Mukkuvar Women: Gender, Hegemony and Capitalist Transformation in a South IndianFishing Community by Kalpana RamReview by: Pauline KolendaAmerican Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 95, No. 2 (Jun., 1993), pp. 504-505Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/679911 .

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504 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [95,1993]

thropic side of the nonprofit sector in the United States.

Hall's essays address not only the history of philanthropy but also an assessment of its current status as well as projections and rec- ommendations for its future development. Always critical, though not polemical, he re- flects on the impact of the Reagan presidency on the recent fate of the sector. Reagan's intent to reduce the governmental role in American life and stimulate the charitable contributions of for-profit corporations re- vealed a strange and partially concealed de- pendency. The charitable nonprofits were dependent on the federal grant system and would be imperiled by budget cuts (a nice contradiction). It is almost as if in many of the services provided by the nonprofits, they bro- ker governmental funds in order to serve local needs and interests, though not surpris- ingly omitting the poorest members of soci- ety. As an intellectual historian Hall also traces another consequence of the shift to- ward the postliberal era: a growth of aca- demic interest in the not-for-profit precinct. Scholars have been drawn to the growing problematic that this undertheorized dimen- sion of public life represents. It is to Hall's scholarly credit and our benefit that he por- trays some of the issues involved in the grop- ing for self-consciousness that is now going on in institutes and university departments. On a theoretical level, I would diagnose the cur- rent situation as one in which a Tocquevillian description of the ways Americans associate themselves freely into groups to get things done has not been connected with continen- tal social theory. The line of social thought and criticism extending from Smith and Hegel through Marx, and then theorized for the academy by Durkheim, Weber, and Par- sons, has never adequately fused with the social history of Anglo-based societies, espe- cially England and the United States, where freedom of assembly and the press and the rise of incorporated businesses and industry served as grounds for the formation of a mass public, market culture. The theoretical su- perstructure has failed to address the con- struction of these contemporary cultural practices.

One of the most notable features of Hall's work is his frank acknowledgment that re- search on the third sector must continue to be interdisciplinary. At the same time, it is curious that political scientists and historians of the past and present can each publish on the nonprofit sector and never cite one an- other's key sources, much less the secondary

literature. If the disciplines remain too her- metic, there is another problem in addressing this sector, and it is a serious one. Judging by Hall's book and the literature he and others reference, the nonprofit phenomenon has not yet been adequately conceptualized by scholars as an empirically rich domain. The deficiency resides not only with inadequate theory, as I mentioned, but with an insuffi- cient understanding of the diversity of mar- ket-driven energies within these sites--the zones from which our discourses on this sub- ject increasingly arise.

For students of the fabrication of market cultures in the Western Hemisphere and the production of the contemporary public sphere in the United States, these volumes are necessary reading. They take us to new places, and help set an agenda for badly needed future research in regions of life we are only beginning to understand, even as they rapidly evolve under aggressive eco- nomic and political pressures.

Mukkuvar Women: Gender, Hegemony and Capitalist Transformation in a South Indian Fishing Community. Kalpana Ram. Women in Asia Publication Series. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Zed Books, 1991. 286 pp.

PAULINE KOLENDA

University of Houston

Despite the continuing fact that three- quarters of India's population lives in the countryside, there has been little ethno- graphic fieldwork done there over the past 15 years. This is a pity, because the rich variety of institutions still to be found, still undescribed, would contribute greatly to the diversity of our ethnographic store. The book under re- view is thus a welcomed addition. It is written by an Indian graduate student at an Austra- lian university who is well versed in the theo- retical arguments about South Asian caste, women, family, and kinship and knowledge- able about the all-too-scarce ethnography of Tamilnadu, the state where these Mukkuvars live.

While the title suggests that the book is about women, the book also treats (in ch. 5) the occupational life of the men-an alterna- tion between fishing in simple sailboats (kaT- Tumarattakal) and small motorized craft during their own coastal season and then migrating in the off-season north to Kerala or to the east coast, as far up as Orissa, to work as hired crewmen on boats and trawlers.

