review of sailing on the sea of love - the music of the bauls of bengal

Reviews

Cognitive anthropology

Barnard, Alan. Genesis of symbolic thought.xiii, 194 pp., maps, tables, figs, bibliogr.Cambridge: Univ. Press, 2012. £16.99 (paper)

In this book Alan Barnard uses the techniques ofsocial anthropology to examine not only theidea that ‘to use symbolism is to be human’, butalso how the process of searching for thebeginnings of that symbolism is possible. Hisprevious book, Social anthropology and humanorigins (2011), covers our human ancestors livingbetween approximately 7,400,000 years ago andabout 200,000 years ago. His current book,Genesis of symbolic thought, starts where it leftoff – the beginning of symbolic culture.

His depth and breadth of anthropologicalunderstanding stretch beyond current-daythinking to include ethnography andanthropological theory past and present. Hisbreadth crosses disciplines, beyond his field ofsocial anthropology, to include research andfindings from archaeology, genetics,neuroscience, linguistics, art history, comparativeanatomy, folklore, and religious studies. Hebrings to light debates within socialanthropology softened with an assessment thatrecent discoveries in other scientific fieldsprovide information for new ideas and theories.He presents debates using opposing thinkersalong with debates between his ideas andgenerally accepted theorists. In fact, one mightfeel the book is a reaction to ClaudeLévi-Strauss’s acquiescence that the origin ofsymbolic thought is indeterminable.

As a matter of fact, he takes on Lévi-Strauss,Sir James Frazer, and Émile Durkheim and in one

sentence discounts all three, before arguing hispoint by enlisting philosophical, linguistic, andanthropological questions, using as backgroundrecent archaeological discoveries, the evolutionof sociology, and examining ritual and religionwith a social anthropological and archaeologicallens. He goes on to use theories of the evolutionof language and mythology, prehistory, andhuman evolution.

When he takes on Lévi-Strauss, the father ofmodern anthropology, Barnard refutes his theorythat dating of the genesis of symbolic thought isimpossible. He provides evidence from his fellowsocial anthropologists and multiple disciplines,including genetics, linguistics, archaeology, arthistory, neuroscience, and comparative anatomy.Then he adds folklore and religious studies alongwith ethnographic and anthropological theoriesfrom past and present. This is a lot for any onewriter to take on, and whereas at times Barnardcan be informative and enlightening, at othertimes he overwhelms the reader. That is mainlybecause there is a lack of order and flow.

This book raises itself beyond a meretransdisciplinary scientific inquiry by delving intothe origin of symbolic thought while alsochampioning the resurrection of socialanthropology. From another point of view, hisresearch can be thought of as a current-dayself-help book, addressing how we can thrive ina world filled with ambiguity, complexity, andvolatility using innate creativity and playfulnessto become more fully human.

Yes, Barnard concedes that hunters andgathers are fully human. His claim is based on adefinition I found dispersed throughout hisbook, including the use of symbolism, kinshipsystems, and the expression of complex thinkingthough myth.

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 19, 405-441© Royal Anthropological Institute 2013

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Barnard is a twenty-first-century scientistenlisting both past and present findings fromacross multiple disciplines to study humanorigins. If you let him, he will challenge you tosee through our modern eyes what it means tobe fully human.

Wendy Daeges California Institute ofIntegral Studies

Kronenfeld, David B., Giovanni

Bennardo, Victor C. de Munck &Michael D. Fischer (eds). A companion tocognitive anthropology. xv, 607 pp., tables,figs, diags, bibliogrs. Oxford, Malden, Mass.:Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. £120.00 (cloth)

Research companions seem in vogue at present,with Routledge, Ashgate, and Sage also havingexpanding series. At over 600 pages, and withthirty-one chapters, this Wiley-Blackwell offeringis a big book. Among the topics covered are:collective representations, habit, emotion,narrative, number, distribution, hegemony,consensus, cultural models, simulation, andevolution.

The book is divided into five main sections.Part I, ‘History of cognitive anthropology and thenature and types of cultural knowledgestructures’, has contributions from B.G. Blount,Naomi Quinn, Jürg Wassmann, Christian Klugeand Dominik Albrecht, Janet Dixon Keller,Giovanni Bennardo and David Kronenfeld, andJohn Gatewood. Part II, ‘Methodologies’, hascontributions from Penn Handwerker, JamesBoster, Kateryna Maltseva and Roy D’Andrade,Stephen Borgatti and Daniel Halgin, Benjamin N.Colby, and Michael Fischer. In part III, ‘Cognitivestructures of cultural domains’, the contributorsare Dwight Read, F. Chit Hlaing, Andrea Benderand Sieghard Beller, Roy Ellen, E.N. Anderson, andDouglas White. Part IV, ‘Cognitive anthropologyand other disciplines’, comprises contributionsfrom Norbert Ross and Douglas Medin, HalvardVike, Carol Mukhopadhyay, Lynn Thomas,Hidetada Shimizu, and Miriam Noël Haidle. Finally,in part V, ‘Some examples of contemporaryresearch’, the contributors are Brian Hazlehurst,Giovanni Bennardo, Victor de Munck, Linda Garro,and Robert Schrauf and Madelyn Iris.

An introduction and an afterword to thevolume are provided by one of the book’s editors,David Kronenfeld, who seems a guiding influence.The volume’s aim, he explains, is to provide anoverview of where cognitive anthropology camefrom, where it is today, and where it is going. It isa diverse field but some concerns are sharedwidely. These include: a focus on ‘culturally

shared and variable distributed complex cognitivesystems’; how such systems work; how they arestructured; how they differ from one culture toanother, how they are learned and passed on; andhow people adapt them contextually (p. 1). Afocus on ‘collective’ and ‘cultural’ knowledge, asopposed to ‘individual’ knowledge, distinguishesthis field from cognitive psychology (and, onemight add, a focus on ‘cultures’ as distinct fromthings-in-themselves distinguishes this from asocial-anthropological approach – most of thecontributions come from scholars based in theUnited States).

Humans, we are told, have a propensity tocreate and learn systems of collectiveknowledge, and culture is the name we give tothis capacity in action. By ‘knowledge’, here oneadverts to the intellectual, including how to actin situations, what the implications of action are,how to achieve goals, what goals are reasonable,how we interpret those around us – theirbehaviour, goals, and values – and when wemight anticipate norms being flouted. Cultureamounts to a congeries of complex,semi-autonomous component systems, withlanguage being one such sub-system, singularand coherent. Furthermore, participation inthese shared knowledge systems is what definessocial entities, and so cultural cognition can besaid to be constitutive of society. At the sametime, patterned interaction in social entitiesproduces shared cultural knowledge, and sosocial exchange is also constitutive of culture.Culture and society form a neat dialectic.

For myself, George Steiner’s succinctsummations concerning language in After Babel(1975) retain their persuasiveness, and coincidewith my ethnographic experience. Language,according to Steiner, is in perpetual change andsubject, at every moment, to mutation, so thatto think of the life of a language (or culture) inorganic and systemic terms is an animist fiction;while the concept of a normal or standard idiomis a statistical fiction. ‘All communication istranslation’ between the personal lexicons ofdifferent individual speakers, Steiner writes(p. 238), and while language (or culture as awhole) might have a common surface, it has aprivate base: ‘The language of a community,however uniform its social contour, is aninexhaustibly multiple aggregate ofspeech-atoms, of finally irreducible personalmeanings’ (p. 46). Reading the apparentlysystemic programme of this volume makes mewish at least to ask: But is there cultural sharing,ever? Of what precisely? At what level ofcomplexity? And how is it achieved continually?

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But then Roy Ellen’s chapter on the centrality of‘environmental knowledge systems’ to thisanthropological subfield does illuminate cognitiveanthropology as a project in action. ‘Cognition’should be understood as an interplay betweenlinguistic, environmental, social, cultural, andevolved factors in human being, Ellen begins.Cognition involves the whole person movingaround in space and time: it is experiential andembodied. From the modelling of micro-processesof individual cognition, moreover, macro-structuralregularities can be seen to emerge concerninghuman nature. These regularities concern, forinstance, the universal recognition of naturalspecies-kinds, a kind of intuitive physics (variouslyencoded), and the experimental method.‘Indigenous’ or ‘folk’ – as against ‘scientific’ –knowledges may be remarkably fluid, since theyderive from everyday environmental engagements(both practical and experimental), but at base theyare no different from other kinds of humanknowledge systems. What is ever apparent arebasic human processes of categorization andreasoning, within evolutionary limits, taking placein individual bodies.

In elucidating tensions between individualand collective, between idiosyncratic andcommonplace, between the social, cultural, andenvironmental, and between the evolutionaryand situational, cognitive anthropology emergesas a significant component of studying humanbeing, and this volume provides a usefulanthology and snapshot.

Nigel Rapport University of St Andrews

Scoditti, Giancarlo M.G. Notes on thecognitive texture of an oral mind: Kitawa, aMelanesian culture. xvi, 307 pp., illus.,bibliogr. Canon Pyon, Herefordshire: SeanKingston, 2012. £65.00 (cloth)

This beautifully presented book is the third ofScoditti’s monographs on Nowau culture, and ismeant to be seen as the final panel of a triptychalongside Kitawa: a linguistic and aestheticanalysis of visual art in Melanesia (1990) andKitawa oral poetry: an example from Melanesia(1996). The island of Kitawa, Papua New Guinea,where Scoditti worked from 1973 to 2007, is wellknown to anthropologists as part of theTrobriand kula exchange system, althoughScoditti’s starting-point, the polychromeprowboards for ceremonial canoes, is far fromMalinowski’s generalist descriptions. In his earlywork, Scoditti argued for aesthetics as a categoryof analysis, against the privileging of socialcategories. Prowboards have provided the

aesthetic centre from which to examine theinitiation and apprenticeship of the carvers withan artist’s eye and then expand ‘spiraliform’ toencompass many of the cultural domains of theexchange system.

Scoditti takes the spiraliform loops of theshell nautilus pompilius to be a generative modelof the artistic productions of Nowau carvers,drawing comparisons with Westernmanifestations such as the golden sectioncommon to Greek temples, and Neoclassical art.A graphic sign on the polychrome board ‘is astructure planned on the basis of the nautiluspompilius, so the mode of growth of the nautilusbecomes the mode of growth of Nowauthought’ (p. 128). Temple and prowboard are‘visual stratagems which have the aim ofsatisfying the human eye at the level of aestheticenjoyment’ (p. 33). The reader is shown the‘texture’ of the Nowau mind/reason (nona/daba)as Scoditti reveals the characteristic philosophyof the culture. His influences are Kant,Gombrich, and Lévi-Strauss, and he sees thepolychrome prowboards as ‘visual texts’ thatreveal an aesthetic schema: ‘a frame of referencewithin which to place any mental operation’(p. xv).

The Nowau engraver provides Scoditti’smodel and point of departure. The initiatedengraver of polychrome boards does not draw;he receives the image – pure and certain – atthe moment of his initiation when his mind is ina heightened state of perception and ispenetrated by the mythical hero Monikiniki(p. 55). An initiated engraver, as a ‘creator ofimages’ (p. 57), makes present the mythicalhero. An engraver who has not been initiatedmust resort to drawing to test his mental image(p. 166). Any text must be interpreted. Thebeholder/interpreter of images complements theengraver’s perception: ‘The deeds of Monikinikiunfold on the polychrome board ... It is thebeholder who unravels them, unwinds them, byinterpreting them, in the same way as the spiralsof the nautilus unwind’ (p. 87). As an aestheticform, the visual text must not, though, call tomind on the visual level the form of the nautilus,which is concealed by the engraver. Rather itmust suggest to the beholder the aesthetic valueproper to a harmonious form (pp. 136-7).

The aesthetic schema coupled with Scoditti’sexegesis of the Nowau mind/reason, ‘vitalbreath’, and general philosophy provide themeans to grasp other cultural forms. Forexample, the forms of memorization andconservation elaborated in chapter 6 show howthe concept of spirality also structures Nowau

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‘spiral-shaped’ time (p. 130). For Nowau, as forother Melanesian groups, time is subordinatedto space. Here it is grasped and concretized asthe form of the nautilus, by following the trailfrom the outermost loop to the innermost. Timeis thus seen/visualized in the form of the shell,where future and past meet in a glance thattakes place in the present. And in chapter 9 theanalysis is extended to the configurations ofdances and the body decorations of male andfemale participants. The scent of flowers and thepoetics of crowns and corollas transpose thevisual aesthetic in the final chapter. Scoditti hasbrought the reader full circle to demonstrate thecognitive movement of sense perception andmemorization.

The exposition is dense with extensiveendnotes to most of the eleven chapters. Andalthough it is intended as ‘a set of notes’, thebook is at times repetitive, and the centralmetaphor seems always on the brink ofspiralling out of control. But it feels right thatthe texture of an oral mind is presentedaccording to its own form. It is evident in theproduction quality of the book and the inclusionof Scoditti’s own drawings that the author seesthis publication as a creative undertaking thatincludes a kind of self-analysis (p. 8, n. 2). Hisproject can thus be seen as an exchangebetween interpreters of aesthetics. Thistranscultural aesthetic engagement is what I likemost about the book.

Deborah Van Heekeren Macquarie University

Concepts and theory

Árnason, Jóhann Páll & Björn Wittrock

(eds). Nordic paths to modernity. vi, 288 pp.,bibliogrs. Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books,2012. £53.00 (cloth)

Nordic paths to modernity is a collected volumeinvestigating the different trajectories leadingtowards modernity in the Nordic context. Thevolume begins by emphasizing the sharedsocio-economic, cultural, and political history ofthe Nordic countries, including Finland, Iceland,Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, while theproceeding chapters elaborate on the diversity ofthe paths that have led them to modernity.

The editors do not clearly distinguishbetween ‘modernity’ and ‘modernization’, butto the extent that they do define it, they proposethat modernity can be observed through threeprimary defining relationships: modernity and

rationality; modernization and industrialization;and/or as a product of ‘multiple modernities’ asproposed by S.N. Eisenstadt, combiningeconomic, political, and cultural componentsto produce ‘divergent patterns of modernity’(p. 14).

