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Book reviews

Saraswati Raju, M. Satish Kumar and Stuart

Corbridge (eds)

Colonial and Post-colonial Geographies of

India

New Delhi: Sage, 2006.

356pp., £35.00 hardback (ISBN 0761934367).

In August 2007, as I sat reading Colonial and

Post-colonial Geographies of India, every-

where around me were programmes com-

memorating 60 years of Indian independence.

Discussions of the impact of British Colonial-

ism on India and narratives of the continuities

and changes in India in the post-Independence

period were on the airwaves and in the

newsprint. London was also celebrating a

three-month long festival of Indian-inspired

cultural events entitled ‘India Now’ so that the

ambivalence and the fluidity of the hyphen in

the post-colonial were everywhere apparent.

This volume echoed these concerns but it also

provided theoretical depth and a geographical

bite to them.

For those interested in the history of

geographical knowledges, the opening intro-

duction is one of the highlights of the book,

offering as it does an overview of the discipline

in India. It begins by providing some glimpses

into how Geography was ‘being produced as a

discipline at about the same time that the

British Raj was reaching its apogee’ (p. 14) and

continues on to explore how the subject and its

concerns for ‘place-making, spatiality and

territoriality’ (p. 19) developed in post-

Independence India.

The other fifteen chapters explore these

issues in specific contexts, which are central to

contemporary Indian realities. In Chapter 2

Satish Kumar explores the ways in which

colonial classifications enabled administrators

to locate and confine individuals to particular

parts of the city. Alison Blunt (in Chapter 3)

outlines how lineage acts to unsettle narratives

of belonging among Anglo-Indians.

The precipitation of conflicts between Hindus

and Muslims over the siting of a temple/mos-

que is discussed by Corbridge and Simpson,

while the struggles over land played out along

the boundaries between India and Pakistan are

the focus of interest for Robert Bradnock.

Together these first four chapters explore some

of the ways in which ‘home’ is summoned up in

the context of colonial and post-colonial

contestations over caste, gender, religion and

territory.

Several of the chapters focus on the

relationship between space and economic

development in India. For instance, From-

hold-Eisebith’s research on the role of infotech

industries suggests that the benefits of the ICT

miracle in India have been spatially uneven.

Raju highlights the importance of regional

patriarchies in shaping the form that caste/

class divisions take in access to vocational

training and to the labour markets that these

open up. The dense fieldwork that forms the

basis for Chari’s chapter on social labour in

Tiruppur makes his one of the most interesting

chapters in the volume. The material nature

of the product—knitwear—and the complex

Social & Cultural Geography, Vol. 9, No. 7, November 2008

ISSN 1464-9365 print/ISSN 1470-1197 online/08/070831-10

DOI: 10.1080/14649360802389896

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social interactions that shape the organisation

of labour in the industry weaves spaces as

varied as the rural hinterlands of Tiruppur and

the markets where the knitwear is sold into

‘this yarn’. Places in India are made and

unmade through these narratives of labour.

The desire for modernity and for social

change in the post-independence years is a

theme that resonates across many chapters in

this volume. It finds the most evocative

expression in the work of Jeffrey et al. where

the authors try to grapple with the reasons

why young men, who seem to have gained

little through formal education in terms of

employment, still believe in the importance of

education. The importance of attending to

modernity as aspiration and desire and the

contradictions this brings forth in terms of

political ecologies, spatial planning and urban

governance also reverberate in various other

chapters in this text.

Almost all the contributions are by geogra-

phers, many of whom are located in the UK

and the USA. The authors have researched

and written widely on India and they draw on

aspects of this much longer engagement in

their contributions. However, these, for me,

also unfortunately, encapsulate two

deficiencies of the book. First, I would have

been interested in seeing more chapters by

geographers located within Indian institutions

included the volume, particularly those from

regional universities, who will, undoubtedly,

have their own take on Indian geographies.

Bringing their work together with those of

authors in the current line-up may have helped

to forge new kinds of geographies of India.

Second, many of the chapters feel like

abstracts or partial insights into the much

larger bodies of work that the authors have

produced elsewhere. The renditions in this

volume feel condensed and some chapters may

be difficult to follow for those without these

intertextual insights. And as the book is not

divided into separate parts with part introduc-

tions there is not enough frisson to make

the whole greater than the sum of its parts.