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SOCIAL/CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 505

The Mukkuvars ofKaDalkarai Uuru (popu- lation 2,776; p. 12), Kanyakumari District, Tamilnadu, are Catholics, converted byJesu- its in the 16th century. Ram explains in chap- ter 1, on the Mukkuvars' marginality, that they are not bound to the Hindu agricultural- ists in the inland hamlets as direct depen- dents in ajajmani-type system (i.e., exchange between craft/servant castes and land- owners), but that they do have to exchange with them, giving fish for rice, vegetables, and fruit. The Mukkuvars' Catholicism is treated in three chapters: chapter 2 is on the non- Mukkuvar priest who is the spokesperson for the hamlet, and chapters 3 and 4 treat a women's possession cult, disapproved of by the church, in which the faith healer becomes possessed with Mother Mary or one of the saints and the sick are diagnosed as possessed by local Hindu godlings. Disappointing to me was the absence of details about the activities of the hamlet Catholic church or explora- tions of the teachings of the Catholic priest or the beliefs of the people. Ram's heavy dependence upon the Hindu sakti complex to interpret the Mukkuvar women's status and her claim that their Catholicism is highly Hinduized are difficult to accept without such explorations. The suggestion that the Mukku- vars give supremacy to Mary over Jesus in emulation of the Hindu villagers' giving pri- macy to goddesses (such as the Smallpox Mother) seems to overlook the preference for Mary over Jesus in much of the Catholic world. Ram also overlooks the high propor- tion of Protestant Christians in the district. Indeed, there are no descriptions of the in- teractions between Mukkuvars and the peo- ple of other communities, even though Ram claims that it is the women, evidently the 18% of the village women who peddle fish (p. 215), who suffer the discrimination dealt out by the Hindus, who consider fishers to be untouchables (p. 22).

The sixth chapter treats the women's credit network--mostly intrahamlet and intracaste. The role of women as the financial managers of their nuclear households should give them family power; relationships between hus- bands and wives are not described. Chapters 7 and 8 treat kinship. Like other South Indi- ans, the Mukkuvars use Dravidian kinship terminology (pp. 170-171); dowries have be- come more costly (p. 190); mothers give their own dowryjewelry to their daughters for their dowries, but increasingly women are forced to allow their husbands to use dowry wealth to invest in boats and fishing equipment (pp. 192-193). The ninth chapter is on the sexual

codification of women's work. Women have less control as financial managers, as they depend on what their men choose to send home as remittances.

This is an excellent work, a bit too long on seminar-type discussions of concepts and ideas developed in studies of Hindus, and a bit too short on needed ethnographic infor- mation from KaDalkarai Uuru and Kanyaku- mari District.

Navajoland: Family Settlement and Land Use. Klara B. Kelley and Peter M. Whiteley. Tsaile, AZ: Navajo Community College Press, 1989. 254 pp.

TERRY R. REYNOLDS University ofDenver

In this deceptively small book, Kelley and Whiteley perform a huge task. They provide a long-overdue contextualization of histori- cal, archeological, and ethnographic mate- rial on Navajo land uses, settlement patterns, and family structures within the broader per- spective of the changing patterns of South- western political economy over the past four centuries. This task is not made easy by a number of factors: a relatively large tract of land, with its varied, changing environments; contact among populations with four major cultural traditions (Athabaskan, Puebloan, Hispanic, and Anglo); population migra- tions; population increase; changing technol- ogy; introduction of capitalism and industrialization; and last, but not least, a wide variety in quality and focus of reports touching upon these topics. The authors do an admirable job of producing a descriptive synthesis of Navajo land-based subsistence economy, with its internal contradictions aris- ing from family-organized production, and of the changes brought about in it through cul- ture contact and environmental variation. Despite how much the authors have accom- plished, one effect of this book is to under- score how much still needs to be done in researching and synthesizing data regarding Navajo economic life.

This book is organized around the major periods in Navajo history. The early periods before 1864 are written by Whiteley; the later periods are authored by Kelley. Kelley's syn- thesis of the existing archeological and eth- nographic literature is masterful. She provides comparative material for each pe- riod, and her chapters are a necessity to fu- ture endeavors in researching Navajo

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