‘Nordic modernity’ is based on the balancingof all of these relationships, and while othercountries have perhaps done the same, theeditors of this volume claim that nowhere hasthe search for the ‘middle-way’ been done moresuccessfully than in the Nordic countries. This isinvestigated further in the course of the mainchapters, through factors such as lateindustrialization (chap. 2), the role of historywriting in shaping citizen morality (chap. 5), andthe external forces influencing the paths taken (ageneral theme, but particularly articulated inchaps 8-11 concerning Finland and Iceland).Subsequently, the volume engages primarilywith long-term historical processes, as thesehave presented ‘paths to’ rather than ‘patternsof’ modernity (p. 6).

In the first chapter, Bo Stråth provides anexcellent overview of some of the factors thathave united the paths of the Nordic countriestowards a modernity that is often equated with‘enlightened and progressive welfare politics andsocial equality’ (p. 25). One such factor is theparticular combination of nationalist sentimentsand socialism as expressed through a sharednon-authoritarian understanding of ‘folk’(people) as opposed to the authoritarianGerman definition of ‘Volk’. Stråth suggests thatthe Nordic notion of ‘folk’ represented aninclusive concept where, for example, thenation-state was expressed as an integrative ideaknown as folkhemmet (the people’s home), inwhich ‘the home as a metaphor subordinatedclass struggle to national welfare’ (p. 28). Socialprotests thus originated in broader coalitions,and were, according to Stråth, not purely basedon class sympathies, allowing for a much lesspolarized society.

Following Stråth’s contribution, the volumeis divided into ten chapters, two on each of theNordic countries. To illustrate, I will brieflydiscuss chapters 2 and 3 concerning thedevelopment of Danish modernity.

Uffe Østergård’s contribution focuses onDanish modernity as shaped by two distinctiveDanish pasts. Drawing on Rogers Brubaker’sCitizenship and nationhood in France and Germany(1992), Østergård describes a Denmark first in ageneral Western European mould – that is, as anold, middle-sized, multinational composite – andlater as an Eastern European-style ‘integrative

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nationalism’, as a result of more recent eventswhich have led to a small, socially homogeneousnation-state. As such, Østergård focuses on thedynamics of these two distinct historical strands.

Niels Kayser Nielsen, similarly, but from adifferent perspective, focuses his narrative ofDanish modernity around the centralization ofculture. His anecdotal reference to Danishnational weather forecasts at the beginning ofhis chapter is, while certainly entertaining, arather forced illustration of the existing toleranceamongst Danes concerning internal differences.Considering recent streams in Danish politicalculture, I am not convinced that ‘tolerance’ is anappropriate term to use; instead it may be betterto call it a perception of internal culturalhomogeneity. Regardless of terminology,however, Nielsen investigates the root of this‘tolerance’ in chapter 3, identifying ProtestantLutheranism, the fall of patriarchalism, and thetransition from an absolutist state towards localgovernment, amongst others.

The chapters reflect the general focus of thisvolume, which is to provide historicalinvestigations into the various paths takentowards modernity in the different Nordiccountries. Upon further reflection, however, thechapters, while individually providing interestingaccounts, do not as a whole engage extensivelywith the wider literature on modernity, nor arecomparisons made to develop the overallargument of the collected chapters. This is partlydue to the structure of the volume, in which theintroduction does not clearly spell out thenarrative of the chapters that follow. Perhaps thisis done intentionally to reflect the multi-facetedconcept of modernity that this volume at largeadvocates. Nevertheless, it ultimately leaves thereader confused and without a sense of thelarger picture.

In conclusion, Nordic paths to modernity is agood collection of individual chapters whichreaders interested in modernity and the Nordicarea would benefit from reading, but presents achallenging read as an edited whole.

Ditte Sass Mahidol University

Meyer, Christian & Felix Girke (eds). Therhetorical emergence of culture. vii, 326 pp.,tables, figs, bibliogrs. Oxford, New York:Berghahn Books, 2011. £55.00 (cloth)

This is the fourth volume in the Studies in Rhetoricand Culture series, the fruit of the InternationalRhetoric Culture Project, a long-running sequenceof workshop-conferences bringing together anincreasing collegium of researchers, among whom

Ivo Strecker has taken a leading role. In a revealingturn of phrase, Strecker once spoke of an ‘edifice’which would be ‘built up’ as this collegiumgradually embraced more scholars. There is acoherence of architecture, both within andbetween the volumes in the series, focused on theexpressive face of human experience and on thequestion, ‘How can we understand at once boththe regularities and the mutability of human sociallife?’

The title of the volume refers not toemergence in evolutionary time, but rather to alively and delicate sense, shared by all the fifteenauthors here, that the relative predictabilities ofculture are constantly modified and augmentedin ongoing social interactions. Though onetheme of the contributions is thewell-understood idea that genres are thefoundation of particular performances, theoverall argument of the book stresses the otherside of that coin, that novelties in performance(rhetoric) also influence the genre itself (culture).This fundamental theoretical idea is expressedmost felicitously in Hauser’s chapter: hedescribes the origin of Kenneth Burke’s widelyinfluential social/rhetoric theory as deriving fromBurke’s work as a music critic. It was becauseBurke was so well acquainted with the genres ofmusical performance that he could appreciatewhat was both pre-programmed and original inany given ensemble performance. Extending theanalogy, the ensemble performance ofexperienced creator/rhetors with knowledgeableaddressees can not only make fresh figures, butalso change the form itself. Though much of theinspiration for this line of social theory originatesin work on artistic or dramatic facets of sociallife, authors here are very clear, as they havebeen throughout the series, that such expressiveperformances are fundamental to livelihoods,politics, and power, as well as to the give andtake of everyday life.

There are two main themes picked up in thewell-argued introduction. One is that of‘resonance’, the ‘unsaid’, sensuous, associative,and corporeal dimension of human socialexperience which may enable both adversarialand co-operative responsiveness amongmutually entangled persons. Or, to put itanother way, resonance is about that dimensionof human intersubjectivity which does not lie onthe surface of words alone. (Music is both auseful analogy and an especially interestingexample of such reverberations in a socialscene.) Contributors explore such phenomenaboth theoretically and ethnographically, andpresent subtle arguments both about what

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might be thus ‘unsaid’, and what it means to tryto write about the unsayable, a struggle thatcomes to a head in the chapter by DonalCarbaugh and David Boromisza-Habashiconcerning expressions of Amerindianspirituality. The outcome is satisfyinglyinconclusive while testing the limitations ofanthropology’s descriptive aspiration.

The other theme is the relation of a rhetoricalperspective to a dialogical one. The editors payappropriate homage – not least through thepresent volume’s title – to the 1995 collectionThe dialogic emergence of culture, edited byDennis Tedlock and Bruce Mannheim. Byconcentrating on interactive situations in whichparticipants respond flexibly to one another inreal time, the Dialogic authors had shown howthose phenomena reified as ‘culture’ in factemerge and transform constantly throughprovisional and ever-contingent processes. Thepresent volume is firmly anchored in thisdialogical perspective, but the editors insist thata rhetorical analysis is in principle more effectivethan a dialogical one: for whereas dialogicalanalysis tends to stress co-operation andamicability, rhetorical analysis includes both theco-operative and the antagonistic features of thesocial soap opera. In particular, the seeking orexercise of power or effectiveness can be readilyunderstood from a rhetorical point of view, asthe five largely ethnographic papers under thesection ‘Emergence’ demonstrate clearly.

On balance, this volume, like the first in theseries (Culture and rhetoric, edited by Ivo Streckerand Stephen Tyler, 2012), leans toward thetheoretical. In this setting, even the ethnographiccontributions may provide occasions for refreshingour styles of anthropological inquiry andexpression. The volume is also – again like theother volumes – very effectively interdisciplinary:with only a pair of exceptions, the chapters can beread with profit by any anthropologist, or anyscholar in contiguous social science disciplines.The overall virtue of this volume, though, is that itadds appropriately to the Rhetoric Culture Project,and so places in the hands of scholars a richreservoir of ideas for describing human societiesfrom their expressive face.

M.B. Carrithers Durham University

Taussig, Michael. I swear I saw this: drawingsin fieldwork notebooks, namely my own. xii, 173

pp., illus., bibliogr. Chicago: Univ. Press, 2011.£10.50 (paper)

This book adds drawing to the anthropologist’scrazy ‘montage’ (p. 141) of writing and thoughts.

In this essay, Taussig meditates upon a glimpseof poverty that he subsequently sketched. Whydid he do this? What is the purpose of thefieldwork sketch, and what is its relationship toreality, the rest of the fieldwork notebook, andthe viewer-reader? I swear I saw this takes to newdepths the sad, short sight of a poor man in anunderpass being sown into a nylon bag forshelter. This image acts as a haunting refrainthroughout the book as Taussig mines it toexamine the relationship between seeing andbelieving, and the medium of the text and/orimage as record of proof.

The sketch in the notebook accompanies thewritten word as a suggestive adjunct, addinga metaphysical dimension to the clinicalabsolutism of the text. If writing is ‘an erasingmachine’ (p. 18) because of its ability toobliterate reality, drawing is a making of reality,expansive to the reductive writing. ‘Drawing’from John Berger, Taussig ‘notes’ that thephotograph takes from reality, freezing time,whereas the drawing makes a reality,encompassing time. The drawing is more of anautobiographical record, steeped in a moreromantic graphite. It links the image-maker tomoments of observation as though weaving asympathetic magic. This explains the fetish of thefieldnotes held by the anthropologist: thenotebook is ‘the guardian of experience ...highly specialized organ of consciousness ... anoutrigger of the soul’ (p. 25). And so thedrawings therein add to ‘the thing-become-spirit’ (p. 31) character of the book,though we treat drawing as secondary to writingin our skewed – sketchy? – hierarchy ofrepresentations; it is unstable, flexible, moreimaginative and dangerous. It also ‘drawsattention’ to the philosophical gap betweenwords and things – scar tissue for Gellner’sburns, collage paper for William Burroughs andBrion Gysin’s experimental publications, asTaussig develops it.

The fieldwork diary is like these scrapbooks inthe sense that it can be opened for reading andre-reading, for interpretation, for making‘unexpected meanings and pairings’ (p. 47), for‘the recursive movements of afterthought’(p. 51) and ‘back-looping’ (p. 50), particularly ifit has been constructed in an open fashion as an‘intertext’ (p. 52). Taussig suggests, then, that animpersonal account is a strait-jacketing ofsubjectivity, a charade against the sensuousnessof life. The ritual use of the note – or thedrawing, as in a courtroom sketch – is anexample of witnessing, the implication of thesubject as well as his or her existential

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affirmation. Hence the use of the oath ofallegiance to the past in the book title: I swear Isaw this. The notebook is a self-publication, amonograph in the making; for Taussig, it is alsopsychological, and a spiritual lodestone andmedium to the invisible audience over theshoulder. There is an affinity here betweenTaussig taking yagé and Walter Benjaminfollowing his own hallucinatory experiences,both posting their distorted realities in theirimage-word books. Built out of the inadequaciesof representation, these ‘text-imageinterchanges’ (p. 101) have the poignancy offailure about them. Their advantage for themaker is that they are good to think through andthat, often reserved for use when travelling, theyact as anchors when on the move. And yet,ironically, once we return home, they often justgather dust. The armature’s use is clearly in itsconstruction, and its comfort is in its thereness.

The fieldbook as product can literally be awork of art. It is also integral to theanthropologist’s production of knowledge.Fieldbooks are a previously neglected area ofstudy in the construction of a discipline. They –our ‘afterthoughts chasing first thoughts’ (p. 151)– typically feature back-stage in our industry ofderealization. Here Taussig has composed abook, short in length, rich in depth, provocativein detail, and disturbing not just at first glance.

Jonathan Skinner The Queen’sUniversity of Belfast

Education and youth

Heinonen, Paula. Youth gangs and streetchildren: culture, nurture and masculinity inEthiopia. ix, 169 pp., bibliogr. Oxford, NewYork: Berghahn Books, 2011. £42.00 (cloth)

Paula Heinonen spent six years amongst streetchildren in Addis Ababa, looking to understandthe intricacies of their social relations and meansof livelihood. Her initial engagement with poorfamilies led her also to explore male andmixed-sex gangs. A central tool in her descriptiveanalysis is the Ethiopian concept of yilunta, orsense of moral obligation to wider society, andits powerful normative influence. So strong isthe connection between the children and thebroader socio-cultural environment thatHeinonen concludes that ‘street children are adistorted microcosm of Ethiopian society’(p. 150) and in no way do they seek toconceptualize, develop or maintain a subculture

or counter-culture. This sets the children firmlywithin the social milieu around them: extendedfamilies, the public, and state actors.

The driving force for the condition ofdestitution is the narrative of escape from harm.Physical and sexual abuse characterize thechildren’s life-histories, and Heinonen spares nodetail or attention in unravelling the causalchains that, notwithstanding the uniqueness ofeach case, sound increasingly familiar as theaccounts are compiled. Intra-family abuses,combined with the failing marriages and healthof adult caregivers, overlay the incessantmanifestations of poverty and processes ofimpoverishment that push children out of thefamilies. ‘Pull factors’ are almost entirely absent.As one central adult subject laments: ‘God hasmade us rich in children but he forgot to giveme the means to feed them’ (p. 75).

The accounts of the poverty experienced arecompelling, and Heinonen does not flinch fromdescribing its worst manifestations. The closeproximity to illness and death is a recurrenttheme – escape from which is limited to tchat(khat) and alcohol use for those with means tobuy, usually as a result of exploitation of moreunfortunate street companions. Sexual freedomis hinted at, but overwhelmed by the harshnessof its economic determinants or the desparateneeds for protection of street girls. Indeed thegranular descriptions of the lives of thesechildren is emotive and saddening, compoundedby the repeated failures of the children to escapethe street on transitioning, painfully, toadulthood.

