a time when area studies
has become transareal in scope, and rather stale interdisci-
plinary paradigms have been superceded by newer transdis-
ciplinary orientations toward the subject(s) of knowledge.
Most transareal scholarship has focused on the intersections
between South Asia and the Middle East, or what some pol-
icy analysts are now calling the “greater Middle East.” It is
therefore refreshing to see a volume attempt to trace the his-
torical and emergent global connections between South and
Southeast Asia. The book contains 14 articles on Indone-
sia, Borneo, Thailand, Bangkok, Singapore, and Vietnam
on the one hand, Sri Lanka, India, and the Indian diaspora
in the Gulf and North America on the other. The editors,
Sonita Sarkar and Esha Niyogi De, use the idea of “criti-
cal postmodernities” as a means of charting the circulation
and migration of hybrid subjects through and out of South
and Southeast Asia. These shifting “trans-status” subjects re-
configure geography as both a metaphor for understanding
power and a mode for mapping new spatial alignments. The
volume’s commitment to tracing “border alliances” and its
166 American Anthropologist • Vol. 107, No. 1 • March 2005
focus on gender relations and gender ideology make it an
important contribution to emerging feminist diaspora and
area studies.
Trans-Status Subjects is not a collection that can be sum-
marized neatly or distilled into a singular message. The
book is divided into three sections: (1) Figuring Genders in
the Colony and Nation: Native and Foreign, (2) Transport-
ing Genders between the Village and City: Representations
and Resistances, and (3) Gendering Local–Global Circuits:
Labor, Capital, and Subjects of Social Change. Although
films and novels provide the cultural texts for analysis in
many of the articles, the first section is largely historical; the
second, and unfortunately weakest section, is anthropolog-
ical and sociological; and the third, and strongest section,
is focused on diaspora theory and labor migration. The sec-
tions are not meant to provide theoretical unity for rather
diverse subject matter but, rather, to suggest strategies for
reading across the papers, which would provide new in-
sights into questions of travel and movement. For instance,
colonialism is seen as either apposite to globalization or as
merely an earlier instantiation of it. The chapters in the
first and third sections of the collection do not so much
speak to each other as force a confrontation between differ-
ent ways of understanding citizenship, economic mobility,
and social status under systems of colonialism and global-
ization so that structures of patriarchy can be seen operating
transnationally.
Although Trans-Status Subjects is theoretically innova-
tive in many respects, at numerous junctures throughout
the book there is a tendency to rehearse received tenets
of transnational theories propounded more than a decade
ago (Appadurai, Sassen, Soja, etc). The lack of attention to
queer or gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender (GLBT) theory
is also somewhat surprising, especially because much of
what is exciting about the field has been developed within
the framework of South Asian diaspora studies. Similarly
disconcerting is the absence of any discussion around
questions about translation, especially with regard to
circuits of migration and questions of transdisciplinarity
(What does it mean to translate across disciplines and
nation-states or culture areas?). Nevertheless, Trans-Status
Subjects is a volume that pushes the analysis of culture into
forward-looking frames and is therefore recommended
reading for anthropologists of all persuasions.
Why Do Men Barbecue? Recipes for Cultural Psychology.
Richard A. Shweder. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2003. 419 pp.
M AT T H E W C . G U T M A N N
Brown University
The recipes in this book are decidedly more intended for
thinking with than cooking. As in other collections by this
author, this volume provides an impassioned defense of rad-
ical pluralism and an introduction to the field of cultural
psychology that Richard A. Shweder has helped to found,
develop, and refine. Although most of the chapters in this
book are reprints of scattered recent articles and four are
coauthored, on the whole they cohere, and the main argu-
ments are clearly presented and sustained.
There are chapters that describe and discuss the field
of cultural psychology—a discipline not to be confused, he
says three times on one page, with cross-cultural psychol-
ogy (pp. 40–41). Another compares sleeping arrangements
in different cultures, the point of which is that the practice
of even teenagers sleeping with their parents is not inher-
ently perverted or harmful. Perhaps the most entertaining
chapter is on “Fundamentalism for Highbrows,” his address
to undergraduates at the University of Chicago, in which
Shweder’s self-professed “postmodern humanism” is clever
and entirely over the edge in touting “the only true Ameri-
can university” (p. 339).
The most confrontational chapter cautions “the en-
lightened First World” against rushing to judgment and
urges tolerance for female genital mutilation in parts of
sub-Saharan Africa; Shweder combines legitimate concerns
regarding the hypocrisy of those who avoid any men-
tion of male circumcision with the indefensible allegation
that fear about genital alternation making sex less enjoy-
able for women may simply derive from “our own ethno-
anatomical folk beliefs” (p. 192).
Along the way, we are also treated to a spirited chal-
lenge to the evolutionary psychology notion that emo-
tions and morality are universally the same and biologi-
cally grounded. As in his discussion of the relation between
theodicy and public health, Shweder alternates between
impassioned and witty defense of anthropological pluralist
shibboleth and unfortunate and distorted readings of intel-
lectual foes such as feminists-at-large. Like many a military
general, at times in this book Shweder seems more adept at
fighting past battles rather than addressing contemporary
ones—in his case 19th-century cultural evolutionary theo-
ries and imperial liberalizing projects that ranked cultures.
His critique of 20th-century modernization theory’s
failed predictions is salutary, yet along with the running
subtext that the West is still not the best, many of the con-
clusions of Why Do Men Barbecue? may prove provocative
for a general public but will remain unremarkable to most
21st century anthropologists. That may be the point, be-
cause this is a volume aimed at a broader readership. Fur-
ther, one does not read Shweder for his views on inequality
and power, still less for his political analysis: Instead, one
turns to him for selected insights regarding cultural misun-
derstandings and preconceptions. And he certainly knows
how to milk an anecdote.