However, this second shortcoming means that

this volume can equally be seen as a window

into wider literatures for those beginning

research on geographies of India, while the

former deficiency could be conceived as an

invitation to write the sequel to this volume.

Parvati Raghuram

Geography Department

The Open University

q 2008 Parvati Raghuram

K.D.M. Snell

Parish and Belonging: Community, Identity

andWelfare in England andWales, 1700–1950

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

xxiii þ541pp., £60 hardback (ISBN 0-521-

86292-2).

It is telling that in the preface to Parish and

Belonging Professor Snell pays tribute to his

Vice Chancellor at Leicester, Professor Bob

Burgess, for granting him the necessary leave

to complete this wonderful book. Snell,

Professor of Rural and Cultural History at

the renowned Centre for English Local

History, has an enviably track-record of

producing ground-breaking scholarly mono-

graphs (Snell 1985; Snell and Ell 2000), but his

latest magnum opus, in terms of the variety of

themes and sources deployed, is his most

extraordinary and satisfying achievement yet.

Such books require serious investment: finan-

cial, time-spent and effort expended. Indeed,

the sheer physical effort in producing 541

stylishly rendered pages is something to

marvel at. Whilst the accepted modus oper-

andi of most historians is rather different to the

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journal-driven activities of geographers, it is

none the less a glowing testament to seemingly

enlightened Leicester that Snell was allowed to

even consider writing such an impressively

weighty tome.

But enough of politics. Essentially Parish

and Belonging is an attempt to demonstrate

the centrality of the English and Welsh parish

to everyday life and hence to individuals’ sense

of place and attachments. In an age where

centralization and globalization have suppo-

sedly undermined the ways in which the places

in which we are born and reside help to

profoundly shape our identities, it is impera-

tive to ask how local communities operated

and how senses of belonging developed and

have subsequently declined. Whilst Snell

acknowledges that senses of belonging have

not been completely eroded—witness the

profoundly articulated attachments to football

clubs, the centrality of community to

soap operas and even the rise of virtual online

communities through websites such as Bebo or

Facebook—English and Welsh communities

are no longer organized around ‘the natural

capacity of the human body and spirit’ (p. 12),

we are now less rooted, our conception and

experience of community more diffuse. In

moments of uncertainty and despair we may

still think of ‘home’, but invariably the place

we think of is as much a hybrid imaginary of

family, friends and a dwelling as much as it is a

street or a community let alone a parish.

Snell’s analysis is not exclusively concerned

with the parish, a unit of ecclesiastical and

civil administration that now provokes

notions of antiquarianism rather than a

profound sense of belonging, though central

to all of the themes explored in the seven

substantive chapters that comprise Parish and

Belonging. Chapter 2, utilizing a startling

array of different literary and folklore studies-

derived sources, offers a wonderfully lucid and

thought-provoking account of the ways in

which belonging was performed through

attacks, both verbal and physical, on those

from outside the parish (‘foreigners’). This

‘culture of local xenophobia’ was as much an

expression of attachment to the parish in the

face of threats to its continued existence and

success as it was a more reactionary attempt to

defend the resources of the parish, including

the demand for labour, against the invasive

influence of those not ‘of the parish’.

Chapters 4 and 8 utilize somewhat different

archives, specifically information generated by

demographic events in the form of the wording

of entries in marriage registers and the wording

of tombstones, respectively. Whilst ostensibly

neither source would appear to offer rich

pickings for subtle analyses of local attach-

ments and have thus hitherto been under-

utilized, Snell exploits both in methodologically

innovative ways to support an extraordinary

thesis. The number of endogamous marriages,

that is to say weddings in which both partners

were from the same parish, actually steadily

increased throughout the eighteenth and early

nineteenth century whilst those proclaiming

their attachment to their parish on their

tombstone also increased throughout the eight-

eenth century, peaking in the final years of the

nineteenth century. Thus, as Jack Langton

(1984) suggested some twenty years ago, the

industrial and agricultural revolutions did not

lead to declining local attachments but instead

tended to further focus attentions and fix

allegiances to the locality.