Heinonen explores these themes by detailedanalysis of two families and three street gangs.The attention to detail in analysis of thepersonalities and characters is deliberate asHeinonen admits that she wants to ‘avoid talkingabout children as an abstraction’ (p. 90). Thecost to the reader, if there is one, is a lack ofcontextual placement within the largersocio-political environment. To my mind, havingmyself worked in Addis Ababa around the issuesof public-sector social welfare, the well-being ofthe poorest and most vulnerable is intricatelyconnected to political whims and objectives,most notably the periodic clean-up operationsby the police and para-military and the constantassumption that street youth represent anincendiary political force.

Indeed the relationships between the streetchildren, their families, and state actors is anarea touched upon but which could have beenassessed further. The adverse interactionsbetween the children and teachers and the

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police in particular, as well as adult caregiverswith local government officials, evidently angersHeinonen, but we are left with the sense that afuller analysis of these interactions would bewelcome. The reader looking for public policysuggestions or directions for civil societyengagement is thus left slightly disappointed, asHeinonen declines to enter this arena, statingthat ‘anthropologists are more concerned withmeaning than with remedies or measurements’(p. 149). While this may be true, work that cantranscend the perceived barriers betweentraditional anthropology and public policy issorely needed. Pervasive poverty is a majordeterminant of the street child’s well-being, butso are the behaviours of public and civilservants. Institutional and attitudinal change inthe public sector is needed, along with thedevelopment of a para-professional socialwelfare workforce. None of the street children,for example, could ever remember encounteringa female police officer. These institutionalchanges, within a wider softening of the worstaspects of patriarchy, would not necessarilyimpact on economic poverty, but would besignificant changes for the better.

Overall, Heinonen must be commended fortackling the complexities of the subject matterwith tenacity and evident concern for thesituation and condition of the lives of the peopleshe observes. She does well to untangle thecontradictions she encounters throughout, suchas the children’s simultaneous desire forautonomy and group membership, or hernoting that ‘violence was necessary for themaintenance of order but also for creating groupcohesion’ (p. 148). As long as these realities exist,it is incumbent on us to describe, understand,and seek prevention and remedial responses.

Doug Webb UNICEF

Levinson, Bradley A.U. & Mica Pollock

(eds). A companion to the anthropology ofeducation. xix, 572 pp., bibliogrs. Oxford,Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. £120.00

(cloth)

This book is the twelfth volume in the BlackwellCompanions to Anthropology series and, like theothers, it provides an overview and synthesis ofprevious work done in a particular subfield. Inthis it succeeds admirably, providing a clear andcomprehensive account of the anthropology ofeducation and many of its more specialistinterests. Its thirty-three chapters are dividedbetween five sections and cover the history anddevelopment of the anthropology of education,

the links with language studies and languagesocialization, the role of education in buildingstates and national identities, the roles andexperiences of those in institutions, and, finally,anthropology’s contribution to educationalinterventions. For those wanting a generaloverview of the many debates that educationhas generated, the first section provides acomprehensive history, while for those wantinga particular focus on specific strands within theanthropology of education, the latter four partsgive a good grounding in theory and suggestthe many various areas of interest within thebroader field. Overall it is helpful to have theseoverviews collected in one place, and the bookserves as a good starting-point for bothanthropologists and educationalists lookingto understand the synergies between theirsubjects.

Education here is interpreted in the widestpossible way and there is an impressive rangeand scope to the chapters. Each chapter is areview article of the relevant theories anddebates and, taken together, they areconsistently well written, concisely andcoherently argued, and every chapter is backedup by an excellent bibliography. There are,however, some surprising omissions. Althoughthe editors claim that ‘anthropologists ofeducation inquire more than many otheranthropologists into the fate of young people,about their enculturation and socialization, andabout habits of human behaviour andrelationships of power that are taught andchallenged in schools as cultural sites’ (pp. 1-2),children and childhood are mostly absent(except in the chapter by Sally Anderson). Theeditors go on, quite rightly, to point out thatthere is much more to education than schooling;nevertheless, children are one of the mostimportant and visible groups within formaleducation systems. Their views and experiencesof education are an increasingly rich source ofdata for anthropologists and yet such studies arenot featured here, leaving this anthropology ofeducation curiously unconnected at times fromstudies of those who are being educated.

One possible reason for this is that thevolume is very much focused on theanthropology of education as it has developed inthe United States, where studies using childinformants have not proved as popular as theyare in Europe. Every aspect of education in theUnited States, from parental involvement inschools to educational law-making in the TexasState Legislature, is covered from every angle,and the insights gained might be widely

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applicable elsewhere. Less prominence, however,is given to the work of academics outside theUnited States, or indeed outside mainstreamanthropology, and those more influential inEuropean anthropologies of education, such asPierre Bourdieu or the Centre for ContemporaryCultural Studies in Birmingham, are mentionedonly infrequently. While the editors acknowledgethat their focus is North America, there arenevertheless tantalizing hints throughout thebook of the different, complementary traditionsthat could usefully be drawn on. These are mademost explicit in Kathryn Anderson-Levitt’soverview of world anthropologies of education,in which she discusses the different theoreticaltraditions that have influenced the differentsocial and political ideas about education andwhat constitutes a good childhood, or a goodcitizen, across the world. The editors have,however, set out and explained their parametersconvincingly and produced a coherent andcomprehensive collection of articles. Althoughthere are other important and relevant areas yetto be explicitly addressed by Americananthropologists of education, these could beusefully followed up in a second edition of thisbook.

There is much to admire in this volume and itis impossible to read it without learning a greatdeal. It is well edited with goodcross-referencing, making clear the connectionsbetween the chapters. This is an important andwelcome book that is likely to define the field formany years to come.

Heather Montgomery The Open University

Morning, Ann. The nature of race: howscientists think and teach about humandifference. xiii, 310 pp., maps, tables, figs,illus., bibliogr. London, Berkeley: Univ.California Press, 2011. £44.95 (cloth)

The concept of ‘race’ has a long history: ahistory that cannot easily be disentangled fromthe horrors of the African slave trade or from thebrutality of colonial violence. In the UnitedStates in particular, certain elements of thishistory make for an extremely sensitive culturalpressure point. Consequently, discourses of theontological dimensions of race often eclipse thehistorical production of racial consciousness:enter the problem topic of modernity. Biologyoften gets pigeonholed as a racist objectifyingscience, fortifying social-constructivistdescriptions of race as an appealing way out – amore ‘politically correct’ and inclusiveframework to make sense out of human

difference. Thus the nature-culture dividebecomes the dualist framework within which thebook roughly situates popular conceptionsof race.

Beginning with a critique of race as a formof exclusion, a measurement of difference, andmore generally as an unwarranted mode ofsociological profiling, the author movesthrough a rigorous investigation of the ways inwhich race is understood, talked about, andlikewise silenced by dominant cultural normsand social etiquette. The sociological studycomprises interviews and questionnairesconducted with university professors and theirstudents at four universities (all situated in thenortheast United States), as well as analysis ofracial narratives in secondary-level textbooks.The aim of the study was to reveal howstudents and their teachers respectively thinkand teach about race.

The book reports some interesting findings:in secondary education, for instance, the viewsof race that are published in the textbooks usedfor teaching are not those views transmitteddirectly from ‘ivory tower’ scientists to thepublic; rather, it is the publisher’s editors whogenerally control what makes it to print. Broadlyspeaking, though, social-constructivist makingsof race are rarely taught at secondary level, withbiological definitions prevailing.

The author reports a sharp distinction atuniversity level, where ‘social’ scientists tendpreferentially to employ constructivist definitionsof race, with ‘hard’ scientists relying more onessentialist constructions. Despite this variation,a consensus against racial essentialism wasvoiced amongst most university students, withstudents generally favouring an understandingof race as ‘culture’, and constructivist viewpointsoften being defined negatively against biologicaldeterminations, inculcating the mind-set thatconstructivism makes race ‘not real’.Accordingly, the author reports the importantfinding that students felt the need to adheretowards ‘political correctness’ in theirconversations about race, claiming ‘that becauseracial essentialism might be dangerous’, it‘therefore cannot be true’ (p. 157).

What the book does not do, however, is talkabout how Africans, Caribbeans, so-called‘mixed races’, or other immigrant groups in theUnited States think about race. This is to say thatthe book does not talk about how the ‘concept’of race varies across cultures, or even outside ofthe United States. The author therefore giveslittle consideration to the possibility of amultiplicity of meanings of ‘race’, subject to

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local variation with meanings being taken upvariously (or not) across differing social andhistorical settings. In so doing, an essentialistsemiotic of ‘race’ is inadvertently reinscribed,reifying ‘race’ as a transhistorical thing to beapprehended unitarily. In this regard, the studyis not very anthropological, and interestedreaders here may find the analysis dull andunder-theorized. Indeed, the discussion makesheavy use of a nature-culture binary to describethe ways in which the category of race is lentmeaning. The author makes no attempt tointerrogate this strained dualism, crucially notrecognizing that ‘scientific facts’ – the rudimentsof biological essentialism – can also beconsidered to be ‘socially constructed’knowledge, poorly reconciling her findingswith the wealth of related social studies ofscience.

Contrary to the suggestions of the book title,then, the study doesn’t so much address theway ‘scientists’, as circumscribed authorities,think and teach about race. Rather, it situates theoften-silenced polemical definitions of race(divided between social constructivists andbiological essentialists) within the contemporarydoxa of the US academy, perhaps pointingtowards deeper roots amongst the broadermiddle classes of the United States. Though thisis a major limitation, narrowing the scope of thebook significantly, it still does well to satisfy itsstated goals, and the reader is left with a solidsense of the range of ideas that are commonlydeployed on university campuses to explain‘race issues’ as societal facts.

In conclusion, then, researchers working onrace in the United States should certainly readthis book. Readers seeking a moreanthropological and wide-ranging introductioninto the topic of racial politics, however, mightlook elsewhere.

Ian Vincent McGonigle University of Chicago

Okada, Akito. Education and equal opportunityin Japan. xvi, 197 pp., tables, figs, bibliogr.Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books, 2011.£45.00 (cloth)

All industrialized nation-states are confrontedwith the challenge of balancing the individual’sfreedom to choose with official attempts torectify unfairness and even out the playing field.The book under review examines this contestbetween liberty and liberality within the contextof how Japan’s educational policies have beenformed since 1868. It offers a historical trajectoryof how linkages between schooling and growing

class inequality have emerged and recognizesthe import of disentangling ‘equal opportunity’,‘equal access’, and ‘equal rights’. This is done bycarefully dissecting ‘equality of opportunity’,noting its two paradigms: egalitarianism andmeritocracy.

Meritocracy is associated with ‘conservatives’,whose interests have been institutionalized inthe Ministry of Education, business community,industrial associations, and the LiberalDemocratic Party. Concerned with cultivating anelite class via competition and creating economicefficiency, conservatives saw the advantages ofearly specialization, a varied curriculum, theinculcation of ‘traditional’ Japanese values, andindividuality (but one subsumed by the nationalcommunity; thus their attention to moraleducation). Unhappy with ‘excessiveegalitarianism’, conservatives believe in thebenefits of ‘diversification based on children’sdifferent abilities’ or noryoku-shugi (‘ability-firstprinciple’; literally, ‘ability-ism’). Conservativeswanted a more centralized schooling system(however, neoliberals, who shared withconservatives a desire to expose the educationalexperience to market forces, advocateddecentralization).

Egalitarianism is associated with‘progressives’, who during much of thepost-imperial period voiced their views throughthe Japan Teachers’ Union. Arguing for morefairness, they were comfortable with a morepermissive educational atmosphere stressingco-operation, delayed specialization, and acommon curriculum, and they saw thereduction in social inequality as a key goal ofschooling. While conservatives saw some valuein pre-1945 traditions, progressives wereexplicitly opposed to the imperialist educationalethos.

Okada attempts to answer several questions:What kinds of equality of educationalopportunity did Japan aim to achieve during thelast century (especially since the Second WorldWar)? How have elites and interest groupsapplied equality of opportunity to educationalpolicies? What criteria were utilized to measureequality of opportunity (p. 2)?

Employing these conservative versusprogressive distinctions, Okada delineates themajor ideological contradictions andcompromises configuring secondary educationin different periods. In the ‘liberal-conservative’pre-war era, the debate was whether school wasfor all or a select few (a note of clarification: the‘liberal concept’ of equality of opportunityconcerns the removal of barriers to access to

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schooling; once these are removed, it is up tothe individual student to achieve academicsuccess). From the mid-1940s to 1950,egalitarianism versus ‘education correspondingto ability’ characterized the discourse. Duringthe 1950s, egalitarianism (and anAmerican-inspired schooling structure)competed with a liberal view (more streamingand diversification). From the 1960s to the1970s, a liberal-egalitarian compromise wasreached (selective ability-first-ism and ‘thediscrimination is selection principle’). From the1980s to the present, neoconservatism hasjoined neoliberalism (liberalization,diversification, nationalism plus the marketprinciple).

This book is highly focused; this may be apositive or a negative depending on individualpreferences. Okada’s purview, as heacknowledges, is restricted (p. 175): he focuseson ‘public statements’ (p. 15); he primarilyinvestigates the secondary level; and he does notexamine the role of ethnicity, minorities, gender,or disability. Other issues, such as bullying,school violence, and the refusal to attend school,are similarly passed over. But to what degree canthese sociological variables be disentangled fromsocio-economic inequality? Another, more minorissue: the concluding chapter is repetitive andtoo much of a summary.

