Book reviewsjrai_1661 905..951 Archaeology, art, and artefacts Arnold, Dean E. Social change and the evolution of ceramic production and distribution in a Maya community. xxx, 351 pp., maps, tables, figs, illus., bibliogr. Boulder: Univ. Press of Colorado, 2008. £54.50 (cloth) Few researchers have been committed to conducting ceramic ethnoarchaeology for their entire career. However, Dean Arnold, who trained originally as an ethnographer, reveals that to recognize the complexities of social and technological change, one must be devoted to longitudinal research. Arnold’s research encompasses thirty-two years beginning in 1965 and continuing to 1997 in the Maya community of Ticul, Yucatán, Mexico. The book is divided into four parts, the first part beginning with a lengthy theoretical introduction focused on social and technological change in relation to several paradigms, including Cathy Costin’s specialization parameters, evolutionary processes, technological choice, and cognitive anthropology and engagement theory. The latter part of the introduction concentrates on the use of ethnographic analogy, Dean’s methods, and a short discussion concerning how the book is organized. The second part of the book systematically discusses the thirty-two years of changes in the Ticul population and organization of potters, and the demand, consumption, and distribution of pottery. What makes this book accessible to both archaeologists and ethnoarchaeologists, and hopefully ethnographers, is that Arnold removes the static dimension of materials by always concentrating on how individuals, families, and the community have changed in relation to pottery production and distribution. These chapters lay the foundation and allow the reader to have a good sense of the social, economic, and technological changes Ticul has experienced over these three decades. The predominance of the pottery production in Ticul remained household-based, even in large units with wage-labour households. Arnold documents a kin-based model documented by using genealogical data, residence maps, and participant observation. The distributional changes started with pottery sold at the local markets and fiestas and expanded into more urban markets when a highway system was built. This led to more specialization with brokers, who could act as intermediaries selling to the rising tourist markets of Mérida and Cancún. The third part of the book uses a life-history perspective through discussing changes in clay and temper procurement, composition of pottery fabric, forming technology, and finally firing technology. Arnold documents that ‘all choices are social’ regarding the complexity of clay and temper procurement. Furthermore, he challenges the predominant view that elite control of resources restricts the mining of clay. Rather he emphasizes the flexibility that potters engage in while procuring clay and temper and forming and firing vessels, which becomes increasingly specialized, efficient, and productive, consequently dictating the complexity of pottery production. Archaeologists will discover his most important contribution is that production did not grow but the intensity of production increased by individuals specializing in specific tasks. The biggest surprise Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 16, 905-951 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2010 from reading the book is that INAA (instrumental neutron activation analysis, a method of materials analysis) was inconclusive in detecting subtle clay and temper changes. I commend Arnold for including these data as negative evidence demonstrating to archaeologists and ethnoarchaeologists that the use of high-tech equipment to see slight changes in clay and temper procurement may prove ineffective. In the book’s conclusion, Arnold concisely summarizes the dramatic changes and reconnects the introductory chapter by discussing Ticul’s efficiency and paradigms of social change and specialization. These changes, as well as the increase of demand for pottery, display the complexity of craft specialization, and by taking a holistic approach (i.e. studying the social, as well as the technological aspects) can make a lasting contribution concerning how archaeologists interpret the past. Arnold’s engagement in participant observation has allowed him to describe the intricacies of pottery production, especially why some families adopted some techniques but rejected others. So how should archaeologists use the Ticul case study if it occurs within a capitalistic, cash economy system? Arnold rightly argues that this study has important relevance to archaeologists since it relates to a long continuum of Maya pottery production. Archaeologists cannot separate the past from the present and we are all dependent on the use of analogy tied to the present. Arnold contends that the role of demand is the key to craft production, and archaeologists will need to separate out elements associated with the modern world economic system from qualities that are related to their own society. The production of the book is excellent, containing plentiful maps, graphs, and tables, as well as numerous black and white photos that aid the reader in conceptualizing the cultural and technological changes that Ticul has undertaken over a span of three decades. All who are interested in ethnoarchaeology, pottery, and craft specialization should read this book and it would be a welcome text for courses focusing on ethnoarchaeology. Dean Arnold’s remarkable commitment to ceramic ethnoarchaeology research in Ticul is a significant contribution to the field of archaeology. John W. Arthur University of South Florida St Petersburg Dingwall, Paul R., Kevin L. Jones & Rachael Egerton (eds). In care of the Southern Ocean: an archaeological and historical survey of the Auckland Islands. v, 317 pp., maps, figs, tables, illus., bibliogrs. Auckland: New Zealand Archaeological Association, 2009. $57.00 (paper) In care of the Southern Ocean documents the 2003 New Zealand Department of Conservation scientific and historical survey of the Auckland Islands, a survey which gave particular attention to the archaeological remains left by the different visitors to the islands. The Auckland Islands are situated 450 km south of the southernmost part of New Zealand, in latitude 500 South, a latitude that is comparable with that of London and Frankfurt in the Northern Hemisphere. However, as the botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker pointed out in 1845, such a comparison belies the extreme weather conditions of the Southern Ocean and the Southern Hemisphere generally, where tree lines are about 1,000 metres lower than they are in the north. This monograph documents the fragmentary archaeological traces left by a succession of human visitations, beginning with ancient Polynesians in the thirteenth century AD, about the same time that New Zealand itself was first colonized. This brief occupation adds another chapter to the remarkable story of Polynesian exploration across the entire Pacific from the tropics almost to Antarctica. Between the thirteenth and the early decades of the nineteenth century AD, the islands appear to have been left to the seals, the hardy Southern rata (Metrosideros umbellata), and a floor cover of giant herbs. Then, between 1807 and 1810, Nigel Prickett, in his chapter on sealing, estimates that as many as 30,000 seal skins were exported from the islands, a loss that has taken between then and now to repair. This points to the fragility and harshness of the Auckland Islands’ environment, a fragility which saw the failure of attempted farming settlements, a brief return of Maori and Moriori to the islands in the mid-nineteenth century, scientific expeditions, notably the German Transit of Venus Expedition in 1874, and more recent surveys and conservation studies. The shipwreck era, which probably continues to the present day with long-distance ocean racing, is discussed by Paul Dingwall. The Auckland Islands were on the Great Circle sailing route from Australia to South America, or to Europe via Cape Horn. Given the vagaries of Book reviews906 Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 16, 905-951 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2010 charts and navigation in an environment where fog and rain prevented celestial navigation, it is a wonder that there were not many more than the ten shipwrecks recorded. The shipwreck story is also a story of castaways stranded on the islands for months, of deaths from drowning and exposure, of hut sites and other buildings which now make up a prominent part of the archaeological heritage of the islands. As shipping companies and the governments of Australia and New Zealand became aware of the possibility of castaways, a series of depots were set up. These contained matches, food, and an essential box of books to while away the months before rescue. An extraordinary feature of the Auckland Islands landscape is signposts (fingerposts) which pointed the way to depots at the northern and southern ends of the islands. These are a melancholy and forbidding sight, almost exemplifying the slim chance a castaway had in this environment. The presence of feral animals on the islands – pigs, mice, and cats – remains a threat to this environment, though rabbits, mice, and cattle have been eradicated from Enderby Island. At the beginning of the Second World War, the German ship Erlangen cut timber from Carnley Harbour in an unsuccessful attempt to reach a neutral port. As a response to this, the New Zealand government set up coastwatching and radio stations on the islands to monitor shipping and deny access to enemy ships. This resulted in one of the longest periods of continuous settlement, and these stations have left a notable archaeological signature. This period also saw extensive surveys of plant and animal life as the coastwatchers included notable scientists Charles Fleming, Richard Falla, and Graham Turbott. Much of what took place in the Auckland Islands concerned Enderby Island and Port Ross, at the northern end of the chain. Separating each historical episode into different chapters makes it difficult to grasp the concentration of activities there. The volume could have been improved if the two overview chapters – one on landscapes by Jones and Dingwall, and the second on the plant trail by Geoff Walls – had been placed towards the front, as these provide information essential to understand the nature of historical experience in the Auckland Islands. Finally, given that much of what is recorded on the Auckland Islands is the result of short-term visitation, I was surprised that the expedition did not also record their own archaeological signature. Chapters by Atholl Anderson, Kevin Jones, Geoff Walls, Steve Bagley, Rachael Egerton, Nigel Prickett, and Paul Dingwall represent significant statements of the archaeological and historical heritage of the islands. Overall, this volume is excellently written and well produced. The New Zealand Archaeological Association Monographs are an important series and the Auckland Islands volume is a worthy addition to the volumes currently available. Harry Allen University of Auckland Henare, Amiria, Martin Holbraad & Sari Wastell (eds). Thinking through things: theorizing artefacts ethnographically. x, 233 pp., fig., bibliogrs. London, New York: Routledge, 2007. £22.99 (paper) The editors’ introduction makes clear the ambitiousness of this essay collection. They seek not only to promote thinking through things, but also to promote a new way to conduct ethnography. They find significant fault with all prior approaches. First, they are objects people, which means they reject the cultural and social turn taken by anthropologists, starting with the post-Rivers era of the early twentieth century. They want to bring objects back in. At the same time, they are not content with scholars like Daniel Miller and his material culture studies or those associated either with science technology studies (STS) or actor network theory (ANT). The trouble with these other objects people is that they do not go nearly far enough. For all their talk about connections, mutuality, hybridity, and networks, they remain mired, at their base, with an analytic assumption of object/person separation in the first place, such that they can come to be seen as related in the second place. Instead, a way needs to be found to grasp the unity of a people and their artefacts, graspable as a single phenomenon. Such a unity gets us to the ontology of a people: the nature of what their material-social being is. The key methodological move for the anthropologist is thus to understand the methods people themselves are using that make their personhood and objects as one. The mission enriches the home turf by informing our thinking with the varying modes of ontological existence practised by other peoples. The anthropological imagination – and methodological toolkit – expands not just with instruction of others’ folkways, technical Book reviews 907 Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 16, 905-951 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2010 practices, and cultural stances, but also with modes of being through stuff. Intriguing as all this may sound, I could not find the sharp distinction the editors are making with the objects-orientated predecessors they seem to disdain, despite claiming their work as a first step to ‘ontological breakthrough’ (p. 15). Try as they might to avoid it, I find at least some of them locked in the infinite regress faced by others who similarly strive to de-privilege the myopic social scientist. I did not find advance to the great debates about how natives think, and indeed sometimes a lack of discipline allowed plunges into ungrounded assertions about how other minds work. And I kept thinking they would benefit from familiarity with efforts from ethnomethodology and Meadian symbolic interaction that struggle with some of the same issues they take up. But these authors nevertheless do some real anthropology. Adam Reed writes convincingly of cigarettes’ centrality (they are ‘king’) in the Papau New Guinea prison he studied. Whereas such goods’ importance similarly shows up in many researches on prisons (none cited), here they are all that matters, a somewhat unlikely outcome (what about sex, after all?). Several essays are not really about artefacts at all (a word used in the subtitle of the book), unless that word is stretched to include property rights (as opposed to property itself) and legal contracts. Amiria Henare is informative, none the less, with an interesting exegesis of what might be thought of as Maori mobilization of Western property rights doctrine in pursuit of indigenous claims. Sari Westell’s piece on Swaziland kingship similarly centres on an abstraction, in this case divine kingship in Swaziland. Here the emphasis is on the identity of monarchical enunciation, not just as exercise of divine right, but also as kingly power in the somewhat beguiling sense that ‘everything that escapes his lips already is the world’ (p. 86). Here we are beyond charisma precisely because these utterances are in fact things, or at least thing-like. More obviously on the artefact topic is Andrew Moutu’s chapter on collecting; it is ‘a way of being’, he says, and he displays how acts of collecting construct, in the very process, the nature of the artefacts themselves. In so doing he recapitulates points made by various museum studies scholars, particularly those alert to social-material reflexivity. Rebecca Empson, in her chapter, attends to the display and storage of family mementos in Mongolia; she uses the word ‘suggest’ to make what are more like pronouncements of what each kept object means. Seldom is there evidence that would bolster her suggestion versus any number of alternative interpretations. In his aptly titled ‘Talismans of thought’, Morten Pedersen indeed makes a case for how objects, such as shamanic costumes, transform the being of the user. Far from the Mongolian scene, I thought of the way a drag queen becomes through her high-heel shoes. Pedersen may not appreciate such an application from West Hollywood; the authors almost assiduously avoid parallels with Western folk thinking. But Pedersen does reach towards grounding his observations in more general bio-cognitive processes (‘cognitive scaffolds’, p. 145) that would place all these discussions into a broader analytic and, ironically, broader cultural register. A chapter by James Leach in critique of Alfred Gell comes off as a rather miscellaneous effort, given the context of chapters devoted to particular ethnographic cases. And why Gell and not, say, Latour or any of the others who have missed the ontological boat? A report of the author’s own participation in an art-science project does not help edify a rationale. With implications for the book as a whole, Martin Holbraad writes about the ‘power of powder’ in the context of Cuban Ifá. I much appreciated his searching discussion of mana to mount his more general explication of how thing and belief are in recursive and indexical relation, or, in still more radical ways, constitute an ontological whole. This book displays erudition and most chapters inform. But its call to ontological arms is weighted with ambiguity, infelicity, and partiality. So much of the writing is turgid – a cost to the community. Harvey Molotch New York University Meskell, Lynn (ed.). Cosmopolitan archaeologies. 296 pp., illus., bibliogr. London, Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 2009. £59.00 (cloth), £14.99 (paper) Archaeology has recently developed sensitivity to its position within contemporary society. Even the most admirable accounts, however, seem to have missed an obvious point: if archaeology speaks to the peoples of the present, then, even (especially) amidst a globalizing world, its language needs to be understood by multiple audiences. As such, archaeologists need exhibit attentiveness to the perception of meanings produced in the present. Book reviews908 Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 16, 905-951 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2010 Cosmopolitan archaeologies is an important and thoughtful collection, one which demonstrates why the validity, not only the place, of the modern archaeological enterprise requires scrutiny. The volume comprises ten chapters and an editorial introduction. Through various vehicles of cosmopolitan commitment the contributors depict the interplay between international bodies, ethnic identities, economic regimes, heritage and ecology movements, and conservationists and developers. The contributions attend to diverse temporal and geographical studies but share at their core not merely appreciations of the multi-scalar repercussions of their projects but also an acceptance of the responsibility for them. The introduction offers a framework for the chapters which follow, principally by outlining the development of select cosmopolitan theories, archaeological ethics, and the micro-politics of disciplinary practice. The work’s primary theoretical paradigm draws from the writings of Anthony Appiah and takes the form of ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’, a dialectic concept which accepts a multiplicity of attachments to place and social networks, resources, and experiences. This permits a construction of cosmopolitan archaeology which, as the editor notes, ‘acknowledges its responsibilities to the wider world yet embraces the cultural differences that are premised upon particular histories, places, practices and sentiments’ (p. 6). In chapter 1, Jane Lydon explores the powers, claims, and appropriations of global heritage discourses in contemporary Australia. The bifurcation between valuing diversity and promulgating universality is shown to be hazardous in that heritage agendas actually disenfranchise communities, mainly in detaching materials from their local matrices of meaning. Chapter 2 adopts a more positive tone. Ian Lilley elucidates why, in the Australasian context specifically, the discipline has developed closer, ‘professionalized’ relations with indigenous communities. Archaeology is often about access and rights. Discourses concerning the ‘ownership’ of the past take many forms. Denis Byrne in chapter 3 describes the relations between nature conservation and cultural heritage, alternatives to so-called ‘fortress protectionism’, and the epistemological disharmony between cosmopolitan plurality and post-Enlightenment secular rationalism. Lynn Meskell takes some of these themes forward in chapter 4 by way of results from an archaeological ethnography in Kruger National Park, South Africa. A disturbing displacement of the inhabited past is presented; a process reinvigorated in the post-apartheid era. Alfredo González-Ruibal, in chapter 5, notes how archaeologists have for too long been caught up in the neoliberal rhetoric of development, which helps to preserve the very inequalities it purports to alleviate. Alternatively, he calls for vernacular research which documents transparently the annihilations of modernity and the frequent deceptions of communities in which archaeology is practised. In chapter 6, Chip Colwell-Chathaphonh describes, through the elaboration of Zuni, Hopi, and Navajo cases, a ‘complex stewardship’ model that embraces difference. This entwines openness, participation, and negotiation to overcome problematic concepts such as universal entitlement. Chapter 7 by Sandra Scham examines the fashions/obligations of archaeological attentions in the ancient Near East. Hospitality as a form of negotiation is used to demonstrate why archaeologists need to consider the economic welfare of the communities within which they work. After all, hospitality is a form of gift-giving and requires reciprocation. Negotiation is also Ian Hodder’s focus in chapter 8, in which he offers interesting contextualization to some events relating to the site of Çatalhöyük. The interplay of the politics of multiple, changing identities is well examined. Chapter 9 by Lisa Breglia illustrates the fractious nature of the local through her long-term ethnographic study of stakeholders at the Mayan site of Chichén Itzá. Indeed considerable stresses are observed between indigenous site custodians and Mexican visitors. In chapter 10, Hugo Benavides recounts further ethnographic research conducted at archaeological sites whilst dissecting the fictions of timeless cultural authenticity within the Ecuadorian state project. These final two chapters, in particular, highlight usefully the ways heritagescapes are at once universal and relative. In this reviewer’s opinion there were two minor shortcomings. Firstly, as cosmopolitanism in general posits the overarching sameness of humanity, the primacy afforded to ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’ seemed inappropriate. Indeed most of the contributors’ formulations of local identities appear more akin to the ‘tribal constructs’ of diluted communitarian positions. Therefore the theorization of other forms of political, sociological, and institutional Book reviews 909 Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 16, 905-951 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2010 cosmopolitanism may have been constructive. Secondly, some essential elements of the unfolding cosmopolitan awareness necessitated greater discussion, in particular the negative and unintended consequences which result from well-meaning archaeological actions. Timothy Clack University of Oxford Paddayya, K. (ed.). Formation processes and Indian archaeology. vii, 294 pp., maps, tables, figs, illus., bibliogrs. Pune: Deccan College, 2007. Rs 500/- (paper) The editor of this book, a great luminary of Indian archaeology and theoretical archaeology, has, for the purposes of this volume, selected a galaxy of post- and pre-depositional archaeologists like Lewis Henry Binford, Michael B. Schiffer, and Carla Sinopoli; younger Indian authors such as Arati Deshpande-Mukherji, Richa Jhaldiyal, and B. Basak; older ones, like J.N. Pal, V. Jayaswal; and a few others who use their field-based studies to cast light on and bring their colleagues up to date with formation processes and Indian archaeology. Most students of Indian archaeology when they enter the Master’s programme at Deccan College, to which this reviewer has a subsidiary affiliation, receive a thorough pedagogic grilling in field-based geomorphology, both practically and theoretically. Indeed, no fewer than thirteen of the authors in this volume hail either directly from the College, or were, for a time, affiliated with it. In brief, Formation processes and Indian archaeology is about a theoretical patch-up, coming of age from the classical era of Indology, where theories of migration and diffusion were marshalled to explain similarities and differences in tool-types/kits across the country and not simply within a region of it. From this volume, it looks like Indian archaeologists have moved to landscape and regional frameworks to help explain and investigate the processes of site-formation, both prehistoric and historic. I have browsed and re-browsed the book but have in particular read the essays dealing with Bengal, two from Uttar Pradesh, and Vijaynagar, in Karnataka, and wonder if this does or does not do justice to the volume. However, as these are, I think, a somewhat representative sample, what do I really think and feel? Well, I feel that the eminence of the authors ought to have moved them to consider extending their analyses of pre- and post-deposition beyond the realm of basic observations (Basak) about aeolean, fluvial/pluvial centred displacements in tools onto some evolved statistical measures of these phenomena. Which would have suggested that they did imbibe something of Lewis Henry Binford’s labours (with the ‘French Mousterian of the Levallois Facies’ article) of half a century ago, and would have helped them for once to break off from the Indological/Orientalist narratives of how many inches/millimetres a particular artefact moved (and in which varying direction) over a period of twenty or so years of repeated field visits. Field visits are of course welcome; however, a progressively refined set of observations regarding deposition and post-deposition, measured quantitatively, beyond elementary descriptive statistics, is welcome even more so. The time has gone when Indian archaeologists might have got away with giving their studies such titles as ‘Preliminary observations on stone and bone displacements’. Overall, however, this book is a pathbreaking foray into a hitherto under-explored and very under-represented field of Indian archaeology. Ajay Pratap Banaras Hindu University Childhood and youth Alber, Erdmute, Sjaak van der Geest & Susan Reynolds Whyte (eds). Generations in Africa: connections and conflicts. 416 pp., tables, bibliogrs. Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2008. €39.90 Although there has been an outpouring of writing on children and youth around the world in the past decade, much of the most stimulating work has come from work in Africa. Child soldiers, thwarted promises of education and development, political upheaval, religious movements, and a bundle of new problems surrounding sex have led Africanists to question what youth or childhood means both in analytical terms and in local cultural worlds. Some of the freshest work situates those questions in exploration not just of the categories themselves, but in the relationships through which they take form and are negotiated, especially intergenerational relationships. This collection of sixteen papers along with a broad introduction, which grew out of an earlier conference, explores various Book reviews910 Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 16, 905-951 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2010 dimensions of intergenerational relations across the African continent. The editors’ introduction lays out the problems and potential in the term ‘generation’: the term has been used to talk about statically reproduced structures of descent, about society-wide cohorts produced through control of procession through a life-course (such as age-sets), and about the idea of historical cohorts which develop different orientations and sensibilities through (and themselves making) processes of historical change. In each of these approaches, the tensions between groups and the processes of succession are a source of dynamism and often cultural creativity, whether in the joking relations between mother’s brothers and sister’s sons or between grandparents and grandchildren, in the resentments and political conflicts between fathers and sons, or in the wide array of exchanges that ultimately knit together and distinguish groups in processes well explored in theories of reciprocity. The ‘generativity’ of generational relations is particularly significant as people negotiate and thereby shape political, economic, and cultural changes. The editors organize the sixteen contributions into four sections: reciprocity, past and present, politics, and virtue. As might be expected from such a large collection of papers stemming initially from a panel at a conference, whose contributors come from all stages of their careers, and some of whom are more focused on the practical implications of their studies while others are more focused on theoretical implications, there is some unevenness in the contributions. A theme that runs through much of the volume (though with a particular focus in the reciprocity section) is the effects of markets and money on intergenerational relations. David Kyaddondo notes how children, who now can contribute cash to their households, also are empowered to demand service and negotiate prices in shops, contravening expectations of respectful behaviour towards elders: ‘Today, even a two-year-old understands the value of money’, people say (p. 36). In Zimbabwe, however, attempts to empower children in child-led organizations, giving them real leadership and management roles, stumble on issues of money, either because children haven’t yet developed budgetary competencies, donors and banks don’t trust children with financial management, or children might model their behaviour on self-serving politicians, according to Michael Bourdillon. Several of the essays (again, not just the ones in the ‘past and present’ section) note a disruption of ‘traditional’ reciprocities binding generations together, through not only the advent of money, but also state interventions, shifting political movements, and new religious engagements. For some, the past is a nostalgic mirror to the present, to others it is corrupt and stifling, but in both instances the past is brought creatively into negotiations of current relationships – evidenced vividly in Koen Stroeken’s essay on bongo flava, a Tanzanian rap form. Perhaps not surprising to Africanists, many of the intergenerational tensions discussed in the book circle around grandparents, and especially grandmothers. Grandmothers often care for their children’s children while those children are eking out bare survival in cities, or are developing relationships with new lovers or spouses. As Claudia Roth points out for Burkina Faso, and Erick Otieno Nyambedha for Kenya, if the grandmother works to support the children, the ‘intergenerational contract’ has been inverted, grandmothers assume parental authority, and men’s roles in supporting women are also reversed. By contrast, as Gertrude Boden describes for Namibia, the state has taken on sources of elder’s authority – access to health, education, and livelihood – giving young people a sense of liberation they link to post-apartheid independence, but also weakening elders’ respect for the young. Other elderly women in Ghana find themselves lonely caretakers in migrant children’s elaborate new houses, built far from supportive networks and known neighbours, poignantly described by Valentina Mazzucato. In a crisply argued paper on Tanzania, Mette Line Ringsted discusses how the life-course of teen mothers is the object of struggle and conflict between the young mothers and their own mothers, through issues such as childcare for the infants, expectations of youth’s opportunities, and the (grand)mothers’ own struggles for survival. The volume as a whole, though the chapters are very diverse, makes clear the complicated relationship of generations to history. While people are formed in and by history, as the volume’s references to Mannheim’s theories of generational cohorts make clear, the papers also show how much history is made and remade in the context of intergenerational negotiations. Even as children, parents, and grandparents reshape their relational statuses, they rework the histories, past, present, and future, that are bound up with generational identities. Deborah Durham Sweet Briar College Book reviews 911 Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 16, 905-951 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2010 Argenti, Nicolas & Katharina Schramm (eds). Remembering violence: anthropological perspectives on intergenerational transmission. ix, 270 pp., tables, illus., bibliogrs. Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books, 2010. £60.00 (cloth) This collection of consistently interesting articles contributes to the very boom in studies of memory towards which the editors ambiguously claim some scepticism. Janine Klungel offers a provocative paper on remembering rape, a subject of national interest in Guadeloupe through the heroine of a historical novel and central to the imagination of the matriarch of the family with whom the author lived. Dorthe Kristensen suggests that the practice of Mapuche medicine in southern Chile helps bring closure to violence committed by the Pinochet regime. David Berliner examines responses to the termination of male initiation ritual among the Bulongic of Guinea, and Jackie Feldman analyses tours to the death camps in Poland for Israeli youth. Adelheid Pichler explores successive historical memories embedded in Palo Monte rituals in Cuba, while Paola Filippucci shows how place constitutes a vehicle of memory for the former inhabitants of villages in northern France destroyed in the First World War. Carol Kidron compares how second-generation Israelis and Cambodian-Canadians describe their respective legacies of violence, and Stephan Feuchtwang explores the various modalities of remembering loss following an event of violent repression by the Taiwanese state in the early 1950s. Collectively, these essays address the after-effects of violence. How are violent acts acknowledged or commemorated, and how can or should they be? Rather than drawing on the concept of ‘memory’, which seems (to this reviewer) more a potent symbol of our time and place than a useful analytic construct for social science, each chapter focuses, more or less explicitly, on intergenerational transmission, a concept highlighted in the subtitle of the collection. This clearly displaces the subject from the bounded individual and emphasizes the social and interpersonal aspects of remembering. Similarly, in emphasizing the processual, it helpfully de-objectifies the topic. A central theme is thus the matter of how second and subsequent generations come to learn about and understand the experience of their parents and in what forms they are able to transmit it in turn. Is suffering put into words or transmitted silently – in bodily comportment, facework (Kidron, after Goffman), ritual acts, material objects, place, absence, or further violence? Is the withholding of experience by the senior generation itself an act of violence towards the next, or can silence be therapeutic or redemptive? What are the tensions between ‘repeating’ and ‘working through’ unspeakable acts, and are they equivalent for one generation and the next? How do we reach, index, or evaluate ‘closure’, and closure for whom? Finally, in comparing various cases, how should we set the balance between ‘objectivism’ (as characterized by the work of cognitive psychologists or as taken up by proponents of ‘trauma’ discourse) and ‘relativism’? How, as the editors helpfully phrase it (p. 21), do we address the ‘methodological [and ethical] challenge of combining phenomenological and constructivist analytical perspectives’? As these questions indicate, remembering entails social struggle of some kind or becomes an object of struggle. Memory happens (succeeds or fails) not simply in the enclosed brain of the individual or the fully public space of history books or monuments. Indeed, another theme addressed in many of the chapters (especially well by Filippucci and Feuchtwang) concerns the tension between state- and kinship-based forms and forums of remembering, and indeed the ‘violence’ entailed when the former attempt to appropriate the latter. Feldman and Kidron’s essays are especially important. Feldman offers an exemplary analysis of the way in which orchestrated performances by survivors at Auschwitz offer a redemptive role to the state and, in effect, reproduce new generations of witnesses. Kidron not only shows the relevance of distinctive cultural ideologies and national contexts for the significance of forms of remembering (albeit without taking into account the possible effects of the age differences between her two groups of subjects), but she is the only author to indicate fully the sharp debates that characterize the study of memory. Some contributors slip into an unfortunate conflation between Freudian and trauma theory when in fact part of the debate stands on recognizing how different they are. Trauma theory is quite distinct from psychoanalytically informed approaches insofar as it does not recognize the unconscious, conflict, fantasy, or even culture (see, e.g., Ruth Leys, From guilt to shame: Auschwitz and after, 2007). In an otherwise insightful and comprehensive introduction, the editors might have marked Book reviews912 Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 16, 905-951 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2010 explicitly their advances over past anthropological discussions such as those in collections edited by Paul Antze and Michael Lambek (Tense past: cultural essays in trauma and memory, 1996) or Gerald Sider and Steven Smith (Between history and histories: the making of silences and commemorations, 1997). Sadly, they do not contribute chapters of their own. Finally, Rosalind Shaw points out in an astute and helpful afterword that the anthropological interest in memory is not simply a cover for talking about ‘continuity’. Indeed, one could argue that it concerns (or ought to concern) the dialectic of structure and event, especially as it is constituted through forms of intergenerational and popular transmission and struggle. Michael Lambek University of Toronto Environmental anthropology Crate, Susan A. & Mark Nuttall (eds). Anthropology and climate change: from encounters to actions. 416 pp., maps, figs, illus., bibliogrs. Walnut Creek, Calif.: Left Coast Press, 2009. $75.00 (paper) The editors of this volume hope to galvanize anthropologists to advocacy, so they and their ‘field consultants’ can intervene in climate debates. It is an admirable aim. I only wish that it were more cogently realized in what feels like a bandwagon book. The twenty-four essays are divided into three sections. The first, ‘Climate and culture’, begins with an archaeological perspective. The tone of Hassan’s essay is curiously alarmist in spite of his message that ancient human populations survived climate change and ‘the impact of severe abrupt climate events is not necessarily negative’ (p. 42). Politically, the essay is also unsettling. It amounts to a liberal version of climate denial and jars with the rest of the volume. Peterson and Broad’s second chapter would have been a better place to start. They give a concise historical account of the treatment of climate and weather in anthropology, from nineteenth-century environmental determinism, through the ‘disaster anthropology’ of the 1960s, ethnoscience and TEK (the acronym for ‘traditional ecological knowledge’), ethnoecologists’ interest in coping with uncertainty, to questions of social justice, new social movements, and climate politics. The third chapter, by Roncoll, Crane, and Orlove, is jumbled because it addresses two different audiences. It describes the methods and successes of cultural anthropology for non-anthropologists, while arguing that ‘[t]o make anthropological insights relevant to policy, anthropologists must translate them into programmatic prescriptions for decision-makers’ (p. 104). Oliver-Smith’s straightforward and useful account of the processes of forced migration completes the first section and exposes a crucial weakness of the volume as a whole. As he notes, ‘[T]he literature on displacement and resettlement is clustered around three themes: disasters, civil and military conflicts, and development projects’ (p. 127), leaving us to ask what is distinctive about climate anthropology. Is it about CO2 emissions and the threat of anthropogenic climate change, or is it just another take on natural disasters, environmental degradation, and/or inequality in the world? If advocacy is to work, these can and must be linked theoretically and practically, but that requires a political confidence the volume lacks. Part two, ‘Anthropological encounters’, includes eleven case studies. Their geographical spread is extensive, but feels arbitrary. Colombi describes the Nez Perce salmon fishers’ sense of place in the Columbia River basin, Strauss tells ‘glacier stories’ in the Swiss Alps, as does Bolin for the Quechua of the Peruvian Andes. Lazrus writes of sinking Tuvalu, and Jacka considers rainforest consequences in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. Green worries about funding for more TEK research while describing ‘how sociocultural inequality reduces resilience to climate change among indigenous Australians’ (p. 218). Hitchcock writes of the increasing impoverishment of the Kalahari San. Finan looks at shrimp aquaculture in Bangladesh to make a case for jobs in applied anthropology. He borrows the ‘livelihoods approach’ from development studies to assert that ‘anthropology provides an appropriate lens to assess the nature of adaptation, vulnerability and resilience’ (p. 162, my emphasis). Unfortunately, these three buzzwords, along with the notion of ‘mitigation’, are used uncritically throughout the volume, as if they were useful terms of analysis, rather than neo-functionalist ways of describing the world. However, the clutch of papers on the Arctic is strong. Marino and Scheitzer describe talking about climate change with the Inupiat of northwestern Alaska. Crate writes of horse and cattle herders in Russian Siberia, who, according to their proverb, ‘will survive until the day when Book reviews 913 Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 16, 905-951 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2010 the Arctic Ocean melts’ (p. 145). She is concerned with the potential loss of ‘a culture’s core’ (p. 148), and ethnodiversity, both issues that are threaded through the volume. Henshaw writes modestly, but powerfully. The Baffin Island ‘Inuit themselves, not anthropologists, are their own best advocates when it comes to climate change’ (p. 161). But she allows a role for the anthropologist in ‘[t]he collaborative, community-based work that defines much of the research in the Arctic [and] can serve as an important model for other regions where indigenous rights are not recognized to the same extent ...’ (p. 162). The third, ‘Anthropological action’, section of the volume includes chapters by Broadbent and Lantto on the Swedish Saami, and Nuttall on Greenland, while Stuckenberger writes about ‘Thin Ice’, a museum exhibition she curated. Taken together, these Arctic papers serve the editors’ aims well. Other papers in the third section are more diverse. Wilk writes on Western consumer culture, Bohren on car culture in USA, but neither manages to use the word ‘capitalism’, and nor does anyone else. Fiske offers an ethnography of US government policy makers and carbon trading, but without reference to the fierce oppositional arguments of climate activists. Puntenney describes the UN as ‘at the centre’ of global efforts to ‘confront the impacts of climate’ (p. 311), but mentions neither the global oil, coal, gas, and motor industries that oppose such efforts, nor those that believe that the UN processes are nothing like radical enough. Button and Peterson focus on a Bayou community to demonstrate the importance of participatory research. Finally, the paper I most enjoyed is Barlett and Stewart’s ‘Shifting the university: faculty engagement and curriculum change’. There is good work here. But the volume is marred by repetition and dull, predictable writing. More crucially, ‘climate anthropology’ remains a catch-all category and there is no beating heart, no political centre, which could inspire anthropologists to advocacy in ways that might make a difference. Nancy Lindisfarne School of Oriental and African Studies Nazarea, Virginia D. Heirloom seeds and their keepers: marginality and memory in the conservation of biological diversity. xii, 193 pp., illus., bibliogr. Tucson: Univ. Arizona Press, 2005. $35.00 (cloth) Modernity has been taking a bashing in anthropology, and recently this is especially visible in environmental anthropology. This book is another instance of that bashing. It is based on work that Nazarea and her colleagues have been doing for well over a decade, and is aimed at modernity in two distinct ways. One of those ways is a criticism of modern agriculture, which Nazarea sees as concerned overwhelmingly with yield. What bothers her is how the concern is pursued, through the development of plant varieties that require intensive, expensive, and rigid cultivation. For Nazarea, the result is monocrop industrial agriculture, which relies on a very small number of varieties to produce the vast majority of the crop. Her concern is not, then, simply the loss of the family farm, but rather is increasing uniformity in cultivation. That uniformity appears as the overwhelming influence of a small number of seed companies, as standardized production techniques requiring extensive chemical inputs, and as the reliance on a very small number of cultivars. For Nazarea, this is an agricultural system that is dangerously prone to disaster. Her other attack on modernity is a reflection of her concern with industrial agriculture, but is cast more broadly. That is her criticism of the uniformitarian approach that she sees as underlying the modernist worldview more generally, which she calls ‘linearity’. This uniformitarianism may be based on reasonable motives, such as the desire to produce inexpensive food. However, it tends to end up as a search for the one best solution to a problem, whether of food supply or anything else, and the wholesale implementation of that solution. The result is a loss of diversity, and also of the playful, the irreverent, the activities pursued simply because they are enjoyable. The vehicle for these attacks is a loose description of ‘seed-savers’. These are the people who continue to cultivate plant varieties that are no longer important in large-scale, commercial agriculture, the ‘heirloom seeds’ of the book’s title. Because Nazarea has been carrying out research related to this for so long, the examples that she invokes come from a variety of places, though she devotes the greatest attention to people in the Philippines, parts of Latin America, and the southern United States. I use the word ‘examples’ advisedly, for the book is not a systematic study in any conventional sense. Rather, it is the pursuit of a theme and the use of occasional illustrations to pursue that theme. The theme itself is implicit in what I have said thus far, a challenge to modernist uniformity. In the early part of the book, Nazarea links this Book reviews914 Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 16, 905-951 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2010 challenge to Barbara McClintock’s work on genes that move from one position to another in a chromosome as a result of stress, and to Ernst Bloch’s description of itinerant French booksellers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. At a basic level, however, this linking provides little more than a metaphorical rationale for Nazarea’s purpose in the volume. That purpose is a celebration of diversity, both genetic and social, not an analysis of it. It is pursued through descriptions of changes in agricultural practices that reduce genetic diversity, of the varieties of plants that are lost and of the individuals who still tend the old crops. Of her description of these three forms of diversity, what Nazarea has to say about the individuals is the most telling. These people are the focus of much contemporary anthropological concern, the underdogs who resist efforts to bring them into conformity with dominant structures. This resistance, though, is not militant or even, in many cases, self-conscious. Rather, it is the resistance of something like indifference. These are people whose values and orientations lie at right angles to what Nazarea sees as the values and orientations of modernity. These are people embedded in the past and the social relations that define it and that infuse the places where they live; they talk about their practices in terms of personalities rather than things; they are concerned with pleasurable celebration in the doing rather than efficient productivity in the result. Nazarea presents interesting stories as she pursues her central argument. At times, however, readers may find themselves wishing for a more judicious consideration of the vices and virtues of both modernity and diversity than she provides. In the absence of such considerations, we are left with a celebration of the small and the marginal. James G. Carrier Indiana and Oxford Brookes Universities Ethnographic film Suhr, Christian, Ton Otto & Steffen Dalsgaard. Ngat is dead: studying mortuary traditions. DVD video. Moesgaard Film, 2009. Straddling the permeable genres of ethnographic, participatory, and narrator-driven documentary, this one-hour DVD will be an extremely useful teaching resource. It presents anthropological insights prompted by filmmaking grounded in long-term familiarity and involvement with a community. It also demonstrates the benefits of an anthropologically trained film crew. Only the anthropologist, Ton Otto, appears in frame, but his two filmmaking and doctoral student collaborators, Christian Suhr and Steffen Dalsgaard, are very much present in the intimate camerawork and excellent continuity editing. Ton Otto’s reflexive and explanatory comments to camera and as background narrative work well to ground the film in the complex negotiations and challenges he faces when organizing funerary exchanges, most particularly a pukankokon (to open the money), for his adopted father. The final, Rouch-inspired section of the film, a screening to the community three years after the initial filming, serves to re-establish the mandate for the film and affirm the role of the key characters. The film is divided by nine chapters that enable dipping in and out for teaching and further exploration: ‘House of Ngat Selan’, ‘Announcement’, ‘Shopping for the ceremonies’, ‘The day of the ceremonies’, ‘Relatives come with contributions’, ‘The cement ceremony’, ‘Pukankokon: to open the money’, ‘Division of money’, and ‘Three years later’. The film begins with Ton Otto’s first return to the village since his adopted father died. As one of his most well-off sons, he feels duty-bound to help organize funerary rituals his family have been unable to carry out because of lack of funds. This draws him into many conversations and debates with his father’s clan and others on the need for the pukankokon and who should be recognized genealogically through requests for help and the gift-giving. The discussions and asides to camera beautifully demonstrate that what is ‘traditional’ or custom is at once familial, political, and personal. As Sakumai Yep, the leader of the Sakumai clan, to which Ton Otto has been adopted, explains to camera at the end of the film: ‘I myself perform the culture, I myself can change it’ (57.12). The self-aware and locally recognized ‘game-playing’ aspect of the performance of this vital life-cycle ritual is made evident on many more occasions. This is one of the joys of the film. We get to relate to individuals with complex motivations and affiliations, who demonstrate in their particularity and personalities a subversion of some of the terms that Ton Otto is attempting to Book reviews 915 Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 16, 905-951 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2010 frame in an understanding to us the audience. The depth of involvement with the key individuals serves to weaken the stated aim ‘to understand why people maintain these traditions that take up so much of their time and involve them so deeply’ (3.06), raising questions as to why the key characters argue, or not, for the need to carry out actions ‘traditionally’. This seemingly unintentional, but very effective, incongruity, more evident after several viewings, encourages a further encouragement of reflexivity, as we the audience wonder how Ton Otto has framed his research questions in terms of how he has imagined his audience. As a result the DVD would also have benefited from more references to textual materials for those who want to gain further general information about this area of Papua New Guinea, and more particular context to Ton Otto’s long-term research. There are wonderful moments of Ton Otto gaining insight through receiving and giving explanations, on one occasion as his sister explains why someone is angry, and on another, why one should expect complaints. In fact, as the film develops, we start to see the possibility of complaint in a more balanced light, in terms of ethnographic specificities and as rhetorical strategies that both reflect and constitute the depth and breadth of relationships that in their duration and complexity cannot but lead to debates over the rights and responsibilities precipitated when someone dies. Half way through the film, it is made explicit that custom is talk, and that ‘people are different ... some have this idea and others have another (Panou Selan, 32.42) and later, ‘some people will never be satisfied ... that is part of custom’ (33.11). As an ethnographic film that demonstrates the value and developing insights of long-term fieldwork, this is excellent. As an exercise in visual anthropology and development of Rouch’s work, it would have benefited from more commentary about the power of the camera and its role, as Ton Otto acknowledges, in the very ‘competition that is part and parcel of exchange ceremonies on Balau’. We also see only a third of the team on camera, and often it is not clear who people speaking to camera actually are and to whom they imagine they are speaking. More inclusion of the interviewers and particular questions of who the speakers to camera supposed would see the film would have opened up the film to wider discussions of the kinds of relationships (imagined and real) constituted in filmmaking. Mike Poltorak University of Kent Werbner, Richard. Séance reflections. DVD video. English subtitles. Distributed by the RAI, 2005. Werbner, Richard. Shade seekers and the mixer. DVD video. English subtitles. Distributed by the RAI, 2007. Werbner, Richard. Encountering Eloyi. DVD video. English subtitles. Distributed by the RAI, 2008. Werbner, Richard. Holy hustlers. DVD video. English subtitles. Distributed by the RAI, 2009. Transfiguration and reflexivity are key cinematic subjects in this magnificent series of four films documenting the arguments over personhood that pervade popular efforts to achieve well-being in contemporary Botswana. Richard Werbner’s films follow Njebe and Martha Gabanakgosi, a husband and wife having difficulties conceiving a child, as they travel between rural villages and the city of Gaborone to consult diviners and church leaders. In deeply contested ways, these ritual specialists address shared presumptions among Batswana that personal well-being depends on the perceptions of others, on placement with others, and on the manner in which a person incorporates substances derived from others into his or her body. In searching for well-being, sufferers commonly aim to be transfigured in aesthetic terms. They may seek cleansing from senyama, a condition of occult darkness documented in Shade seekers and the mixer associated with being unrecognized by ancestors and powerful others, or pray to God to ‘revive all their goods dressed in glory’, in the words of a church prophet in Encountering Eloyi. Diviners and church leaders make forceful and sometimes domineering efforts to transfigure themselves and their clients through forms of dress, placement in light or shade, and expressions of vicarious suffering. Like transfiguration, reflection on the motives and practices of powerful others is a necessary condition of well-being, given the precariousness of persons’ moral placement in others’ regard, as well as pervasive concern about deceptive appearances and the