Chapters 3, 5 and 6 explore the ways in

which attachments were rooted in legal

expressions and local practices concerned

with the relief of the poor, both under the

almost exclusively parochially administered

Old Poor Law (c.1598–1834) and the union-

focused and centrally administered New Poor

Law (1834–1929). Chapter 3 returns to the

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archive central to Snell’s first book (1985), the

records created through the enforcement of

the so-called Laws of Settlement which tied

individuals to parishes for the purposes of

defining welfare responsibilities. Despite the

legal roots of settlement and the fact that it

was often used to throw the poor from pillar to

post, or rather parish to parish, it nevertheless

helped to reinforce a sense of not only

belonging but also a deeply entrenched sense

of mutual responsibility and care. Chapters 4

and 5 break entirely new ground in suggesting

that the New Poor Law, far from breaking

away from the old parish-based system,

remained remarkably parochially entrenched.

In most poor law unions the vast majority of

individuals continued to receive their relief not

in the confines of the iconic union workhouses

but instead in their settled parish. The over-

seers of the poor also continued to assess and

collect poor rates at the level of the parish, a

system which persisted until 1927. Thus even

a measure which is oft noted as the first act of

British state centralization was in actuality still

rooted in the ancient parish system.

Chapter 7 in many ways stands alone from

the other chapters in terms of thematic content

and style. The examination of the creation of

‘new’ parishes in the eighteenth, nineteenth

and twentieth centuries has, as Snell suggests,

been hitherto neglected. One only need walk

through any English south-coast seaside resort

or any northern city to see the striking, iconic

impact that the creation of new parishes had

upon the built landscape. This reviewer, a

native of Canterbury and Bristol graduate, can

easily mark out the new parishes of Brighton

by the dramatic brick-built Victorian churches

that pockmark the undulating landscape but

cannot, with hand on heart, mark out the

boundaries of the sixteen ancient parishes of

compact Canterbury or the eighteen parishes

of old Bristol. However, whilst most of the

new parishes of the nineteenth and twentieth

centuries had all the iconic attributes of their

more venerable neighbours and fulfilled more

or less the same ecclesiastical roles, they did

not have the same civil functions. Thus whilst

the idea of the parish remained as vital and

vibrant as ever, in other senses new parishes

undermined deeper senses of attachment being

‘stripped threadbare of many earlier parochial

functions’ (p. 445).

There may be a wide array of other spatial

units to which attachments were also formed—

the street, the hamlet, the county—but none

elicited such deeply held feelings and prompted

such public displays of belonging. As Snell

states, amongst the thousands of memorials he

has recorded he has yet to find a gravestone

proudly pronouncing ‘of this poor law union’

(p. 481). Furthermore, we could also analyse

parochial attachments through the letters of

emigres, the tattoos and graffiti of convicts and

transportees, or even through individuals’

diaries. But none of this takes anything away

from Snell’s chosen foci. Indeed, it is a

testament to Snell’s thoroughness and imagin-

ation that a topic which had hitherto been so

little studied will now in all likelihood assume a

central position in social and cultural studies.

Provocative, original and clearly articulated

books always make an impact. Parish and

Belonging is one such book. It demands the

attention of all social and cultural geographers

whose research attempts to understand the

dynamics of place and attachment. It is, in

conclusion, a rich, stimulating book.

References

Langton, J. (1984) The industrial revolution and the

regional geography of England, Transactions of the

Institute of British Geographers 9: 145–167.

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Snell, K.D.M. (1985) Annals of the Labouring Poor:

Social Change and Agrarian England. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.

Snell, K.D.M. and Ell, P. (2000) Rival Jerusalems: The

Geography of Victorian Religion. Cambridge: Cam-

bridge University Press.

Carl J. Griffin

School of Geography, Archaeology and

Palaeoecology

Queen’s University Belfast

q 2008 Carl J. Griffin

Rane Willerslev

Soul Hunters. Hunting, Animism, and Person-

hood Among the Siberian Yukaghirs

Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.

xvi þ229pp., $60.00/£35.00 hardback (ISBN

978-0-520-25216-5), $24.95/£14.95 paper-

back (ISBN 978-0-520-25217-2).

It is a fruitful practice for geographers to

occasionally contemplate understandings of

human–environment relationships that differ

significantly from their own—indeed this is a

part of the process of decolonizing the

discipline. In examining hunting as a way of

life among the Yukaghirs, an indigenous

people of northeastern Russia, Rane Will-

erslev, a Danish anthropologist, offers a

intriguing look at emplaced understandings

of ‘nature’ and ‘humanity’ vastly dissimilar

from those held by many of us. Willerslev

spent a total of eighteen months living and

hunting with the Yukaghirs of the upper

Kolyma watershed, a group that has main-

tained, and recently increased, its dependence

on subsistence hunting (and a group whose

language, tellingly, has no word for ‘nature’).