This book is a historical treatment, not ananthropological investigation. Of course, a workshould not be criticized for what it did not setout to do. Nevertheless, the book would havebenefited from some attention to how policiesand legislation impact on practices andbehaviour at the local level: that is, whathappens in schools among teachers, students,and parents. But Okada’s book is a useful casestudy from a macro-level perspective. Though hehimself admits that he only compared Japan toGreat Britain (indeed, why not compare Japan toChina, South Korea, or Germany?), he notes inthe conclusion that his work potentially hascross-national import. I concur. His explorationof the tension between egalitarianism andmeritocracy as institutionalized in Japaneseschooling resonates in general with howpost-industrialized states attempt to balanceequality with liberty. Clearly written, this is aconcise guide to Japan’s post-imperial history ofeducation that highlights all the key points ofpost-war educational history. A glossary ofJapanese terms and list of abbreviations, as wellas three appendices, provide the reader withhandy references.

Brian J. McVeigh University of Arizona

Evolutionary anthropology

Diamond, Jared. The world until yesterday:what can we learn from traditional societies?512 pp., maps, figs, bibliogr. London: AllenLane, 2012. £20.00 (cloth)

Waiting for his flight to LA, Jared Diamondsurveys the teeming modern chaos of PortMoresby airport and muses that ‘in the last 75

years, the New Guinea Highland population hasraced through changes that took thousands ofyears to unfold in much of the rest of the world’.Well, yes and no, Dr Diamond. There havecertainly been great changes, but change is notunidirectional. History is not a shared escalator.Modern New Guinea is still not very like itsneighbours, Australia and Indonesia.

Diamond also thinks that ‘New Guinea is insome respects a window onto the human worldas it was until a mere yesterday’. He assumesthat past societies moved through certain setstages of development. All societies at aparticular stage of progress were very muchalike. Yet throughout its – largely unknown –history, New Guinea (itself very diverse) wouldsurely have seemed distinctly unusual to anyintrepid visitor from other shores.

Diamond assumes, however, that thedifferences between traditional societies, at firstglance so great, are as nothing compared to thereal divide in history, the great ditch thatseparates the inhabitants of modern Westernstates from everyone else. The argument of thisbook hinges on this contrast between the Westand ‘traditional societies’. The West is shorthandfor modern industrial states, but Diamond doesnot specify whether this category includesChina, India, or the former Soviet Union, and ifnot, why not. Nor is there any discussion ofwhen the modern West begins.

The residual category, the ‘traditionalsocieties’, is defined in an early footnote associeties with populations of under a fewthousand that make a living by foraging,herding, or farming, and are barely influencedby the West. This category would cover societiesas diverse as the Eskimo and the Bedouin, but,as we read on, it expands to embrace Africanpeoples (Nuer, Zulu) with populations runninginto the hundreds of thousands. It is notaltogether clear whether ancient Greece andRome would be classed as traditional societies,but the category turns out to include pocketswithin modern Western states. ‘European friendsof mine who grew up in small European villages

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in the 1950s described childhoods like those in atraditional New Guinea village’, Diamond notes,surely implausibly. He concludes that ‘the worldof yesterday wasn’t erased and replaced by anew world of today: much of yesterday is stillwith us’. In short, ‘traditional societies’, or‘yesterday’s world’, turns out to be everythingthat we – or, perhaps, Californians – wouldregard as old hat.

The main thing about those ‘traditionalsocieties’ is that they do things very differently.Diamond made this discovery on his visits toNew Guinea over the years (studying birds, notpeople). He was surprised to discover that ‘manyof my New Guinea friends count differently’. Notonly that. They ‘select their wives or husbandsdifferently, treat their parents and their childrendifferently, view danger differently, and have adifferent concept of friendship’.

Diamond offers occasional eclecticexplanations of some of those very various waysof going about life (evolutionist, ecological,historical, psychological, as the mood takes him),but the real purpose of this book is to offer ideasdrawn from ‘traditional societies’ that willimprove our lives. ‘Traditional peoples have beenunconsciously executing thousands ofexperiments on how to operate a human society.We can’t repeat all those experiments ... butwe can still learn from what actually didhappen’.

By and large, Diamond approves of theexperiments of traditional society, although inhis summary they turn out to be boringlyrepetitive rather than stimulatingly various. Hetells us, for example, that traditional peopleswent in for mediation and reconciliation, and soshould we. Mothers breastfeed for longer thanour mothers ever did, children are carriedaround close to their mothers’ bodies, and evensmall children routinely pick up more than onelanguage. This, he feels, is probably all to thegood, although he has to concede that theevidence for the consequences is patchy. Andthey ate better, consuming less salt and sugarthan we do. Yet he does admit that noteverything was rosy in that old Eden. We mustpick and choose from amongst past ways ofgoing about life. ‘The thirst for revenge isn’tnice’, Dr Diamond editorializes, just in case weare tempted to adopt everything from thattraditional world, ‘but it can’t be ignored. It hasto be understood, acknowledged, and addressed– in ways other than actually taking revenge’. Inmany societies the old are honoured andrespected. Other traditional peoples abandon,even kill, the old and feeble when they became

a drag on the camp. Which example should wefollow?

Some of Diamond’s recommendations areless banal but more puzzling. He praises theinhabitants of traditional societies for what hecalls ‘constructive paranoia’. They are afraid ofsnakes and of ferocious wild beasts, so peopletake care when they go out in the bush. Theylisten to what they hear from their parents andneighbours about the dangers out there. We,however, take our ideas of danger from TVprogrammes, which is less sensible. (In point offact, most New Guineans are far more frightenedof ghosts and witches than they are of wildanimals.)

In short, Diamond found out on his trips toNew Guinea that not everyone behaves likemodern Americans. He generalizes this finding –that non-Westerners are not like us – but hisexamples are drawn from superficial anduncritical readings of ethnography, and thecomparative framework on which he depends,the lazy dichotomy between them and us,traditional and modern, would not pass musterwith a sophomore class in anthropology. As forthe lessons that might make us better humanbeings ... well, ethnography is not a goodwillstore of apps for life, in which child-rearingtechniques are on offer alongside ethnicbead-work and African drums.

Adam Kuper London School of Economics andPolitical Science

Tattersall, Ian. Masters of the planet: thesearch for our human origins. xxii, 255 pp.,fig., illus., bibliogr. Basingstoke, New York;Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. £16.99 (cloth)

Palaeoanthropologist Ian Tattersall, emerituscurator at the American Museum of NaturalHistory, provides another lucid overview ofhuman evolution. In just fourteen chapters,7 million years of possible hominin ancestorsare covered at a good pace, clearly and innon-technical language. With guidelinereferencing included for each chapter at theback, this is an up-to-date, authoritative sourcecovering what we currently know (and don’treally know) about our ancestry. It’s ideal foranyone needing to mug up quickly on the stateof the science of palaeoanthropology. Lesssatisfactorily, it attempts to account for how webecame the symbolic species.

The past two decades have yielded rich newdiscoveries of possible bipedal ancestors,including Sahelanthropus, Orrorin, andArdipithecus. The 4.4 million-year-old Ardipithecus

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ramidus is a ‘strange beast’, first found in Awashin 1994 but only published about in 2009 afterpainstaking extraction and reconstruction.Tattersall casts doubt on acceptance of A.ramidus as a definite early biped, a claim basedon the reconstructed pelvis. Arms, hands, andfeet show distinctly arboreal adaptations, withan extraordinary grasping divergent big toe,implying ‘Ardi’ may be on a side-branch ofhominin evolution. Only 200,000 years youngeris Australopithecus anamensis from Lake Turkana,still a climber but also showing definite bipedalspecialization, making it a plausible antecedentof later australopithecines. Some of the best ofthis book is found in the chapters onaustralopithecine life-style, where Tattersalldiscusses the earliest evidence of cutting tools,and social strategies in relation to environment.

Tattersall belongs to the generation ofpalaeoanthropologists who started to place theirfossils into the context of the neo-Darwiniansynthesis, but he has long resisted a singlelineage narrative of genus Homo. He favoursGouldian notions of rapid change via exaptation– emergent novel uses of traits, withoutalteration in the genome – or even ‘hopefulmonster’ effects, where slight genetic changemay result in large phenotypic differences.Admitting our lack of knowledge of where genusHomo came from, he reaches for some suchmechanism to account for the suddenappearance of a species looking like us, revealedin the subadult H. ergaster ‘Turkana boy’ from1.6 million years ago. Yet despite bodyproportions highly similar to ours, and asomewhat expanded brain, this is still a speciesgrowing up more like an ape than like us.

The fascinating problem of theneither-an-ape, nor-yet-human life history ofTurkana boy is left bald, because by this stage ofHomo evolution Tattersall is shy of discussing H.ergaster ’s social (and sexual) life. Neitherco-operative breeding models, nor thegrandmother hypothesis get so much as amention, nor even a reference at the back.

Tattersall is right to insist that we understandour evolution in terms of standard Darwinianprocesses with no special pleading, yet he alsoconfronts the paradox that ‘[t]he changeover ofHomo sapiens from a nonsymbolic, nonlinguisticspecies to a symbolic, linguistic one is the mostmind-boggling cognitive transformation that hasever happened to any organism’ (p. 220). Weare given few clues as to how this miracleoccurred; it turns out to be ‘a byproduct of thehugely ramifying genetic accident that resultedin the appearance of Homo sapiens ... Happily for

us, the resulting creature turned out to functionpretty well’ (p. 210). The ‘neural ingredient’predisposing our species to symbolic thought,Tattersall continues, ‘was simply one passiveconsequence of the developmentalreorganization that gave rise to anatomicallyrecognizable Homo sapiens some 200,000 yearsago’.

It is striking that Tattersall is fine withsocio-ecology for australopithecines, but thecloser we get to Homo sapiens, the more heinvokes accidental mutations by way ofexplanation. No question of social interaction –no intersubjectivity, joint attention, sharedintentions, social brain hypothesis, or sexualselection model – is discussed as critical tosymbolic cognition. Yet in conceptualizing thetransition to symbolic communication, Tattersalluses the example of the invention of NicaraguanSign Language. This occurred in the aftermath ofthe Sandinista revolution when deaf children,previously isolated in family homes, werebrought together as a community. Ironically,there can be no better illustration of how a shiftof social conditions enabled people to speak toeach other.

Tattersall is among those who argue thatmodern anatomy appears before moderncognition, yet his own account of early symbolicbehaviour in the African Middle Stone Agecontradicts this. Sites like Blombos, PinnaclePoint, and Border Cave are taking us back to thedates of modern speciation. Isn’t it moreparsimonious to suggest symbolic strategies andour speciation were part and parcel of the sameprocesses?

Camilla Power University of East London

Historical anthropology

Alliegro, Enzo Vinicio. Antropologiaitaliana: storia e storiografia 1869-1875. xiii,639 pp., tables, illus., bibliogr. Florence: SEIDEditori, 2011. €55.00 (paper)

Between the 1970s and early 1990s, theinternational community became interested inItalian anthropology, finding alternativeparadigms to the one developed in English- andFrench-speaking academia. In this period, theworks of authors such as Antonio Gramsci andethnographers such as Ernesto Demartino werediscovered by an English-speaking public andbecame influential in the anthropologicaltheoretical canon.

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Despite this success, by the beginning of the1990s, scholars had begun to identify the earlysigns of peripheralization of the Italianexperience from the international debate: amarginalization that twenty years later appearsevident and proven by the exclusion of Italyamong the countries whose anthropologicaltradition is surveyed in the new edition ofRoutledge’s Encyclopedia of social and culturalanthropology (eds Alan Barnard and JonathanSpencer, 2010) and the reflections ofinternational scholars.

In the face of such marginalization, toreconsider the specific history and the theoreticalelements of this national tradition appears afundamental first step in beginning to makesense of Italian anthropology’s present oblivionand its past fame. In this respect, the work ofAlliegro appears to be a timely contribution thatsheds light on the first century of Italiananthropology, from early anthropologicalteaching in 1869 to the establishment ofanthropology as one of the key universitydisciplines in the 1970s.

The volume is part of a broad strand ofhistorical research that, in the last half-century,has explored the past of anthropology in Italy(pp. 2-5). While the majority of these worksinvestigated only particular moments of thisintellectual and institutional history, Alliegrooffers an extensive overview of more than onehundred years of anthropological studies inorder to overcome ‘the fragmentation reachedby the [previous] precious studies’ (p. 6).

Alliegro’s analysis develops along three maintrajectories of investigation: the biographicalstudy of the lives of main protagonists of thediscipline; the institutional history of the majorprofessional associations and the emergence ofanthropology as an academic discipline; and thehistory of the ideas that marked theconsolidation of the anthropological tradition inItaly. The historical enterprise ismethodologically conducted with abibliographical approach that surveys theprincipal scientific works and conferenceproceedings in light of the current debate aboutthe history of anthropological studies.

The historical narrative is structuredchronologically into three parts: a first part, ‘The“long Risorgimento” and liberal Italy’ (chaps 1

and 2, pp. 23-144), which covers the years fromthe 1860s to the 1910s; a second part, ‘From thefirst post-war to Fascism’ (chaps 3-5, pp. 145-314),which discusses the decades from the 1920s to1940s; and, finally, ‘Between Fascism andRepublic’ (chaps 6-10, pp. 315-540), which

discusses the period between the 1950s and the1970s. Following this structure, the chaptersinvestigate the transformation of the disciplineby analysing the development of theory andmethodology. Alliegro sheds light on the rise ofphysical anthropology as the earlyinstitutionalized form of Italian anthropology(chap. 1) and the parallel onset of folklorestudies (chap. 2) in the late nineteenth century;he shows the formalization of the latter into a‘science of folklore’ (chap. 3) and thedevelopment of ethnological studies linked withItalian colonialism (chap. 4); he emphasizes thelink between racism and anthropology duringFascist rule (chap. 5) and the theoretical andmethodological revolution represented by theworks of Ernesto de Martino (chap. 6); heinvestigates the formalization of folklore (chap.7) and ethnological studies (chap. 8) into thebroader discipline of cultural anthropology(chap. 9); and he concludes by showing itsinstitutionalization into a new universitydiscipline (chap. 10).