Collisions between discrete cultures form a red thread
in this text. Struggle, change, and power relations are not as
interesting to him as cultural stability and “staying power”
(p. 343), for example, the resilience of religion in the face of
modern science. Shweder’s is the billiard ball, freeze-frame
model of culture, in which boundaries are easily discerned,
sometimes national in character. Despite periodic mention
of phrases like globalization, hybridity, agency, and cultural

critique, and the recognition of factors like migration that
may complicate the cultural homogeneity implied through-
out this book, the conceptual framework in Why Do Men
Barbecue? is proudly Geertzian. The idea of endogamous
conflict, much less oppression internal to a society, is of
little interest to him and barely acknowledged.
Just as many scholars used to conduct family studies
based largely on responses by “heads-of-household,” as if a
local patriarch could effectively speak for all who dwelled
within his domain, here culture is implicitly treated as
consensus bound and unconflicted. Thankfully, feminist
theorists have since convincingly proved the salience of
difference and inequality within families and households,
and the importance of such conflict for change in gender
and kinship relations. Just as much as in more advanced
classes, students in anthropology 101 classes (Shweder’s
expressed point of reference) need to be taught about in-
equality within cultures as well as between them, and, per-
haps most importantly, about the relationship of local and
global inequalities.
Throughout this volume, Shweder seeks to distinguish
his views from radical relativism, to tease the limits of the
different-but-equal ethos, and to sing his paean to what he
terms confusionism. A passage from a concluding chapter
is characteristic of this earnestly whimsical concept and
Shweder’s approach to intellectual life in general. Contra
E. O. Wilson and attempts to unify knowledge, he writes,
“According to this nonconsilient Confusionist truth, the
knowable world is incomplete if seen from any one point
of view, incoherent if seen from all points of view, and
empty if seen from nowhere in particular” (p. 300). True
enough, but not enough.
Une Science Impériale Pour L’Afrique? La Construc-
tion des Savoirs Africanistes en France 1878–1930.
Emmanuelle Sibeud. Paris: Edition de l’Ecole des Hautes
Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 2002. 356 pp.
R O B E RT G E R A R D L A U N AY
Northwestern University
The relationship between the formation of anthropology
as an academic discipline on one hand, and the European
colonial enterprise on the other, is by now a well worn
theme. Not surprisingly, the British case has received the
most attention, given that Britain was the world’s leading
colonial power in the 19th and the first half of the 20th cen-
tury. Yet the relationship played itself out differently in dif-
ferent colonial settings. Sibeud’s dense study of early French
colonial ethnography tells a somewhat different story.
The book focuses on the experiences of a specific
cohort of ethnographers whom Sibeud labels “érudits
coloniaux,” a label that translates very imperfectly as
“scholar/administrators.” They were particularly active
around the turn of the 20th century, in the years between
the Berlin Conference and the outbreak of World War I. The
best among them were remarkable scholars in their own
Single Reviews 167
right, most notably Maurice Delafosse, whose pioneering
contributions to the ethnography, history, and linguistics
of francophone West Africa are still (if begrudgingly) ac-
knowledged by specialists. The ideology that guided the
work of Delafosse and his contemporaries was the con-
viction that those individuals best equipped to carry out
a rational, effective, and humane colonial administration
were those who possessed an intimate knowledge of the
language, history, and culture of the colonized, acquired at
close range through long-term association. For a brief mo-
ment, the colonial ideal of the broussard (bushwhacker) held
sway. It was fashionable, and even useful for their careers,
for administrators to publish an article or two, if not always
of the highest caliber. Yet such an emphasis on fieldwork,
on what one might call “participant colonization,” was
hardly a foregone conclusion. The scholar/administrators
were self-consciously at odds with the reigning paradigm
of anthropological museology, centered on a racist cran-
iometry that acknowledged no need for close contact with
colonized peoples, categorized as irredeemably inferior.
The central paradox of Sibeud’s narrative is that these
scholar/administrators ultimately found themselves doubly
marginalized, by the colonial administration on one hand
and the academic establishment on the other. The colo-
nial administration came to consider the scholarly preoc-
cupations of its agents in the field as a distraction from
the exercise of their duties, and the development of any
intimacy between administrators and their charges as a
recipe for divided loyalties. The academic establishment
was often unenthusiastic about their work. Durkheim and
Mauss were initially unimpressed, decrying the superiority
of Anglo-Saxon ethnography over French efforts. However,
Arnold van Gennep, himself something of a maverick in
French academic circles, was an ally, publishing their work
in his Revue d’ethnographie et de sociologie. The reputation
of these scholar/administrators was ultimately eclipsed by
the emergence of the Griaule school in the 1930s, an out-
come that Sibeud argues was neither inevitable nor salutary.
She contrasts the Griaule school’s construction of an essen-
tialized, decontextualized, and ahistorical Africa with the
more complex, if contradictory, depictions of the previous
generation.