As little literature is available on the Yuka-

ghirs, and most is in Russian, Soul Hunters’

review of this literature provides a valuable

source of information, all the more so in that

Willerslev reads the existing works describing

this people with a highly critical eye. His

arguments offer richly theoretical and highly

original reinterpretations of animism and

personhood; he also makes cogent obser-

vations regarding Yukaghir epistemologies

that upset common Western understandings

of the environment.

Animists’ assertions that persons may adopt

various forms, such as humans, animals,

plants, or rivers, and that persons may also

move between these forms, are most often

interpreted as metaphorical in current anthro-

pological literature. Willerslev condemns this

interpretation as ‘arrogant’ and mostly reveal-

ing of the dualism of Western thinking (p. 182).

He argues for a distinct understanding of

personhood in animistic societies: ‘person-

hood, rather than being an inherent property

of people and things, is constituted in and

through the relationships into which [Yuka-

ghirs] enter’ (p. 21). Yukaghir hunters attempt

to think like, indeed almost become the animal

which they hunt, entering a personal, and

indeed highly sensual relationship with their

prey. Setting out to hunt, they seek to

‘dehumanize’ themselves, through purging of

human smells and ceasing to speak in human

language. They adopt the bodily movements

and sounds of their prey. Through successful

mimicry of their prey, they seduce it. The

boundary between species is permeable (as are

the boundaries between the living and the

dead). Yet in this very permeability dangers

lurk—a hunter too effectively adopting the

identity of his prey may lose himself to the

animal in a love relation. Killing, while

providing food, also terminates the seduction

before it goes too far. It is mimesis that the

hunter seeks, and here Willerslev refutes the

Heideggerian assertion that reflexivity and

involvement are mutually exclusive: such

mimesis demands ‘self-involvedness’ and

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‘world-involvedness’ simultaneously (p. 23).

The Yukaghir hunter ‘assumes the viewpoint,

senses, and sensibilities of his prey while still

remaining aware of himself as a human hunter

with the intention of killing it’ (p. 26). Taking

on an animal’s identity is thus ‘not really about

moving from one point of view to another.

Rather, it is about not surrendering to a single

point of view’ (p. 110). Hunters choose the

contexts in which they traverse species

boundaries, and once they return from the

hunt, perform re-humanizing activities, such

as talking.

Yukaghir knowledge of their world is

related to doing: ‘people’s knowledge, [includ-

ing] about spiritual matters resides primarily

in their activities rather than discourse’ (p. 58).

Knowledge gained experientially is seen as

superior to that passed on orally. Willerslev

observes that Yukaghir hunters speak only

about their own experiences, and avoid

generalizing from these. Indeed, language is

seen as interfering with the acquisition of

knowledge. A child, the re-incarnation of a

deceased relative, holds the knowledge of that

relative at birth, but loses her or his ability to

effectively access this knowledge when learn-

ing to speak. S/he slowly regains it through

practical activities over a lifetime. Speaking,

however, does play an important role in

separating humans from other animals—it is

how Yukaghirs can reflect on an activity from

a peculiarly human perspective. Willerslev

also observes that dreaming is an important

way of experientially acquiring knowledge—

dreaming is not seen as less real than or even

separate from being awake, but as a con-

tinuum of consciousness during which a

person can gain experiences and with them

knowledge.

In 1997 I visited the village, Nelemnoe,

from which Willerslev set out with hunters,

and heard some of the (hi)stories he recounts

in Soul Hunters regarding shifting person-

hoods and reincarnations. I also encountered

the same diverse reactions to Nikolai Shalugin,

a local Yukaghir leader who initiated an

obshchina, or post-socialist indigenous coop-

erative unit that inherited a portion of the

former state-farm’s materials and equipment

upon the latter’s dissolution at the end of the

Soviet period. Local officials berated Shalugin

for irresponsibly squandering this wealth,

giving it away to relatives and other villagers,

so that by 1997 the obshchina owned nothing.