potential for selfaggrandisement at the expense of public good. The first pair of films, Séance reflections and Shade seekers and the mixer, focus on practices of envisioning ancestry in the village of Moremi in the northeastern Tswapong region of Botswana. The diviner Rantii induces Njebe to envision the wrath of his deceased grandmother by Book reviews916 Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 16, 905-951 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2010 indicating the positions of the fallen lots, as well as by looking directly into Njebe’s eyes as Rantii indicates through gestures how the spirit searches parts of the body to find where the trouble lies. Rantii himself is an object of scepticism and suspicion on the part of four prominent Moremi elders who in Shade seekers reflect critically on his practice of combining divination by lots with biblical testifying and prayer. Villagers envision through the image of seriti (dignity) the imperative to have other people regard one’s conduct in the best possible light. One who has achieved the shadowy aura of seriti is seen to have obtained the blessings of ancestors by balancing ambitions for personal gain with action for the public good. While Rantii asserts in his praises that he has ‘created increase’, village elders fear that his insistence on ‘mixing things up’ indicates self-aggrandizing tendencies that cause witchcraft and drought. Encountering Eloyi and Holy hustlers shift focus to the city, where young male Christian Apostolic prophets likewise assert powerfully their capacity to foster well-being, but do not aim at reconciliation with ancestors. Instead, Eloyi prophets call upon God to help them fight the pervasive influence of demons and witches, drawing on Old Testament authority for sacrifices aimed at protection and blessing. Eloyi prophets often induce fear in their clients and extract money in private séances, de-familiarizing them with their accustomed visions of the world and leading them to attribute evil intent to kin and neighbours. Yet to regard these prophets as simply cynical would be to overlook their empathetic enactments of clients’ sufferings with their own bodies, and their public vulnerability to the witchcraft substances they extract from clients’ houses. In Encountering Eloyi, prophets transfigure Njebe and Martha’s house as an abode of witchcraft as they ransack their possessions, the bishop likening the destruction to ‘maintenance’ necessary for the well-being of house and persons. This material presents an important counterpoint to my own book Death in a church of life (2010) documenting the efforts of the female bishop of the Baitshepi Apostolic Church in Gaborone to foster love, forgiveness, and resignation following deaths. Baitshepi members viewing Holy hustlers expressed outrage at a scene in which a male prophet shows compassion to Eloyi adherents by weeping like a mother over their sufferings. How, Baitshepi members asked, is a person to console herself with the prospect of eternal life if she beholds pain on a prophet’s face? Werbner’s films compellingly display the arguments of images arising from the diverse styles of transfiguration and reflexivity that are necessary conditions for well-being in Botswana. Like the medical technologies shown by Julie Livingston to transform the significance of debility and humanity, in Botswana varieties of religious assertion derive their form and meaning from aesthetics of well-being. Frederick Klaits Duke University Evolutionary anthropology Fuentes, Agustín. Evolution of human behavior. xiv, 300 pp., tables, figs, illus., bibliogr. Oxford: Univ. Press, 2008. $79.95 (cloth) The topic of this book is human origins in the light of modern evolutionary theory. Instead of making his own argument, the author surveys the proposals currently in circulation, totting up points for and against and attempting a compromise. The outcome, I am afraid, was, for this reviewer, a tedious read. ‘Clearly’, we are reminded in the preface, ‘a large part of the general public has a poor understanding of human evolution, and even in broader academic circles that understanding is not always much better’. By way of a remedy, Fuentes offers ‘a synthesis of the structural similarities and differences across published hypotheses/proposals for the evolution of human behavior’, aiming ‘to elucidate common themes and patterns and move toward a more integrated perspective(s) on human behavioural evolution’. ‘Rather than present a dogmatic assertion that there is one way to understand how human behavior evolved’, the author continues, ‘I present an overview of ideas, paradigmatic approaches, and major hypotheses and proposals’. It’s as if the author were conducting a poll on the basis of a new system of proportional representation. The book consists of nine chapters plus an epilogue. Chapter 1 warns: ‘Misunderstanding human behavioural evolution can result in potentially dangerous ideas’. Chapter 2 reviews the history of evolutionary theory, touching on Darwin, Wallace, Baldwin, Washburn, Tinbergen, Hamilton, Wilson, Trivers, and Dawkins. The author isolates ‘kin selection, reciprocal altruism, sociobiology and the selfish gene’ as four different ‘perspectives’, noting reassuringly that Book reviews 917 Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 16, 905-951 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2010 all four ‘intertwine to produce a shared basis, a set of common understandings about evolutionary systems ’. This might seem an odd claim since sociobiology by definition is the use of selfish gene theory, is the theory of kin selection, and is the theory of reciprocal altruism. Given such joint authorship, it’s hardly surprising that the perspectives appear to ‘intertwine’. The next chapter introduces ‘basic assumptions’, focusing on HBE (human behavioural ecology), EP (evolutionary psychology), DIT (dual inheritance theory), and memetics. Again, puzzlingly, the author equates 1970s ‘sociobiology’ with 1940s ‘Neo-Darwinism’, treating sociobiology as something quite different from kin selection and reciprocal altruism. Chapter 4 offers a reasonably up-to-date summary of the fossil and cultural records of human evolution, followed by a brief discussion of ‘behavioural inferences’. The core of the book is chapter 5. ‘I have made a concerted and largely successful effort’, explains the author, ‘to capture and present a realistic and accurate overview of the main perspectives and proposals.’ Hypothesis 1 is Darwin’s The descent of man. Hypothesis 2 is E.O. Wilson’s 1975 Sociobiology: the new synthesis, which apparently proposes a ‘state wherein most human groups are territorial and xenophobic’. Hypothesis 7 is the idea that ‘cruelty, especially in males, is a human adaptation’, this explaining such things as bloody rites of sacrifice and the ‘pain-blood-death’ complex supposedly fundamental to ‘forager society’. In all, thirty-eight variegated hypotheses are violently juxtaposed and briefly summarized, leaving chapter 6 to sort out the mess. There is a huge problem with all this. Mostly, the supposedly different ‘hypotheses’ operate on such different levels that they cannot be compared or forced into competition. For example, ‘tit-for-tat co-operation’ – treated as a distinct hypothesis – may well be an internal component of all thirty-eight. The same applies to Fuentes’s own hypotheses, which is termed ‘co-operation – a general pattern’. In what sense is this an alternative to, say, ‘co-operative breeding’, ‘grandmothering’, or ‘sham menstruation’ – narratives focusing on co-operative strategies specifically between females? The author is aware of this difficulty but doesn’t consider it insuperable. Table 6.7 lists ‘the most prominent commonalities from the proposals’. All apparently agree on the importance of conflict between groups and co-operation within them. All allegedly agree on the importance of ‘language’, ‘tool use’, ‘the nuclear family’, and ‘the heterosexual pair-bond’. But we also read that monogamy ‘received little note’ in the thirty-eight hypotheses considered, and that child-rearing by ‘multiple caretakers’ is commonly assumed. ‘Sham menstruation’ emphatically does not assume nuclear families, any more than does ‘co-operative breeding’. Chapter 6 leaves these and other contradictions hanging in the air. Towards the end of his book, the author attempts a synthesis. He calls it ‘a hybrid of evolutionary biology and anthropology’. Each topic – for example ‘male-female co-operation’ – is discussed under the headings ‘fossil data’, ‘comparative data’, ‘paradigmatic views’, ‘my thoughts’, and ‘testability’. Under ‘my thoughts’, the author tells us of his hunches, his biases, his doubts and tentative opinions. At every stage, he attempts to find the middle road – somewhere between nature and culture, xenophobic cruelty and loving solidarity, Charles Darwin and Margaret Mead. For this reviewer, the message is unconvincing and the project misconceived. Chris Knight Comenius University Rousseau, Jérôme. Rethinking social evolution: the perspective from middle-range societies. x, 291 pp., maps, figs, tables, bibliogr. London, Ithaca, N.Y.: McGill-Queen’s Univ. Press, 2006. £48.00 (cloth) Rethinking social evolution is written clearly. The arguments are set out carefully and many detailed case studies are analysed and compared. The book is squarely in the tradition of Marx, White, Sahlins, and Service. For Rousseau, social evolution means progressive evolution, from simple to complex societies, and not Darwinian adaptation to specific environments. Although there is more than one way of reviewing this book (see Paul Roscoe’s review in Cambridge Anthropology Journal 18: 3, 2008, 441-2 for an alternative perspective), I set out my take on the volume as follows. In explaining how human societies move beyond absolute simplicity, Rousseau relies heavily on Woodburn’s distinction between immediate and delayed return. He accepts Woodburn’s claim that the distribution of immediate and delayed return systems cannot be explained by ecology (contra Layton in Man 1986: 18-33), and that all immediate return societies are hunter-gatherers, on the base-line of Book reviews918 Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 16, 905-951 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2010 social evolution. His explanation for the simplicity of forager society is based on a tautology: ‘the human need for sociality has two sources: humans, like other primates, are social’ (p. 44), and yet, in ‘simple human societies ... members are trying to remain autonomous’ (p. 49). Middle-range societies emerge with the transformation from immediate to delayed return. This comes about because ‘it is onerous to be obliged to share the product of one’s labour with others’ (p. 61). Providing the term ‘progressive evolution’ is expanded to encompass any unidirectional trend driven by the dynamics of an ecological or social system, and not confined to the classic band→tribe→state model, then such temporal processes can be identified in both ecological and social systems. However, comparison of societies that are not historically linked risks the fallacy that Needham (1963) identified in his introduction to Durkheim and Mauss’s Primitive classification: lacking any evidence that change has taken place in a particular society, they assume that which they hope to establish, namely that state A is prior to state B. A formal congruence is not evidence of an evolutionary progression. Moreover, to write as Rousseau does, that the Nuer have ‘incipient notions of stratification’ (p. 113) implies knowledge of the future course of Nuer society. Tracing archaeologically or historically known trajectories would be preferable. Interesting as the internal dynamics of social systems are, I am puzzled by Rousseau’s rejection of social adaptation. He does not consider why some societies are conveniently stuck in the middle range, why complex social systems sometimes collapse into simpler ones, or why farmers or herders occasionally revert to foraging. Rousseau objects that the hypothesis ‘that alternative practices may differ in the survival advantage that they provide’ (p. 32) cannot readily be tested because, in many small-scale societies, there are no alternative strategies competing with each other. But comparative method, as used by Rousseau, has also been used to test hypotheses concerning human social adaptation. While at one point he accepts the adaptive value of sharing and co-operation in human evolution, Rousseau argues that adaptation merely imposes limits on agency. He does not consider whether agents’ behaviour is itself adaptive, for themselves or for those who exploit them. Ecology (resource distribution) does not, contra Rousseau, just impose limits on agency; it also encourages particular types of social strategy. Egalitarian strategies tend to occur in social or ecological contexts where everyone expects to suffer shortage at different, but unpredictable, times in the future. Friedman, in a study of the Kachin cited by Rousseau (’Dynamics and transformation of a tribal system: the Kachin example’, L’Homme, 1975), attaches particular importance to the need for regular movement if swidden agriculture is to remain viable, causing the instability of local-level leadership that leaves the Kachin stranded on one of the lower rungs of social complexity. Rousseau’s example of the collapse of large game sharing when Chinese traders come to the Kayan with refrigeratorequipped boats shows that people can adjust their strategies when circumstances change. Even in Darwinian evolution, ecology is the ‘backdrop’ against which the relative fitness of alternative genetically generated variants is tested. The concept of fitness landscapes was introduced in evolutionary biology to model the ways in which different species interact during their evolution (e.g. predators and prey), making it possible to explain directionality in natural selection. Rousseau finds the fitness landscape concept very useful for explaining social change, but I found no indication of how Rousseau’s non-Darwinian fitness might be measured. Rousseau sees agency as the key to liberating humans from the constraints of ecology. ‘Self-interest is not sufficient to explain social evolution, but social evolution cannot be understood without it’ (p. 227). However, he concludes that ‘the unintended consequences of purposeful change and mutation and selection can have unexpected long-term consequences’ (p. 228, my italics). Here, perhaps, the approaches of the reviewer and reviewed finally converge. Robert Layton University of Durham Globalization, nationalism, and diaspora Alexiades, Miguel N. (ed.). Mobility and migration in indigenous Amazonia: contemporary ethnoecological perspectives. xviii, 310 pp., maps, tables, bibliogrs. Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books, 2009. £45.00 (cloth) Despite an upsurge of interest in the historical contingency of nature and of humanBook reviews 919 Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 16, 905-951 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2010 environmental interactions in Amazonia, assumptions persist that its indigenous peoples are historically emplaced and spatially static. So asserts this timely volume, which proposes to assess interrelations between ethnoecology and movement, migration and displacement. Not only have mobility patterns in general been given relatively short shrift by scholars, but, as Alexiades notes in his introduction, relatively few Amazonian societies presently occupy the same areas they did a century or even a few decades ago, raising important questions about how such dislocations bear on environmental knowledge, practices, ideologies, and identities. As many of the contributors show, notions of knowledge loss or acculturation following such spatial upheaval generally fail to square with outcomes that instead often involve dynamic processes of appropriation, experimentation, and innovation. The book grew out of a panel of the Ninth International Congress of the International Society of Ethnobiology, held at the University of Kent in 2004, and the approaches span social anthropology, historical ecology, geography, ethnobotany, botany, and evolutionary biology. The title notwithstanding, three chapters (Pinedo-Vasquez and Padoch, Newing, Voeks) focus on non-indigenous peoples, which is appropriate given both their evident mobility and the fluidity of contemporary Amazonian identities. The interdisciplinarity is refreshing and valuable, but also accentuates a considerable diversity of interests and concerns. Alexiades’s introduction reads more like a literature review than an attempt to frame a general theory or position, but he offers a useful and encyclopaedic overview of the pre- and post-conquest history of indigenous migrations, as well as the current state of play in Amazonian historical ecology and ethnoecology. The book is structured in two parts. The first, entitled ‘Circulations’, deals more explicitly with mobility patterns; ‘Transformations’, the lengthier second half, shifts attention to the consequences of earlier group migrations. Amidst the broad range of issues addressed, at least three common themes can be discerned. The first is the relational character of Amazonian environmental knowledge. This underpins Rival’s argument that the ethnobotany of the mobile, foraging Huaorani, which is highly contextual and prioritizes phenology, remains no less developed than that of more sedentary cultivators. Feather reveals how Nahua journeying is closely associated with the acquisition of knowledge and with establishing or severing relationships both to the land – through toponymy, for example – and to people, living and dead. A short chapter by Pinedo-Vasquez and Padoch, while less concerned with knowledge per se, draws attention to how peasant households commonly span rural, urban, and even suburban locales, and Newing further highlights the complexity and dynamism of rural-urban relationships in her analysis of the issues raised by high personal mobility for communal natural resource management projects. The close connections between ways of engaging nature and the management of ethnic boundaries constitute a second salient theme. Micarelli considers how traditional and emerging forms of ecological understanding are involved in mediating relations between ethnic groups and to the state in a Colombian resguardo. Dudley examines processes of ethnogenesis and landscape transformation in two Lecos communities, and Zent argues that issues of access to scarce resources, natural or otherwise, have shaped Piaroa ethnic frontiers and migration patterns since pre-contact times. Thirdly, several contributors show how group migrations can precipitate knowledge diffusion and enhancement. Clement, Rival, and Cole’s ambitiously multidisciplinary chapter assesses the likely role of human movement in promoting processes of plant domestication. Alexiades and Peluso argue that relocation and sedentarization prompted Ese Eja to increase their pharmacopoeia by appropriating medicinal plant knowledge from outsiders. Athayde et al. explore the revitalization of Kaiabi basketry following their relocation to the Xingu, and Voeks, focusing on the African diaspora in Brazil, demonstrates the fluidity and adaptability of ethnobotanical knowledge as it crosses even vast ethnic and geographical divides. An intriguing picture emerges of how people subtly reconfigure relationships to the land as well as to others as they travel through space. The book raises more questions than it answers, however, about contemporary forms of Amazonian mobility. Only two chapters (Pinedo-Vasquez and Padoch, and Newing) present relevant quantitative data, and only one (Feather) explores in much depth the meanings of travelling to indigenous peoples themselves. Little attempt is made to connect or differentiate the consequences of, say, forced relocation, seasonal migration, and spontaneous individual journeys. The authors nevertheless make a convincing collective case for an understanding of ecological knowledge as historically Book reviews920 Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 16, 905-951 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2010 contingent in space as well as time, effectively complementing the importance now placed on local historicity with a sense of different ways of inhabiting and relating to space. Harry Walker London School of Economics and Political Science Crichlow, Michaeline A. Globalization and the post-creole imagination: notes on fleeing the plantation. xvi, 305 pp., figs, bibliogr. London, Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 2009. £59.00 (cloth) £14.99 (paper) The debate around ‘creolization’ has fairly well-established positions. From one side, the view is that the remit of the term has so expanded that it has lost whatever analytical purchase it once possessed. In particular it has lost contact with the regional background which gave it its original significance. As Sidney Mintz has pointed out, we seem at times to be using the word, often fairly loosely, to talk about ‘change’. From the other corner, creolization continues to be a valuable descriptor of social processes in a world where people move or are displaced, where practices and ideas have to be reformulated; where the emphasis is on searching for, rather than reiterating, adequate institutional forms. Some sophisticated attempts to salvage creolization have been made along these lines, and Crichlow’s book is one. This is a demanding and provocative text. It also has a rushed quality, as if the author wanted to publish it as quickly as possible; but, then again, there is a creole feel here too that certainly carries the writing along in an engaging way. Crichlow makes a number of insightful interventions, usually by way of pinpointing a problem in how creolization has been used and then bringing new analogies into play. She argues that creolization best describes the tactics or strategies of a self who, while ‘fleeing the plantation’, simultaneously tries to ‘place’ his or her freedoms somewhere. ‘Homing’ or ‘placing’ freedoms becomes the book’s central motif. The plantation initiates a trajectory and a rhythm of escape (there is a debt to Benitez Rojo in this). There are several lines of argument. One is that creolization must account for vertical (hierarchical) as well as horizontal (equal) social relationships in its figuring. This point, though not absolutely new, is well presented. An attractive mnemonic is invoked – the cross. In order to mark a cross, the hand must make an adequate conjunction of the vertical and the horizontal against a specific ground. Creolizing practices take place in the sight of powerful actors and institutional controls. There is always, therefore, a compromise with power in any attempt to localize ‘home’ and ‘freedom’. Hence, creole subjectivity, and the tactics of placing the self, involve making marks whereby egalitarian and hierarchical gestures are conjoined. The forms of equality derived cannot be appreciated without understanding the deployments of hierarchy they have entailed. As an argument, this is a useful corrective. Within an ‘entangled modernity’, the contradictions and refractions created by these hierarchicoegalitarian gestures are all too visible. Crichlow talks about ‘limboing struggles for place’ and ‘secreting respectability’ as aspects of a creole tactics. In the absence of institutionalized rights and citizenship, creolization becomes a pragmatics of ‘citizenness’ derived from the activity of homing or placing freedoms. The elaboration of these and other images and metaphors is the book’s major strength. Some weaknesses of the book come to the fore in its treatment of facts and factual debates. To evidence her model of creolization, Crichlow deploys arguments around post-slave peasantries and the various economic transfigurations that have taken place in St Lucia and Jamaica. She dismisses previous research: we are told that (unspecified) previous accounts have romanticized peasant ‘resistance’ and essentialized peasants at the expense of understanding the ‘influence of the world economy’ (p. 82). This is not a very generous rendering of long-standing regional debates. When Crichlow does supply facts on rural adaptation in St Lucia and Jamaica, these largely conform to a story familiar from the work of Besson and others. One case study in particular (p. 147), of a woman selling corporately owned family land for personal gain, immediately calls to mind the many discussions of these kinds of tactics or ‘crab antics’ made by Besson over the years. There has been some poor editing of this text that does not do great credit to Duke University Press. An interesting, if slightly thin, discussion of St Lucian satirists becomes jumbled in chapter 4 with apparently contradictory facts expounded in different places (cf. pp. 118 and 125). That said, the arguments here are significant – once they have been reassembled. Crichlow rightly criticizes Burton for assuming a teleological stance from which to judge Caribbean ludic practices as merely ‘oppositional’ rather than ‘resistant’ (p. 75). The discussion of St Lucian Book reviews 921 Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 16, 905-951 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2010 satire supports her critique. This is a book, then, that clearly attempts a mimesis of the creole or ‘post-creole’ processes with which it is engaged. And there is in it a heady combination of the revelatory, the obscure, and the analytically valuable. Huon Wardle University of St Andrews Dube, Saurabh (ed.). Enchantments of modernity: empire, nation, globalization. xv, 504 pp., bibliogrs. London, New Delhi: Routledge, 2009. Rs 850 (cloth) To read this informative, scholarly, and sincere volume of critical reflections on ‘modernity’ is to become apprised of the size and seriousness of the issue. Can knowledge, ethics, and practice that begin locally (entailing a particular history and cultural framing) possess a universal human provenance, applicability, and truth? Can knowledge be differentiated into kinds: ‘Humans can speak’ being, then, absolutely differentiable from ‘Humans can speak the word of God’? Are there not gradations of human rights: ‘I can benefit from the deliverances of the scientific method’ undercutting, then, ‘I can benefit from the deliverances of religious tradition’? The volume doubts the possibility of ‘revitalizing liberalism’ (Craig Calhoun), however, and reinstating humanist universalism as a legitimate and necessary intellectual and moral endeavour. There are nineteen contributions, from a set of eminent scholars of anthropology, history, and literature (although a number of the essays have appeared before, and sadly there is no index). The volume is part of Routledge’s ‘Critical Asian Studies’ series and printed in India: the subcontinent is a major focus of the contributions. Contrary to narratives of modernity that describe the triumphal rise of rationality, universalism, and disenchantment, Veena Das explains in her foreword, this book tracks enchantment as a major affect. Saurabh Dube elaborates. Modernity’s purported rupture from the world of magic, superstition, and hierarchy is itself a mythic narration: ‘enticements’ of representation and practice lie behind the myth of modernity’s immaculate origin, the magic of money, market, and state, and the hierarchical oppositions between emotion and reason, ritual and rationality. These mythemes are formative of the ‘modern’, comprising its condition of knowing. However, there remain ‘plural, disjunctive articulations of modernity’: contradictory, contingent, and contested processes of meaning and power. Dube’s contributors set about illuminating this. By way of the Bandung Conference, Dipesh Chakrabarty would unsettle an easy periodization of the twentieth century: of anti-colonialism giving way to post-colonialism and then to globalization. Michael Herzfeld compares Greece and Thailand in order to overcome the absence of anthropological theorization grounded in non-colonial dominions. Saidiya Hartman examines the constitutive nature of loss in the making of an African Diaspora and the role of grief in transatlantic identification. William Mazzarella explores affect as a terrain that is pre-subjective without being pre-social. Jean and John Comaroff interrogate the rural South African resolution to a contradiction at the core of neoliberal capitalism: offering wealth to those in control of its technologies while threatening the very livelihoods of those who are not. Turning attention to the subcontinent, Deena