This is a nuanced and meticulously researched account
of the relationship of knowledge to power in French colo-
nial Africa in the early years of the 20th century: It eschews
the anachronistic moralizing that sometimes colors con-
temporary accounts of colonial ethnography. The strengths
of the book lie in its detailed understanding of the microp-
olitics of both the French colonial administration and of
Parisian academic circles, and in its careful contextualiza-
tion of the ideas of the scholar/administrators as compared
to their colonial, as well as academic, opponents and sup-
porters. The one striking omission is any mention, much
less discussion, of French colonial studies of Islam in an
African context, most notably the work of Paul Marty, a
contemporary of Delafosse and his cohort. The omission is
all the more glaring in that the excision of Islam from the
168 American Anthropologist • Vol. 107, No. 1 • March 2005
purview of “authentic” Africanity reflects the triumph of the
Griaule school over the tradition of scholar/administrators
such as Delafosse, who read Arabic and was intensely aware
of the role of Islam in West African society.
It is a pity that a book that examines in such close de-
tail the careers of the scholar/administrators does not really
engage with their ethnography as such.
We learn a great deal about the relationship of mem-
bers of this cohort to one another, to other administrators,
to academics, but, ultimately, not to the Africans whom
they simultaneously governed and described.
Landscape, Memory and History: Anthropological
Perspectives. Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathern, eds.
London: Pluto Press, 2003. 246 pp.
NEIL L. NORMAN
University of Virginia
Identity through the medium of memory and place, as it
relates to shifting and contested perceptions of landscape,
are organizing themes around which the case studies in
this volume coalesce. Examining these themes against his-
toric, ethnohistoric, geographical, and literary sources, the
authors provide time depth to the study of the processes
that inscribe meaning to elements of the physical and imag-
ined environment. The authors complicate monolithic his-
toric accounts of landscape by demonstrating the use of
history(ies) by various parties in attempting to fix, or blur,
ideas of place. In the introduction, the editors situate the
volume within a broader body of anthropological scholar-
ship and sketch the project that develops throughout the
remainder of the text as the interpretation of the “verbal
pictures,” which endow various locales with historic depth
as well as subjectivity. The editors and nine of the ten au-
thors are anthropologists. The tenth is a human geographer.
To lead off the case studies, John Gray mines the re-
cent poetry of Tim Douglas and others to explore the am-
biguities and ironies associated with poetic descriptions of
the Scottish borderland. These descriptions both exalt cul-
tural distinction and lament the region’s inexorable rela-
tionship with England. Gray presents the region’s sodden
environment as both discomforting and a source of border-
land identity.
Invoking Theodor Adorno, Stuart McLean uses Irish
bogs as a vehicle through which to engage history, geogra-
phy, and archaeology, and to question the relation between
nature and history. He describes the bogs as positioned
within numerous overlapping political discourses and preg-
nant with tropes of disease and decay, making them targets
of modernity projects. McLean adeptly labors for an ade-
quate vocabulary to describe the elusive nature of bogs,
which at once capture human imagination as archetypi-
cal natural spaces and, yet, offer potential spaces for de-
velopment projects. Janice Harper addresses the forested
regions of Madagascar, which conservationists consider nat-
ural spaces that reflect nonhuman life. She juxtaposes this
view with that of Malagasy forest residents, who see the
forests as symbols and metaphors of shared histories and
locales of collective resistance against outside control.
Conflicting visions of politicized landscape reappear in
Angèle Smith’s study of 19th-century Irish ordinance maps.
Smith assesses the maps as political tools used to create a
sense of order and control by British administrators and
landed gentry. However, mapping and labeling choices, and
multiple ways of perceiving the maps, leave open the pos-
sibility for contestation at the local, regional, and national
levels.
Monuments to the death of Aboriginal Jimmy Inker-
man and European pastoralist Frank Bowman illustrate yet
another contested landscape that Veronica Strang uses to
address the waxing and waning of Australian heroic ac-
counts. In recent times, Aboriginal groups have used a mon-
ument to Inkerman’s death as a framing point for cere-
monies directed both within their community and outward,
as “symbolic spears” (p. 124) hurled at those who would en-
croach on Aboriginal controlled lands. Ruth Lane picks up
the tension over land use and land representation where
the expansion of irrigated farmland has excluded Aborig-
ines from lands considered sacred. Lane draws from hu-
man geographers who foreground mobility “as a material
engagement of people with place” (p. 142) to explore dif-
ferent conceptions of landscape by both groups.
The issues of mobility and a shifting conception of
landscape recur in Michael O’Hanlon and Linda Frankland’s
careful examination of routes and roads across landscapes
inhabited by Wahgi in Highland New Guinea. They argue
that the current Wahgi ambivalence for vehicular roads re-
lates to perceptions of marriage roads, which “are valued for
their connective properties but are equally seen . . . to pose
a threat to clan-based communities” (p. 168).
Pei-yi Guo examines the built landscape of artificial
and semiartificial islets created by the Langalanga of the
Solomon Islands. This chapter explores the poetics of land-
scape, where artificial islands are viewed through the gaze of
tourists as strongly associated with “tradition” or the past,
while current Langalanga promote the sites as locales of
heritage.
In the concluding chapter, James Carrier considers
Negril and Montego Bay, Jamaica, as a “disputed landscape
burdened by history” (p. 226). The bay region is caught
between fishers, who see seascape as a source of commodi-
ties and sustenance, and conservationists, who suggest us-
ing the bay for tourist development efforts. Carrier demon-
strates how fisher groups come to terms with the seascape
through notions of biodiversity, management planning,
and “sustainable” commodity, while co-opting these argu-
ments to support their own vision of the landscape.
The chapters articulate nicely with one another and
build on the goals and themes outlined by the editors in
the introduction. However, issues of power as they relate
to the production of history (cf. Trouillot 1995) are ad-
dressed only tangentially throughout the volume and are
subsumed in the epilogue within a discussion of “heritage”

versus “development” as reoccurring and competing narra-
tives used to politicize landscapes. This volume nonetheless
makes an important contribution to historically informed
anthropological studies of landscape.