Yet numerous Yukaghir villagers explained

that he was misunderstood and ‘not a bad

man’. Willerslev explores this as an unavoid-

able paradox. Hunters have always shared

their harvest. Storing meat brings bad luck: the

animal spirits which sanction animals to be

seduced will not provide if meat is available.

Humans are entitled to prey; animal master

spirits are obliged to share with hunters who

treat their prey and the animal master spirits

respectfully. This entitlement to a part of what

others ‘possess’ is not limited to meat,

however: Yukaghir villagers felt equally

entitled to demand tractor parts, tools, etc.,

from Shalugin, as rightfully theirs when

needed. Shalugin’s ‘over-generosity’, dispar-

aged as poor leadership, was required by

Yukagir norms. Indeed, Willerslev notes that

Yukaghirs differentiate themselves from other

peoples such as Russians, by their norm of

sharing, which they see as morally superior.

This sharing is not based on ‘balanced

reciprocity’ but rather ‘entitlement’. One can

perceive the obstacles this poses to the

introduction of market capitalism, private

property, and related post-Soviet reforms.

Perhaps most provocatively, Willerslev ques-

tions the concept of a Yukaghir worldview.

‘Worldview’ connotes a ‘body of context-free,

propositional knowledge about spiritual

beings, their characteristics and interrelations,

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[which] lies fully formed inside people’s heads’

(p. 156). Rather, hunters’ ideas and under-

standings, including those about spirits and

relationships with these, are generated and

continually reformulated within the context of

activities. The idea of a ‘worldview’ fails to

acknowledge ambiguity—a characteristic criti-

cal to a group that navigates between different

personhoods, between living and dead, across

what most Westerners see as distinct states of

waking and dreaming.

Willerslev candidly acknowledges that he

spent the vast majority of his fieldwork living

with and talking to Yukaghir men, a fact that

notably limits his understanding of this

society. Nevertheless Soul Hunters provides

us with a radically divergent construction

of (hu)man–nature relations. Such works

can ultimately help us to better appreciate

the diversity of indigenous geographies, which

coincide with and complement Western

geographies.

Gail Fondahl

Geography Program

University of Northern British Columbia

q 2008 Gail Fondahl

Adam Krims

Music and Urban Geography

New York and London: Routledge, 2007.

xii þ203pp., $95.00 hardback (ISBN 0-415-

97011-3), $25.00 paperback (ISBN 0-415-

97012-1).

Music and Urban Geography should prove a

useful reference for those interested in

spatialized analyses of urban musical culture,

commercial music production and/or alterna-

tive analytical portals into contemporary

urban dynamics. Krims’ approach is highly

original within these fields and he offers

a unique theoretical blend of musicology and

urban geography theory. Krims’ book, five

chapters long, includes in addition to a

remedial introduction, a chapter exploring

music’s role in creating parameters of urban

representations, a chapter containing a case

study exploring the linkages between music

and tourism in Curacao, as well as a chapter

exploring the changing representations of

Los Angeles through the music and cinematic

structures of the movie Boogie Nights. Krims’

final two chapters offer a contemporary

Marxist alternative to Adorno’s outmoded

reading of the music industry; both a partial

rebuttal to the more popular Cultural Studies

approaches to music, late capitalism and the

urban lifestyles.

Krims offers a reasonably flexible yet

unapologetic Marxist reading of musical

culture, the music industry and how contem-

porary capitalism mediates their

relationship to the city. He introduces a useful

concept of the urban ethos, a notion that may

prove a serviceable shorthand term for the

range of historical representations of the city.

Music geographers, urban geographers and

other cultural theorists should find Krims’

discussion of how the relations of production

mediate the interplay between music and

urban life a useful addition to the somewhat

limited scope of theorizations of music’s role

in everyday life. An exploration of how

changes in the regimes of accumulation affect

the production of music and the represen-

tations of cities is particularly helpful in that

respect. Krims also successfully demonstrates

that music has become an effective element in

the construction of the sort of highly designed

interior spaces that have become markers of

the post-Fordist urban condition in offering an

alternative to more commonplace cultural

studies approaches to contemporary music

production.