Heath explores the failure of the colonial government in India to regulate ‘obscene’ publications effectively, while Milind Wakankar re-examines Indian literary-critical thought under colonial conditions. Naveeda Khan approaches Islamic iconoclasm as an affective form of excess, concealing prior intimacy with images. Veena Das uses the lens of madness to explore the modernity of the excluded urban poor of India. Ashis Nandy feels that ‘development’ will not eradicate poverty because the concept is unstable and rarely refers to absolute destitution; moreover, democratic politics in multi-ethnic societies entail co-opting majorities into patronage structures that remove poverty from the top of political agendas. It was for the latter reason, explains Faisal Devji, that Muhammad Iqbal urged that Muslims in pre-partition India be assured disproportionate political representation (over against Hindus): here was a vision of democratic rights and ethical advance based not on Europe’s perverted egos but on an appreciation of the role of religion (as against pure thought) in elevating individuals and transforming societies. For Gandhi, too, according to Ajay Skaria, the religious politics of the ashram were the route to a ‘neighbourly nationalism’. And yet, Uday Mehta reveals, Gandhi claimed to be a loyal subject of the British Empire, considered as a unified moral (rather than political) project. Freedom from colonialism did not need to wait because an ‘ethical cosmopolitanism’ recognized all individuals everywhere as having the capacity for Book reviews922 Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 16, 905-951 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2010 moral action and self-control, whatever the level of social development. The theme of cosmopolitanism – the attempt to frame liberalism beyond national memberships – is pursued by Craig Calhoun. Cosmopolitanism cannot of itself provide an adequate defence against empire, capitalism, fascism, or communism. To counter the illiberal manoeuvrings of the likes of Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad – who claims that human rights are the new Christianity, enabling European countries to invade, and subvert local traditions and values – cosmopolitanism cannot simply conceptualize the world in terms of diverse individuals: collective projects, cultural identities, and communal solidarities must also have their starting-points within it. Liberal democracy must emerge locally, empowering people in the context of actual conditions: amid traditions, commitments, and belongings. It was Hegel, Walter Mignolo explains, who gave Kant’s eighteenth-century ‘cosmopolitan’ vision a synchronicity such that the East and Africa were deemed backward versions of the West, but it was in the North Atlantic commercial circuit of the sixteenth century that the Western imaginary of the modern first emerged. The seduction of such an imaginary was a clarity that misconstrued the many Others it created. It was (and is) a limited epistemology, maintained by violence. As Michel-Rolph Trouillot elaborates, the imaginary of the modern ‘appear[s] to refer to things as they exist, but because [it is] rooted in a particular history, [it] evoke[s] multiple layers of sensibilities, persuasions, cultural assumptions, and ideological choices tied to that localized history’. My query for the volume as a whole concerns the ‘but’ in Trouillot’s statement. Why need an interpretation conceived from one history and culture not refer to things as they are and exist universally? ‘A global cartography emerged from the Western imaginary of the north-Atlantic commercial circuit’: can such a cartography not be actual and accurate? Likewise, a global meteorology, or palaeontology, or genomics, or neurology, or dietology, or paediatrics, or science of human play, or problem-solving? Indeed, it becomes apparent that the things not universalizable, not globally identifiable accurately and actually from a particular human locale, are the exception. One might call this domain that of aesthetics, or culture. The issue of universals for a liberal or cosmopolitan anthropology is holding fast to a distinction between domains of knowledge; so that, say, cultural identifications, religious traditions, and communal solidarities are matters of subjective aesthetics, while the individual right and the human capacity to exercise aesthetic judgements are universally recognized. Nigel Rapport University of St Andrews French, Jan Hoffman. Legalizing identities: becoming black or Indian in Brazil’s northeast. xxiv, 247 pp., maps, illus., bibliogr. Chapel Hill: Univ. North Carolina Press, 2009. $59.95 (cloth), $22.50 (paper) Studies of race and ethnicity in Latin America traditionally tended to separate out the study of race and of people who are now often called Afro-descendants from the study of ethnicity and those labelled as indigenous. In the last decade, an increasing number of scholars have tried to bring these two currents into the same stream, questioning the analytic divides between blackness and indigeneity and between race and ethnicity. Jan French’s excellent study pushes forward the challenge to traditional distinctions between blackness and indigeneity in new and challenging ways. She examines how both ‘black’ and ‘indigenous’ identities emerged, over a period of about thirty years, in a small area of northeastern Brazil where all the dwellers were part of a rural peasantry, of very mixed racial ancestry; prior to about 1975, people barely identified themselves as ‘blacks’, descendants of Africans or slaves, or as ‘Indians’. French’s ethnography shows how federal legislation – first, the Indian Statute of 1973 (directed at Amazonian peoples) and, later, the quilombo clause of the 1988 constitution, which opened the way to land claims for the descendants of people who had notionally lived in quilombos (maroon slave communities) – provided avenues which people could travel, reshaping them en route, towards new identities and land rights. She also shows how fundamental the Catholic Church, fired initially by liberation theology, was in promoting these journeys. The reasons some local people ended up as Xocó indigenous people, while others later became members of the Mocambo quilombo (and yet others remained as neither), are tied up in complex and very local labour and land conflicts, in which local priests and other church-related activists mooted the legal possibility of making identity-related claims, which were later reinforced by government anthropologists sympathetic to the idea that new identities could emerge or be recovered. In Book reviews 923 Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 16, 905-951 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2010 a sense, the move towards one identity rather than the other was historically contingent. Like many anthropologists faced with these emergent identities – which are often challenged as inauthentic and ‘invented’ by critics, such as landowners fearful of dispossession, but also observers simply incredulous that people who look, if anything, ‘black’ could possibly be ‘real Indians’ – French challenges the essentialist view that identities must have continuous, stable roots. But she also makes a convincing case – along the lines argued by Sahlins – that the identities that people gradually construct are woven out of existing elements. They are not ab novo constructs invented according to instrumentalist schemes to get land or responding simply to the availability of new legal categories. They are identities that, because they resonate with people’s history and experience and are linked into struggles for a better future, command emotive – one is tempted to say, authentic – attachment. Thus a long-standing story about a local man ‘buried alive’ for having sex with the landowner’s niece was quickly reshaped to recount that the man was a black slave, the boss a white slave-owner, and that Afro-Brazilian religion had a role to play. But French argues that the new version retained older elements, such as the detail that the black man’s sons, by his wife, were mixed race (caboclos), recognizing pervasive race mixture in the area; or the fact that the niece’s child, who came out white, could end up living with her father’s black family, a reflection of long-standing practices of racial inclusion. French could have made more of the fact that the ‘new’ identities which these people adopted are very long-standing ones – indio, negro – on the Brazilian and Latin American scene. Here is a very powerful structural continuity. I think she could also have paid more attention to the fact that, while certain narrative elements refer back to previous histories of mixture, the people who engage in these identity-based struggles may often use quite essentialist notions of stable, continuous roots, including notions of ‘blood’, to talk about themselves. It is vital to show, as French does exceptionally well, that these essentialist narratives are only part of the story – and their essentialism stands alongside, for example, the fact that some people in this area of Brazil claim to be both indigenous and black at the same time – but they are present. French has produced a great and intriguing book, which is required reading for people interested in racial and ethnic identities in Latin America. She shows the importance of the law, yet also its flexible and emergent character; she provides a convincing account of how and why new identities emerge and why they have the power they do. Peter Wade University of Manchester Pirinoli, Christine. Jeux et enjeux de mémoire à Gaza. 383 pp., illus., bibliogr. Lausanne: Antipodes, 2009. €26.00 (paper) In Jeux et enjeux de mémoire à Gaza, anthropologist Christine Pirinoli combines, on one hand, the examination of the ways in which three generations of Gazans remember – and forget – pre-1948 Palestine with, on the other, the investigation of how a modified version of that memory has been instrumentalized by the Palestinian Authority (PA) for the consolidation of a state bureaucracy. With a focus on the 1998 celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Nakba, or catastrophe, as Palestinians refer to the events that led to their exile, the book introduces three main arguments: first, in the selection of past events operated by memory, the ongoing context and perspectives for the future play a fundamental role; second, Palestinian memory evolves as a mirror image of the Zionist; and, finally, the PA, challenged by the tasks of state construction, has refashioned such memory, disguising as Palestinian ‘traditions’ what are actually clientelistic practices and the increasing centralization of the political power. Two main divisions, preceded by introductory chapters, compose Jeux et enjeux. Researching remembrances and forgetfulness among refugees, Pirinoli, in the introductory sections, justifies her decision to conduct her investigation among the ex-residents of Barbara, a Palestinian village which was situated on territory annexed by Israel and has been destroyed. By selecting a ‘unity of memory’ rather than an existing place, the author exposes eventual flaws of some ethnographic work conducted in refugee camps with the naïve and often frustrated expectation that they function like the isolated Trobriands. The first division of the book is dedicated to demonstrating how Barbarouis’s accounts – analysed in terms of both the contexts in which they are enunciated and their respective contents – are gathered in a Palestinian nationalistic discourse, which opposes itself to and mirrors the Zionist one. While the latter endeavours to portray Palestine as an empty desert, waiting its redemption by Book reviews924 Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 16, 905-951 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2010 Hebrew pioneers, the former reacts against this attempt at obliterating Palestinian existence. In this sense, there is little surprise that the fellahin (‘peasants’) have become an icon for the Palestinian nationalistic discourse as, contrary to the Zionist depiction, their cultivation of the land provides evidence of Palestinian continuous presence on the ground throughout the centuries. On the other side, however, as shown in the second division of Jeux et enjeux, there is room to ask to what extent nowadays the fellah can still signify Palestine. In the face of the generalized disappointment with the meagre results achieved by the Oslo agreements, the PA reinvents Palestinian memory to mask its own political failures: if the spatial return to historical Palestine has become increasingly unattainable, refugees are expected to content themselves with a temporal return, that is, with the re-enactment in the present of some of the pre-Nakba traditions. The price to be paid, warns Pirinoli, is that memory ceases to work as a ‘identitarian cement’ enabling cohesion among the highly dispersed refugees, leading instead to the bursting of the Palestinian ‘imagined community’. The book’s weak points are few. One problem is the rather fiddly mirror image: while it assists in the demonstration of how Palestinian and Zionist memories are structurally homologous – in the values assigned to a golden past, the arduous exile, and the redemption of the future – it does not completely account for the internal dynamics of Palestinian recollections, to a great extent presented as a result of outer conditions. In addition to that, the two main divisions of the book remain very much apart, and Pirinoli’s argument would benefit from a more fluid dialectic between refugees’ discourses and those of the powers-that-be. Among the book’s many merits, three particularly are worth mentioning. First, in a self-reflexive tour-de-force, Pirinoli faces all the obstacles characterizing fieldwork in a highly politicized environment and does not fall prey to velleities of objectivity and neutrality. Second, she pays attention to the social significance of silences in more than one level: Zionist efforts to silence Palestinians and make them vanish from the landscape, for instance, by extracting and replanting trees first put in place by Arab hands, and Palestinian attempts to gloss over class and gender differences through the adoption of the unifying and essentializing image of the fellah. Last, she emphasizes the social prominence gained recently in Palestinian imagery by the woman peasant, called upon to become an atemporal, apolitical, and mute repository of tradition. Well argued, richly documented, and finely written, Jeux et enjeux is of interest to students not only of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, but also of the relations between memory, gender, and state construction. Gustavo Barbosa London School of Economics and Political Science Theodossopoulos, Dimitrios & Elisabeth Kirtsoglou (eds). United in discontent: local responses to cosmopolitanism and globalization. vii, 186 pp., bibliogrs. Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books, 2010. £35.00 (cloth) Why is empathy extended by Greeks towards their traditional enemies, the Turks, and towards other ‘Middle Eastern’ Muslims (Iraqis, Iranians, Afghanis, Palestinians), on the basis of them being fellow-sufferers in dispossession from ‘American imperialism’? Why has Israel in the past been attacked by troops from Pakistan, Cuba, and North Korea, from Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt, and Jordan, as well as by latter-day jihadists, Palestinian and other? This volume would supply nuanced answers to such questions: How Greeks see a global conspiracy of Western realpolitik which trades in fine words – ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’, ‘cosmopolitanism’ – but actually delivers inequality and unilateral interventionism. How disrespect for the ‘Islamic nation’ continues to inspire militancy against ‘the Western secular, liberal, post-Christian capitalist ideology and world view’ (p. 64). The sympathy underlying Dimitrios Theodossopoulos and Elisabeth Kirtsoglou’s edited collection is relayed thus: let us proceed ‘as if dissatisfied people around the world were entirely right in their judgement that current political and ideological developments relate closely to an unfavourable distribution of power that excludes far more than it includes’ (p. 169). A paradoxical fact then emerges: anti-globalist critiques commonly assume a global and cosmopolitan perspective, deploying global motifs, technologies, and imaginaries. Here – to combine insights from Benedict Anderson and Arjun Appadurai – is an imagined community of the globally discontented whose empathy, paradoxically, is equally global in imagining coevals everywhere who are dissatisfied with the current neoliberal regime. ‘Anti-cosmopolitanism Book reviews 925 Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 16, 905-951 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2010 inspires a cosmopolitan imagination of resistance to and discontent with those who ... “hold both the pie and the knife”’ (p. 99). What, in this imaginary, ‘as if’ construction actually concerns ‘globalization’ or ‘cosmopolitanism’? The question is not really pertinent. ‘Global’ and ‘cosmopolitan’ are ‘catchy idioms’ which are semantically vague with no essential core. In their local usage, these terms can be understood anthropologically as epiphenomena which disclose broader concerns with power and inequality. ‘Globalization’ implies a super-organism that has penetrated too far too fast, involving neoliberal processes of commoditization and Westernization. ‘Cosmopolitanism’ implies an ideological product designed to serve certain political interests while pretending to promises of rationality, openness, and trust. What is significant, anthropologically, is the global phenomenon of people in peripheral locations being unable or unwilling to suspend their disbelief concerning how power actually promulgates a global system of inequality. Theodossopoulos and Kirtsoglou supply three powerful and cogent pieces to this volume (introduction, conclusion, joint chapter) in elaboration of their position. Six further contributions then demarcate the global imagined ‘community in discontent’ in different locations. John Gledhill describes a widespread disconformity with the cosmopolitics of neoliberal elites – espousing the virtues of a market society and the free movement of people and goods – in places such as Mexico and Brazil. Victoria Goddard describes how Argentinean urban poor experience the cosmopolitan programme of immigration, development, and modernization, planned by the state, as a disciplinary regime that perpetuates relations of inequality. Àngels Trias i Valls describes how ideas of anti-cosmopolitanism emerge in non-metropolitan Japan amid worries concerning social inequality, environmental degradation, and national identity: a renunciation of Japaneseness before strangers and foreigners feels like disenfranchisement. Andrew Strathern and Pamela J. Stewart examine how a range of indigenous rural rooted people – Taiwanese village leaders, New Guinean cargo cultists, Nalik followers of Bahai’i, Ulster Scots – experimentally combine their local concerns with a sense of global outreach and so shift centrality back to themselves. Iain Edgar and David Henig describe how Islamic jihadist night dreams, locally conveying prophetic revelations from Allah, provide sources of spiritual and political inspiration for combating ‘hegemonic capitalistic cosmopolitanism’. Lastly, C.W. Watson evinces how popular Indonesian magazines such as Sabili potently express dissatisfaction with ‘global processes’, including the penetration of repulsive Western cultures and the dangers of Zionism (and co-conspiratorial freemasonry), and the need for the ‘Muslim World’ to stand united against colonialism, political, economic, legal, and cultural. This is an important volume, and the contributors’ command of their material and commitment to their areas of research are very clear. I would end this review with a general question, however, concerning the limits and virtues of anthropological sympathy. Bill Watson admits that Sabili contains ‘strident, absurd and unacceptable’ anti-Christian and anti-Jewish messages; Elisabeth Kirtsoglou admits that while some discontent voiced by informants is valid, some is far-fetched. And yet we are urged not to see Sabili as fanaticism but ‘in its own terms’; and we are encouraged sceptically to indulge our discontented informants even when we cannot empathize with them. Why? Because in ‘joining the communities of the discontented’ we can capture local meaning and move towards the true cosmopolitan practice of democratic dialogue. But an important ingredient here is adverted to by John Gledhill: anti-globalization (as with an earlier postcolonial critique) ‘builds on, and would be unthinkable without, the intellectual values generally (though not necessarily uniquely) associated with the Western Enlightenment’ (p. 148). Not every symbolic construction of the world is of equal worth or validity; nor may their imaginative projection be deemed an inconsequential indulgence. I would sympathize with Sabili and the jihadist imagination to the extent that I do with Mein Kampf or the Spanish Inquisition. One of the intellectual values I associate with the Enlightenment is bringing humanity to truth. The right of every individual to live according to the best knowledge humanly available is, indeed, my understanding of the ‘cosmopolitan vision’. And while not everything falls easily at present (or may ever) under the rubric of the universally verifiable – including mystical revelations, dreams, senses of beauty and of relative deprivation – it remains an anthropological duty to distinguish between best knowledge and that which is merely circumstantial or contextual, and so to help limit paradigms of falsification. Nigel Rapport University of St Andrews Book reviews926 Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 16, 905-951 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2010 History and politics Davetian, Benet. Civility: a cultural history. x, 607 pp., tables, bibliogr. London, Toronto: Univ. Toronto Press, 2009. £60.00 (cloth), £23.95 (paper) This book is a welcome contribution to research on ‘civility’ and ‘the civilizing process’. Weaving together multidisciplinary research from anthropology, psychology, and sociology, Davetian undertakes an impressive comparative historical analysis of the ‘anatomy of civility and incivility’ in England, France, and the United States. Part 1 adds to, and indeed draws heavily on, Norbert Elias’s seminal study, The civilizing process (2000 [1939], revised edition), which traced the development of manners and social etiquette primarily in France and Germany. Davetian adds to this by exploring the comparative developments between France, England, and the United States, covering the time period from 1200 to the end of the nineteenth century. In part 2, Davetian explores the development of the ‘identity movement’ in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. In particular, he is concerned with how the questioning of American patriotism has affected civility; while this movement contributed to transforming the United States into a more ‘socially engaged and socially conscious nation’ (p. 339), Davetian cautions that this shift may bring with it a weakening of American patriotism and, thereby, changes in the ‘anatomy of civility and incivility’ in the United States. Davetian delves deeper into the roles of emotions in part 3 of the book. At the outset, he argues that the study of emotions should inform all of social science research, rather than forming a specialism of its own; civility research needs to focus on emotions, interactions, and culture, all explored from a relational, processual, comparative approach (to aid in the development of a ‘topology’ of civility). Davetian thus develops Elias’s analysis of shame, including other emotions involved in civility and incivility, such as guilt and embarrassment, as well as pain associated with the ‘denial’ of emotional needs. Davetian returns to a comparative analysis of England, France, and the United States in part 4 of the book, where he summarizes participant observation research he undertook in order to explore contemporary interpersonal interactions comparatively, thereby analysing aspects of civility and incivility. His research indicates that the specific histories of the development of (state and non-state) governance in France, England, and the United States have influenced how citizens within these nations identify and distinguish themselves, and how they manage the presentation of themselves in face-to-face interactions. Davetian illustrates several ways in which these differences have manifested themselves. In the final part, Davetian discusses ‘civilizing and recivilizing processes’. He refers to ‘civility as a bilateral process involving restraint on the one hand and aggression and tactical behaviour on the other’ (p. 355). This echoes Robert van Krieken’s assertion (in Norbert Elias, 1998) that we should develop a dialectical understanding of civilizing processes, whereby ‘civility’ and ‘violence’ can occur alongside in the form of ‘civilized barbarism’ (or ‘civilized’ violence); violence does not disappear with civilizing processes, it just changes form. Davetian raises the idea that ‘incivility can be used as a moral weapon to transform social values’ (p. 355). So, can ‘incivility’ in the short term contribute to ‘civility’ in the long term? This questions the dichotomous separation of civilizing and decivilizing trends, and of civility and incivility. Davetian therefore discards the term ‘decivilizing’, preferring ‘recivilizing process’. He sees civility as ambivalent, where ‘too much authenticity breeds rudeness and violence, while not enough breeds hypocrisy and passivity’ (p. 501); when civility tends towards one of these extremes, we witness a revolution where notions of civility and incivility are questioned, and a shift in civility may occur. This shifting process is what Davetian means by the ‘recivilizing process’. One of my few criticisms is that Davetian does not engage with a variety of Elias’s (and ‘Eliasian’) writings. In critiquing Elias’s civilizing processes, he primarily focuses on The civilizing process. When he uses the example of Nazi Germany to critique Elias, he never refers to Elias’s writings from The Germans (1996). Davetian aptly points out the limitations of Elias’s The civilizing process, as it only explored developments in France and Germany. However, subsequent authors have extended Elias’s work to analyses of England, the United States, and other nations. Engagement with these other ‘Eliasian’ studies would have no doubt added substance to Davetian’s critical engagement with Elias’s theory. However, at 607 pages, Civility, both in terms of its length and in the substantial ground it covers, does not leave much space for Book reviews 927 Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 16, 905-951 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2010 an in-depth analysis of Davetian’s own work and Elias’s theory of civilizing processes. Perhaps such an in-depth discussion could be further developed in a subsequent piece of writing. Amanda Rohloff Brunel University Fay, Derick & Deborah James (eds). The rights and wrongs of land restitution: ‘restoring what was ours’. xx, 288 pp., maps, illus., bibliogrs. Abingdon, New York: Routledge-Cavendish, 2009. £75.00 (cloth) This volume dispels any notion that gaining land rights is an easy or comprehensive means to end the social exclusion of minority groups. None of the claims reported and analysed was completely successful, except perhaps the Mandlazini case described in chapter 9 (the outcome of the Australian sea claim described in chapter 6 had not been determined when the book went to press). The editors and several contributors take Verderey’s work on post-socialist Romania as their reference-point. Verderey identified a number of difficulties in implementing the restitution of land which re-occur in a number of the case studies presented here. In land claims the state is both making the rules and playing the game, for example through its representatives in court. Claimants may value land as either a political or an economic resource – that is, as a material manifestation of identity versus a medium for economic gain – and this may create conflict among claimants. Claims based on prior ownership pose the difficulty of deciding which previous property regime to take as a model for the management of returned land. Fourthly, the outcome of a claim may be rendered unwieldy or impracticable by the ambient political conditions within the state, such as corruption among low-level state officials, or the national dominance of an ethnically derived elite. Geographical representation in the volume is somewhat biased, with South Africa, Anglo North America, and Latin America receiving three papers each, but only one paper on Australia and one on Europe. The selective focus on specific continents does have the advantage of allowing contrasting cases to be discussed and compared. Thus, the South African papers present a claim to a nature reserve in the Eastern Cape, to the site of District 6 in Cape Town by former residents, and the restitution of land by two communities displaced by a harbour development and White settler farmers. The North American papers analyse the marginal status of Metis in Labrador in relation to the geographically and ethnically more distinct Inuit and Innu, the Kluane First Nation in the Yukon, and the Cayuga Nation in New York State. The last, the final chapter in the book, is a particularly useful political analysis of why the Cayuga claim failed, with advice for the more diplomatic handling of future claims. The case studies from Latin America juxtapose the status of a mixed community in Brazil, in which some members claim descent from native peoples and others descent from escaped slaves, with indigenous communities in Peru, whom the government attempted to redefine as ‘peasants’, and Mexico, where the North American Free Trade Agreement is being used by the state to justify attempts to dismantle collective ownership of land won through previous land rights campaigns. Among the common issues that emerge in different chapters are the following. Claimants may not want to return to a wholly traditional way of life, but find their own place within the current economy. There are also problems in appealing to an idealized past in which the rights claimed were freely exercised, when subsequent history has transformed the identity of claimants. The former residents of Cape Town’s District 6, for example, have developed different interests, according to the social conditions into which they were resettled. In the Brazilian case, two neighbouring villages chose, in one instance, to identify with their Amerindian ancestors, while the other identified with their enslaved forebears. The danger that a successful land claim can still be undermined where land management remains in the hands of the dominant community or local government is illustrated in several chapters, although, interestingly, the indigenous Peruvian peasants ultimately benefited from the violence of the Shining Path guerrilla movement, despite their suffering during the civil war. The threat (alleged or real) that a land claim poses to the economic interests of the powerful, dressed up as ‘progress’ or ‘development’, occurs repeatedly, but while this increased the willingness of the Canadian government to settle claims, it destroyed any hope of the Cayuga regaining a reservation. The ugly, and related, assertion by opponents of claims that giving special rights and land to minority groups is a form of apartheid also reappears. Finally, the unequal power of government and claimant communities may invert the legal situation in which, although the indigenous community hold unextinguished Book reviews928 Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 16, 905-951 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2010 rights, claimants in court find themselves asking for concessions from government. The potential role of native law, and problems of translation, that this paradox raises are excellently portrayed by Morphy in one of the most positive chapters. Robert Layton University of Durham Fowler, Ian & Verkijika Fanso (eds). Encounter, transformation and identity: peoples of the Western Cameroon borderlands 1891-2000. Essays in honor of Shirley Ardener. xxvii, 253 pp., map, illus., bibliogr. Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books, 2009. £47.50 (cloth) This is, in effect, a golden jubilee tribute. Shirley Ardener worked in and/or on Cameroon for almost thirty years together with Edwin Ardener, and she has continued to do so during the twenty plus years since his death. A specialist concern to document the region of Cameroon she and Edwin knew best has drawn together Cameroonian contributors and Europeans of various nationalities. Many of the historical chapters are inspired by the Buea Archive, which she rescued twice (once at its establishment, then again when helping revive it from the desuetude into which it had fallen during the era of structural adjustment). Another cluster of chapters presents ethnography of Western Cameroonian women, making them doubly appropriate as celebrations of Shirley’s influence, to which prefatory materials by Verkijika Fanso, and by Dorothy Njeuma with her late husband Martin Njeuma, accord generous acknowledgement. The first chapter is a hitherto unpublished paper by Edwin Ardener that had been intended as part of a volume for local publication. It offers both a wide-ranging ethnographic survey of the Western Cameroonian borderlands with Nigeria and an analysis of identity work done by Cameroonian peoples on their ethnic claims that can be documented from the time of the earliest colonial administrators (reflecting processes that presumably pre-dated them in some regards). Regional specialists will be drawn to different elements of the account, which I found valuable for its discussion of the populations from which the Tiv claim to derive (a tradition with support from language distribution that none the less continues to beg questions about its process, particularly its speed and scale). More of the early colonial context is evoked by Sally Chilver’s epitome of Hermann Detzner’s account of the demarcation of the international border at a moment when German and British relations were fraught (1912-13). Detzner was a picaresque character who, as Ian Fowler tells us in a well-judged explanatory note, was to pass the First World War in a largely pretend campaign against Australian forces in highland New Guinea. The significance of the German colonial project in Kamerun, which established (not always by intention) some of the parameters of postcolonial contest in Cameroon, not least the division between French- and English-speaking provinces, is evident also in Peter Geschiere’s scholarly reconstruction of the short life, and its aftermath, of the ill-fated Karl von Gravenreuth, born 1858, the officer who perished in an ill-conceived attack on Buea, the local capital, in 1891. Another defining German death, in 1899, of the labour recruiter Gustav Conrau in Bangwa, was previously retold in the genre of ‘faction’ by the anthropologist Robert Brain. Michael Ndobegang and Fiona Bowie weave Conrau into their account of Bangwa, and their chiefship and capital, since his death. Yet another set of European deaths, this time from a First World War battle in Ejagham country, and their derelict graveyard, provides Ute Röschenthaler her way into a fascinating account of the village of Nsanakang. Kamerunian colonial identity had been internalized to a high degree, as Verkijika Fanso shows in the uninterrupted stream of representations concerned with territorial boundaries made between the Anglo-French partition under the League of Nations, and the later partition of its British sector between Cameroon and Nigeria in the era of African independence. Several of the later papers are concerned with gender and family. An intricate paper by Caroline Ifeka relates Anyang gendered political symbolism to the relation between use and exchange values. Margaret Niger-Thomas recounts how a conversation with Shirley Ardener was the spur to her documenting a genre of memorial funerary sculpture for high-status women in the ndem association found among Banyang and Ejagham peoples. Fiona Bowie’s second contribution focuses on transnationalism through the instance of a dispersed Bangwa family and is nicely symmetrical with her earlier co-authored chapter on German impact upon Bangwa. Ludovic Lado stands apart from others in the volume, presenting an argument from the anthropology of food to support an inculturation of the Roman Catholic mass that is subtly made but might escape specialist Book reviews 929 Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 16, 905-951 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2010 attention here. The volume closes by reverting to its dedicatee as Joyce Endeley and Nalova Lyonga show how individuals like Shirley Ardener can make a difference to the functioning of south-north networks, including that between Buea and Oxford. The contents of this volume may seem varied, but they cluster in ways appropriate to their subject. In this respect they are helped by Ian Fowler’s introduction, which provides a credible and coherent connective narrative. This is a volume for specialists who will be grateful such things remain possible. Richard Fardon School of Oriental and African Studies Greene, Candace S. One hundred summers: a Kiowa calendar record. xx, 263 pp., plates, illus., bibliogr. London, Lincoln: Univ. Nebraska Press, 2009. £30.99 (cloth) This beautifully produced book is the result of the ‘rediscovery’ (p. viii) of the calendar Silver Horn (1860-1904), itself part of the personal collection of Mrs Nelia Mae Roberts (d. 2001), owner of the Roberts Indian Store of Anadarko, Oklahoma, and donated to the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History at her death by her niece Marcia Bassity. The author is an ethnologist working in the Smithsonian and has written extensively on the Plains Indian artistic tradition. The book contains a foreword by Ellen Chensky, a preface by Daniel Swan, a glossary and guide to pronunciation of Kiowa words by Gus Palmer, Jr, and three appendices: ‘The Little Bluff Calendar Text’ from the papers of Lieutenant Hugh L. Scott obtained from the compiler’s nephew at Fort Sill in 1892; ‘The Hauvahte Calendar Text’ by Mark R. Harrington from circa 1909; and ‘Other Kiowa calendars’. Silver Horn or Haungoaah, to give him his Kiowa name, was an esteemed artist, working in silver, bead, and feathers, and, in later years, a religious leader. The calendar forms part of the Plains Indian tradition of ‘winter counts’, which were a method of recording history in an aide-mémoire to the oral record, by the use of a mnemonic pictorial event to mark each year. In some well-known Lakota examples they are in the form of a spiral, with the earliest event shown in the middle and spiralling outwards towards the present. The events chosen were not necessarily important, but should be memorable. Greene suggests that the Kiowa may have acquired the idea of winter counts from Plains Indians further north, whose calendars sometimes go back further into the eighteenth century. These ‘counts’ were originally produced on hide, but later the tradition was transferred to paper and fabric, particularly in the late nineteenth century, when readily available ledger books formed a convenient medium, the present calendar being of this type. In fact the reservation period saw a flowering of the Plains Indian artistic tradition, with the availability of paper and pen and colour mediums leading to a tradition of ‘ledger book art’, recording historical events and traditions. Other Kiowa calendars are also mentioned (pp. 20-2), and Mooney’s calendar history of the Kiowa Indians (1998) records much of these and possibly inspired other Kiowas to begin producing calendars. Silver Horn’s calendar was produced on the pages of a bound ledger book 6” ¥ 15”, though now the pages are loose. The edges of the pages are also considerably dog-eared, but in the main the pictorial content is not obscured. Each page contains three entries, which were arranged side by side, but running up the page, across the lines of the ledger. The majority are in the order summer, winter, summer. The pages are displayed in a similar fashion, from bottom to top on the even-numbered pages, with the editor’s explanation on the opposite pages, directly under each of Silver Horn’s entries. This calendar covers the period 1828-1928, and, following Kiowa tradition, but unlike that of some other tribes, has two images per year, one for winter and one for summer, although it is still called a ‘winter count’, because the Kiowa word for ‘winter’, sai, is also used for ‘year’. Winter events are marked with a leafless tree. The reason for the inclusion of two entries is that the summer entry records events in camp around the time of the Kado gathering, while the winter one records events further abroad. The calendar had no written text attached and the entries were interpreted with the help of Silver Horn’s children (p. 32). Greene thinks that it was compiled in 1905-6 (p. 27), the earlier entries being copied from an earlier calendar. He also produced a shorter calendar, covering 1828-1904, for James Mooney, which is in the Smithsonian. The Kiowa were enemies of the neighbouring Osage, Utes, Cheyenne, Pawnee, and Arapaho and allies of the Comanche and Plains or Kiowa Apache, and the calendar records involvement with all these tribes, as well as rarer events such as a visit by a Lakota in 1844, Nez Perce visitors Book reviews930 Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 16, 905-951 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2010 in 1883, the Leonid meteor shower of 1833, cholera in 1849, and smallpox in 1862. There is some confusion in the pagination at one stage, with 105 appearing twice, but this only results in one page calendar entry (1874-6) being repeated. Bruce Ingham School of Oriental and African Studies Scher, Philip W. (ed.). Perspectives on the Caribbean: a reader in culture, history, and representation. ix, 302 pp., tables, bibliogrs. Oxford, New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. £19.99 (paper) This book presents an interesting overview about Caribbean studies, useful in particular for teaching undergraduates because it demonstrates the range of topics connected to the Caribbean. The editor, Philip W. Scher, has gathered sixteen articles and book chapters originally published between 1981 and 2002, some of the already ‘classic’ studies for anyone working in the Caribbean. Unfortunately he has missed the opportunity to include articles originally published in another Caribbean language than English. It would have presented students a wider view on Caribbean studies if the collection had included articles translated from French, Spanish, or Dutch. The language limitation is also visible in the chapters. Only one author, Jorge Duany, refers in his chapter predominately to publications in Spanish; all other chapters, even the ones about Haiti or Martinique, list nearly exclusively publications in English. This anglophone bias does not reflect Caribbean studies on an international level. Another point of negligence is the disregard of literature as an important research area in Caribbean studies. Though the editor quotes in his introduction Derek Walcott and refers in another paragraph to Naipaul’s trope ‘Mimic Islands’, he did not include a contribution about the importance of literature in the Caribbean and the Caribbean Diaspora. None the less, the book presents students a good introduction into the Caribbean. The editor has divided the chapters in five sections, dealing with economics, identity, performance, cosmologies, and questions about the impact of globalization. In addition to some core articles in Caribbean studies (e.g. Sidney Mintz’s already famous Caribbean transformations, 1974), Scher selected a representation of studies from the 1990s to reflect the diversity of topics that scholars investigate in the Caribbean. Most authors focus on one question within one geographical context; hence most chapters present case studies about one specific island (Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Haiti, Martinique, Cuba, or the Dominican Republic) in relation to one topic (e.g. gender, work, religion, or culture). It would have been helpful if the editor had presented an extended discussion about the Caribbean in his short introduction instead of just referring to Mintz’s important contribution to the debate. However, his decision to let authors from different disciplines present their own view of the Caribbean without implementing a stringent frame offers a wide range of insights into the hybridity of Caribbean ideas and topics. Bettina Schmidt Bangor University Medical anthropology and genetics Bentley, Gillian & Ruth Mace (eds). Substitute parents: biological and social perspectives on alloparenting in human societies. xviii, 354 pp., tables, figs, illus., bibliogrs. Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books, 2009. £58.00 (cloth) Any edited volume that assumes a multidisciplinary approach inevitably faces a double challenge. Editors have to bring together a collection of essays whose connection through a common theme – in the case at hand, the concept of ‘alloparenting’ – must generate a homogeneous piece of work. On the other hand, such an enterprise must expect that potential readers will be presented with information from different disciplinary fields and methodologies with which they may not always be familiar, because they deal with different concepts, backgrounds, or findings. The series ‘Studies in the Biosocial Society’, published by Berghahn Books, aims to meet such challenges by choosing works that seek to explore the combined efforts of natural and social sciences. Substitute parents – the third volume of this series – is an example of the efficiency of this approach, whose success in achieving its goals must be first of all attributed to the competence of editors Gillian Bentley and Ruth Mace. By including such diversified perspectives as those of evolutionary ecology, anthropology, economics, psychology, and sociology, this Book reviews 931 Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 16, 905-951 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2010 collection of essays provides an encompassing and informed perspective on issues of family, kinship, childhood, adoption, education, and community, crossing disciplinary and methodological borders to integrate a contextual diversity that includes incursions into Mexican, Argentine, Southern African, British, and North American cultures. As I have already mentioned, the essays in this volume are linked through the common theme of ‘alloparenting’, which, broadly speaking, can be described as a set of childcare practices that range from direct parenting to vast networks of support, including both direct family – brothers, grandparents – and neighbourhood or school networks. In the case of human alloparenting, the role of the mother is particularly marked since, differently from other mammal species, humans have short birth intervals. This means that besides our ability to bear multiple offspring in the course of fertile life, offspring remain strongly dependent on their mothers for an extended period of time before becoming self-sufficient. Thus, regardless of the form of care-giving in question, progenitors’ responsibility for ensuring their child survival and upbringing – whether directly or indirectly – is always paramount. This book, comprising sixteen essays preceded by a preface, is structured in two parts, the first part dealing with the various strategies progenitors adopt, such as relying on direct family or neighbourhood networks, as described by Kramer and Gotlieb; the role of school (Mayall); the economic implications resulting from the birth and education of children (Gillian Paull); and the impact of adoption and surrogate practices (Lycett). Part two places greater emphasis on the point of view of children, and their perceptions of the different care-giving practices, and is concerned, for instance, with the biological impact entailed by step relationships (Flinn and Leone); alloparenting practices in Southern Africa and the implications of the AIDS virus on families and communities (Van Blerk and Ansell); and finally a group of chapters dedicated to issues of separation and divorce from children’s perspective (Bensel and Robinson, Scanlan and Butler). In spite of all the virtues pointed out so far – and which the following comments are not intended to diminish – as a social and cultural anthropologist I cannot help but be puzzled and even somewhat disquieted by the fact that several essays in this collection not only choose to emphasize the role of women as the chief figure in the upbringing and education of children (the lack of explanation for this possibly indicates that this perspective is not consciously predicated) and give primacy to the concept of ‘allomothering’, but positively dismiss the influence of paternal families, fathers themselves included. Thus, conclusions such as ‘there is little evidence that male and paternal kin are beneficial for child health’ (chap. 3) are not only arguable, but become even more problematic when we consider, for instance, cases of adoption, surrogacy practices, or orphanage, issues that are also contemplated in this book. Nevertheless, precisely because this work raises so many issues and interrogations, crossing a wide range of themes, contexts, and disciplines, I believe this work will be very useful to undergraduate and graduate students from a variety of fields and backgrounds. This book offers its readers the possibility to gain a global and integrated insight into the phenomenon of ‘alloparenting’, affording in-depth knowledge on a number of themes while effectively opening theoretical, methodological, and disciplinary horizons. Catarina Frois Centre for Research in Anthropology, Lisbon Satya, Laxman D. Medicine, disease and ecology in colonial India: the Deccan plateau in the 19th century. 310 pp., figs, tables, illus., bibliogr. New Delhi: Manohar, 2009. Rs 775 (cloth) Of all the many regions and provinces of British India, Berar appears among the most historically neglected. Formerly part of the domains of the Nizam of Hyderabad, it was annexed by the British in 1853 and merged with the Central Provinces fifty years later. By Laxman D. Satya’s account, Berar was also from the time of its takeover one of the most ruthlessly exploited and intensely impoverished areas under British control. A source of cotton, grain, and other sought-after commodities, especially once the railway made it accessible to outside trade, the province endured levels of famine and disease, of mortality and destitution which, by his account, were hardly matched anywhere else on the subcontinent. Satya provides a mass of statistics and contemporary observation to show how bad conditions in Berar actually were: that, for instance, the level of revenue extracted from the province in the late 1870s (a period of famine) was more than three times higher than Book reviews932 Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 16, 905-951 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2010 in the neighbouring Central Provinces, or that the death rate, as recorded in mortuary statistics between 1871 and 1878, showed Berar, with almost thirty-six deaths per thousand of the population, as far higher than the next highest province, Bombay, with just under twenty-five. When 200 miles of railway was laid in the 1880s, there were over 45,000 casualties, which the author equates to 227 deaths for every mile of track: hence, the railways of British India were constructed ‘on the bodies, bones and skulls of the labourers who built them’ (p. 123). The conclusions to be drawn from such a wealth of depressing data is clear to the author from the outset: Berar epitomizes the ‘politically and intellectually exploitative nature of [the] British Empire’, its ‘intense exploitation of India’s resources and labour to enrich itself’, and ‘the inhuman insensitivity of the European colonizers towards the millions of people who perished in utter poverty, misery, and disease’ (p. 13). For those who think that academic discourse on British India – with its talk of dialogic exchanges and co-constituted knowledges – has grown far too soft and has forgotten the raw essentials and brutal facts of colonial rule, Satya’s account of nineteenth-century Berar might arguably serve as a salutary shock. The problem is, however, that a work so uniformly and unreflectively grounded in outrage lacks any subtlety of interpretation and distorts as much as it informs. Satya tries to follow in the footsteps of Mike Davis’s infinitely more nuanced and effective study Late Victorian holocausts (2001), but in doing so he baldly asserts (more than once) that there was no difference between famine relief camps in British India and Nazi concentration camps and that British ideas of race and Social Darwinism were indistinguishable from the ideology of Mein Kampf and the genocide of the Jews. He takes the ill-considered view that the British deliberately adhered to a miasmatic understanding of disease (which he assumes, quite erroneously, applied to every disease, including smallpox) in order to spare themselves the effort and expense of adopting a more interventionist sanitary policy, and in pursuit of their racist ideology and utter contempt for Indian lives denied the country knowledge of the true causes of malaria and other diseases. The author’s sweeping claims not only fail to recognize the complexity of colonial (and Indian) attitudes to disease and its containment; they also reveal a shaky knowledge of disease itself (as when he blames the British for failing to observe a connection between scurvy and cholera, when there is no obvious one, or when he fails to grasp the process by which individuals acquire immunity to smallpox). Paradoxically, the British are described at every turn as utterly indifferent to Indian suffering – and yet the only sources he provides, the only observations about the misery of Berar and its inhabitants he presents, come precisely from British authors, mostly officials. He claims that the British ordered no investigation into the devastating famine of the late 1870s and yet cites in detail information contained in the 1880 Famine Commission Report. The tragedy of this work is that it reveals an enormous amount of material about a neglected province, one that does appear to have been hard-hit by colonial policies and their intended (or unintended) consequences. But sadly the author is unable to see beyond his own immediate sense of outrage and to process the data he has gleaned in a more critical way that would ultimately have been more revealing and provided more convincing testimony to the misery and suffering of the people of Berar. David Arnold University of Warwick Method and theory De Neve, Geert & Maya Unnithan-Kumar (eds). Critical journeys: the making of anthropologists. 210 pp., bibliogrs. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. £50.00 (cloth) The idea for this volume, the editors tell us in their preface, arose from their attempts to convey to Sussex students ‘what fieldwork in anthropology is all about’. This pedagogic provocation led in turn to a wish for ‘more systematic reflection on different types of fieldwork experience’ and a convened workshop on ‘anthropological journeys’ at the 2004 Association of Social Anthropologists conference in Durham. This edited volume of eleven rather different ‘critical journeys’ and anthropological biographies is the final outcome. The journeys themselves make good reading. The chapters are personal and often confessional affairs, full of the unexpected twists and turns that accompany any passage of discovery. They combine analytical distance with emotional rawness, allowing the reader to follow people’s intellectual apprenticeship within different disciplinary sub-fields or theoretical debates. Whether it be Henrike Donner’s account of the Book reviews 933 Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 16, 905-951 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2010 co-construction of the field through everyday conversations with Calcutta women about domesticity, Geert de Neve’s thoughtful reflections on working with research assistants, or Elizabeth Hsu’s account of learning to be an acupuncturist, each offers pellucid insights into the craft of producing anthropological knowledge. Tony Good’s description of the different genres of professional writing required of anthropologists – as scholars as opposed to development consultants or expert witnesses in asylum cases – offers a different but equally revealing take on his ‘field’, as does Rachael Goeberman-Hill’s account of learning to become a multidisciplinary researcher. One of the aims of the book is to demonstrate that there is ‘never just one way of being an anthropologist’ (p. 13), and in this it succeeds. Beyond underscoring disciplinary diversity, what is gained by the juxtaposition of these personal intellectual narratives? Like so many in the field, the editors position the book’s contribution within the long shadow of the Writing culture debates on reflexivity, bringing this (somewhat) up to date with Gupta and Ferguson’s 1997 edited Anthropological locations, which focuses on movement rather than place as constituting the ‘field’. However, the contributors to this volume tend not to follow through the epistemological implications of the argument that travel refigures the field, partly because their accounts are so richly embedded within embodied personal experience. The embodied experience of fieldwork, even if experienced partly through travel and retrospective reconstruction, is still a key formative trope within ‘British’ social anthropology. As this book implicitly acknowledges, it is also an important source of disciplinary cultural capital to be drawn on throughout academic careers. By comparison, the work of theoretical contextualization is less developed in some chapters. The editors suggest that the book’s importance lies in its attention to the way in which anthropological engagements with the field shape the discipline as well as their own understandings of it. However, despite the acknowledgement of Bourdieu’s call for ‘participant objectivation’, the discipline and its institutional enactment are left relatively unexamined. Little is said about the precariousness of academic career structures, the ethnographic compromises forced on contract researchers, or the new forces of accountability and productivity that tend to prescribe and constrain fieldwork engagements. Will this volume’s journey turn full circle, as the editors intend, and encourage a more hands-on and engaged approach to teaching, or at least experiencing, fieldwork? The book succeeds in demonstrating the diversity of anthropological practice. However, for this reviewer’s taste, it slightly dodges the question of whether ethnography can ever be taught. In her chapter, Unnithan Kumar powerfully insists that, through teaching, the field gains new life and allows her to remain ‘emotionally close’ to her research site, whilst also enhancing student learning. Yet the preface instead argues that ethnography is best learned ‘through example’. Does this leave us stuck with the fetishization of ‘the field’ as a space beyond pedagogy? The recent issue of the on-line Anthropology Matters journal entitled ‘Field of screams’ highlights the emotional stakes, and the importance of finding ways of experiencing and practising ‘what fieldwork is all about’ that go beyond narrative retellings. For all the discipline’s dislike of research training and didactic textbooks, it is only through inhabiting and constructing the field that we can begin to understand the experience and its generative serendipity. Books such as this are an important start, but until we can begin to experiment creatively with learning fieldwork through fieldwork, prescriptive methods texts and dreary generic courses will remain. David Mills University of Oxford Enfield, N.J. The anatomy of meaning: speech, gesture, and composite utterances. xii, 252 pp., figs, illus., bibliogr. Cambridge: Univ. Press, 2009. £60.00 (cloth) How does an interpreter take multiple signs to create a coherent whole meaning? This is the central question the sociolinguist Nick Enfield addresses in his study of ‘composite utterances’, where speech and gestures are woven together to create meaning. The central stance of the book is that we should not treat language as an isolated sphere in which meaning is created: speech is always grounded in a context, and dependent on other signs. The aim of the monograph is to offer a descriptive and analytical study of deictic (pointing) and illustrative gestures used in such composite utterances. Enfield proposes the concept of ‘enchronic time’ to make sense of the feat of interpreters to arrive at a single interpretation out of a multiplicity of signs: enchronic time is the local, ‘conversational time’ in which signs Book reviews934 Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 16, 905-951 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2010 conveyed by speech and gesture are combined and cumulated to bring about understanding on the part of an audience. The theoretical arguments of the book are grounded in rich and fascinating data derived from fieldwork in Laos: video recordings of interactions at the market, and interviews involving descriptions of traditional fish traps or kin relations. The book is divided into two parts. Part I explores deictic words and gestures, starting with demonstratives (chap. 2) – specifically, Lao terms roughly equivalent to ‘this’ and ‘that’, or ‘here’ and ‘not here’. These provide, to use Enfield’s term, the ‘glue that binds word to world’; the author argues that demonstratives are dependent not on physical space, but on the ‘interactional space’ that is shared – or not – by speaker and addressee. Enfield follows in the third chapter with an intriguing discussion of lip-pointing – a type of gesture rarely described in the literature – and in the fourth chapter, of hand-pointing. Lip-pointing, and what he identifies as ‘big’ and ‘small’ hand-pointing, are not three equivalent gestures, but are qualitatively different and fulfil different functions, their use depending on context, perceived degree of shared understanding between speaker and audience, as well as social constraints and face-saving considerations. The second part of the book discusses illustrative gestures. Through videotaped interviews on the features of fish traps (chap. 5), and kin relations and marriage rules (chaps 6 and 7), Enfield analyses the way speakers spontaneously ‘sketch’ objects and diagrams in mid-air through gestures to clarify and complement speech, and comments on the capacity of both speaker and audience to hold cognitively in the mind’s eye the structures being sketched. These structures are at times effectively ‘edited’ by the speaker: for instance, the nodes of a kinship diagram might be pulled forward to create space for a new part of a diagram within arm’s reach. In the conclusion, Enfield proposes that the issue of semiotic unification – how interpreters take multiple signs for a coherent whole meaning – should be understood as a kind of problem-solving. What is particularly fascinating and original in Enfield’s monograph is the way the body is brought into the discussion on meaning creation, and treated as artefact and tool for communication – a ‘cognitive artefact’, in Enfield’s words. The book’s many insights have a range of implications for linguistics, the cognitive sciences, and anthropology, including for the understanding of intersubjectivity, joint attention, distributed cognition, embodiment, semiotics, and even materiality. For instance, Enfield’s discussion of the interviews on fish traps – where absent objects are conjured through gestures – appealed to my own interest in material culture, and brought me to think about the relation between embodiment and materiality. There are some questions that are left open in the monograph, and I was often left wanting more information and discussion on a number of facets of the research. For instance, what elements of the gestures are cultural conventions, and which are the result of a process of problem-solving on the part of the speaker? I was also left wondering about intra-cultural differences in the use of gestures, since interviewees seem to have different degrees of competence at describing the fish traps. Do these signal differences in technical expertise, relative status, or communicative skills? Arguably, however, these unanswered questions are not so much lacunae as proof of the range of theoretical ramifications of the book that remain to be explored in research on cognition and human sociality. Overall, the monograph strikes me as an extremely thought-provoking and valuable contribution to the recent cross-disciplinary trend of research on the cognitive and pragmatic conditions for human interaction. Geoffrey Gowlland London School of Economics and Political Science Scott, Susie. Making sense of everyday life. xi, 236 pp., illus., bibliogr. Cambridge, Malden, Mass.: Polity Press, 2009. £55.00 (cloth), £17.99 (paper) Scott begins her text somewhat abruptly by asking ‘what is everyday life?’, which she rarely wavers from addressing. The aim of the book is to raise, critically, the question of our everyday existence in the modern world in a manner accessible to undergraduate students. Indeed, the text is based on an undergraduate course taught by the author, which accounts for the lively presentation of materials. The initial posing of the ontological question of ‘what is everyday life?’ gives way to the epistemological and methodological problems of how everydayness can be investigated and through which means. In an attempt to aid the student through these discussions, the author presents a ‘toolkit’ in the second chapter for reference throughout the subsequent chapters. Book reviews 935 Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 16, 905-951 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2010 This toolkit comprises brief but lucid accounts of major theoretical schools in the social sciences, from dramaturgical and ethnomethodological to phenomenological, structuralist and post-structuralist schools of thought. This explicitly theoretical chapter lays the ground for the later chapters, which each pick out a single issue in everyday life and use the early theoretical discussions to analyse the material through different lenses. The issues singled out for chapter-long analysis are: emotions; home; time; eating and drinking; health, illness, and disability; shopping; and leisure. One of the virtues of organizing the text as Scott has is to allow the student access to how academics use theory to investigate social phenomena. Scott is very good at indicating the strengths and weaknesses of any single theoretical position on a particular topic and leaves enough unsaid for students to come to a position on the matter. But the real strength of the text lies in its ability to raise some of the unseen structures and processes of everyday existence to visibility and turn seemingly mundane and quotidian activities such as shopping or going to the pub with a group of friends into contested fields of sociality with highly sophisticated logics and intricate rituals of interaction. The blurb at the back of the book suggests that each chapter is organized around three main themes: ‘rituals and routines’, ‘social order’, and ‘challenging the taken-for-granted’. This is not quite true. Each chapter has its own slightly different organization, but all treat the themes with great care. The chapter I felt strongest deals with time, and does so by looking at different aspects of time in social life, exemplified by reference to various studies. Initially, there is a short discussion on time and the experience of it which then moves on to the social ordering of time through calendars, recurring events, and time as self- and social-disciplining, which is quite reliant on some of Foucault’s later works for analysis. The discussion then moves to the sociality of time in leisure and the gendering of time in our social interactions. The chapter ends with a look at the various ‘challenges’ to time in the form of Durkheimian ‘anomie’ or ‘hanging-out time’, in which everyday modes of relating to time are suspended or broken off. As good as this chapter is, it nevertheless highlights a problem which recurs throughout the book. If I take the example of the discussion of the politics of time in the book, studies are referred to which point to various waiting times by social groups which supposedly reflect levels of subordination. Although there is certainly a strong case to be made for a politics and power of time, I am not too sure it is as easily accessible for analysis as statistically marking which groups wait longer. This may not be a problem with the book per se but with the methods, means, and language of much sociology. My fundamental problem with this text is possibly its greatest virtue to its intended audience(s): this is a text not for anthropology undergraduates but for sociology and cultural studies undergraduates. It may seem that I am overstating the divide between the disciplines, but few anthropologists are referred to throughout the text and rarely at any length – Lévi-Strauss is the most referred-to anthropologist in the text and receives only four mentions – so that I cannot see the virtue of using Scott’s enjoyable book as a means to help undergraduate anthropology students come to terms with what the discipline has to say about everyday life. And as a means to broaden students’ horizons, I suggest that there are books better equipped to do just that. Hayder Al-Mohammad University of Kent at Canterbury Strecker, Ivo & Stephen Tyler (eds). Culture + rhetoric. xii, 255 pp., bibliogrs. Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books, 2009. £55.00 (cloth) The essays published in this edited volume are the result of the sustained reflection pursued by a group of scholars engaged in the International Rhetoric Culture Project. At the core of this project is the scholarly interest in a rhetorical theory of culture. The growing interest in such a theory engendered four international conferences and a new book series, entitled ‘Studies in Rhetoric and Culture’, published by Berghahn Books. The aim of the present volume, edited by Ivo Strecker and Stephen Tyler, is to launch the new book series and to introduce a larger audience to the project. Cultures are not only constructs, cultures are rhetorical constructs, the editors affirm in their programmatic introduction. As Strecker and Tyler underscore: ‘[O]ur minds are filled with images and ideas, but these remain unstable and incomplete as long as we do not manage to persuade both ourselves and others of their meanings’. Rhetoric, in this view, is a human disposition, enabling actors to craft, maintain, and challenge meanings imposed on a meaningless world. This presumably universal Book reviews936 Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 16, 905-951 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2010 disposition distinctive of the human animal seems to constitute a crucial factor in the ‘emergence of cultural diversity past and present’. The key aim of the rhetorical paradigm as proposed by Strecker and Tyler is to reinvigorate what was formerly known as symbolic anthropology. The theoretical avant-garde comes with its own precursors attached. In his contribution to the edited volume, Christian Meyer identifies some of the ancestors of rhetoric culture theory. In a sweeping overview, the author generously leaps over centuries, briefly discussing the work of Protagoras, Critias, Prodikos, Isocrates, Cicero, Quintilian, Vico, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Burke, Blumenberg, Kennedy, Lafitau, and Leenhardt. Curiously enough, no anxiety of influence ever seems to have bothered all these venerable authors. Meyer’s presentation is framed in the conventional terms of a history of ideas; it provides a standard account of rhetoric useful only for those who are not familiar with this distinctive tradition of philosophical thought. Arrived at the end of a long line of precursors, Meyer’s conclusion might seem trivial to some readers, namely that ‘social life is grounded in discourse, and that without speech there would be no culture’. But perhaps the insight is not so trivial after all. For if social life is grounded in discourse, as the author suggests, then discourse is also grounded in social life. What would such an insight mean for a historical account of the emergence of rhetoric in ancient Greece? The most interesting piece published in this edited volume is perhaps Michael Herzfeld’s ethnographically grounded essay on the embodied rhetorics of earnest belief. Exploring the political performances of the Italian prime minister, Herzfeld characterizes Berlusconi’s demonstration of political conviction as ‘a highly transparent performance of a lack of transparency’. According to the anthropologist, Berlusconi consistently aims to convey ‘earnestness’ in his political performances, but such ‘earnestness’ represents a mode of self-presentation rather than a psychological state of being: ‘[I]it is a public performance, one designed to lend conviction, of an attitude that may itself be entirely false’. In the ‘post-Protestant world’ identified by Herzfeld in his stimulating essay, the expectation of sincerity has gradually lost its traction, and what is judged by the audience is not the personal intent but the public performance. Significantly, Herzfeld also adds a cautionary note regarding the theory of rhetoric culture more generally. His unease concerns the syntactical structure of the programmatic phrase ‘rhetoric culture’. This awkward expression, which was questioned by many at the Fourth International Rhetoric Culture Conference, might inadvertently suggest to some readers ‘that there is a kind of culture that is not rhetorical’. This, of course, is not the case. With Herzfeld’s cautionary note in mind, one might wonder if there really is any virtue in creating an odd terminology besides the dubious glories of an academic avant-garde and its rhetoric of the new? Perhaps Herzfeld’s presumably less appealing phrase ‘social poetics’ might do just as well. Among the explicit aims of the Rhetoric Culture Project is the critical attempt to rethink and reformulate the contested concept of culture. As philosopher Peter L. Oesterreich argues in his contribution, ‘[B]elonging to particular social and cultural fields, persons act for and against others within the context of competing worldviews and interpretations of meaning, which they try to assert through persuasive speech’. The cultural field, in other words, is ever-changing, ever-shifting, ever-emerging. Contrasting with this distinctive understanding of the cultural is the ‘presence of diverse cultures, whose opposing worldviews are rooted in different traditions’. According to Oesterreich, the presence of these diverse cultures ‘may be a source of future social unrest’. Ironically, it was precisely this reified notion of culture invoked by Oesterreich as a means to justify the rhetorical paradigm that encouraged anthropologists to abandon the concept altogether. Carlo Caduff University of Zurich Trask, R.L. Why do languages change? xi, 198 pp., figs, tables, bibliogr. Cambridge: Univ. Press, 2009. £50.00 (cloth), £15.99 (paper) This is Larry Trask’s last book, and it has been revised by Robert McColl Millar of the University of Aberdeen after Trask’s tragically early death from motor neurone disease in 2004. The work, though not earth-shattering in its implications, should win a deservedly large audience because of the erudition and brio with which it is written, and these are two qualities which coexist all too rarely in academic writing, though they abound in Trask’s œuvre. Trask’s specialist field was the history of Basque, an isolate which none the less borrowed immensely from Latin and some of its daughter languages, and Basque is the language Book reviews 937 Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 16, 905-951 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2010 which Trask cites examples from most frequently after English. Trask covers much in the space of eight chapters, starting from instances of lexical change and expansion (such as the change from rouge to blusher) in the first chapter (pp. 1-18), to an exploration of the essential vacuity (or at best the unanswerability) of the identity of the world’s oldest language in the eighth, which bounds from that theme to a discussion of pidgins, creoles, mixed languages, and sign languages. In these chapters Trask illustrates many points by exemplifying them with the known histories of individual words. His accounts of the Basque origin of silhouette and of the Carolina Algonquian source of Pimlico, on pp. 56-7 and 67-70, respectively, are especially striking. Trask also explodes some tenacious but hollow myths such as the alleged origin of the computer term ‘bug’ from a moth which short-circuited electrical relays in the early Mark II computer in 1947. (In fact, examination of documents drawn up by the spreader of the word, Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, shows that the word had been used in the modern IT sense for some years previously.) Chapter 2 discusses and illustrates the social processes of prestige and power, and other reasons why languages change, while the next chapter explores the often surprising origins of words. Those interested in finding out where English comes from should read chapter 5, although Trask could and should have made more use here of the wealth of examples made possible by illustrating the comparative method and the operation of sound-laws within and between Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and English. The discussion of Grimm’s Law (the first Germanic sound-shift) on p. 91 gives some illustrations of this nature, though I was surprised that Trask did not point out that this law was actually first set out by the Danish polyhistor Rasmus Christian Rask. Chapters 6 and 7 deal with topics which appeal even to anglophone non-linguists. The first of these examines the factors which have made American English varieties different from British English ones, while chapter 7 (pp. 130-53) looks at the reasons (including phonological factors) which explain why the spelling of English words seems so random. The style of this book is not academic in the sense that all references are fully caparisoned with apposite citations from the relevant literature. Much use is made of the Oxford English Dictionary, and references therein to the dates of the first citation of words are often used; both print and on-line versions of the OED are mentioned in the references. There are a few errors in the text: the reference to the work of ‘James Clarkson’ should refer to the Indo-Europeanist James Clackson. Trask also misassigns the time of the Feast of the Holy Innocents, which falls on 28 December. More importantly, although he cites many forms from Old English, the phonemically distinctive length of vowels and diphthongs which the language had is never marked on transcriptions of Old English words in this book, although this is traditional practice, for instance, in textbooks for learners of Old English. Sometimes further detail would have been welcome: the etymon of Chicago (p. 77) is not merely Algonquian, but it comes from Miami-Illinois, the ancestral language of that area. This example provides the title for Trask’s chapter 4, ‘Skunk-Leek – my kind of town: what’s in a name?’, a discussion of placenames and substratum influences in language, including loan words. Trask was adept at introducing complex linguistic concepts while using easily digestible examples, and he continues to do so here throughout each chapter. This book should enlighten many minds about many aspects of historical linguistics (especially English historical linguistics) and why people are interested in it, and it should encourage them to examine the works referred to at the end of the book and to learn more about a field to which converts are always welcome. Anthony P. Grant Edge Hill University Religion and myth Gaudio, Rudolf Pell. Allah made us: sexual outlaws in an Islamic African city. xv, 237 pp., maps, illus., bibliogr. Oxford: WileyBlackwell, 2009. £17.99 (paper) Language and sexuality studies has become a major focus in linguistics research over the past ten years, with many studies examining the linguistic practices through which subjects ‘give voice to’ same-sex desires and attendant social identities. ‘Give voice to’ can be a misleading reference, of course. Since the Stonewall period (1969), North Atlantic sexual politics has assumed that a fully developed homosexuality is ‘out and proud’. In contrast, acts of discretion and/or concealment are markers of a sexual consciousness that has yet to reach its social, political, or linguistic maturity. To be sure, Book reviews938 Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 16, 905-951 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2010 foregrounding visibility in this fashion may have certain benefits in the human rights arena. Yet language and sexuality studies also make clear that too much emphasis on visibility often overlooks the nuanced details of local linguistic practices, practices that are invoked variably and strategically, and at times individually. This is one of the important lessons to be learned from a careful reading of Allah made us: sexual outlaws in an Islamic African city. Gaudio’s monograph summarizes the results of more than fifteen years of research in Kano (northern Nigeria), where the primary focus of inquiry became the lived experiences of two categories of Hausa men: yan daudu (primarily same-sex identified, and often feminized men) and masu harka (the more masculine men, sometimes married with families, who ‘do the deed’ with yan daudu). These are not public categories, in the sense that the (Western) category of gay man is public. When necessary, yan daudu and masu harka employ certain linguistic and social practices (and Gaudio describes many of them) to communicate with each other in the public arena without risking full disclosure of message and identity. Ordinarily, these men meet discreetly, in a friend’s home, in a bar or café which supports their presence, or in some other secluded location; they are fully expressive only when contexts are protective and secluded. Consistent with that point, neither yan daudu nor masu harka self-identify as ‘out gay men’ or see themselves as part of some transnational community of men who have sex with men. The primary identity is Hausa, and often Hausa and Muslim, and they locate their experiences of sexual sameness within the Hausa cultural, sexual, and spiritual traditions – so much so that one mai harku (singular form), introduced to Gaudio by a mutual friend, could not believe that Gaudio, a white man from the USA, could also be same-sex identified, asking incredulously, ‘White men do it too?’ Allah made us addresses two goals. First, the book introduces the details of yan daudu daily experiences, to demonstrate the texture of a sexual sameness that refuses to embrace the North Atlantic agenda of public visibility. To be sure, yan daudu are not closeted subjects. Their public presence may be noted by others and those references may have uncomfortable consequences. But by Gaudio’s accounting, these responses are in line with those directed at women who regularly ‘break the rules’ of sexual propriety in the northern Nigerian setting, particularly so, the market vendors, sex workers, and other ‘independent women’ (karuwanci) whose lives are not entirely framed in terms of domestic duty and obligation. Second, the book examines yan daudu within the contexts of a changing northern Nigeria and evolving notions of cultural citizenship within that setting. This inquiry involves a discussion of the Islamic conquest (twelfth century), British colonial rule, the politics of independence, and more recent resurgence of seemingly fundamentalist Islamic interests which, by this narrative, are also expressions of resurgent, and masculine-centred, Hausa rather than Nigerian civic placement. Yan daudu were threatened with expulsion from Kano, when Shari’a (Islamic law) became the official basis of the legal code in Hausaland (2000). Yet many of these men remain in Kano, and the yan daudu presence as such remains a part of the urban scene. Gaudio wisely does not attempt to explain why yan daudu remain in an environment where social sanctions, under certain conditions, could become quite severe. He gives us, instead, a sense of what lived experience is like in this context: the private parties, the deep personal friendships, the mediation between heterosexual and same-sexual desire, the linguistic practices that assist subjects as they move within this complex terrain. Gaudio’s monograph is not a study of language and desire, rendered out of context and reduced to Lacanian impulse. Allah made us keeps the discussion of language and sexuality deeply embedded within the social inflections of gender, race/ethnicity, class, national vs regional loyalties, and enduring religious commitments. William L. Leap American University Pinxten, Rik & Lisa Dikomitis (eds). When God comes to town: religious traditions in urban contexts. xiv, 151 pp., illus., bibliogrs. Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books, 2009. £35.00 (cloth) This book is a neat little volume with clear localized case studies (if not always schematically well linked by thematic focus) showing how urbanization generally influences the religiosity of everyday life in modern urban centres. A backgrounded element which could have been emphasized is how globalization and transnationalism exposed individuals everywhere to the vulnerabilities of the world stage (whereby it is argued that people are only bit players) and how subsequently new patterns of social stratification, identity construction, Book reviews 939 Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 16, 905-951 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2010 economic polarization, and the impact of the alleged postmodern ‘crisis’ on the modern paradigm of science explain the contemporary resurgence of religion. All this is sourced in emergent metropolis, twentieth-century megacities and regional trading/commercial zones, and, while not new, has intensified in the past thirty years or so. Globalization (however defined) has enabled popular movements to have access to resources independently of hierarchies on a significant scale. At the same time the impacts of secularization have undermined the monopoly of orthodox institutional religion and, hence, often its capacity to co-opt heterodox popular religions or urban-based social movements. There is no doubt that the social and psychological consequences of urbanization and its diverse plural landscape have, contra the secularization thesis, heightened the appeal and relevance of religions as discourses of political resistance, whereby anxiety-coping mechanisms and networks of solidarity and community gain are reconstituted. These days, it may be argued that (post)modern urban dwellers are not less religious (even compared with rural folk/peasantries), but in making new connections to the sacred they are differentially religious. Movements of people also show the dilemmas when rural folk migrate to urban centres and bring with them their own distinctive set of cultural values. Hirschon’s fine Greek case study shows clearly how orthodoxy might be linked to national identity. It demonstrates that it is not necessary to throw the baby out with the bathwater in the project of modernity, but shows how the religious are able to change to the needs of changing (urban) society. Coleman also notes ‘shifts and continuities’ (p. 33) in the diverse urban religious landscape where use of the religious imagination clearly ‘has no limit’ (p. 42). Collins, from a perspective of urban ecology, asks what defines urban space. Here Lefebvre’s brilliant and understated (at least in anthropology) ruminations on urban space could have been given a more centralized focus in the debate: ‘To change life ... we must first change space’, says Lefebvre (The production of space, 1990, p. 190; see also his Writing on cities, 1996). The term ‘city’, he argued, has a present and immediate material reality that is best defined in terms of an architectural or physical statement. It is also a contested and contemplative site, whereby actors define their lived worlds through an everyday bodily poetics which he called rhythm-analysis. In the mix of various cultural sites, city-space is an assemblage that is interlinked with the individual and the wider social body. In turn each cultural site has its own centre. This is reflected in the multiplicity of religious practices that have effloresced in recent times and which are embedded in wider systems of influence and control. The urban Quaker House (Collins’s chapter) is a case in point. But how does physical space determine social arrangements or social reproduction? Harvey and Lefebvre have shown how, through particular relations in physical space, certain meanings and resources are appropriated; in a sense, then, physical space thus becomes social space. In fact, lots of comparative work has been undertaken in South and Southeast Asia on understanding spatial cosmologies and lived worlds through temple/monastery and stupa (cetiya) art and architecture. Among other forces of influence, the Charismatic Renewal may posit a challenge to orthodox Catholicism, which has a 2,000-year tradition of accommodating the popular within its vast purview. In the case of Poland post-1989, Drweski gives a fine overview of a church in crisis (temporarily?). Here the church will surely reposition itself to accommodate the transnational forces of modernity even in the face of an increasingly laicized Catholicism. New spatial references are indeed needed. Movement, translocalization, and ritual boundary-crossings are pertinent themes in a discussion of the reformulation of urban religious space, picked up in places in the collection without excessive theoretical rumination. The appropriation of social space comes out in Vozikas’s chapter on the locality of St Marina and its festive rituals. The author notes shifts from traditional rural understandings where churches and shrines are at the centre of community life. Rural migrants need to redefine the sacred in urban contexts to ensure a continuity and familiarity with their local traditions – seemingly, in this case, without too much conflict. Similarly Dikomitis, shifting focus to Greek Cypriots, emphasizes a reimagining of social space, reinserting meaning through practice – though in this case moving back and forth between the village and city. Informant voices come out clearly in this chapter. Theije bemoans the lack of serious attention to religion in urban anthropology, a point which needs underlining. The use of case studies in the collection emphasizes that ethnographic attention can show the ways in which religion plays a significant role in the everyday lives of Book reviews940 Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 16, 905-951 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2010 urbanized folk, or rural folk coming to terms with conditions of urbanization and the condition of modernity. As Theije notes, in ‘the urban context of increasing cultural pluralization, religion plays multiple roles’ (pp. 98-9). Tensions and anxiety appear not only within and between religious traditions, but also among devotees caught at the intersection of change. Sometimes, as we have seen elsewhere, the outcome is a mélange: a hybrid form that is neither completely one nor the other. There is not much mention of globalization in the text, its imposition on national consciousness and its material and imaginative trans-localizing; one such force that has engendered some of the religious multiplicities that we see today in these case studies, as found among Catholic devotees, for instance, in Brazil (Theije’s chapter). Then again, in a world of increasing smooth surfaces of resistance (in the sense of Deleuze and Guattari), anything can happen; spatial trajectories of influence flow not only west to east, but east to west, and now north to south. Boundaries thus have little substance outside of the state imaginary and its persistent modalities of religious orthodoxy. These need to be continually reinforced by entrenched politico-religious conservative forces. The volume as a whole provides an interesting collection of case studies around a number of selected themes: nation versus state; urban transformations; urban migration; and the impact of modernity. Case studies in the collection include Greece, Brazil, Poland, Cyprus, and China. In the latter case, interesting as it is, a study on taijiquan practices in a historical and modern urban context seems a little awkward in the collection. The chapters could, in some instances, stand by themselves, although there are some useful thematic linkages existing between the various case studies. In general, the book is easy to read and suitable as a student reader or an academic or postgraduate reference text. It is high time that anthropologists consider modern urban religiosity and its contested spatial practices with the seriousness they deserve. Jim Taylor University of Adelaide Sackey, Brigid M. New directions in gender and religion: the changing status of women in African Independent Churches. viii, 219 pp., bibliogr. New York: Lexington Books, 2006. £46.00 (cloth) Brigid Sackey’s New directions in gender and religion is based on twenty-five years of participant observation and a religious experience in Ghanaian churches that the author traces to her childhood. This depth of familiarity with African churches is rare and allows the author to range beyond the confines of a single church to compare and contrast a broad sweep of what she calls African Independent Churches (AIC). In defiance of a large body of work on Christianity on the continent, Sackey includes Spiritual, Pentecostal, Charismatic, and newer Pentecostal-Charismatic Churches in the ambit of AICs. The atypical definition of, for instance, ‘neo-Pentecostal/Charismatic’ (p. 33) as AICs is unfortunately not based on a theoretical engagement with the theological and classificatory bases of current distinctions or on a new analysis of historical developments but on the weight of her experience. This strategy supports a general assertion that there is ‘a convergence in aspects of worship’ (p. 26) between various churches but does not prove the particular point that all churches in her study are AICs. And although Sackey claims that the lumping of various churches into a single (historically defined) category reflects an ‘emic’ perception (p. 40), this is not borne out by other descriptions about the ways in which churches differentiate themselves denominationally (e.g. pp. 35-7). Particularly problematic in this book is Sackey’s assertion that AICs in Ghana evolved from the encounter between two ‘religions’ (p. 7) or ‘cultures’ (p. 26): ‘African Traditional Religions’ and Christianity (p. 7). Throughout the book, the author uncritically accepts the existence of timeless ‘African Traditional Religions’, which she juxtaposes with a similarly one-dimensional, monolithic, and static ‘mission Christianity’. There is no engagement with current literature on supposed Christian ‘culture’ or traditional ‘religion’. The decision to take mission Christianity (without specifying denominational differences) as the definitive form of the religion also seems arbitrary. Apart from this crude syncretism, the study is also historically deeply flawed. For instance, the author claims that mission Christianity, unlike ‘traditional religion’, was ‘devoid of healing and medicine’ (p. 37; cf. pp. 111-19) and that spirit possession and glossolalia were uniquely African (pp. 38-9). There are no historical or archival references in the text to support such statements (cf. p. 23). The same historical and theoretical problems plague other parts of the book. For instance, Sackey claims that the increasingly assertive Book reviews 941 Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 16, 905-951 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2010 leadership role that African women play in Ghanaian churches is a continuation of the role and position of women in traditional African religion (chap. 3). Although interesting, this point does not follow from an analysis of the ethnographic or historical data. Theoretically, the author describes the growing autonomy of women church leaders and founders as proof that ‘Western feminism’s’ assumption of ‘universal subordination’ (p. 49) is hopelessly ethnocentric. Sackey then contrasts the ‘holistic’ (p. 50) and ‘spontaneous’ (p. 55) ‘gender relationships in Ghana’ and Africa more widely with the ‘dichotomous’ (p. 50) and ‘organized’ (p. 55) views in the West. In this comparison, African culture comes up trumps as its gender roles are described as more ‘flexible’, complementary, and equitable (p. 51), while ‘both genders know their rights, strengths, and limitations’ (p. 52). Such timeless claims are somewhat tempered by assertions that the ‘social and religious infiltration’ of British colonialism (p. 61) led to the deterioration of Ghanaian women’s ‘resplendent’ and ‘glorious’ (p. 60) historical abilities to make decisions and take prestigious political positions. These assertions are extraordinary not just for the breadth of ethnographic and historical generalization but also for the consistency with which they ignore the contemporary work of supposedly ‘Western’ academics on gender and religion. Although the latest academic sources referred to in the book date from 2002, the theoretical concerns and emphases of New directions in gender and religion are firmly situated in the 1970s/80s. Despite reservations about the book’s theoretical originality, it offers a valuable record of the life histories of women church leaders in Ghana. It also chronicles the diversity of healing practices and changing leadership patterns in Ghanaian churches. Apart from such contributions, Sackey’s book is fascinating for the way in which it blends academic and insider perspectives. For instance, she makes the matter-of-fact ‘argument’ that ‘[f]aith melts all anxieties that cause sickness in a person, and through that makes him or her whole’ (p. 122). She also concludes that ‘a religious experience is a personal encounter influenced by a greater spiritual force, which may compel the person to react in a certain way’ (p. 106). Such arguments and conclusions are not merely, as she claims, ‘observations of participation’ (p. 10), but make the existence and efficacy of supernatural forces an integral part of the analysis. I am not convinced that this is a positive new direction for anthropology. Ilana van Wyk London School of Economics and Political Science Science and technology Helmreich, Stefan. Alien ocean: anthropological voyages in microbial seas. xvii, 403 pp., illus., bibliogr. London, Berkeley: Univ. California Press, 2009. £14.95 (paper) Stefan Helmreich is one of the most important contributors to anthropological discussions on artificial life. Alien ocean: anthropological voyages in microbial seas is his second single-authored work (his first was Silicon second nature: culturing artificial life in a digital world, 1998), and explores debates about life from the perspective of oceanographers’ studies of water-based microbes. This work sets a high standard for the anthropology of science and technology, and Helmreich shows a multi-layered and complex grasp of the work of microbial scientists, explaining their work with sophistication and ease (sometimes the reader can easily forget he is an anthropologist and not a microbiological oceanographer) as he describes ‘molecular phylogenies’ (genealogical trees based on DNA and RNA) (p. 78), Prochlorococcus and Synechococcus (light-eating microbes) (p. 176), or his own involvement in the processes of sorting through the microbes: ‘Using a P20 Pipetman, I add 6 microliters of gluteroaldehyde to the relevant caps, and then, with a P200 Pipetman, add 75 microliters of dimethyl sulfoxide to the appropriate cyrovials’ (p. 191). In the text we are introduced to microscopic creatures such as the hyperthermophile, which lives ‘in total darkness, bathed in the poison breath of the inner earth, at 3,500 pounds of pressure per square inch, at temperatures exceeding 230 degrees Fahrenheit’ (p. 71). Hyperthermophiles (lovers of heat), to oceanographers, hold the secrets to all life’s watery heritage. Familiar as many of us are with the flow of life, from sea to land, from simple to complex, Helmreich admits that ‘some microbiologists argue that this tale of the deep, direct lineage cannot be so neat. Microbes have the capacity to exchange genes with their contemporaries continually, particularly in the fluid space of the ocean, and this may muddle any attempt to root the tree of life’ (p. 72). Book reviews942 Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 16, 905-951 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2010 Gene gymnastics lead Helmreich to argue that ‘the uprooting of the tree has followed, paradoxically, from taking the notion that DNA contains information that can be employed to trace lineages ... that novel modes of conceptualizing biogenetic kinship are in the making, along with understanding the flow of genes as information, substance, and property’ (p. 73). Taking a multi-layered approach, Helmreich draws on commentaries from scientists, commentators, and decision-making agencies in constructing this image of the importance of the sea. He proposes a stark contrast between a wondrous and life-giving sea to one with a threatening destructive capacity. Helmreich is interested in life, its polyvalency, and how biological sciences are engaged in ‘shifting [the] limits of life’ (p. 5, original emphasis). The content explores origins, circuiting past human, plant, or animal life with the ‘first’ life – life that may well have begun in the marine microbes that oceanographers search for on earth (and, we read later, perhaps on other planets too – chapter 5, ‘Extrarrestrial seas’, provides a gripping investigation into the reframing of the search for life on other planets). A key theme that Helmreich addresses in his book is the shifting meanings applied to nature and culture, and he translates this through a native/alien narrative that runs through his interlocutors’ representations of the oceanic, political, and symbolic landscapes with which they engage. An argument about the seas feeds directly into authoritative claims about property and rights, as debates about native and alien species become a vehicle for debating indigenous and exogenous claims to lands, seas, and territories. Using biology as a rubric often results in contradictory statements about natives and aliens, how species are introduced or destroyed, and what constitutes a ‘native’ or ‘alien’. Helmreich uses these contrasting categories to set up problems of definition – does ‘native species’ (of plant, microbe, person) refer to the period before 1778 (the date Captain Cook arrived in Hawai’i, an important fieldsite for Helmreich’s investigations) or 1,500 years ago? A microbial scientist takes the view that it is the former date that counts in this respect (p. 157). Colonization is as much a process applied to non-human life as to peoples, and reasserting control over plant species has led some to use this as a means to ‘return to the old Hawai’i’ (p. 158). The chapters present a picture of different elements of oceanographers’ practices, from the collection, analysis, and categorization of samples, to and from ‘blue-green’ capitalism, with which these oceanographers are ultimately entangled via often counterpoising indigenous and state-led concerns about property and the in/alienability of microbes that rest deep on ocean floors and in the mud-beds of the world’s seas. Chapter 2, ‘Dissolving the tree of life: alien kinship at hydrothermal vents’, takes the tree of life as a figure both literal and representative of how models of relationality are developed of microbes. Yet the ‘tree of life’ is less a tree, with a root and ever-complex branches, than an interlocking, criss-crossing chaotic rhizome. Oceanographer scientists know this and Helmreich did not have to draw it out from their work (though they did not have the philosophical rhizome figure to explain it but developed their own complex threaded ‘meshwork’ of representations). In fact one strength of the book’s analysis is the presentation of these scientists, not as socially aloof arbiters of truth who are encoding their work with rigid sexual and racial norms (the presentation most definitely pushed in Helmreich’s previous work on computer scientists), but as conscientious, politically liberal thinkers who refuse to speak on behalf of indigenous peoples, who steadfastly refuse to commit to rigid scientific models, whether these be modes of representation as demonstrated by their conflicts over the tree of life model, or racial ones, as illustrated not by the prevalence of peoples of colour on research ships or at conferences, but by the acknowledgement amongst the predominantly white oceanographers that certain minorities are sorely under-represented in microbial oceanography. Helmreich’s analysis demonstrates the challenging complexities that confront both ethnographer and oceanographer. Kathleen Richardson University College London Jensen, Casper Bruun & Kjetil Rödje (eds). Deleuzian intersections: science, technology, anthropology. vii, 278 pp., bibliogrs. Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books, 2010. £47.50 (cloth) This edited collection, divided into ten chapters, seeks to explore and understand how the work of Gilles Deleuze, alongside his collaborations with Félix Guattari, can be used to bring fresh and new insights in the areas of anthropology and science and technology studies (STS). For example, the editors suggest (chap. 1) that Book reviews 943 Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 16, 905-951 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2010 Deleuze’s injunction to focus on the relation ‘AND’ that exists between dualisms such as subjective ‘AND’ objective is useful in bringing together anthropology and STS. After all, the middle term ‘AND’ is for Deleuze the zone of indeterminacy where dualisms fold into one another in order to create new contingent assemblages, and this draws attention to how different heterogeneous materials within anthropology, STS, and Deleuzian studies might experiment with one another in new and innovative ways. But the book also uses Deleuze to rethink various dualisms within the social sciences and humanities more generally. As Brown notes in chapter 4, a Deleuzian approach to social questions prompts one to see how social objects do not merely operate on (e.g.) subjective and/or objective grounds but in fact how they slide across such dualisms through relative degrees of scale. Stengers (chap. 1) suggests that what such a theoretical position requires is a recognition that research should call forth an experimental moment where commonly held conventions are instead thought about as new creations arising within qualitatively distinct events. But what actually does this mean practically? One answer is given by Escobar and Osterweil’s analysis of global social movements (chap. 9). They argue amongst other things that Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of assemblage is a fruitful way to think about global social movements because assemblage highlights the way in which ‘wholes’ are constituted through the exercise of the capacities of its components. This is different from a theory that seeks to look for wholes formed by logical and necessary relations. And so, for example, many global social movements are characterized not by (dualist) centralized control and hierarchies through which necessary relations of command are established between organizers and activists, but, rather, by decentralized decision-making, self-organization, and diversity through which assemblages of different movement activists are mobilized by specific contingent encounters via non-necessary events. Therefore, and as Bowker argues in chapter 5, a Deleuzian standpoint highlights how objects fold into one another so that what might be considered outside (a non-active component) can also be considered as being inside (becoming an active component and acquiring emergent capacities via an event). In respect to anthropology, as Viveiros de Castro points out in chapter 10, Deleuze and Guattari’s thoughts on such matters are helpful because they help make sense, for example, of the way in which kinship formations enjoy the potential to enable people to work in something like an assemblage and so engage in a creative process of becoming-other as opposed to being subjected to the hierarchic verticality of alliances. Pickering (chap. 7) extends these themes in his empirical case study of the rise of cybernetics in Britain through Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of nomad sciences. For Pickering, ‘nomad sciences sweep in from the steppes to undermine and destabilize any settled order’ (p. 155). Accordingly, cybernetics in Britain was nomadic because it arose and developed outside of normal institutional support, lacked systematic modes of transmission, and mutated in its development. And the ethical advantages of choosing a Deleuzian approach are mapped out by Fraser (chap. 2), who argues that we need to rethink ethics in a manner that goes beyond the actual in order to access an ethics of the virtue or what is potential. My only slight reservation about this stimulating collection is that an array of Deleuzian terms are used which might leave some coming at Deleuze for the first time slightly bewildered. Perhaps this is because most of the authors seem to have a poststructuralist take on Deleuze and Guattari and therefore read them as creating new experimental ways of rethinking and writing about the social and natural. This is perhaps true of Deleuze and Guattari’s A thousand plateaus (1980), but when one reads their earlier work, Anti-Oedipus (1972), it is clear that they are indebted to more conventional theoretical positions, such as Marxism. Giving more space to such overlaps with conventional social theories would perhaps have opened up Deleuzian thought more concisely to first-timers. Nevertheless, this is an excellent edited collection that points to new lines of inquiry in the areas explored. The editors must congratulate themselves in pulling together a fine body of work. John Michael Roberts Brunel University Social anthropology Bourgois, Philippe & Jeff Schonberg. Righteous dopefiend. 