REFERENCES CITED
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph
1995 Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History.
Boston: Beacon Press.
Witchcraft, Sorcery, Rumors, and Gossip. Pamela Stewart
and Andrew Strathern. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2003. 228 pp.
JAMES H. SMITH
Spelman College
Overall, this is a thoughtful, exhaustive, and, at times, orig-
inal review of the copious literature on witchcraft and ru-
mors, as well as an attempt to synthesize the two litera-
tures and to collapse the conceptual boundary separating
them. Impressively, the authors review the entire anthro-
pological corpus on these subjects, and the chapters fol-
lowing the introductory section on witchcraft and rumors
engage the literature on Africa, New Guinea, India, Europe,
and the Americas with impressive scope and attention to
detail. The tone is descriptive, and the structure is oriented
around the diverse ethnographies the authors summarize
and draw relationships among; they make few original an-
alytical points of their own. However, they do draw atten-
tion to all of the major themes in this subdiscipline, such
as the relationship between witchcraft and class formation,
and the responsiveness of witchcraft beliefs and accusations
to larger social structural transformations. The volume is
therefore an excellent primer to this growing subfield of
anthropology. By synthesizing diverse literatures, the au-
thors do come on some very interesting points, many of
which are nicely crystallized in diagrams; one memorable
model relates particular forms of witch eradication with spe-
cific social and political contexts over time, focusing on
Zambia. However, it would have helped if the authors had
foregrounded their key analytical points and orientations,
rather than allowing summaries of other peoples’ works to
constitute the structure of the text. More importantly, the
authors could have done a better job of accounting for the
differences that pertain with regard to witchcraft, sorcery,
rumors, and gossip in the various regions on which they fo-
cus (Africa, India, New Guinea, Europe, and the Americas).
One of the authors’ major contributions is the reintro-
duction of an aspect of witchcraft studies that faded into
the background somewhat after the 1970s: mainly, the so-
cial and political consequences, or what used to be called
the “function,” of witchcraft accusations and movements.
Thus, Pamela Stewart and Andrew Strathern draw the
reader’s attention to the interaction between localized be-
liefs and practices and national politics, showing how these
narratives about fortune and misfortune are, under certain
Single Reviews 169
historical and political conditions, projected to the regional
or national level, and transformed in the process. In the few
places where analysis prevails over summary, the emphasis
is more on mapping conflict and resolution processes than
on understanding the meaning or content of witchcraft be-
liefs per se. However, it strikes me that these are insepa-
rable processes that should be analyzed dialectically. The
authors’ emphasis on function goes along with the text’s
overarching focus on the conflict dimensions of witchcraft
and rumors. This focus is a bit one-sided, given that Stewart
and Strathern also emphasize the transformative and rev-
olutionary potential of witchcraft beliefs and accusations.
There is a precedent for a more positive view of witchcraft
beliefs: Years ago, anthropologists operating in a structural
functionalist vein argued that witchcraft functions as a so-
cial strain gauge, encouraging redistribution so as to pre-
vent excessive accumulation on the part of individuals or
groups. Moreover, witchcraft beliefs can become a means
of imagining and enacting social justice as the antithesis
of the terror of the witch, and they can also give rise to
political action that sustains communities in conditions of
extreme uncertainty. As the anthropologist Monica Wilson
noted decades ago, witches are standardized nightmares,
representing the most negative potentials of a particular so-
cial moment, and, thus, they are also signposts that enable
fundamental social change by representing what people,
and society, should not be and do. For example, in Kenya
in the 1990s, the discourse about devil worshippers in the
highest levels of government imagined a form of secretive
politics destructive to national wealth and well being and,
thus, fuelled a more positive social vision, in which making
destructive secrets transparent to the public was sacralized.
In this way, the global discourse of democratization and ac-
countability was mediated, popularized, and made locally
relevant through a discourse at once Christian and local.
All in all, however, this book is strong and will be of
great assistance to students and experts who wish to get
a good handle on the unwieldy literature on occultism,
religion and politics, and the social and political effects of
rumors and gossip.
Surrealism and the Exotic. Louise Tythacott. New York:
Routledge, 2003. 260 pp.
CALEB SMITH
Duke University
In the article On Ethnographic Surrealism (1988), James
Clifford connected the French avant-garde movement to
the contemporary academic discipline of ethnologie, arguing
that the Surrealists adapted the objects of non-Western cul-
tures to a reflexive critique of European modernity. Surreal-
ism’s taste for the exotic, from such a perspective, belongs to
a general valorization of other cultures by Europeans whose
faith in Western technology, rationality, and progress was
devastated by the World War I. In Surrealism and the Exotic,
Louise Tythacott pushes Clifford’s insights to their limits,
170 American Anthropologist • Vol. 107, No. 1 • March 2005
in which Surrealism becomes less a French movement than
a mode of intercultural contact—an imperial phenomenon
in which a Western power, even as it consumes other cul-
tures, discovers in them new forms of self-critique and
subversion.
Reconfiguring conventional geographies, Tythacott
joins scholars like Elisabeth Cowling, Jack Spector, Michael
Richardson, and Dickran Tashjian, who see the zone of
contact between metropolis and periphery as Surrealism’s
origin—a major revision of earlier accounts, including
Walter Benjamin’s, which placed the Surrealists within the
history of European industrial capitalism. Tythacott also
works in the recent tradition of Clifford, Edward Said,
Marianna Torgovnick, and other critics who explore impe-
rialist encounters not only for their violence but also for
their novel, perhaps even liberating, effects in the West-
ern imagination. Tythacott’s particular contribution is not
simply another revisionist reading of Surrealism, but a new
introduction to the movement’s history and ideas in thor-
oughly postcolonial and postmodern terms. The book may
find its greatest value as a textbook on modernism from a
contemporary globalist perspective.
