BOOK REVIEWS / Sociocultural Anthropology 943

years of Soviet restructuring is styled in Cold War terms with"sovietization" first "creeping" (p. 69) and then "galloping" (p.77). With equally broad strokes, the authors also draw examplesand try to draw links between Eastern Yamal Nenets, the wideterritory of Nenets settlement (from the Ural mountains to theYenisei River), and to neighboring peoples of both theSamoedic and Ugrian language families. Although all thesecommunities are no doubt related somehow, they assimilatesomewhat uneasily into the picture of "the Nenets." Ethnogra-phers will be disappointed if they are looking for subtle markersof difference in terms of language, social structure, worldview,kinship, pastoralism, or economy.

Despite leaning on these old adjectives, the book has severalremarkable chapters that will undoubtedly find their way intothe growing literature on rural peoples of Siberia. First and fore-most, the book presents a very good summary and annotation ofhard-to-find Western Siberian provincial scholarship on abo-riginal cultures and history. The bibliography is filled with ref-erences to local publications and archival references fromTomsk, Tobol'sk, and Yekaterinburg. Most of this material hasbeen published previously in Russian by Golovnev (especiallyGovoriashchie kultury [Yekaterinburg, 1995]), but this bookwill make this excellent material available to the English readerfor the first time. Second, this book is one of the first to portrayrural Nenets herders and their urbanized cousins as part of a cul-tural continuum wherein each subgroup supports each other in acomplex adaptation to industrial monopoly capitalism. This iswelcome medicine indeed for the ethnography of Nenets herd-ers, who amongst Siberian peoples are more likely than not to beportrayed as the people that time forgot. Third, there are two in-teresting chapters that to some degree sit outside of main trajec-tory of the book. Chapter 2 gives a short but well-written ethno-graphic vignette of the way that personal space and authority isdivided along gender lines. Chapter 4 provides an excellent ar-chival-based account of the famous Nenets rebellions to Sovietattempts to expropriate reindeer in the late 1930s and early1940s. Unlike other expositions of this period that have recentlyappeared in Russian, the authors take the strong controversialposition that at least one of these rebellions was provoked by aRussian security officer in a remarkable forward-looking at-tempt to protect the Nenets from even more harsh measures (pp.88-93). Although this chapter stars a sympathetically portrayedNKVD agent (described as a 1943-vintage "KGB agent" in thebook), the Soviet state as a whole is portrayed as counterweightagainst Nenets attempts to expand or maintain large reindeerherds. This contradicts other accounts of the extensive financial,legal, and institutional incentives that the Soviet state investedin large-scale or even gigantic pastoral projects in the 1960s and1970s.

It must be mentioned that the book has been produced in avery attractive format by Cornell University Press. There are 16stunning pages of color photographs portraying primarily Ne-nets herding life and ritual but also recent industrial incursions.There are a number of clear and useful line drawings, maps, andtables giving a very good visual and tabular frame to the story.Although the bibliography is rich, there are an unusually highnumber of inconsistencies in the Cyrillic transliteration system,which may trouble some researchers who are not fluent in Rus-sian (for example Yekaterina II, Yenisei, Yamal vs. Ekaterinburg,Ermak, Enisei, iasak). It is also interesting to report to philologists

that the endangered Russian soft-sign has seemingly beenpurged in all pages of the text but in the bibliography. The indexis on the whole very good (but weak on some of the geographicalnames).

The one major omission from this book, which is critical to itstheme of creative adaptation and survival, is an ethnographic ac-count of Nenets life in the 1950s and 1960s (i.e., the period pre-ceding the wide-scale development of Yamal resources). This isthe period of time in which the lives and biographies of mostcontemporary actors were formed, yet in the literature it is one ofthe darkest periods in Siberian history. In my own work, I am asguilty as all other Siberian ethnographers on this count. It is asurprisingly difficult period to document for a Western-trainedanthropologist because of the wealth of slogans and campaignsthat people cite to mark their life passages (see Grant In the So-viet House of Culture, Princeton, 1995) For some time I havewondered if collaborative work might not bring out some of thishistory, but in this work it only represents four pages of text(pp. 96-100).

This is a well-illustrated and well-documented work, writtenwith great feeling and sympathy for Yamal Nenetses. It willserve students, geographers, and political scientists very well.We will look forward perhaps to a more ethnographically in-spired work from these two authors in the future. •>

Food and Love: A CulturaJ History of East and West JackGoody. New York: Verso, 1998. 305 pp.

AMY B. TRUBEKNew England Culinary Institute

The essays in this book, written over several years, aregrouped into three areas: family, food, and doubts. However, theunderlying themes that unite the essays create a much broaderand ambitious book than these topic headings may imply.Goody wants to take an extremely broad look at production andcommunication practices; he argues that only by casting the netover a large sweep of time and space can the traditional scholarlydichotomy between East and West be recast. Family, food, anddoubts happen to be the focus of this larger inquiry. For Goody,the emphasis by scholars of all theoretical inclinations on the"uniqueness of the West" has obscured many non-Western in-novations and privileged Western practices in answering howand why social change occurs, be it temporal or spatial in nature.Goody's long-term commitment to rigorous comparative analy-sis is thus further confirmed. With such an approach, what hap-pens is a lively intervention into scholarly analyses of the or-ganization of family life, food practices, and forms of cognition;the results are intriguing new frames of reference for consider-ing not just these topics, but many others as well.