For the coherence and depth of his historicalreconstruction, the work of Alliegro offers astarting-point from which to define the essentialaspects of Italian anthropological thought andits development over more than a century. Fromthe volume, the divorce of cultural anthropologyfrom physical anthropology in the post-war eraemerges clearly, as does the independence ofthe discipline from archaeology, the longtradition of anthropology ‘at home’, the weightof the idealist and Marxist philosophy of itstheoretical approach, and the strong link withlinguistics, in particular dialectology andsocio-linguistics. Moreover, the volumehighlights the interconnection betweenacademic knowledge and institutional politicaldebate.

If these are undoubted strengths, however,Alliegro fails to investigate otherinterconnections between anthropologicaldebate and other aspects of the Italian socialworld, primarily the link with politicalmovements, NGOs, the Catholic Church, massmedia, and, more broadly, the non-universityculture. This is a field of inquiry yet to beexplored analytically in order to draw a broadersocial history of anthropology during thetwentieth century. Furthermore, interrupting hisanalysis at the end of the 1970s, Alliegro doesnot explore in any depth the last forty years ofdevelopments in anthropology: those decades inwhich, on the one hand, the discipline hasstrengthened its role in higher education but, onthe other, the theoretical paradigms that

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underpinned Italian anthropology entered intocrisis and Italian scholars started a difficultrelationship with the international community.

In a time when the current internationalmarginalization of Italian anthropology wouldseem to question its value and results, thepublication of Alliegro’s volume is timely inproviding a portrait of an anthropologicaltradition capable of developing strong andinterpretative paradigms, which has been analternative to British functionalism or Frenchstructuralism. What remains unexplained,however, is the reason for the marginalizationthat lies in those decades the author does notdiscuss (pp. 536-40): an open field for futureresearch.

Michele Filippo Fontefrancesco DurhamUniversity

Johnson, Christopher H. & David

Warren Sabean (eds). Sibling relations andthe transformation of European kinship1300-1900. xii, 356 pp., figs, tables, illus.,bibliogr. Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books,2011. £55.00 (cloth)

Through the detailed study of sibling relationsover several centuries, the authors of thechapters that form this book simultaneouslychallenge one of the basic assumptions of socialhistory and the history of kinship: namely, thatkinship becomes less important as societiesmove into modernity and foreground siblingrelations (which have often, at least in Europeanresearch, been considered of secondaryimportance). As the editors explain in theintroduction, the book aims ‘to capture therealities of siblings’ roles in the making ofkinship systems and the societies in which theywere embedded’. This treatment signifies afundamental change in how siblings areconsidered, moving them from subjectsproduced by kinship systems, and upon whomthese systems act, to a new status as agents whoparticipate actively in kinship processes.

The chapters are distributed in two parts thatcover far-reaching transformations in Europeankinship. Part 1, ‘Property, politics, and siblingstrategies’, covers the late medieval to the earlymodern periods; and part 2, ‘Sibling relations,close marriage, and horizontal kinship’, coversthe period from 1750 to 1900, thus highlightingthe transition from the use of marriage to extenda lineage’s power to a preference for closemarriage to consolidate this power. Thistransition involved a change from marriagesbetween people of unequal situations to

marriages between people in quite similarsituations, as well as a tendency away from theseparation of siblings’ destinies depending ontheir birth order and sex towards a greaterintimacy throughout life.

The authors included in part 1 discuss thesignificance of the transmission of dowry,offering an alternative interpretation to Goody’sdiverging devolution (Derouet); the tensionsamong siblings in German dynasties resultingfrom the need for many offspring to ensuresuccession and the need to provide for them allwithout compromising the integrity of theterritory and wealth (Spieb); the problems ofdefining sibling terminology over time inGermany and the figure of the ‘Schwesterfraw’ asa way of understanding the transmission ofpower and property in the aristocracy(Hohkamp); and the co-operation and conflictresulting from the highly structured nature ofordered sibling relationships in Germanaristocracy (Ruppel). The Hohenzollerns, inBrandenburg-Prussia, are discussed as anexample of the solutions given to the problemsof succession and of the division or non-divisionof land as a strategy (Marschke). This part endswith a comparison of two Italian cases thatchallenges some general concepts about kinshipsystems and sibling groups in the transition fromthe sixteenth to the nineteenth century (Delille).

Part 2 opens with an analysis of the changesin brother-sister relations as reflected in Scottishballads on incest and murder from theseventeenth and nineteenth centuries (Perry).The chapters that follow delve into issues ofemotions, affection, and self, through casestudies. One author follows the fates of themembers of three French families, throughletters and journals, to document the interplayof emotion and power at the end of theeighteenth century and beginning of thenineteenth century (Johnson). Another usesliterary texts to explore the move fromexogamous to endogamous alliances and theemotional connotations around 1800 (Sabean),while the following chapter uses theDroysen-Mendelssohn correspondence todescribe friendship, sibling, and romanticrelationships between Protestant and Jewishfamilies during the first half of the nineteenthcentury (Schulte). The Victorian debate on‘marriage with the dead wife’s sister’ ispresented through a case study put in contextwith pamphlets on the controversy andreferences to literary works (Corbett), and, in thefinal chapter, the relationship of Prime MinisterWilliam Ewart Gladstone with his sisters is used

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to show how the most intimate familyrelationships were cross-cut by gender and agerank, producing disparate physical andemotional outcomes (Davidoff).

The different chapters show the individualityof the research and styles of the differentauthors, but they all address, in one way oranother, the main issue, which is not just siblingrelations, but how they fit into broader issues ofkinship, such as power and influence andinheritance and succession. In all cases, theresearch is solid, not drawing from a singlesource, such as a series of letters, but including abroad range of historical evidence. The analysesthemselves are nicely nuanced and all connectwith the main theoretical issues of the field,providing a lively discussion and indicating newdirections for research. Scholars from many fieldsfocusing on family and kinship, as well asgeneral readers with an interest in familyrelations, will enjoy and find stimulation in thisvolume.

Nancy Konvalinka Universidad Nacional deEducación a Distancia

Tilley, Helen. Africa as a living laboratory:empire, development, and the problem ofscientific knowledge, 1870-1950. xiv, 496 pp.,maps, plates, tables, illus., bibliogr. Chicago:Univ. Press, 2011. £18.50 (paper)

Scholars in the social study of science haveprofessed that laboratories should be studied asmacro-problems situated in their social andhistorical milieu, not just considered asdelimited, fact-making Cartesian spaces. That is,laboratories should be conceived not asessentially physical locales with a clearlydemarcated inside and an outside, but ascomprised instead of semiotic relations thatextend their influence by recruiting others’interests into participation in their epistemicprojects. The parallel with the machinery ofcolonial management becomes clear, as Tilleypaints a vivid picture of colonial scientificendeavours in British Africa situated in theanalytic frame of a living laboratory, a spacewhere power was exerted to yield new andemergent forms of knowledge.

The specific aims of the book are to revealhow scientific research impinged on imperialambitions in British Africa, particularly the effectsthat knowledge produced in the colonies had onBritish colonial management, though also howsuch studies influenced conceptual and politicaldevelopments ‘at home’. The book thus dealswith the way scientific knowledge was deployed

as a tool of power in Britain’s African colonies,showing how the knowledge that was producedultimately fed back to undermine the power thatit sought to wield.

The book offers particular focus on theAfrican research survey: a decade-longendeavour (1929-39), the aim of which was todetermine the extent that ‘modern knowledge’was being applied to ‘African problems’ in themanagement of Britain’s colonies. The Africansurvey thus circumscribed the territories of Africaas an object of scientific investigation; and withthe rise of interest in medical, racial andanthropological sciences at that time, Africabecame constructed as a veritable ‘livinglaboratory’ in which such disciplines wouldflourish.

Tilley reports the crucial finding that colonialscience was often supplanted by nativeknowledge, as in certain instances ‘nativescience’ could better master the land than‘colonial knowledge’. For example, in Nigeriathe edible leaves of the baobab tree were notedto be typically shade-dried by indigenous peoplebefore their consumption, though it was onlyafter ‘Western’ scientific laboratory tests revealedthat shade-drying avoids the vitamindegradation that sun drying causes thatscientists realized the extent of the previouslyoverlooked ‘local’ knowledge (p. 213). Similarly,through the study of the effects of nganga (aparasitic disease that affects cattle) on localagriculture practices, colonial scientistssynthetically widened their existing knowledgebase on the pathogenicity of vector-borneparasites.

Though the African survey has been –canonically – interpreted as furthering imperialhegemony, Tilley elucidates how the epistemicbasis of the survey’s aims precipitated a criticalturn in Britain’s strategic administration over itsAfrican territories, and in fact marks the ‘eve ofdecolonization’ (p. 3). Tilley historicizes thesurvey as the movement that ontologizedindigenous knowledge, arguing that thecodification of indigenous knowledge criticallydepended on colonial relations bringing them tolight. As such, she argues, provocatively, thattheories of ‘ethnoscience’ somewhat ‘owe theirexistence to imperial structures andsocio-political asymmetries’ (p. 11).

Through such epistemic encounters, sheargues, ‘modern’ technoscience andethnoscience began to be bridged, and the aposteriori recognition of what she calls‘vernacular science’ gained momentum (p. 122).Crucially, she argues that the production of

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scientific knowledge in Africa transformedcolonial understandings of Africans and theirenvironments, with the recognition of localknowledge essentially undermining the power ofthe empire, dethroning its exclusive role in theproduction of scientific knowledge.

Continuing against the grain of the axiomthat ‘knowledge of the colonies confers powerover the colonies’, then, Tilley reveals howanthropologists specifically played an importantrole in the dismantling of the British Empire inAfrica. Following the Malinowskian move inethnography in the 1930s, Britain’s‘anthropologists catalysed an importantexchange between the Colonial Office and itsAfrican dependencies’ (p. 274), particularlyemphasizing the uncertainties around thecredibility and validity of racial sciences: a move,she argues, that ultimately helped to erodethe justification of imperial rule on racialgrounds.

Perhaps the most salient lesson from thebook is that conceptions of ‘local’ knowledgecan emerge precisely from the constitutiveencounter with the ‘outsider’, that knowledgefunctions qua power by recruiting subjects of itspower, and that colonial pursuits in ‘livinglaboratories’ can yield unexpected results, withlocal knowledge throwing up underminingsurprises and impasses in the face of epistemiccolonization.

Though the conclusions of the book mayread as polemical, the scholarship is excellent,meticulously crafted into a work that will be wellregarded by historians and epistemologists.

Ian Vincent McGonigle University of Chicago

Tucker, Erica L. Remembering occupiedWarsaw: Polish narratives of World War II. ix,290 pp., bibliogr. DeKalb: Northern IllinoisUniv. Press, 2011. £18.00 (paper)

In Remembering occupied Warsaw, Erica L. Tuckerpresents a remarkably rich set of accounts of atime and place underrepresented inEnglish-language anthropology. These narrativesbelong to twenty-five elderly residents of theZoliborz neighbourhood with whom Tuckercarried out in-depth ‘life-history, focusedinterviews’ (p. 11) in the late 1990s. Focusing onthe inhabitants of one district was perhaps awise methodological decision, a response to the‘problem’ of how to conduct a markedlyintimate kind of research in a city. And yet thespecific identity afforded to Zoliborzians, namelythat they are considered distinctive withinWarsaw, and that they are largely members of

the intelligentsia, also marks Tucker’s book outas a very valuable contribution toanthropological literature on social stratification,or ‘class’, in Poland.

That Zoliborz borders with Muranów, the siteof the Warsaw Ghetto, makes it an interestinglocation in which to research one of themonograph’s central concerns: to provide anuanced account of how ethnic Poles rememberthe Holocaust (p. 5). In the introductory chapter,Tucker delicately sets out her intentions for thebook, stating, for example, that she does not‘seek to make a case that the experiences andmemories of ethnic Poles are more importantthan those of Jewish Poles or that the formergroup had suffered more than, or even as muchas, the latter’ (p. 6). She touches upon therelatively well-worn tenet that remembering canbe a ‘moral imperative’ (p. 15), particularly innarrating the past to those too young toremember it first-hand. Tempering this, however,is the reality that this kind of remembrance canbe both ‘traumatic’ (p. 16) and ‘potentiallydebilitating’ (p. 15).

Chapter 1 confronts ‘identity politics ininterwar Poland’. Tucker’s historical range isambitious: ‘As early as 1386, when Poland andLithuania formed the Polish Lithuaniancommonwealth’ (p. 29) begins one subsection.This scope is eye-watering, but necessary inorder to understand the complexity of thememories at hand. Tucker’s appraisal of Polishhistory is framed by her observation that manyof her Warsovian informants displayed carefullycurated galleries of photographs in their homes.These collections commonly coalesced familialand national memory. Images of Piłsudski arehung next to photographs or paintings of elderkin. Depictions of country manors remind us ofTucker’s informants’ class positions asdescendants of the landed gentry, or szlachta.This type of material culture shows usnon-verbal narratives, which go further back intime than many of the informants’ interviewaccounts, of citizens’ kinship with the idea ofPolish independence.

The second and third chapters, which arecomprised of remembrances of the Invasion andthe Occupation, respectively, detail, amongother topics, how the ‘ethnic Poles’ Tuckerinterviewed remember the Nazis’ abominationstowards Polish Jews. This sets the ground forchapter 5, which is entitled ‘Reflections onhelping Polish Jews’. The chapter begins withTucker’s recollection of a post-fieldworkconversation in which she recounted, to a friend,one of her informant’s anti-Semitism (p. 139).

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How could it be, the friend responded, ‘thatsomeone who hated Jews could be in theresistance’? The book would be an invaluablesource for scholars working within Holocaustand survivor studies (among other disciplines).Although not narrated by Polish Jews,Remembering occupied Warsaw is, as one wouldexpect, in no small part their story.