In an early chapter on the “Culture of Surrealism,” for
instance, the Surrealists’ interest in “found objects” and
the relics of Parisian flea markets is compellingly linked to
their interest in “exotic” artifacts. (Tythacott, a lecturer in
Art Gallery and Museum Studies at Manchester, catalogues
the Surrealists’ collections with an archivist’s sensibility.) In
each case the object is extracted from its circumstances of
production and imported, with its subversive strangeness,
into the modern Paris of standardization and mass produc-
tion. The object’s disruptive power depends on its cultural
homelessness. Thus, the flaneur in the junk shop and the
Surrealist ethnographer abroad share a common desire to
discover objects whose original use value has become ob-
scure, perhaps destroyed with the society that produced
them.
At the same time, however, their common desire to
“juxtapos[e] mutually alien world-views” (p. 2) and turn
the mundane into a dreamscape is part of their critique
of metropolitan French society—and Surrealism’s attack
on European modernity extends to imperialism itself, in-
cluding its missionary, nationalist, and economic drives.
On the other hand, Tythacott shows that the Surreal-
ists’ estranging encounters with the “exotic” took place
in precisely the channels opened by imperialism. Reposi-
tioned this way, Surrealism looks like an agent of mod-
ern imperialism’s self-critique. In this self-critical edge,
Tythacott discerns the movement’s enduring value for
anthropology.
Surrealism suggests a “reflexive” approach “in which
the encounter with otherness provokes a re-evaluation
. . . of the ethnographer’s conceptual premises” (pp. 2–3).
In chapters on Michel Leiris and Georges Bataille, Tytha-
cott argues that Surrealism moved these two experimental
ethnographers toward a productive interrogation of their
own roles as knowledge producers in relation to the ex-
otic: “Leiris’ affiliations to Surrealism enabled him to stand
outside the mainstream anthropological perspective and he
was perhaps one of the first to critically reflect on the im-
plications (political, moral, subjective) of the ethnographic
encounter and to develop the seeds of what might be called
a post-colonialist or postmodern approach” (p. 212).
For all its attention to the movement’s excesses and
blind spots, then, Surrealism and the Exotic attempts to
reclaim Surrealism as an ancestor of contemporary, the-
oretically informed anthropology. By a curious reversal,
this reclamation tends to domesticate the Surrealists: They
become the spokespeople of now orthodox critiques of
Eurocentric modernity. Readers who have lately come
to feel the limits of postmodernism and postcoloniality
as theoretical frameworks may wish that the “subver-
sive” impulse of Surrealism could be rediscovered in a
new academic context. Could our encounter with the
Surrealists provoke a critique, rather than a recognition
and reaffirmation, of contemporary theoretical premises?
To answer this question we might have to distinguish
between the historical movement and the critical impulse
of Surrealism, where the latter would aim to defamiliarize
the dominant terms of knowledge production, including
the postcolonialist and postmodern terms dominant today. In
any case, Tythacott leaves this question open, settling for a
genealogy of contemporary approaches with international
Surrealism at its roots.
Foundations of Despotism: Peasants, the Trujillo
Regime, and Modernity in Dominican History. Richard
Lee Turits. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. 384 pp.
G E R A L D F. M U R R AY
University of Florida
Anthropologists of the Caribbean will be interested in his-
torian Richard Lee Turits’s book on the Dominican dic-
tator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo. Faithful to the historian’s
craft, he researched a 20-page bibliography heavy in pri-
mary sources, but Turits also carried out 130 field interviews,
many of them with older peasants reminiscing about life
under Trujillo. He encountered, as have anthropologists, a
militantly expressed nostalgia among older villagers for this
dictator nearly a half century after his death—a persistent
loyalty few dead dictators enjoy. Academics and urban elites
now demonize Trujillo’s memory. They dismiss this “good
old-days” mindset as peasant ignorance or false conscious-
ness. Turits’s excellent book, however, makes us question
whose consciousness warrants upgrading.
The story-plot of the book is clear. Shortly after his
1930 coup, Trujillo developed a vision of modernization
and national economic independence based on agrarian
production by an autonomous landowning peasantry. His
implementation of the vision was launched in 1934 with an
aggressive agrarian reform program that titled existing peas-
ant holdings, expropriated and redistributed the unused
land of the wealthy, and built irrigation systems to increase

production and roads to increase access to markets. Peas-
ants were ordered to report to him personally any local of-
ficial guilty of negligence, corruption, or abuse. And woe to
the offender. Trujillo allied himself, as no other ruler had
ever done before (or has ever done since), with the peasant
sector, publicly dignifying them as the backbone of the na-
tion, and putting his rhetoric into practice with a very real
flow of land titles, irrigation canals, roads, and schools. Had
Trujillo died earlier, he might have gone down in history
as an enlightened reformer, an anthropological hero whose
iron fist struck in favor of peasants and against regional war-
lords and idle wealthy landowners. The causes of his trans-
formation from hero to villain occupy the final chapters of
the book.