In many of the essays, Goody uses as a starting point the workof scholars interested in the historical genesis of "capitalism,industrialisation, and modernisation." He does not dispute theirimportance in the history of social trans formations, rather hebegs to differ with the analytic assumptions people use in theirscholarship. Goody thinks the causal connections made be-tween the development of capitalism and a certain time andplace have been drawn too finely, for "capitalism was not an

944 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST • VOL. 102, No. 4 • DECEMBER 2000

entity like the wheel or the alphabet" (p. 12). The neglect (hiswords) of the Bronze Age period, where clear similarities can befound in the organization of society throughout both Asia andEurope, is of particular concern. And in the realm of differences,for Goody hoe agriculture and literacy play a more importantrole in the trajectory of societies than a simple geographic dis-tinction between East and West.

Throughout the book, he argues that such scholarly assump-tions have led to ethnocentric approaches to such complex is-sues as the genesis of romantic love, the development of strati-fied cuisines, and the organization of family life. Individualessays vary in their organization and content, but most revolveprimarily around reviews of scholarly literature; for example,the chapter '"1116 Uniqueness of the European Family" traces thework of Lawrence Stone and the Cambridge Group, and a laterchapter looks at Wally Secombe's two-volume history of thefamily in northwest Europe. As he combs their arguments for as-sumptions and insights into the historical development of thenuclear family, the formation of households, the concept of ro-mantic love, and more, Goody always holds these studies up tothe light of comparison and wonders if they remain compelling.Using this approach, he queries Anthony Giddens's discussionof romantic love. For Giddens (and others):

The emergence of romantic love is connected with freedom and self-realization, which is once again to take a very late and culture-boundview of both. Which society did not display these features in somecontext of social life? Are we really sure enough of the status of theseconcepts to make such an assertion? [p. 100]

Later on. Goody explores the scholarship on Great and Littletraditions. He considers that this approach leads to conceptualrigidity and poses the question, "what type of communicationsoccurs within and between?" (p. 185); another concern lies inthe superficiality of coming up with common qualities that ex-tend over large populations. In the chapter "Reflections on His-tory and Anthropology," he argues that both disciplines must letgo of the East-West divide:

[W]e cannot understand what is happening in the modern world, es-pecially the East, if we remain committed to a Weberian. Marxist orfolk view about the deep structure of East-West differences. Thosemisunderstandings may not affect all our work in any direct fashion,but they do so indirectly because of the inevitably ethnocentric aca-demic tradition in which we have been raised, [p. 237]

The chapters on food, the topic for which I have the most ex-pertise, follow the same approach, though they are narrower inscope, preoccupied primarily with the role of social stratifica-tion in the development of cuisines. These essays query the ten-dency among scholars of food practices to veer their analyses to-wards materialist or cultural/symbolic approaches. Goodyrightly points out that the complexity of food practices in factdictate a more nuanced approach, one that examines structureand symbol, especially when considering change over time."Food, Family, and Feminism" examines the puzzling accep-tance of French haute cuisine among Britons since (at least) the1500s. Goody points to the culture of the French court as a possi-ble reason and takes that analysis in a new direction. He usesMona Ozouf s work on women's roles in England and France,and the relatively high status of women in the French court, as aguide. He considers the role of these women in the British fasci-nation with French haute cuisine, adding a new cultural and

symbolic dimension to this fascinating historical question.Other essays re-examine symbolic approaches to understandingthe logic of eating practices, query the link between globaliza-tion and the homogenization of cuisines, and investigate wineconsumption.

Always adopting a comparative perspective grounded in thepracticalities of the empirical information, Goody takes afreshlook at important questions. Clearly, this set of essays is directedat scholars rather than students and general readers, for you needsome familiarity with the scholarly traditions Goody interro-gates to appreciate his insights. As well, the essays range verywidely in approach; at times the connections between them aredifficult to make. That said, for anthropologists interested innew ideas for formulating research, or teaching students aboutworld cultures or world history, Goody's book provides muchfood for thought. •*

Fear as a Way of Life: Mayan Widows in Rural Guate-mala. Linda Green. New York; Columbia University Press,1999.213 pp.

LESLEY GILLAmerican University

How do Mayan women, widowed after years of brutal civilwar, survive in the Guatemalan countryside, where the militaryhas insinuated itself into the fabric of society and fear remains away of life? And how do they construct a modicum of dignityand a sense of well-being when the army continues to definewhat constitutes permissible behavior? Mayan widows mustconfront these questions without the support of husbands andkinfolk who were killed by the army, and they must do so in acountry where the fundamental problems that sparked a popularinsurgency in the 1970s and 1980s remain unresolved, despitethe signing of peace accords in 1996. In this excellent book,Linda Green explores the widows' struggles to rebuild theirlives in rural Guatemala. Green examines the intricate ways thatviolence is interwoven with the widows' attempts to refashionhistorical memory and rebuild social relationships and culturalpractices.

Violence, in her analysis, is embedded in social institutionsand the interactions that shape daily life, and it is conceptualizedas a historical and political economic process shaped by a coer-cive military apparatus and enduring relationships of inequality.To understand how widows deal with violence in the present,Green urges us to revisit the past and consider what she de-scribes as the "blood on people's hands," She demonstrates howyears of structural violence—the concentration of land owner-ship and processes of commodification—weakened the socialfabric of Mayan communities and undermined the ability ofmen and women to manage the divisions, animosities, andgrievances that had long characterized village life. As social re-lations frayed, the army exploited local cleavages, and spaceemerged for political violence to operate with deadly conse-quences. Village feuds turned lethal, when some people de-nounced neighbors as subversives to the military. The presenceof spies and military commissioners in communities aggravatedfamily feuds by undermining local authority structures, eroding