359 pp., plates, bibliogr. London, Berkeley: Univ. California Press, 2009. £14.95 (paper) The latest in the ‘California Series of Public Anthropology’, this book is a photoBook reviews944 Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 16, 905-951 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2010 ethnographic study about homeless people who inhabit nooks and crannies surrounding Edgewater Boulevard in San Francisco. It is based on twelve years of involved and thorough fieldwork, much of it participant observation, undertaken by Bourgois and Schonberg, who accompanied these socially excluded people in their daily (and nightly) routines of creating relationships, making temporary domiciles in derelict places constantly threatened with total destruction by local authorities, and adapting to continually changing ways of making enough money to sustain addictions and thus make the ‘perpetual crisis’ of their lives more endurable. They accompanied them to welfare offices, hospitals, doctor appointments, family gatherings, funerals, and on day trips. The authors’ access to official records as well as to relatives and friends of the Edgewater homeless enabled them to verify their life stories and other recollections/ accounts and thus to expose and analyse the historical structural and institutional forces shaping and depleting their social relations and their bodies. The text contains fieldnotes (in italics) as well as over seventy black and white photos taken in a classic documentary style which dignify the Edgewater homeless in the appearance of their faces, clothes, abodes, and injuries, showing the immense value of serious, independent photography. Even though the homeless themselves felt they looked rather rough, they nevertheless used the pictures to decorate their makeshift homes built under freeways and other inner city spaces. The authors draw on conceptual equipment from thinkers such as Marx (‘lumpen subjectivities’), Foucault (governmentality, biopower, power at the ‘capillary’ level), Primo Levi (the ‘grey zone’), Bourdieu (symbolic violence, misrecognition, habitus) and others. Exploring racial differences, they delineate habituses – ‘outcast’ and ‘outlaw’ – that white and African-American homeless people have, which encompass styles of clothes, masculine dignity, personal hygiene, whether or not they sustain contact with family members, whether or not to beg. The ‘outcast’ habitus describes an injured passivity, feelings of failure, helplessness, and victimhood, whereas the ‘outlaw’ habitus is proactive and orientated towards enjoyment, adventure, and feeling high. For example, ‘crack’, a drug known for its euphoric high, was used more by African-American than white homeless men; likewise, injecting directly into veins, producing a stronger high than skin popping, was more favoured by AfricanAmerican than white homeless men, whose skin-popping practices meant they also suffered more frequently from abscesses, thereby confirming their feelings of being down on their luck. In chapter 1 the authors examine racism and the ethnic tensions dividing the Edgewater homeless who are thrown into close physical proximity to one another in their day-to-day lives as well as competing for the same scarce resources. Chapter 2 addresses gender relations through descriptions of Tina and her developing relationship with Carter. In chapter 3, the physical consequences of poverty, addiction, and homelessness are analysed within an elucidation of the public debates regarding harm reduction versus criminalization measures. The authors inspect childhood socialization experiences in chapter 4, detecting many ideological and cultural forces within families of origin, including nuclear families, which channelled people into violence, addictions, and homelessness. Legal, semi-legal, and illegal ways of working and earning money are discussed in chapter 5, and the trap of poverty and homelessness is shown through Carter’s vain efforts to earn enough money to pay for his detoxification. Parenthood is viewed in chapter 6, where it is shown that homeless people who have abandoned their children have done so partly in an effort to protect them against their own violence and addictions. In chapter 7, about male sexuality, homosexual relationships amidst homophobic men are discussed while, in chapter 8, Tina and Carter’s romantic relationship is charted. The last chapter describes the obstacle-laden processes homeless people go through when trying to access medical care and the consequences of worsening states of health as they fail to. The suffering that the Edgewater homeless experience in a multiplicity of ways, which finds expression in, inter alia, self-destructive behaviour and interpersonal violence, here is linked to wider social/cultural contexts that are less visible in everyday life. Refusing the binary ‘stucture/agency’, the authors use the term(s) ‘lumpen abuse/subjectivities’ to locate the class-like position occupied by homeless heroin users and the structural and personal violence to which this position has left them vulnerable, thus linking everyday subjectivity to how society is organized. The authors note that the Edgewater homeless, despite mutual betrayals and violence and the danger of living outdoors, share the Book reviews 945 Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 16, 905-951 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2010 identity of ‘righteous dopefiend’ and find refuge from a hostile world in the mutual solidarity of their community. Chantal Butchinsky Oxford Brookes University Cole, Sally (ed.). Rainy river lives: stories told by Maggie Wilson. lxv, 232 pp., maps, illus., bibliogr. London, Lincoln: Univ. Nebraska Press, 2009. £23.99 (paper) Maggie Wilson was an Ojibwe woman who lived on the Ontario-Minnesota border between 1879 and 1940. She was a storyteller who worked with anthropologist Ruth Landes, who paid Maggie Wilson one dollar for one day’s work. After Landes left the Ojibwe for New York, she persuaded Ruth Benedict to pay Maggie Wilson ‘fifteen cents per double-sided page’ of fieldnotes she sent to Columbia University. Maggie Wilson complied by telling ‘stories to her daughter, Janet, who wrote them down on a stenographer’s pad’. Maggie Wilson, with Janet’s help, sent to Columbia University ‘more than one hundred stories in forty letter-packages’. Columbia University deposited the letters in the National Anthropological Archives in the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. Sally Cole, who wrote a biography of Ruth Landes, knew about the letters and edited them for this book. She also provides a brief history of Maggie Wilson, explaining how the story of her family runs parallel to the history of the Ojibwe. At that time, the Ojibwe ‘were moved onto reserves, missionized, and taken into residential schools’ (p. xi). Like many Native North Americans, Maggie Wilson was a woman who knew about her world through dreams by which an elder could name and give an identity to a person, make someone fall in love, cure as well as cause illness, and make animals flee from a hunter, bringing starvation. The stories themselves provide a vivid picture of women and men suffering but also surviving great physical hardship because they could hunt moose and bear, fish, harvest wild rice, collect blueberries, gather maple syrup, build and repair canoes, sew skins with sinew, and build shelter. They contain accounts of women and men, some of whom Maggie Wilson knew and others whom she created out of her experience. The characters in her stories fall in love, deal with anger, aversion, compassion, jealousy, and loneliness and suffer sickness and death as they struggle to make their way through a changing and difficult world. Some of the highlights include stories of one woman living happily with two men, and two women living unhappily with one man. In my particular favourite, Maggie Wilson told how her aunt was marooned with her husband on the shore of a lake and given up for dead. The couple relied on their hunting and fishing skills to find food, build a good wigwam, and make clothes out of hides and sinew. Maggie’s aunt was pregnant at the time and went into labour, scaring her husband, who wept as she was about to give birth. Maggie Wilson’s aunt stoutly rebuked him by saying: ‘Shut up! And don’t sit there crying. Come here and help me as much as you can. It’s not you that is having the pains’. The stories present a woman’s perspective because, as Cole writes, they are the product of ‘perhaps the first “team” of a woman anthropology student [Ruth Landes] and a native woman consultant [Maggie Wilson] in the history of anthropology’. Cole contends that the stories represent an ‘insider’s account of those years of disruption and desolation’. In a footnote, she adds they are ‘metaphors of experience and lessons in living’. If so, they are heavily mediated metaphors because they are primarily in English with a sprinkling of Ojibwe words. They are told through Maggie Wilson’s daughter, Janet, who could write English and may have picked up Western conventions of storytelling in a residential school. As the combined efforts of a mother and a daughter, they draw on the memories of the older woman and present them through the newly acquired literary skills of the younger one. Nevertheless, this book has both historical and ethnographic value because it reveals more about the practices of the North American anthropologist working under the direction of Franz Boas and his students to document vanishing cultures and provides a fascinating insight into the world of Obijwe women. James M. Taggart Franklin and Marshall College Crook, Tony. Exchanging skin: anthropological knowledge, secrecy and Bolivip, Papua New Guinea. viii, 267 pp., maps, illus., bibliogr. Oxford: Univ. Press, 2007. £40.00 (cloth) Amongst the Min people of Papua New Guinea, ritual knowledge is not transferred lightly. Likened to ‘exchanging skin’, knowledge transfer is an intimate affair, creating personal bonds in a slow process of disclosure. Being conscious of the connections between village life, subsistence, and local history is a political tool which regulates power relations and displays them in Book reviews946 Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 16, 905-951 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2010 various initiation rituals. How, then, can anthropologists penetrate this realm? How can they represent both the knowledge and its transmission in an ethnography? When knowledge is deemed secret, its disclosure becomes unethical; when transfer is so personal, it resists a restructuring into a written text. This challenge has been glossed the ‘curse of the Min’, or the ‘Min problem’, a ‘graveyard of anthropological careers’ (p. 3). Crook’s monograph, in turn, challenges this notion by offering a novel way to understanding the Min from ‘within their skin’. Based on intensive, long-term fieldwork in the village of Bolivip, this approach illuminates both the problem and the knowledge system in question. Using the device of the ‘textual person’, Crook has created a textual rainforest in which the reader is introduced to the main elements of Bolivip knowledge transfer in the same way as a real person would learn. The book begins with everyday perception of Min life, sketchy and associative, deeply observed and yet on the very surface, climbing in the tree-tops of Crook’s analogy, where knowledge ‘appear[s] as an activity of the body and a circulating nurturant bodily substance’ (p. 24, emphasis removed). A glimpse of the table of contents reveals very little of the book; it is as if one is in an aeroplane looking down on an endless rainforest canopy. The monograph, shaped as a textual person, alternates between two kinds of ‘groves’: from Bolivip’s everyday life, we swing to the theories of James Weiner and Marilyn Strathern, who used Melanesian principles as structuring devices for their texts. Crook discloses his ancestors, he takes us into the tree-tops of his academic world – in Western imagery, this would be his ‘roots’, but the reader is encouraged to experience it as the ‘decomposition of two interpretative persons into their constituent parts’ (p. 33). Swinging back to Bolivip, we learn about subsistence and some of the principles of order: key metaphors like ‘base/root’ are introduced and fleshed out in villagers’ explanations as the dogma and pragma of knowledge transfer are analysed. The terms for skin (kal) and knowledge (kàl) are brought together, explaining the title of the book (p. 112). At this point, the reader is again pushed along to swing across to a different grove: the complicated personal relationships of Margaret Mead and her colleagues during their fieldwork amongst the Iatmul people of Papua New Guinea. Different academic traditions, forced to melt down somewhat within a tiny ‘mosquito room’, created new theory – Batesonian ecology, Meadian patterns, and Fortunian functionalism merged into their love lives together with their personalities. Knowledge is an interpersonal affair, gendered and contextual; it is most powerful when trafficked in a constructed form. A different construction, male initiation ritual in Bolivip, presents the next level of descent to the ‘roots’. Using the gardening metaphors of this chapter, Crook provides fertilizing ‘water’ for the exchange of knowledge by illuminating more principles of fertility and substance, embedded in the thick description of initiation ritual. Moving further down to the base, the next swing to the anthropologists’ ‘grove’ discusses Frederic Barth’s work amongst the neighbouring Baktaman as another example of the dynamics between local history, personalities, academic schools, ethnographic data, and resulting theory. By critically analysing Barth’s portrayal of Baktaman knowledge as peeling onion skins, Crook argues that ‘Barth’s ontological gaze keeps knowers and unknowers separate’ (p. 207), establishing dichotomous boundaries that were en vogue at his time but do not hold in the complexities of real life and lived experience. At this point, the reader has reached the end of the journey, stands at the base of the tree, and – hopefully – has exchanged skin with Crook and the people of Bolivip. The epilogue can be read as an account of the journey through the textual person; finally, the acknowledgements provide its ultimate roots. The enigma of the Min, well represented in this monograph, does not easily dissolve in a reader’s mind. ‘Exchanging skin’ with a textual person is an intense and at times confusing process, an acrobatic exercise of the mind. While Crook has successfully provided a path from the top to the bottom, he could have made the journey easier by using the author-year citation style instead of acronyms and by cutting down on the 350-word glossary, which an attentive reader frequently needs to consult as a dictionary. As in the Min’s slow, at times painful and exhausting initiation rituals, the reader is required to swing in the tree-tops, slowly finding the descent to the base while collecting pieces of an enigmatic jigsaw. At the end, it depends on the individual reader’s own history, personality, and overall context as knowledge is never complete without a recognition of the social relationships that it eclipses. Susanne Kuehling University of Regina Book reviews 947 Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 16, 905-951 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2010 Fischer, Johan. Proper Islamic consumption: shopping among the Malays in modern Malaysia. xix, 258 pp., illus., bibliogr. Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2008. £40.00 (cloth), £17.99 (paper) Set against the backdrop of 9/11, the author’s fieldwork in 2001 and 2002 straddles the political, social, and cultural milieu of coming to terms with Muslim Malay modernity and a radical shift in world politics, especially the role of Islam and Islamic politics. Fischer is not the first to study the Malay Muslim middle class in Malaysia, which has a fertile history of scholars, both from Malaysia and outside it, explaining the seeming contradiction of an increased Islamic religiosity along with increased materialism or consumption of all things modern. However, his rich ethnography provides vital clues as to how the state and individual consumers operate within the Islamic marketplace on a local level. He deconstructs the everyday consumer choices and decisions against a backdrop of the Islamization of society and the market. His fieldsite of Taman Tun Dr Ismail, a suburb of Kuala Lumpur, thus becomes a microcosm of the larger Malaysian politicoreligious landscape as situated ‘between mosque and market’ (p. 8). The major shift Fischer writes about is in what the middle class consumes. Since the Melayu Baru or New Malays’ spending spree and conspicuous consumption was slowed down by the 1997 financial meltdown, consumption patterns have shifted. Fischer argues that with the government’s shutting down of Al-Arqam, a sect that was charged with deviant teachings after it had grown in size and clout to become a threat to the government in the early 1990s and in the post 9/11 world, Muslim Malay consumers shifted at least part of their consumption to Islamic and Islamicized products. This shift was initially consumer-led but soon the government took over the reins (albeit with private capital injections and private ownership). The key word the author introduces into this debate is ‘halalization’, to describe the way the economy and subsequently society were transformed. The government learned the lessons of small-scale halalization from Al-Arqam and made it into a national project, with the certification of products and the places of consumption, that is, restaurants and fast-food outlets. Al-Arqam was closed down but allowed to trade under different names within the growing Islamic marketplace, so long as it focused on the economic and not the religious or political. The state therefore transformed Al-Arqam’s form of millennial capitalism into a national project. This became part and parcel of the ‘nationalization of Islam’, which in turn accelerated the halalization of the (moral) economy. ‘Halalization is an example of embedding Islam in a series of everyday practices that necessitate reference to fundamental principles or a moral codex’ (p. 63), remarks Fischer. The internalization of this process fosters good citizens, who ‘shop for the state’ (p. 34). The co-option of people, ideas, and modalities of being remains the state’s principal modus operandi and it would have been interesting to see who owns and operates other major halal-certified corporations that are profiting from the general halalization of the marketplace. The growing Islamic finance market and the introduction of Middle Eastern banks is largely absent, but could have provided a backdrop to the way consumption is financed. Fischer does highlight alternative economic activities such as multi-level marketing and direct selling that circumvent the perceived Chinese stranglehold on the economy. These lightly veiled pyramid schemes become an ethnic duty, which goes some way to explain their persistence and success, making this an especially nefarious interrelationship. The book does not include Badawi’s failed attempt at an Islamized pragmatic approach to fusing Islam with modernity, moderation and consumption. Fischer’s fieldwork predated Badawi and his Islamization (and halalization) project of ‘Islam Hadhari’, but its inclusion would have moved the debate beyond Mahathir’s more practical outlook and into the brave new world of a more comprehensive (maybe even more authentic) vision of an Islamic Malaysia. The ethnography nicely predicts and traces the development of the heightened Islamic visions and conceptualizations the government uses to Islamize and halalize society, the economy, and the state in response to Westernization, commodification, and the associated social ills. Thus Fischer argues: ‘[A]ssumptions about the empty core of commodities may provide the impetus for the entire process of halalization. Central to these ideas is the urge to make Islam control and fill these empty vessels properly’ (p. 194). The greatest achievement of this monograph lies in the way it weaves together a convincing narrative of the competing and conflicting ontologies of consumption and the different Book reviews948 Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 16, 905-951 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2010 modes of being a middle-class Malay Muslim. It is a useful addition to the canon of research on the middle class(es) in Malaysia and of Islamic consumption in general. Gerhard Hoffstaedter La Trobe University Gandolfo, Daniella. The city at its limits: taboo, transgression, and urban renewal in Lima. xv, 269 pp., illus., bibliogr. London, Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2009. £41.50 (cloth), £15.00 (paper) Drawing on theories of transgression and taboo in the exploration of modern public and political life in Lima, this book represents an original approach to the understanding of urban space and boundaries. It consists of an interweaving of theoretical essays and field diary entries based on the author’s fieldwork (between 1997 and 2005) in Lima, the city where Gandolfo grew up and later returned to after years abroad. Rather than focusing primarily on questions of urban migration and growth that have characterized many previous studies of urban change in this context, Gandolfo is concerned with understanding the dynamics of limits. She takes as her point of departure the protests among Lima’s street sweepers against the privatization of the city’s cleaning services during the government of Alberto Fujimori, and the project of beautification and modernization of the city centre by Lima’s mayor. A central theme is an incident when female street cleaners stripped during a protest in 1996, inspiring other demonstrators to do the same and putting an end to the police interference. In her explorations of this and other moments – past and present – in which the boundaries regarding nakedness, beauty, and filth become unsettled, Gandolfo draws on the work of Georges Bataille in addition to historical sources on the changing meanings of bureaucracy, architecture, and art in the city. The project of beautification of Lima’s historical centre reveals the discrepancies between representations of the city and its reality, as well as the contemporary and historical denial of social inequalities. Through the act of stripping in a situation of ‘pure despair’, the women conveyed these discrepancies by their crossing of limits. This act also demonstrated the interrelationship between the city and the human body which represents a central concern in the book. Seeing the stripping in a comparative framework regarding women’s use of motherhood – and nakedness – to make political claims, Gandolfo argues that the transgressive character of such acts is at once the reason why they are effective and the reason why they often fail to effect lasting change. This is not an original argument, but becomes more interesting when related to how the beautification of Lima’s centre was based on an idyllic image of Lima’s past, and how the city’s convulsive history is continually reconfigured into a version that under-communicates racial and sexual violence and class conflict. Such an idyllic image – holding in magical balance its tendency towards excess – can be seen as part of a modern process of identity-making dependent on the public demonstration of beauty and power. Gandolfo’s exploration of urban boundaries through an emphasis on affect and the senses is characterized by an eloquent and visual language. Despite the author’s fine-tuned observations and often mind-tangling theoretical reflections, however, many aspects of her analysis remain scattered and somewhat fragmented. Empirical descriptions and analysis are often not integrated and her argumentation is rather implicit. Some of the questions Gandolfo poses are both wonderfully put and highly intriguing – for instance, whether the ‘sovereign’ is really a mother – but she does not always follow these questions to their consequences. The more or less direct use of the field diary – often closely linked to the author’s own experiences and family relationships – makes parts of the text unnecessarily detailed and anecdotal, although contributing to bring her own position closer to the reader and making her procedures of discovery extremely transparent. Gandolfo is inspired by the Peruvian novelist and anthropologist Luis Arguedas regarding the use of the diary and the stress on subjectivity and artifice in the creation of realist effects as ‘absolutely true and absolutely imagined’. In many ways, Gandolfo makes herself into the key informant of her own study, and the book thus illustrates central questions about ethnographic fieldwork, the significance of subjectivity, and the extent to which we all use ourselves as the key informant of our studies. However, this stress on the author’s own experience of Lima after years abroad – in combination with a rather limited use of interviews – gives an impression that the book primarily represents the perspective of the cosmopolitan middle class. Therefore the notion of ‘limits’ is given much of its meaning through the author’s own positioning, while generally excluding the perspectives of people who Book reviews 949 Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 16, 905-951 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2010 experience these limits from other positions. As a result, the experiences and perspectives of people who are differently positioned are treated as given, and therefore as somehow determined. It is particularly in connection to this and related challenges that the book makes an interesting contribution – not only to understandings of the dynamics of taboo and transgression, but also to discussions about subjectivity and the relationship between ethnography and autobiography. Cecilie Vindal Ødegaard University of Bergen Hughes-Freeland, Felicia. Embodied communities: dance traditions and change in Java. xv, 286 pp., figs, tables, illus., bibliogr. Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books, 2009. £45.00 (cloth) This book is at once a superb ethnography, grounded in a long-term case study conducted between 1982 and 1999 into the dance traditions of the Sultan’s court in Yogyakarta, and a significant contribution to the theorization of culture, society, and the body during a period of far-reaching change. Felicia Hughes-Freeland addresses two prevalent themes in dance anthropology: the politics of dance and the cultural interpretation of movement. The result is a captivating investigation, densely packed with acute ethnographic observations and sensitive personal impressions, as much as with theoretical considerations and academic references. Although she makes use of a Western conceptual apparatus to discuss the theorization of the body while referring to scholarly debates about dance in Java, her analytical framework is shaped by emic categories of the person and local interpretations of dance forms and movement. Dance matters to anthropology because communities use it to represent themselves to themselves and to others. It is both a representational system and an embodied practice. Accordingly, Hughes-Freeland approaches dance from a double perspective: as movement that relates to the performance of everyday action, and as formal choreographic conventions associated with power centres. There are thus two main issues in her study of court dance in Yogyakarta. One is a fine-grained exploration of the inner world of Javanese dancing, while the other deals with its transformation from a court heirloom to an Indonesian national art form and further to a tourist commodity. In order to understand dance movement through her own body, Hughes-Freeland invested extensive time and effort in learning how to dance, which she confesses to having found extremely difficult, as the Javanese dancer has to balance concentration with ease, and strength with grace. She gradually realized that learning Javanese dance is ‘to learn how to assert presence by restraining movements within the limits of one’s own body space’ (p. 94). This personal involvement allowed her to fit into the local social scene. In so doing, she experienced for herself how the embodiment of Javanese values in court dance form endows practitioners with skills and insights relevant for appropriate behaviour in social interactions. In Java, dancing is an empowering competence, as court dance movement is valued not only for itself, but also for its instrumental power to produce effects in the social world. However, the effects produced by Javanese dance have changed since the founding of the court of Yogyakarta in the eighteenth century. Javanese court dance has become an Indonesian art form, integrated into the national policies dealing with cultural development and education. Hughes-Freeland investigates the resulting relationship between the court’s performance traditions and national cultural politics. While pointing the tensions between national policies to preserve traditions and to promote tourism, she maintains that the commoditization of Javanese court dance on the market as a tourist attraction has not obliterated the former relationship between expression and spirituality. The court repertoire came out of the court walls in 1918 with the foundation, on the Sultan’s instructions, of a dance school for the purpose of promoting court dance as a form of education. The new school initiated practices that would shape court dance and allow it to survive as classical dance after independence, including standardizing dance movement, nomenclature, and choreography, and its innovations fed back into court practice. Later on, in the 1970s, as the court troupe was leaving for a tour of Europe, a select team of court retainers and dance masters formulated the basic principles of the art of dancing in Yogyakarta. With a view to giving a consistent account of court dance to foreign journalists and other outsiders, they converted an oral tradition into a written one, drawing on erstwhile practices to create a modern aesthetic. The definition of Javanese court dance as an Indonesian classical tradition that could be separated from its original context and developed Book reviews950 Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 16, 905-951 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2010 accordingly made it possible to commercialize it on the tourist maket. By the 1980s the court no longer had a monopoly on its own traditions. The patronage of the court dance had extended to dance associations and academies, as well as to hotels and other commercial venues. Although the changes of patronage and context for performance of Yogya-style classical dance have at times led to tourist art, in most other cases they result in abbreviated restagings that replicate traditional forms for non-traditional audiences. Even if it is rather demanding, Hughes-Freeland’s study makes for highly rewarding reading. Yet, it is unfortunate that she did not take into account the social and political resurgence of Islam which shook Indonesia in the 1990s, and particularly since President Suharto’s resignation in 1998. Regrettably, for a book published in 2008, her investigation stops in 1999, just as this country was undergoing a tremendous upheaval. Michel Picard Centre Asie du Sud-Est, CNRS-EHESS Book reviews 951 Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 16, 905-951 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2010