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Some readers will find Krims’ book too

heavily focused on New York and Los Angeles

which, though forming the basis for many

representations of American urbanity, do not

represent the lived urban experience for most

American urbanites. Krims offers musicological

analyses of hip hop, classical and tumba (the

local music of Curacao), which occasionally

drift beyond what most geographers are trained

to understand yet probably not so far that his

points get lost. It is clear that Krims is quite

comfortable using hip hop to explore the city,

but readers may find his focus too heavily

reliant upon the nightmarish or cartoonish

examples to explain how they form believable

representations. Missing from the text is any

significant reading of rock music, or stridently

urban artists such as the Red Hot Chili Peppers,

which would have made the analyses (especially

about Los Angeles) more robust and the text

itself appealing to a broader audience.

Still, Music and Urban Geography should

prove useful to geographers, media scholars

and cultural theorists. Faculty looking to liven

up readings in upper division urban geography

courses will welcome Krims’ insight into

the complex intersection of culture, late

capitalism and the city, especially where

student populations have some familiarity

with hip hop. Geography of media courses, on

the other hand, may find this text an effective

bridge between cultural industries and ‘big

picture’ issues surrounding economics and

urban restructuring. The chapter on Curacao

would also seem very useful in tourism

geography or economic development courses.

For advanced social and cultural geography

courses, there are dozens of access points

for students hoping to critically explore the

recursive relationships between the city and

urban cultural products. Krims’ examples

offer many additional points of debate for

all readers.

On a theoretical level, Music and Urban

Geography’s major contribution may prove to

be Krims’ updated Marxian reading of the

music industry. Neither overly elaborate nor

exhaustingly precise, Krim offers a replace-

ment for the rigid and now badly beaten

constructs offered by Theodor Adorno many

decades ago. Krims’ theorization may find

utility as a departure point for additional

Marxist treatments of music and as a worthy

counterposition for non-Marxists as well.

Steven M. Graves

Department of Geography

California State University, Northridge

q 2008 Steven M. Graves

Donald S. Moore

Suffering for Territory: Race, Place and Power

in Zimbabwe

Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005.

322pp., $84.95 cloth (ISBN 0-8223-3582-4),

$23.95 paperback (ISBN 0-8223-3570-0).

In Suffering for Territory, Donald Moore

explores the micropolitics of land control in

contemporary Zimbabwe. Moore conducted

his study in the Kaerezi resettlement scheme

along the Mozambique border, and it is hard

to image a place where the politics of land

would be more contentious. His narrative

weaves together vignettes, interviews, analysis

of historical documents, theoretical discussion

and his own personal accounts to tell the story

of the struggle for land in Zimbabwe’s eastern

highlands.

The writings of Donald Moore, who is an

anthropologist at Berkeley, will be familiar

to some geographers primarily through his

contributions to Liberation Ecologies, a well-

known volume on political ecology edited

by Peet and Watts (1996). Although Moore

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is an anthropologist by training, thematically

this book has much to offer the geographer. His

focus on the micro-practices of government,

issues of territory, the importance of place and

the disciplining of space, makes Moore’s

approach inherently geographic. In addition,

Moore’s theoretical analysis will resonate with

many social and cultural geographers.

The strength of this text lies in his rich

analytical approach, which combines Gramsci’s

notion of hegemony as a key component of

governmentality with Foucault’s genealogical

approach to explore the effective practices of

power that create ‘fields of action’ where spatial

struggles are carried out. Moore draws upon

the work of several contemporary geographers

as well, including that of Bruce Braun, to

develop his argument that political technologies

produce territory including its presumed natu-

ral features.

Along the way, Moore coins some wonderful

geographic terms such as entangled landscapes,

which, he argues, are produced by multiple

spatialities, temporalities, and power relations.

The term encapsulates Moore’s principal objec-

tive, which is to contextualize the processes that

lead to the production and regulation of

landscapes. He seeks to highlight how dominion

emerges as a product of contest among

commoners and several sovereigns including

chiefs, rainmakers, property owners and state

administrators. Although his use of new

terminology is generally insightful, on occasion,

Moore falls into the common trap of over-using,

or in Moore’s case, over-creating jargon.

Yet despite its strong thematic and theoretical

parallels to geographic scholarship, its intri-

guing and inherently geographic subject matter,

and the mostly thoughtful terminology,

I found Moore’s book largely unapproachable.