Although it departs from the volume’s main theme,
Turits’s treatment of Trujillo’s 1937 massacre of 15,000
Haitians is particularly provocative, identifying territorial
fears rather than the conventional bugaboo of anti-Haitian
racism as the driving causal force behind the tragedy. Far
from being anti-Haitian, long before the massacre Trujillo
named a road after the Haitian president, publicly kissed
the Haitian flag, and even boasted of his own Haitian an-
cestry (p. 160). Why did the tragedy occur? And why a
massacre rather than an expulsion? Turits’s blunt answer
is delightfully refreshing: We do not know. In contrasting
Trujillo’s premassacre friendliness to Haitians to his post-
massacre scramble for justifications, however, Turits de-
motes popular racism to the status of consequence rather
than cause of the massacre.
This reviewer would propose a few anthropological
corrections. Turits’ repeatedly claims that Trujillo moved
the peasants from “ ‘nomadic’ pastoral practices to seden-
tary farming” (p. 184). This is unfortunate terminology
that grates on anthropological ears; Dominicans were
never Bedouins. The shift was from swidden cultivation
with open livestock grazing to permanent agriculture
with fenced-in grazing, not from pastoral nomadism to
agrarian sedentism. We can also quibble with some ethno-
graphic details. Turits believes that Dominican civilians
in the north did not participate in the Haitian slaughter
(p. 169). This reviewer interviewed northerners who most
emphatically did. The peasants who fought guerrillas for
Trujillo were his macheteros, not machateros (p.253). Truits
says that the Spanish r sound in the Dominican border is
not rolled “at the end or in the middle of words” (p. 318).
Wrong. The r in cara is not “rolled” or trilled in any Spanish
dialect; it is flapped. Turits is referring to an unflapped
Dominican allophone before consonants or in word-final
position. But such minor errors leave intact the integrity of
Turits’s thesis. One can treat with skepticism Turits’s hint
that it was Trujillo’s peasant connection that somehow
kept him in power. Latin American dictators bereft of
a peasant base but with strong armies have done quite
well, thank you. But a positive peasant connection was
uniquely strong in Trujillo’s case, and Turits has brought
it finally to the prominence it deserves. His book forces
us to confront a contradiction between two academic
Single Reviews 171
dogmas—the Dogma of Peasant Wisdom and the Dogma of
Trujillo-the-Monster. Either peasants are dumb or Trujillo’s
monster status must be rethought and nuanced. Who are
the ideological dupes? Those soon-to-die octogenarian
admirers of the strong-handed dictator who longed for
the return of tranquility and respect? Or the true-believer
peddlers of electoral procedures, that snake-oil medicine
good for all countries and ailments? Turits skirts these
sensitive questions. But his honest assessment of the early
Trujillo years, juxtaposed to the social chaos and institu-
tional corruption generated by four subsequent decades of
elections, forces us to listen to these aging rural voices, to
demythologize the sacred mantra democracy, and to ask
deeper anthropological questions about the nature of the
State.
Signs of the Inka Khipu: Binary Coding in Andean
Knotted-String Records. Gary Urton. Austin: University of
Texas Press, 2003. 202 pp.
R O C Í O Q U I S P E - A G N O L I
Michigan State University
One of the most striking enigmas about Andean civiliza-
tions is the idea that the Inkas, like other Amerindian
cultures, did not have a writing system. However, as the
scholarship of recent decades shows, the Inka were able
to record and preserve information. In his comment on
Condori Mamani’s tale (1997) about the Inkas’ death caused
by his inability to read a paper handled by a Spaniard, Frank
Salomon stresses the contemporary Andean consciousness
of a writing system, different from Western writing. Inkas
did write, just not the way Spaniards understood it. They
utilized a unique writing and statistical device called the
khipu. The khipu constitute one of the Inka notation sys-
tems equivalent to Western writing that scholars from dif-
ferent disciplines (anthropology, archaeology, linguistics,
art history, history, and mathematics) are trying to deci-
pher, decode, analyze, and “translate” today. The khipu
were knotted-string devices used for recording both sta-
tistical and narrative information, most notably by the
Inka but also by other peoples of the Central Andes, from
pre-Inka times through the colonial and republican eras
and even to present day, in a transformed and attenuated
form.
Gary Urton’s study of Inka khipu has been recorded
in several titles, which can be traced from 1988 on. This
book marks another step in the anthropologist’s research
on these Inka devices. Based on the computer technology
system of binary coding, Urton’s book explores the possi-
bility that khipu were structured primarily as a binary code.
Urton examines different types of recordkeeping systems
to argue that the khipu were not only a mnemonic device,
and they may, in fact, have worked as a writing system. A
key concept underlying Urton’s research is the “semiosis”
(Charles Peirce’s concept that a sign is not a sign unless it can
translate itself in another sign) between a sign (khipu), the
172 American Anthropologist • Vol. 107, No. 1 • March 2005
world represented by this sign, and its process of conven-
tionalization. His central argument is that the physical fea-
tures resulting from the manipulation of fibers in the con-
struction of the khipu constituted binary-coded sequences.
The majority of khipu studies have focused on the de-
scription of patterns of numbers and colors (Marcia Ascher
and Robert Ascher, William Burns, Leland Locke, Carlos
Radicati, Tom Zuidema) but there is almost no information
of a possible binary coding system (p. 136). Once the bi-
nary encoding of khipu has been established, Urton identi-
fies seven levels of decision making or operations: material,
color class, spin/ply, pendant attachment recto/verso, knot
directionality, number class, and information type (deci-
mal/non decimal). The next step is to search the way in
which semantic values could be assigned to these construc-
tions. Based on Peirce, the author proposes looking at the
Inka khipu as tokens of (among other things) the intel-
lectual, syntactic, and semantic system of information of
Andean communities who produced khipu as a whole.
