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the brain organically-as a concrete social organin place of the metaphorical social organism of hissocial anthropological teachers. Having subsumedthe organic metaphor with the force of metaphor it-self, Turner must needs pose the question of its con-crete substrate in the most literal terms possible.

Symbols that Stand for Themselves.ROYWAG-NER. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1986. 150 pp., notes, figures, references.$27.00(cloth), $9.95 (paper).iuLLioMARANHAORice University

This book develops further the argument intro-duced in the authors previous, The fnvention ofCulture (University of Chicago Press, 19811, ac-cording to which symbols have a certain autonomyin relation to their users, and culture resultsfrom theinterplay between humans and symbols. In thepresent work, Roy Wagner argues that meaning is aperception elicited by trope. He criticizes Saus-sures suggestion of the linguistic sign as a media-tion between the perception of a referent and theconception of an image, and claims that the gameof culture consists of mediating referential cod-ings and perceptual images, on one hand fol-lowing the necessities of collective life, and on theother hand enduring the expansion of symbols hol-ographic properties. Like many anthropologistswho have recently turned to poetics, semiotics, andaesthetics for an alternative understandingof sym-boland culture, Wagner proposes a redefinition ofperception along the lines of these three spheresof discourse. The mainstay of his argument is thatno level of symbolization can be assigned a found-ing role; it follows that the invention of meaning sa processof unrelenting ransformation, and he pro-vides us with a description of such a process. Thehousehold question addressed to the proponents ofnegative dialectics or of nihilistic criticism is perti-nent here too: is such a description of the processintended as definitive? I f the answer is yes, doesit not insinuate itself as foundational of culture andsymbolism?The intellectual strategy of Wagners musingabout the meaningof meaning is reminiscent ofBenjamin Lee Whorfs quest for the specificity ofmeaning in phrasing in each language. However,for the author under review, meaning in the gameof culture is all too definite for words, and lan-guage can thus bemisleading to our understandingof cultural meanings. He focuses on those transfor-mations that take place in the interval betweenword and object. His triangle diagrams remind usof Ogden and Richards seminal treatment of sig-nification (The MeaningofMeaning, 1923) and histrichotomous division of tropes brings to mindPeirces theory of symbols, but Wagner wishes tograsp at once both something more specific thanthe relation between referent and signifier andsomething more generic than the process of symbolformation. To accomplish this goal, he invokes ex-amples of the habu ritual among the Daribi, previ-ously studied by him, and of what he calls the

Western Core Symbol, as well as a redefined no-tion of perception stemming from a dialecticalrelation between body and mind, sensorium andthought, or practical and symbolic reasons.Perception can betraced back to the Indo-Eu-ropean root kap-, meaning to grasp. In tsOldEn-glish and Old Germanic forms, it maintained thisnotion of grasping, as well as in the Latin capere,to take, seize or catch. Inaddition to such a con-sistent etymological pedigree, making it a signifierof the ideas of grasping, holding, seizing, or catch-ing, perception, once appropriated by psychol-ogy, became indelibly marked by its associationwith the sensorium. This semantic weight rendersWagners task Herculean and makes his readerwonder whether his choice should not have fallenupon another word, perhaps aesthetics or po-etics rather than perception. But he cannot beblamed for an unthoughtful choice of words, sincethe key to understandinghistext resides in the stylehe employs and in a carefully pondered choice ofwords. He writes as if teasing language, interspers-ing segments of textual scholarship with popularsayings, reversing common-sense statements, inshort, making frequent useoffigures of speech suchas oxymorons, chiasmuses, and tautologies.

In the conclusion of the book, Wagner brings thebodyand the brain into the argument, showing howthe neurological knowledge of the brain and the se-miotics of symbols fit with one another in wayswhich parallel the dialectic between language andsexuality, the symbolic and physical links of the hu-man network which are the defining tropes of thehuman condition.

The background of Wagners discourse resides instructural and symbolic anthropology which he re-forms by imagining a structuralism without struc-ture and a symbolism without symbols as units, atthe same time kneading structuralism and symbol-ism into the shape of the semiotic study of meta-phor. Nevertheless, he remains attached to thepos-itivity of symbols and fears the dissolving conse-quences relativity may have in culture. Relativityhas the capacity of rendering natives and ethnog-raphers self-conscious of meaning, and once suchself-consciousness sturned upon the meanings onelives by, culture becomes endangered. He writes,The real peril posed by the exotic isnot that of self-estrangement, but the possibility of a relativizingself-knowledge hat such estrangement implies (p.182).

Masks, Transformation, and Paradox.A. DAVIDNAPIER (with a foreword by Rodney Need-ham). Berkeley: university of California Press,1986.mi +282 pp., plates, notes, blbliog-raphy, index. $40.00 (cloth).

IAMES 1. PEACOCKUniversityof North Carolina at ChapelHillHis style is accretive and his contentions are de-lineated by way of slow divagations. . . statesRodney Needham in his preface to this work (p.

xviii). That is so.Napiers sentences are lucid, thedocumentation careful, but the argument is com-

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plex and does not, so far as I can see, reduce to asimple logical or functional thesis thatiseasily sum-marized.