Another particularly rich facet of thismonograph is its dissection of the relationshipbetween memory, age, and generation. Tucker’srecollection of being a twenty-somethingfieldworker who initially viewed ‘all of [her]informants as “older people” ’ (p. 46) when infact their ages in 1939 ranged from 9 to 34 yearsof age is a nicely self-deprecating ethnographictouch. Tucker addresses these age gaps bydividing memories of the Invasion (chap. 2) into‘Children’s perspectives’ (p. 49), ‘Adolescents’perspectives’ (p. 50), and ‘Adults’ reflections’(p. 57). In doing so, Tucker puts forwardextraordinary instances of children’s politicalengagement with their environment. Acts ofmały sabotaz (‘little sabotage’), such as thegraffiti of ‘PW’ on walls, have particularly stuckwith me (p. 126).

Tucker’s extremely readable Rememberingoccupied Warsaw is a deeply valuablecontribution to the anthropologies of memory,Poland, the Holocaust, war, and class. I expectthat it would also be interesting to historiansand to general readers interested in Poland. Thefinal chapter’s descriptions of Tucker’s muchbriefer visits to Warsaw in 2004 and 2008 gosome way to framing the book not only as astory of wartime Poland, but also as an accountof a ‘postsocialist’ Poland, during whichmemories of the war once veiled by Sovietgovernance began to appear in officialdiscourses.

Siobhan Magee University of Edinburgh

Medical anthropology

Dew, Kevin. The cult and science of publichealth: a sociological investigation. vii, 179 pp.,bibliogr. Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books,2012. £42.00 (cloth)

By exploring the evolving role of public health,this book argues that it has come to function asDurkheim’s ‘cult of humanity’. The ‘cult ofhumanity’ refers to a belief in ‘the unity ofsociety’ (p. 7) and a shared humanity despiteincreasingly differentiated individuals and roles

in society. In this perspective, public health notonly is a science, underpinned by ‘rationality’and strict methodologies, but functions as areligion as it relies on the belief that allindividuals deserve access to health by virtue oftheir unity and shared humanity. It acts as amoral force aimed at alleviating uncertainty andsuffering and constraining other selfish forces.Rather than a Foucauldian analysis, this bookoffers a perspective on the function of publichealth not just as a site of power and control,but as a moral force and a means of resistance initself. In doing so, the book explores tensionsboth within public health and between publichealth, the state, and the population, andcontrasts both its positive and negativefunctions.

The book begins by introducing thedevelopment of public health in the urbanizing,industrializing European context, moving on toits influence in the United States, Canada, NewZealand, and Australia. It explores the shiftingstances of public health from structural tolife-style, and from individual topopulation-based concerns. Chapter 2 showshow public health can be a moral force, actingto restrain rising inequalities exaggerated byneoliberal economic policies. Through thetheory of ‘social justice’, public healthencompassed not just concern with specificdisease but the social, economic, and politicaldrivers of health inequality, providing a site ofresistance to economic reforms fosteringinequalities. However, the author does notabandon a Foucauldian perspective, showingthat public health can also serve the state toexercise greater control and regulation.

The moral goals of public health also createtensions, explained in chapters 3, 4, and 5.Firstly, the concern over individual rights is atodds with the need to promote the paramountexpertise of health professionals, which does notleave much room for individual choices.Secondly, despite the ‘extension of the clinicalgaze’, large populations continue not to beprioritized by public health measures in research,funding, and interventions, which remainsproblematic: ‘If public health is taking on themantle of the cult of humanity then itsobjectives to alleviate suffering and resisthealth-hostile influences need to extend evenfurther than they have to date’ (p. 52).

Thirdly, the social justice principle of publichealth may conflict with health-economicconcerns. When public health is operationalizedinto clinical practice, the desire to standardizemedicine and control the efficient allocation of

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resources might be in opposition with clinicalcare (chap. 4). Finally, public health research andpolicy can be used to support the vestedinterests of various groups such as stateorganizations or businesses (chap. 5). All theseissues are illustrated in relation to vaccinationcampaigns, their promotion, and the handlingof critique or resistance to such programmes(chap. 6).

In conclusion (chap. 7), the book argues thatpublic health has become, in Durkheim’s term,‘the new religion’, with its rituals and socialpractices, regulations and discipline, and ideals.Whilst public health as a ‘cult of humanity’ canmediate between science and the lived reality onthe ground, the book argues that this mediationneeds a place where critique can be receivedand where the population ‘targeted’ by healthmeasures has a voice in policy design. The oftenchallenging reception of medical anthropologyfindings among public health policy-makersillustrates this point.

The main interests of this compelling bookare threefold. Firstly, its interest lies in theimpressive range of debate and theory that itdraws upon to build its argument about thenature of public health. Secondly, the argumentpresented in the book encourages us to thinkabout public health in relation to society and itsbeliefs. More specifically, Dew’s Durkheimianapproach may encourage reflection on howpublic health is conceptualized andoperationalized in settings where religion hasnot been replaced by a ‘cult of humanity’. Thismight constitute a powerful lens to analyse therole of public health in such settings. Thirdly,whilst providing a critique of the functions ofpublic health, the analysis in this book departsfrom a Foucauldian perspective. Itconceptualizes public health not only as aninstrument of power, but also as an instrumentof morality, thus allowing for a more positiveassessment of the function of public healthwhilst still highlighting its ambivalent nature.

Georgina Pearson London School ofEconomics and Political Science

Inhorn, Marcia C. & Emily A. Wentzell

(eds). Medical anthropology at theintersections: histories, activisms, and futures.viii, 342 pp., illus., bibliogr. London, Durham,N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 2012. £16.99 (paper)

This book is a by-product of a Society forMedical Anthropology conference at YaleUniversity in September 2009 on ‘MedicalAnthropology at the Intersections: Celebrating

Fifty Years of Interdisciplinarity’. This anthologyjoins at least three earlier anthologies inproviding overviews of medical anthropology asa subfield of the discipline. The others areMedical anthropology and contemporary theoryand method (second edition, 1996), edited byCarolyn Sargent and Thomas M. Johnson;Medical anthropology: regional perspectives andshared concerns (2007), edited by FrancineSaillant and Serge Genest; and A companion tomedical anthropology (2011), edited by MerrillSinger and Pamela I. Erickson. All thecontributors to the volume under review,needless to say, are world-renowned medicalanthropologists and again demonstrate thatmedical anthropology is a variegated endeavour.

The first three chapters in part I focus on‘histories’. In chapter 1, Emily Martin reviews themany ‘grafts’ between medical anthropology,feminism, and science and technology studies.In chapter 2, Lynn M. Morgan seeks todemonstrate the ‘benefits and challenges ofcombining anthropology and history, using anempirical case study that began as investigationof the historical emergence of embryo and fetalsubjectivity in the United States’ (p. 41).Lawrence Cohen in chapter 3 critiques theterritorialization of anthropology, includingmedical anthropology, into area studies and callsupon medical anthropologists to ‘produce amore effective form of deterritorializedknowledge’ (p. 89).

The next three chapters in part II focus on‘queries’. In chapter 4, Didier Fassin provides anoverview of the contested notion of ‘globalhealth’, which has come to supplant‘international health’ and to some extent ‘publichealth’, and insists ‘that in spite of globalization,most health issues and policies remain national,even local’ (p. 96). Arthur Kleinman in chapter 5

poses five questions for the anthropology ofmental health over the course of the next fiftyyears: (1) ‘What is the difference between socialsuffering and mental health problems?’ (p. 118);(2) ‘[W]hat is the implication for medicalanthropology research of going beyond stigmato redefine in cultural terms what is at stake inthe most severe psychiatric conditions?’ (p. 120);(3) ‘How is the paradox of globalpharmaceuticals for psychiatric disorder ... to beoperationalized in theory and empirical studies?’(p. 121); (4) ‘How do ethics, forensics, andcaregiving fit into the medical anthropology ofprofessional psychiatric and family-based mentalhealth care?’ (p. 124); and (5) ‘[H]ow are we toreframe science and society in the golden era ofbrain research?’ (p. 126). He argues that medical

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anthropology is now in the process of movingfrom the periphery to the centre ofanthropology. Finally, in chapter 6, MargaretLock explores the multiplicity of socialimplications of the rapidly expanding knowledgein molecular genetics and genomics andsuggests that recognition of the social inequitiescharacteristic of daily life in the global systemholds the potential for ‘moving theanthropology of genetics and genomics intosome exciting new directions that will build onwork already accomplished’ (p. 158).

The final three chapters in part III focus on‘activisms’. In chapter 7, Rayna Rapp and FayeGinsburg examine the intimate connectionbetween disability studies and the anthropologyof disability and discuss how anthropologistssuch as themselves have become scholar-activistscommitted to the empowerment of people withdisabilities. Merrill Singer explores thecontributions that medical anthropologists canmake to public policy by collaborating withcommunity-based health organizations. At amore macro-level, he maintains that medicalanthropology ‘has something to offer the effortto create beneficial and research-informed healthpolicy at local, regional, national and globallevels (e.g., with reference to responding to themultiple and unequally distributed healthchallenges of global warming and otheranthropogenic ecocrises)’ (p. 204). In the finalchapter of the book, Richard Parker examineshow medical anthropology’s ‘engagement withsocial movements, political critiques, andactivism – feminist activism, AIDS activism,reproductive health and rights activism, LGBTactivism – has given work on these issues bothintellectual power and political importance’(p. 236).

Medical anthropology at the intersectionsprovides an excellent overview of many of theconcerns of medical anthropologists both at thetheoretical and applied levels fifty years intowhat has proven to be a dynamic subfield of theparent discipline. Conversely, numerous othertopics of concern to medical anthropologists areleft unexamined, such as the intricateconnections between health and theenvironment (e.g. the impact of climate changeon health), national health care systems, medicalpluralism, and efforts to create a healthy worldfor humans and for the environment bysupplementing global capitalism with analternative world system committed to bothsocial and health justice and environmentalsustainability.

Hans A. Baer University of Melbourne

Paton, Diana & Maarit Forde (eds). Obeahand other powers: the politics of Caribbeanreligion and healing. xii, 354 pp., illus.,bibliogr. London, Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ.Press, 2012. £18.99 (paper)

The title points us immediately to the heart ofthe book. As elsewhere, misfortune and illnessmay, in the Caribbean, invoke ultra-humanagency. But is obeah to be regarded as‘religion’? In the Anglophone West Indies, theterm generally connotes sorcery, generally of amalevolent kind. The contributors to thisvolume, derived from a 2008 Newcastleconference, give us a detailed discussion of theuse of such epithets by practitioners and outsideauthorities, but at times their ‘obeah’ seems toshade into Orisha (West African-derived) religionor the religious practice of the slave plantations.A chapter by Kenneth Bilby contests malevolenceto argue that in the Maroon communities ofSurinam and French Guiana, the word ‘obeah’has positive connotations of spirituality.

The link with healing seems rather tenuous inthe absence of earlier narrative evidence. Yet oneproto-medical anthropologist of 1860s Cubaventured an opinion on slave sickness whichemphasized local conditions of work andrecourse to plantation healers, incontradistinction to the usual nineteenth-centuryemphasis on race and rascality. Perhapsborrowing from the British Caribbean, ‘obeah’was the term employed to describe an epidemicof mass poisoning in post-NapoleonicMartinique: a practice locally assumed to be anextension of the local pharmacopée noire; shopswhich sold arsenic to counter rat infestationwere closed, and free non-whites were forbiddento practise pharmacy. The local whites weresuspicious of the slaves’ friendly societies basedon tribal origin (particularly of the Igbo), whilstthe less anxious metropolitan visitors wonderedif the poisoning episodes could be attributed tothe paranoia of the planter, anxious aboutapproaching slave emancipation, with thedeaths more sensibly attributed to cholera oryellow fever. Carnivalesque Afro-Cuban self-helpand devotional societies were raided by thepolice in the early twentieth century forsuspected subversion.

The chapters here are less discretedescriptions of different regional practices thanaccounts of how power and authority – the‘other powers’ of the book’s title – haveintersected with, and at times have helpedproduce, different religious formations. Thecontributions encompass the plantation/colonial

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period of disdain for slave practices, the growthof local nationalisms in the post-emancipationperiod with the legal banning of religiousvernaculars such as the Trinidad Shouters andthe prohibition of obeah as simply deceptionand fraud, followed by island intellectuals takingup and reframing local practice in the run-up toindependence, and so into our current debateson African survivals and creolization. AlasdairPettinger’s chapter traces the fate of a Haitianchant supposedly recorded by Moreau deSaint-Mery in 1797 – ‘Eh! Eh! Bomba, hen! hen!’– through its repetitions and supposedtranslations from Moreau to C.L.R. James.Katherine Smith’s chapter, meanwhile, examineshow a current Haitian art group’s changingsculptures of the transgressive Gede spirit of thedead reflect local ambiguities and politicalidentity.

Recent digitalization of the Jamaican Gleanernewspaper has allowed Diana Paton to scrutinizecases of obeah pursued by police and courtprosecutors from the 1890s onwards. Localrecourse to obeahmen appears fairly pragmatic,as opposed to the official version of a duped andterrified citizenry. In a similar survey of obeahand money in Trinidad, Maarit Forde argues themain motive for twentieth-century prosecutionswas the use of a ‘non-rational’ (non-capitalist)economy. And currently payment for spiritualservices is still disguised as ‘gifts’ in Trinidad.Inherited money always retains the deceased’sspirit on it and needs to be ‘washed’(laundered).

By the twentieth century, with repeatedlabour movements and migration across theCaribbean, a common set of beliefs had grownup from Panama to Trinidad which was called‘obeah’ by government authorities, whoattributed to it an African origin, even though itclearly interdigitated with European magical andspiritual practices (as ‘high science’) andincorporated industrialized products such asplaying cards, dyes, and bottles, and suchpopular sorcery manuals as the De LaurenceCompany books (derived from nineteenth-century French occultism?). In Haiti, the oldCatholic opposition to Vodou traditions has beenreplaced by anti-Protestant concerns, ironicallygiven Evangelical Protestants’ own strongopposition to Vodou, even whilst a fear ofsorcery persists in Catholic churches. In PuertoRico, use of Catholic prayers in local sorcery andhealing is not just a mild syncretism but, arguesRaquel Romberg, an active cultural plundering:ritual piracy. Taking her cue from Taussig andGeschiere, she argues here that modern idioms

of sorcery in the Caribbean and elsewhererepresent a flawed model of capitalism as anoccult economics. In Puerto Rico, brujeria is aparticipation in the modern colonial economythat is not so much alternative as pirated.