Finally, Urton’s book reflects on linguistic principles of
markedness, insistence (frequency), parallelism, semantic
couplets (Bruce Mannheim), and two different kinds of bi-
nary oppositions (mutual exclusion [a/non-a] and symbolic
opposition [a/b]). On the results of this reflection, the au-
thor sketches out a theory of interpreting the hierarchical
and asymmetrical signs of khipu as the basis for canonical
Inka literatures, the components of which would have been
used for constructing narrative recitations.
Urton’s work stresses the necessity of a better and more
careful study of the khipu transcriptions contained in colo-
nial Spanish documents. These could provide categories for
understanding classes of meaning in Andean thought. This
could serve as a point of departure for developing inven-
tories of classes of meanings in semantic, coupletlike ar-
rangements, and encoded in the khipu by means of binary
coding. This book also contributes to expanding the proof
that khipu may work beyond the mnemonic function.
In addition to addressing the contributions of this
work, its reading may give rise to questions at different lev-
els of scholarly specialization. For example, were the khipu
an initial stage of writing that was truncated with the ar-
rival of the Europeans and the destruction of the Andean
world? If that were the case, could that be one of the rea-
sons why scholars have been unable to decode the infor-
mation recorded in these devices? From the perspective of
an interdisciplinary researcher working with colonial docu-
ments and their discourses, one wonders why there is such
an overwhelming absence of information on how exactly
khipu worked. In addition to these questions, khipu studies
should address other Andean notions about recorded in-
formation, such as quilca or qellqa (translated into Spanish
as signifying “letter or document” or “letter [of the alpha-
bet],” “to paint,” “embroidery,” and “wooden sculpture”).
Based on colonial testimonies, it is possible that the khipu
constituted one of the possible actualizations of writing sys-
tems that were contained in an abstract concept, such as
“qellqa.”
Urton’s work is the final step on a long path that this
scholar and khipu studies have been taking for years. It is
also the beginning of an effective decoding of Inka records.
It provides answers, raises questions, and proposes new
ways to approach record keeping in the Andean world.
When we achieve the decoding of khipu, we will be able
to access unknown and fascinating aspects of the Andean
cultures.
REFERENCES CITED
Condori Mamani, Gregorio
1977 Autobiografı́a. Cuzco: Centro de estudios rurales andinos
Bartolomé de Las Casas.
Salomon, Frank
2001 Para repensar el grafismo andino. In Perú: El legado de la
Historia. Luis Millones, ed. Pp. 107–127. Sevilla: Universidad
de Sevilla.
Histories and Historicities in Amazonia. Neil L. White-
head, ed. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003.
236 pp.
STEVEN RUBENSTEIN
Ohio University
Anthropologists have long understood that culture change
does not necessarily mean “culture loss” and have strug-
gled to devise a theory of culture that could accommodate
and account for this fact. This volume not only makes an
important contribution to this endeavor, it also convinc-
ingly argues for a new theory of history as well. Neil White-
head, in a volume coedited with Brian Ferguson (1992), has
already demonstrated the importance of the historical en-
gagement with colonialism in understanding Amazonian
societies. Here he adds to the work of Jonathan Hill and
others (1988) who have enlarged our understanding of lo-
cal conceptions of history itself.
In a profound and provocative introduction, White-
head explains that his basic objective is to conceive of
history as something other than the passage of time. Ob-
serving that both Amazonian and Western histories “are
histories of the mutual, mimetic, and entangled relations
of Amazonians and non-Amazonians over the last five hun-
dred years” (p. x), he argues that local Amazonian histories
are essential for an understanding of colonial (which, in
the Amazon, includes the contemporary experience of in-
ternal colonialism) history. He proposes an “ethnohistory”
that goes beyond a contextualization of native discourse
and practice, to include the “ethnography of historical
consciousness.” This is what he means by “historicities”—
“cultural schema and subjective attitudes that make the past
meaningful” (p. xi). For Whitehead, such historicities, how-
ever culturally situated, cannot be understood locally or
in isolation, because it is precisely these historicities that
mediate the disjuncture between self and other in colonial
encounters.
Alas, like many edited volumes, the following chapters
do not always live up to the editor’s vision. Nevertheless,
many are timely and important. Several make an important

addition to Whitehead’s point by exploring the ways his-
toricities take form through spatial relations. As Domingo
Medina points out in the first chapter, maps play a crucial
role not only in representing Ye’kuana identity but also in
defending their control over resources. The acquisition of
legal title to land has been a central concern for indigenous
groups in the Amazon as elsewhere, but as Medina empha-
sizes, how land is used is as important an issue as title. In the
Amazon, colonization is an ongoing process centering on
control over land. Several other chapters explore different
ways in which geographic knowledge is encoded culturally,
and space is simultaneously historicized and politicized.
Several chapters deal with questions concerning the
representation of a collective voice and globalization. How-
ever, these themes could have been more thoroughly in-
terrogated and developed. Although all authors work at
transcending the opposition between culture and history,
they sometimes rely on other, related binaries—especially
inside–outside and speech–writing. Many of the case stud-
ies suggest ways in which the boundary between “inside”
and “outside” is historically constructed. Too often though,
the relationship between the two is described in mechan-
ical terms, such as adaptation, resistance, and manipula-
tion. This is a shame because indigenous activists often
discover that there is a fine line between agency and accom-
modation. The concept of “historicities” seems designed to
work against mechanical oppositions, and some contribu-
tors contrast verbally encoded historicities that often fall
on one side of this line or the other, with spatially encoded
historicities that often overwhelm the insider–outsider bi-
nary. Still, I wish more chapters had picked up on White-
head’s allusion to the role of mimesis in these processes,
and the implication that agency may be culturally encoded
and, thus, at times, take unconscious form. Some contrib-
utors suggest another way to transcend this binary: They
examine overlapping spheres constituted through various
circulations that link indigenous and nonindigenous peo-
ples, such as consumer goods (Scaramelli and Tarble) and
discourse (Riley and Gassón).