As Needham states further, The substantive fo-cus seems plain enough: it is the apotropaic facialiconography epitomized in the Gorgon head ofclassical Greece, and its possible connection withthe ideology and plastic arts of India and Bali (p.xviii). Agreed. Most of the book, beginning withchapter 4, is concerned to trace iconographic andsometimes functional, cognitive, or other parallels,or historical connections, between the symbolismof the Gorgons head in the myth of Perseus andanalogous symbols ranging along the Indo-Euro-pean spectrum from Greece to India to lndianizedBali.

What these connections mean is difficult totease out, and the author does not press a singleinterpretation. He favors a Needhamite thesis thatcertain mask iconographies constitute autonomousimages to which the human mind is naturally dis-posed (p. xxv). Behind this commonality of im-ages, though, he infers a certain attitude towardsmasks and masking: this great attention in polythe-ism to the idea of appearance. Monotheism, ex-emplified in Christianity, sharply distinguishesmask from self, persona from person, in a way thatpolytheism refuses to do, so that in the polytheisticcultures, including those of Greece and India, themask stands for reality in a way our culture nolonger comprehends. The reality that the mask andindeed a variety of grotesque representations of theface (beginning with two types of facessowell de-fined as to be archetypal in preclassical Greece,the Satyr and the apotropaic Gorgon [p. xxivl) ex-press is an interplay of ambivalent forces both nat-ural and supernatural, good and evil, that are saidto be unified in a distinctive balance in polytheistictraditions. And he considers various implications ofsuch a conception-f the ambivalent mask/self-for understanding the cosmology/psychologyof thispolytheistic stream, where ambivalence is a pri-mary cosmological factor.As is suggested in both foreword and preface, thiswork i s part of an endeavor guided by RodneyNeedham: the search for universal or general pat-terns or archetypes of human experience (see, forexample, Rodney Needham, P rimordial Charac-ters, Charlottesville, VA: The University Press ofVirginia, 1978).More particularly, the work turns tothe question of delineating representations of thepersonality, of identity (for a very different effort inthis regard, also Needhamite, see Michael G.Kenny, The Passion of Ansel Bourne: Multiple Per-sonality in American Culture, Washington, DC:Smithsonian Institution Press, 1986).While bearingon psychological issues, the approach is radicallydifferent from that normally pursued in psychologyor psychological anthropology, for it is based on acomparative analysis of symbols in their icono-graphic patterning with only rare and cautious in-ferences about psychological processes that thesemay reflect. It is not that Napier restrictshisdata tothe iconographic; his scholarship s remarkably ec-lectic, ranging from classics to neurology (thoughwith omission of some possibly pertinent ethno-graphic studies of drama, ritual, and contemporaryBali). Rather, his style is to elaborate the intricacies

of the iconographic and possibly cosmological andhistorical interconnections of the symbols, whileletting these data and analyses speak (or not speak,for those readers who prefer the plainly spoken) tothe psychological/cultural assertions that frame theargument.

However one takes the books analysis, it is cer-tainly a work of impressive scholarship and origi-nality, an alluring light to those who would regainanthropologys cornparativist birthright while ex-ploring the profundities of human experience.

Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Be-douin Society. LILA ABU-LUGHOD. Berkeley:Universityof California Press, 1987. xix +317pp., plates, notes, appendix, bibliography, in-dex. $38.00 (cloth).CLlFFORD CEERJZinstitutefor Advanced Study

Poetry, Auden said elegizing Yeats, makes noth-ing happen. Whatever the force that dictum may ormay not have for the modern West, where poetryhas tended to become an intellectual luxury goodor a cultural avocation, it certainly does not applyto the Bedouins of the Egyptian Western desert. AsLila Abu-Lughod shows in this brilliant study ofmoral constraint and personal expression amongsome 160-odd farmers and herders settled along theMediterranean west of Alexandria, the making ofverses and the reciting of them can, in a societywhere the spoken word remains more than a merevehicle of communication, be a most conse-quential business. Among the Awlad Ali-aspread-out tribe of ex-nomads that stretches over500 kilometers of scrub tree desert-the formationof identity, the definition of sentiment, and the or-ganization of power all respond to it. In Abu-Lu-ghods book, detailed, immediate, and superblycomposed, it is possible to see not only how this isso but what it implies, something of a sea change,for the study of culture.

The main axis of Abu-Lughods analysis is a con-trast between t wo quite different sorts of discoursepresent among the Awlad Ali: a public, strongly as-sertive, rhetoric of male honor and female modestycentering around anger, dominance, strength, andautonomy, and a private, retiring, carefully obliquerhetoric of personal affection, centering aroundgrievance, dependence, weakness, and loss. Poetryplays a role in both discourses, but it is in the latter,where the capacity to say and not say something atthe same time is of particular value, that its force iscritical. In the brief, elusive, oral lyrics about aban-donment, jealousy, love, and longing (like J apa-nese haiku in form.. . ike the American blues incontent and emotional tone [p. 271) that, awayfrom the ears of men, women exchange with oneanother likeso many furtive gifts, a whole ideology,counter to the official one of pride and decorum,and subversive of it, is formed. Poetry is. . .thediscourse of opposition to the system and of defi-ance of those who representit: it is antistructure ustas it is antimorality (p. 251).

The general outline of Awlad Ali social life is not

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