Even with all of the familiar themes, the text

feels alien and I had great difficulty wading

through it. Time and again while reading this

book I found myself asking how such familiar

ground could become so foreign. The answer

I decided was in the form. Moore has written a

kind of ‘thick’ ethnography. It is thick in terms

of its level of description and theory, as well as

its sheer volume. This kind of ethnography

made for an extremely difficult read, making

me wonder who could appreciate such a

volume. For those with a specific interest in

Zimbabwe and the politics of land, this is

clearly a must read. But, for those less familiar

with the region, Moore’s writing style makes

for a tedious one. As such, I found this book at

once brilliant but also frustrating. Moore’s

discussion of how government-sponsored villa-

gization plans separated fields from homes and

thus attacked the spatial and functional

assemblages of livelihood practices is excellent

(see Chapter 3). On the other hand, as someone

who has spent years conducting research in a

small cluster of villages (as Moore also has)

I found his efforts to integrate his own

experiences with his analysis and ethnography

at once worthy, but also overly descriptive and

occasionally self-indulgent. For example, his

account of running with the cows to the dipping

pool, where he supposedly shared a little in the

suffering of his Zimbabwean hosts, seemed

glorified as did the detailed accounts of his

participation in hunting escapades.

Moore’s analysis of geographic themes such

as territory and place are sophisticated and

rich and I encourage readers with interests in

these topics to read his chapters on ‘Racialized

Dispossession’ (Chapter 4) and ‘Enduring

Evictions’ (Chapter 6). On the other hand,

Moore’s attempts to link his work with

environmental themes seem contrived. In his

epilogue, for example, Moore argues that

humans alone did not produce the history and

geography he has described; nature too played

a key role. He then uses an example of

the humble mud hut to argue that as much

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as colonial evictions and postcolonial villagi-

zation, the hut constitutes a critical ‘articulate

assemblage’ because it gathers together nature

as well as labor, culture and landscape to

produce material and discursive discourses.

Although a hut is made of ‘geophysical

substance’ as Moore refers to it, the physical

environment takes a distant back seat in

Moore’s analysis to political and cultural

processes. This is as it should be considering

the theme of Moore’s case study, so why the

effort to draw unconvincing linkages to

physical geography? On occasion Moore

seems to feel the need to link his work with

all too many contemporary geographic themes

and literatures. Indeed, the greatest weakness

of this book may simply be that it attempts to

do too much. It is hard to blame a scholar of

Moore’s caliber for attempting too much, but

the combination of mixing ethnography with a

vast array of theory, terminology and story-

lines proved a bit too much for this reviewer.

No doubt, Moore’s work will have an

impact on the field of African studies and

anthropology. His topic is timely, Zimbabwe is

exploding and the land issue he discusses is at

the core. His work is theoretically sophisti-

cated and I imagine numerous scholars

will draw upon his approach. It is a shame,

therefore, that the text is not more approach-

able. While the work will undoubtedly appeal

to those with an advanced understanding of

land issues and history of Zimbabwe, for

others I recommend reading the introduction

and a select chapter. For the geographer,

I suggest Chapter 8 entitled, ‘Spatial Subjuga-

tion’. Here geographers will be impressed

with Moore’s familiarity with the contri-

butions of geographers to a broader literature.

Indeed, Moore proves to be a very favorable

spokesperson for our discipline. We can thank

him for presenting these key geographic

themes to the anthropological audience who

may have much less difficulty with his form of

ethnography.

Those looking for an account of the current

situation in Zimbabwe should look elsewhere,

for although Moore’s analysis helps explain

the underlying causes and he attempts to link

his work to the contemporary issues of white

evictions in his introduction and conclusion,

this book is largely an historical work. Moore

draws primarily on his fieldwork from 1990 to

1992 with recent, shorter returns.

In summary, Moore has written a theoreti-

cally rich and detailed account of the struggle

for territory in Zimbabwe that will undoubt-

edly have an impact in Anthropology and will

be widely cited by those studying the land

issues in the region. Furthermore, while his

work has much to offer the geographer (I have

little doubt his term ‘entangled landscapes’

will find its way into many a geographic

publication), this book has unfortunately been

written in a style that is accessible to only the

very few. For the rest of us, I recommend

Moore’s excellent journal articles and book

chapters.

Reference

Peet, R. and Watts, M.J. (eds) (1996) Liberation

Ecologies. New York: Routledge.

Paul Laris

Department of Geography

California State University, Long Beach

q 2008 Paul Laris

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