Many chapters situate their subjects at a transition
from an oral to a written culture. Whitehead is wisely con-
cerned about identifying the formal properties of signs with
their cultural usage, and the attention to landscapes as
texts suggests one way to further this project. Neverthe-
less, most chapters reveal just how hard it is for anthropolo-
gists to move beyond the metaphor of culture as text. Ama-
zonianists might benefit from Andeanist Frank Salomon’s
constructive and sophisticated engagement with this issue
(2001). Cormier’s chapter on Guajá, however, reveals the
full potential of Whitehead’s project; her analysis of how
their myth and ritual act to decolonize history would be of
interest to non-Amazonianists, and should be read by any
anthropologist interested in religion, politics, and history.
REFERENCES CITED
Ferguson, R. Brian, and Neil L. Whitehead, eds.
1992 Warfare in the Tribal Zone. Santa Fe: School of American
Research Press.
Single Reviews 173
Hill, Jonathan, ed.
1988 Rethinking History and Myth. Urbana: University of Illi-
nois Press.
Salomon, Frank
2001 How Andean “Writing without Words” works. Current
Anthropology 42(1):1–28.
Thinking from Things: Essays in the Philosophy
of Archaeology. Alison Wylie. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2002. 339 pp.
MICHAEL J. O’BRIEN
University of Missouri–Columbia
Most presses today shy away from collections of previously
published articles, especially if they are by a single author.
Such books do not sell particularly well, and if it does too
many of them, a press can gain the reputation of being a rest
home for shop-worn authors past their prime. From an au-
thor’s point of view, however, there is a certain prestige that
comes from having one’s papers between the same covers,
if for no other reason than it signals, at least to the author,
that what he or she has to say is important enough that it
bears republishing. From the author’s standpoint, such col-
lections are easy to produce. All you need to do is crank out a
minimalist introduction in which you wax poetically about
your significant ideas and contributions, and once more,
take aim at your critics, maybe just for old time’s sake. In
terms of whether they are reviewed or not, most collections
of essays are not worth more than a one-sentence comment
in the books-received section of a journal.
Every once in awhile, however, an edited collection
comes along that is an exception to the rule. Wylie’s collec-
tion of articles is one of those exceptions, and it qualifies as
a major exception. In fact, I cannot remember when I have
been more impressed with a collection of single-authored
articles. For one thing, Wylie was not content simply to
reprint articles verbatim. Rather, she deleted extraneous
material (abstracts, acknowledgments, and the like) to
streamline them and added extensive endnotes to bring
the articles, which were originally published between 1982
and 1999, up-to-date in terms of both the train of argument
and the references cited. The notes add immeasurably to
the value of the book. Some chapters are hybrids of two
articles or an article and a conference paper. The first
four of the 17 chapters—96 out of 246 pages of text—are
new, and they summarize Wylie’s philosophical views on
archaeology and set the stage for her various arguments in
the chapters that follow.
Wylie is only one of the several thousand profes-
sional archaeologists out there who over the years have
thought they had something to say about philosophy and
archaeology—two topics that in the 1970s, the heyday of
processual archaeology, became so interwoven that it of-
ten was impossible to tell them apart. This is where Wylie
begins her story—in the intellectual mix that led to U.S.
archaeology’s fascination with science and philosophy and
that ultimately helped bring about the antipositivist move-
ment known as postprocessualism. Her discussion of the
rise of processualism and its emphasis on philosophical
174 American Anthropologist • Vol. 107, No. 1 • March 2005
issues such as deduction, induction, and falsification is an
excellent summary of a complicated time. To those of us
who remember the glory days of processualism, the names
of philosophers such as Carl Hempel, Ernst Nagel, and Karl
Popper were forever etched in our memories. In some ar-
chaeological circles their work, after it was translated into
archaeological terms, became more important than any-
thing most prehistorians had produced. The problem was
that archaeologists, not philosophers, were the ones doing
the translating. For the most part this made about as much
sense as a philosopher discussing the conceptual basis of
frequency seriation.
Wylie is one of only a handful of people whom I trust to
speak authoritatively on philosophical aspects of archaeol-
ogy. This is because she was trained as both an archaeologist
and a philosopher, as opposed to being an archaeologist
who took a class in philosophy during graduate school. Be-
ing not only an archaeologist but also a philosopher, Wylie
can dissect the processualist arguments of the 1970s instead
of simply summarizing them. She can also move easily into
other areas of archaeology, such as ethics and gender stud-
ies. In short, the breadth of knowledge that Wylie demon-
strates in Thinking from Things is impressive. In one chap-
ter she might be discussing professional versus commercial
interests in archaeology and in another chapter reviewing
some of issues growing out of the Native American Graves
Protection and Repatriation Act. Or she might be defend-
ing the use of analogy in one chapter and discussing gender
politics and science in another.
All in all, the book represents an important work—well
thought out, well balanced in terms of tone (not overly
preachy), and well referenced. I had read most of the articles
before, but taken together they left me with the impression
that if one were trapped in an elevator with Wylie, the lively
and wide-ranging conversation you could have would make
for an enjoyable wait.