In a fine summing up, Steven Palmié showshow this volume renders the dialectics ofmodernity in their place of origin ‘morallycomprehensible through forms of symbolicrecoding of that which is otherwise toomeaningless to bear’. We are moving herebeyond the vague syncretisms of creolization tosome greater historical precision – which is to bewelcomed.

Roland Littlewood University College London

Music

Bigenho, Michelle. Intimate distance: Andeanmusic in Japan. xii, 230 pp., illus., bibliogr.London, Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press,2012. £14.99 (paper)

Michelle Bigenho’s second monograph hasseven well-linked and fluid chapters. The authormasters a personal and self-reflexive narrative,yet maintains theoretical rigour, making this notonly a helpful addition to anthropological andethnomusicological literature, but also a bookappealing to the non-specialized reader.Bigenho, as an anthropologist and violinist, takesthe reader on an ethnographic journey of musicperformance through her own participation in athree-month tour of Japan with Bolivian folkloricgroup Música de Maestros. This inter-area studyallowed her to use participant observation andinterviews with Japanese and Bolivian musiciansto explore an ‘intercultural nexus’ (p. 8) drawingon imagined identities, indigeneity, and racethinking. She examines the Japanese musicians’desire to learn and perform Bolivian music, adesire rooted in imagined similarities of ritual,language, music (pentatonic scales), and, aboveall, the feeling of a shared common race andblood with indigenous Andeans. How do theseJapanese musicians negotiate the pull towardsdifference and their embodiment of the Otherwhile maintaining rigid nationalisms? This‘intimate distance’, arising from nationalisticparadoxes and the limits of performingindigeneity (gender, body, ethnicity) throughmusic performance, is the primary concern ofthe book.

Bigenho avoids getting caught up in theinterpretative frameworks of cultural

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appropriation, exoticism, and commoditizationthat continue to dominate anthropological andethnomusicological literature. She focuses on themusicians’ racialized identity connections with aforeign Other and the contradictions theseconnections produce, as they feel emotionallyconnected yet distant. Moreover, this intimatedistance extends to the detachment between theBolivian mestizo performers and the indigenoussubjects – fellow Bolivians – whom theyrepresent on stage. This leads to the strikingcontradiction that making the music of theOther your own does not necessarily meanengaging with this Other’s political or socialworld.

Both the Japanese and Bolivians identify withwhat Alcida Ramos calls the ‘hyperreal Indian’,who does not exist, but, nevertheless, generatesreal work, inspires real journeys, and trapsmusicians in an essentialized repertoire (‘Thehyperreal Indian’, Critique of Anthropology 14: 2,1994). Bigenho discusses the work and valueinvolved in performing musical otherness,exploring the negotiations between meetingaudience expectations and resisting essentializedconceptions of ‘Andean folklore music’ (p. 84).The author deconstructs the inflexible premise ofeconomic difference and dichotomized distancebetween the represented and the transculturalaudience, placing more emphasis on theintimacy of cultural work. Bigenho, however,does not explicitly engage with GayatriChakravorty Spivak’s concept of ‘strategicessentialism’ (In other worlds: essays in culturalpolitics, 1987), which would provide anotherpotential perspective on neoliberal negotiationsof indigenous representation in what Bigenhocalls ‘Andean music for global consumption’(p. 33).

As these Japanese musicians seem attractedto Bolivian music via notions of ancient commonheritage, Bigenho explores both Bolivian andJapanese historical colonial experiences, in orderto understand their transcultural connection.Furthermore, she touches on historical racethinking and how both Japanese and Boliviansappear disconnected from indigenous people,each in their own national context. In doing so,Bigenho boldly brings race to the forefront ofmusic-centred research, a much-neededapproach in today’s social science andethnomusicological research, which still seem toavoid addressing race directly.

The book closes with an intriguing discussionabout inter-area studies as a methodologicalcritique of area studies itself. The fact thatBigenho was an American Latin Americanist on a

tour bus together with Japanese and mestizoBolivians playing indigenous Bolivian musicbroke the usual postcolonial dichotomy ofcolonized-colonizer, creating a methodologicaltriangulation that allowed her to observe theOther’s Otherness (p. 151).

A range of intimate distances are scrutinizedin this book, but Bigenho’s focus lies primarilyon the transnational ‘intercultural nexus’. Thisleft me wanting to know more about theintimate distance between indigenous Boliviansand mestizo Bolivian musicians, who struggle tomake a living from their music while competingin an international market that thrives onessentialisms. Bigenho also limits her discussionto the behaviour and thoughts of musicperformers and is relatively silent about the rolethat audiences undoubtedly play in mediatingintimate distance, through their active listeningparticipation.

Overall, Bigenho combines a rich, intimate,and theoretically rigorous ethnography with abrave methodological approach. In critiquingarea studies and arguing for the inter-areaethnographer to recognize the ‘unevenness inher own area of expertise’ (p. 151), she shows usthat what matters in ethnography is not theholistic understanding of the culture underscrutiny, but choosing and using methodologicaltools to match the objectives of the project.Finally, I would like to highlight the author’ssharp critique of nationalism as an ideology andthe fresh analytical focus on the affectiveeconomies involved in playing ‘someone else’smusic’.

Fiorella Montero Diaz Royal HollowayUniversity of London

Capwell, Charles. Sailing on the sea of love:the music of the Bauls of Bengal. xiv, 242 pp.,maps, illus., musical notation, bibliogr. CDs.Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2011. £16.00 (paper)

Charles Capwell’s book on the music of theBauls was first published (as The music of theBauls of Bengal) by Kent University Press in 1986,and was based on doctoral research carried outbetween 1969 and 1971. In those days, theseitinerant religious singers, with their syncreticmix of Vaishnava, Sufi, and Tantric practices,were barely known outside rural Bengal, exceptperhaps as a footnote to the story of Bengal’sgreat twentieth-century poet, novelist, anddramatist, Rabindranath Tagore. In thesucceeding quarter-century, modernizedversions of Baul music have become staples ofboth the world music scene and the

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contemporary popular music of West Bengaland Bangladesh. Capwell alludes briefly to thesedevelopments in the short preface to this secondedition (pp. ix-xi) but makes no attempt to coverthem in the book. Thus while the emergence ofurban ‘Baul music’ in the work of singers suchas Purna Chandra Das in the 1960s and 1970sreceives some discussion here, its wideradoption through the work of popular singerssuch as Paban Das in West Bengal and Mumtazin Bangladesh falls outside the purview of thisvolume. In fact, Bangladesh and Islam scarcelyfigure in these pages, which are strongly basedin the Vaishnava culture of rural West Bengal.This is something of a shame, since one of themost fascinating aspects of the Bauls is theirborder-crossing between Hinduism and Islam.This refusal to respect religious boundariesand identities is particularly notable in thework of the best known of all Baul poets,Lalan Fakir, whose songs are widely sung inboth Bangladesh and West Bengal, but arelargely absent from the repertoire discussedhere.

In other respects, too, Capwell’s book showsits age, reflecting an earlier stage in Westernscholarship and knowledge of Baul life andculture. Capwell was clearly interested in Baulspiritual practice and their esoteric sexualsadhana, but his analyses of song-texts referringto these themes are cautious and tend to avoiddetailed explanations of the symbolism. Indeed,the whole description of Bauls in chapter 1 iscuriously distanced and external, focusing atlength on Baul modes of dress (which areadmittedly often striking and unconventional),and it is followed by a chapter exploring the‘evolution of the Bauls as a cultural emblem’ inBengali society, incorporating an extendedtreatment of Tagore’s interest in the Bauls, andby a third which discusses how Bengalimusicologists classify Baul music. IndividualBauls and the Baul social and cultural milieuonly come into focus somewhat more in thefollowing two chapters, which deal with anumber of individual Baul singers and with theperformance contexts of Baul music. Overall,Capwell, writing in the mid-1980s, provided onlylimited insight into the complex culturalbackground of the Bauls or the difficulties andambivalences of Baul identity (as distinct fromthe role of Bauls as a ‘cultural emblem’ withinrespectable Bengali society). Much more, too,could be said, and has been said since by otherwriters, about the religious practice thatunderlies the often allusive and symbolicallyloaded language of Baul songs.

However, the reader can look elsewhere toremedy these omissions, to Jeanne Openshaw’sSeeking Bauls of Bengal (2002) for ananthropological exploration of ‘Baul’ identity inrural West Bengal, to the writings of Rahul PeterDas or the late Carol Salomon for the innermeaning of Baul texts, and perhaps to MimluSen’s illuminating recent memoir of herinvolvement with Paban Das Baul and his fellowmusicians, The honey-gatherers (2010; publishedin India as Baulsphere) for insights into Baulsociety and into how the Bauls became aninternational commodity. What Capwell doesprovide, and it is of great value, is a detailedanalysis of Baul musical and textual practice inWest Bengal in around 1970, based on asubstantial sample of the Baul repertoire of thetime. As such, this remains an important bookfor Baul studies and for studies in Indian music,and one well worth reissuing, especially sinceCapwell’s work remains the only seriousmusicological study of this unique music. Thebook is copiously provided with musicaltranscriptions, texts, and translations, andaccompanied by two CDs that include themusical examples from the cassettes providedwith the first edition. Seagull Books are to becongratulated for making this important workavailable once more.

Geoffrey Samuel Cardiff University andUniversity of Sydney

Politics and economics

Navaro-Yashin, Yael. The make-believe space:affective geography in a postwar polity. xxiv,270 pp., map, illus., bibliogr. London,Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 2012. £16.99

(paper)

The context for Yael Navaro-Yashin’s secondethnography of the state in Northern Cyprus isthe past – a violent and relatively recent pastthat encompasses contemporaryTurkish-Cypriots’ lived experiences ofinter-communal violence in the 1960s and 1970s,the mass movement of refugees and theirresettlement according to religious and linguisticidentities, the Turkish invasion of the island andits partition in 1974, and the resulting creation ofa Turkish-Cypriot enclave in the North of theisland under de facto Turkish suzerainty. Theproclamation of independence from the state ofCyprus and the unilateral assertion of nationalstatus for Northern Cyprus – a claim that has

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been rejected in international law ever since –has resulted in the decades of stalemate and themimicry of state practices that Navaro-Yashinrefers to as the ‘make-believe state’. And it isprecisely this contested, disorienting,phantasmatic, and ghostly quality of theresulting political space of Northern Cyprus thatimpedes the past from becoming settled,distant, or resolved in any way, dooming itperpetually to return in uncanny – ‘unhomely’ –and unbidden resurgences for Navaro-Yashin’sinformants, who attest to a deep-rooted sense ofmelancholy (maraz) in the militarized andfortified space they experience as an ‘open-airprison’.

The largely unspoken, but eerily presentsense of unease that Turkish Cypriot settlers inthe North feel on a daily basis leadsNavaro-Yashin to look to their material world andphysical surroundings as the source of a politicalsentiment that is incorporated more than it isverbalized. This unspoken sense of anever-present, haunting past – the memory ofthings in the double sense of that expression –she analyses in terms of affect. The book bringstogether a number of previously publishedarticles together with some new material; all of itsystematically devoted to delineating theparameters of the theory of affect that sheelaborates from the work of Teresa Brennan. LikeNavaro-Yashin, Brennan sought to move beyondpsychoanalytic theories that centre humanemotion in the psychic interiority of theindividual and to understand collectively sharedemotions as inhering not only within people, oreven intersubjectively, but in the relationsbetween people and their environment.

In a series of case studies looking at statepractices of mapping, the Turkification of Greekplace names, the repopulation of the North withTurkish nationals and the resulting sense amongTurkish Cypriots that they are the last remnantsof a disappearing culture, and the penning-in ofthe population inside a border that was officiallyclosed and closely patrolled from 1974 to 2003,Navaro-Yashin highlights the sensibilities sharedbetween people and a physical environment ofmilitary occupation that belie and traduce theofficial ideology of suspicion and fear that wouldjustify such practices. She further studies thecomplex and contradictory affects engenderedby the bureaucracy of a ‘state’ that is only everreferred to in quotation marks in internationaldocuments, but she really comes into her ownwhen describing the abjected spaces of themournful and unhomely green line that cutsthrough the centre of the capital Nicosia with

barbed wire, walled-up streets, and dividedhomes, and when speaking to the refugeesfrom the South who now live in the homes ofGreek Cypriots expelled during the invasionof 1974.

What does it feel like to live in the homes ofothers? To sleep in their beds? To wear theirclothes? For your children to play with theirtoys? What does it do to you to have otherpeople’s photo albums in your dresser drawerwhile longing for the possessions you had toleave behind when you fled your own home?Navaro-Yashin brings out the full significance ofthese sensitive observations with reference to herreading of melancholia: a form of sorrow bereftof the closure that mourning would offer in apolitical climate that forbids qualms about thelegality of appropriating ‘loot’ from displacedGreek Cypriots.

Navaro-Yashin’s sustained study of the effectsof war, displacement, political authoritarianism,and the existential gap between officiallysanctioned and actually lived sentiments is notonly convincing in its theoretical acuity, breadth,and originality, but it also plays the role of anintervention in its own right through itsmeticulous witnessing of the suffering of herinformants and of their human dignity in theaftermath of terror and in the midst of adversity.Navaro-Yashin makes bold claims for thesignificance of this work, over and above theNorthern Cyprus question, for anthropologicaltheory more broadly, but she has not been boldenough: this is a book that goes beyond theconfines of anthropology to shed light upon thehuman condition in the era of the nation-state.

Nicolas Argenti Brunel University

Reichman, Daniel R. The broken village:coffee, migration, and globalization inHonduras. x, 209 pp., figs, illlus., bibliogr.London, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press,2011. £40.50 (cloth)

The broken village: coffee, migration, andglobalization in Honduras explores the ways inwhich globalization and neoliberalism haveaffected the people of a village pseudonymouslyknown as La Quebrada (the broken village of thetitle). Like many other communities in Mexicoand Central America, La Quebrada hasundergone rapid cultural change over the pastfew decades, with the rate of change increasingsince 2000. The book explores three importanttypes of social change and how villagersstruggle to make sense of them: labourmigration to the United States, failed attempts to

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improve access to coffee markets, and the rise ofa variety of Evangelical Protestant sects.

Reichman’s scope is ambitious. One of thesetopics would be sufficient for most authors.However, he argues persuasively that thesechanges are related in ways that make analysingthem together fruitful. Globalization andneoliberalism have weakened traditionalcollective actors, and these new strategiestogether reflect a focus on individual responsesto social pressures rather than collective ones.

The book weaves together detailed accounts ofthe lives of community members and the broaderneoliberal globalized structures in which they aresituated. This combination of perspectives enrichesour understanding of a difficult situation. Smallpoor nation-states like Honduras are constrainedboth by formal agreements with internationallending agencies and by the political consensuswhich accepts neoliberal policies as necessary anddesirable. The International Coffee Agreement andsimilar agreements intended to stabilizeagricultural prices were replaced with free-marketorthodoxy. The inability of local leaders to delivergoods and services from the national government,combined with new pressures like migration andreligious change, has weakened communities likeLa Quebrada.

As traditional collective action has provedunsuccessful, individual strategies for success havereplaced it. Case studies explore the ways thatindividual community members deal with thesituation. These case studies are vivid and detailed,though most are only a few pages long. Migrationto the United States became an important newstrategy as coffee prices collapsed. Some havefound real success, while others struggle asmigrants. A variety of new Evangelical churches,introduced by the United States during the CentralAmerican conflicts of the 1980s, created deepdivisions within the community at the same timethat they created support networks for members.The book observes that this transition fromcollective to individual action is not limited tosmall towns in Honduras: even new criticisms ofneoliberalism, like the Fair Trade market system,depend on individual consumer choice ratherthan real collective action.

These new individual responses are viewedambivalently at best by community members, aproblem which Reichman explores. ‘Needy’migrants are judged positively, but mostmigrants are seen as ‘greedy’. A coffee growerwho has managed to create a businessimporting and selling coffee in the United Statesis criticized and even attacked by members ofthe community because of his perceived success.

Church members criticize members of otherchurches and even mock different beliefs. Still,communal responses seem to the people of LaQuebrada nearly impossible. A coffeeco-operative focused on the Fair Trade marketfailed, unable to attract enough small farmers tobecome certified. Community leaders havefound it difficult to attract government projects.Attempts to change the country’s situation aremet with hostility, culminating in the 2009 coupd’état which removed José Manuel Zelaya fromthe presidency.

The attempt to grapple with so many issuessimultaneously is both the strength and theweakness of the book. Exploring the similaritiesand relationships between the different types ofsocial change and trying to contextualize each inbroader historical terms creates a rich andcomplex text. However, it also requires thatsome issues be given relatively superficialtreatment. This is particularly true in the lastchapter, in which several theoretical discussionswould have been improved by considerableexpansion.

This book is an important and compellinglywritten treatment of social change in one ruralHonduran community. It would be importanteven if the kinds of social change it examineswere limited to Honduras. However, theproblems and solutions that Reichman exploreshere are found broadly throughout LatinAmerica. In some ways, this is a portrait of amoment that has already passed: migration tothe United States is on the decline in theeconomic crisis, while the price of coffee andother agricultural goods has risen sharply sincehis research was done. However, the generalprocesses that Reichman lays out continue, andwhatever some community members wouldprefer, La Quebrada and places like it cannotchange back to the communities they were.

Julia Smith Eastern Washington University

Yarrow, Thomas. Development beyond politics:aid, activism and NGOs in Ghana. xv, 199 pp.,bibliogr. Basingstoke, New York: PalgraveMacmillan, 2011. £55.00 (cloth)

Development beyond politics is a book about thelives of activists, aid workers, and the social elitewho run NGOs in Ghana. It is also a book aboutthe lives of concepts, in the hands of thesespecific actors. In part I, Yarrow focuses on howdevelopment – as a set of persons, things,practices – is made and maintained. Part IIexplores the intricacies of simple ideas used incomplex ways and complex sets of information

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strategically simplified. The implicit problemrevealed through the text is: what is analysiswhen the words familiar to anthropologicalframings are in use by those one studies? Howto disentangle the distinct intentions ofoverlapping vocabularies?

Chapter 1 documents the means by whichpeople learned about change and becameactivists in the turbulence of 1980s revolutionaryGhana. Many of those active in the NGO sectornow were students during that era, profoundlyaffected by the ideals and ideology of movementsof the time which sought ‘to change the waypeople relate to one another’ (p. 26). Chapter 2

introduces ‘personal lives in the aftermath of“great ideas” ’ (p. 49), exploring the compromisein action and ideals entailed by NGO work whenexperienced against Ghana’s political history. Itexplores the currency and use of terms in people’snarratives of themselves and their country,demonstrating the incursion of developmentthought into how people think about themselvesin their work. Yarrow finds in their stories that thedevelopment of a better society calls for the‘development of better kinds of self’ (p. 75).

One of these kinds of self is the subject ofchapter 3, which proceeds through an analysisof ‘friendship’: how friendships came to matterin the 1980s – and continue to matter still. Theimplicit question is how long-standingrelationships are to be cast: negatively, as acompromise of independent moderngovernance, or positively, independence borneof groups unified into the ‘voice’ of civil society(p. 95). In donor discourses of good governancefor Africa, personal relations tend to bedesignated as matters of ‘corruption’,‘nepotism’, and ‘neopatrimonialism’ (p. 70). Thedifficulty of escaping analytically a framing ofpersonal relations as either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ isthat this well-rehearsed judgement repeats inthe critiques Ghanaians level at themselves. Howthings are done is inflected with why they aredone – with what interest (personal, public) –such that this valuation becomes a key uponwhich the nature of the action turns. Throughthe understanding gained by his own relationswith Ghanaian NGO workers, Yarrow places thenecessary relations of development – not thesystems – at the centre of this account. Thisforegrounds the stories NGO workers tellthemselves about their hopes and struggles,their strategies for living with the tensions ofpublic organizations built through privatenetworks. Together, the chapters of part 1

comprise a strong case against the portrayal ofdevelopment as a ‘charade’ of selfishness, where

NGOs are a ‘set of resources that elites exploit totheir own advantage’ (p. 75). By turning awayfrom outcomes of development, Yarrowaddresses more closely the conflicts, intentions,struggles, and compromises of people whowork in NGOs, and how they make (up) whatdevelopment is in and for Ghana.

Part II turns ethnographic attention to thedualisms at work in development discourse:global/local, indigenous/Western, policy/practice.These chapter titles ought not be read asanalytical terms; the use and manipulation ofthese value-laden oppositions is the ethnographicobject at hand. They are the language with whichpeople already work, called upon to framedebates and to align or distinguish viewpoints.Furthermore, Yarrow points us in an analyticdirection unusual to anthropologists: by bypassingthe well-worn tension between the ‘complexdetail’ of academic knowledge and the seeminglyformulaic reductionism of developmentknowledge, he is able to attend to what reduction,formula, and strategy do. What, he asks, are theachievements of simplification? What does it makepossible? Mindful of critiques of abstraction asobjectification and dislocation (p. 112), the bookdraws attention to the productive capacities ofabstracted knowledge. It is a well-worn pathwhere academics criticize oversimplification andthe insensitivity of development to context anddevelopment workers complain about the‘uselessness’ of academic knowledge (p. 171).Instead of moving his account towardsdevelopment-friendly ‘use’, Yarrow seeks what isgenerative in the difference between theseknowledges, aiming to shift the arena forconversation. In this way, hope is placed notperpendicular to development in the detachedcritique of academia, but parallel, in what alreadyhappens. This is an unusual opportunity forrethinking the engagement of anthropology withdevelopment, and is deserving of broadreadership.

Rachel Douglas-Jones Durham University

Social anthropology

Benson, Michaela. The British in rural France:lifestyle migration and the ongoing quest for abetter way of life. ix, 182 pp., map, illus.,bibliogr. Manchester: Univ. Press, 2011.£65.00 (cloth)

For at least sixty years, thanks in part toElizabeth David’s food writing, a fraction of the

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British middle class has looked to rural France asthe locus of ‘authentic’ living: the simplehonesty of the paysan in the distinctive paysageguarding the appropriate genre de vie. It is awell-honed imaginary playing upon seductiveideas about rootedness, dwelling, intimacy withthe landscape and its products – in short, thedream of belonging. Going beyond ‘the ruralidyll’, it incorporates British notions of Frenchexclusivity, distinctiveness, and (natural)refinement. Michaela Benson conductedfieldwork in the Lot, engaging with Britishpeople who had migrated specifically toachieve this life-style, but finds that, ‘Myrespondents never appeared to be any closerto their self-defined better way of life,irrespective of the length of their residencein the Lot’ (p. 67)

Following compulsory redundancies, earlyretirements, or disillusionment with theirwork in Britain, people had sold up andrelocated in la France profonde – drawn byspectacular scenery, cheap housing, and, mostimportantly, the chance to reinvent themselves.The move to a beautiful region in Francedislocated them from the disappointments ofBritain, allowing them to define themselves asmore discerning than those they left behind orothers who chose more conventional locations:‘Normal people go to places which are likeEngland except warm’ (p. 125). They thenconstruct narratives of local acceptance andintegration, appearing preoccupied withachieving ‘authenticity’ through house styles,shopping practices, gardening, and otheractivities. However, as chapter 3 demonstrates,Benson believes that they live in a ‘persistentstate of uncertainty’ about their integration andtheir achievement of the illusive ‘better way oflife’. She toys with the idea of their lives ashovering within a liminal space, but rejects thisbecause liminality requires ‘two fixed andimmutable points ... whereas my respondents inthe Lot had no well-established and commonlyattributed end-point, other than the vaguenotion they were headed toward a better way oflife’ (p. 68). Instead she prefers to think in termsof ‘ambivalence’, manifested when they deviatefrom their project or look back nostalgically toBritish systems. She notes that contact withfriends and relatives back in Britain remainimportant and that, though they distancethemselves from tourists, they recognize thattourism is an important source of income formany. Rather than seeing this as a deviationfrom ‘authenticity’, one might see it as sensiblestrategy.

Successful ethnographic monographs shouldequip the reader with sufficient resources tointerrogate the researcher’s conclusions; here theauthor’s viewpoint prevails, backed by ‘aptillustration’. Although ‘the ethnographicfieldwork comprised extensive participantobservation, a series of unstructured interviews,the collection of life and migration histories anddocuments’ (p. 17), the richness of thisexperience does not emerge; it is condensedinto generalization reinforced by shortquotations (never knowing which quotations areculled from interviews and which from life).Named individuals and couples provide snippetsof their experiences, but there is little clue as towho these people are – from which fractions ofthe British middle class they emerge or how theyrelate to each other. Their stories are neverallowed to unfold.

The British of the Lot are a category definedfrom outside – by the French, by theethnographer, by themselves when they stepaway from the ‘others’ who are too ‘same’ forcomfort. They certainly are not a community ora group, and this poses problems for thegeneration of meaningful ethnography; howdoes one catch the social/cultural in thedeterminedly individual? The answer could lie inattention to performativity, the crafting ofmeaning through a continuous interplay ofideology and performance, the process ofachieving identity. This study cries out fordetailed life-stories, extended case studies, socialdramas, situational analysis.

This book is one of the New Ethnographiesfrom Manchester. In his foreword to theseries, Alexander Thomas T. Smith refersto the Manchester School monographs ofthe 1950s and 1960s as ‘the “gold standard”for how ethnographers might grapplewith new challenges and issues in thecontemporary world’ (p. vii). In particular,Jaap van Velsen’s situational analysis recognizedthat in the modern world norms are in conflictand people expediently plot paths betweencontradictions (‘The extended-case methodand situational analysis’, in The craft of socialanthropology (ed.) A.L. Epstein, 1967). Wordslike ‘ambivalence’ and ‘authenticity’ rarelyilluminate this manoeuvring. I relished theprospect of a new wave of ethnography andwas particularly attracted to this study, restingas it does on a rich vein of the British imaginary,but sadly I found little of the old Mancunianflair.

Pamela Shurmer-Smith University ofPortsmouth

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Hastrup, Frida. Weathering the world: recoveryin the wake of the tsunami in a Tamil fishingvillage. viii, 150 pp., illus., bibliogr. Oxford,New York: Berghahn Books, 2011. £42.00

(cloth)

As we all well recall, the tsunami of 2004 killedvast numbers of people who happened to be onthe coast, most significantly in Indonesia and SriLanka. Large numbers of scholars were attractedby the horror and humanity in the aftermath.Consequently, a substantial literature is nowemerging on what happened after the wavesreceded. We now understand well the contextand consequences of the tsunami for society,politics, and the world of aid. For some, thetsunami was a logistical problem for thoseimplementing, as well as those subject to,reconstruction programmes in the aftermath:‘inappropriate’ housing, improbable peaceagreements, and the well-known glut of fishingboats. The tsunami has also proved to be anintellectual opportunity for exposing thefallacious reasoning of governments andhumanitarians, questioning concepts such as‘aid’, ‘community’, and ‘nationalism’.

In contrast, this book is an attempt tounderstand the tsunami anthropologically, usinganthropological rather than disaster theory, andthe ethnography of everyday lives rather thanpolicy pronouncements and failings to frame thematerial. This is an important shift, and theamount of theorization and conceptualizationthat must have gone into tugging a disasteraway from its usual moorings in the literature isnot to be underestimated.

Drawing on the writing of Veena Das (and agroup of other scholars primarily known for theirassociations with the University of Cambridge,University College London, and CopenhagenUniversity rather than with disasters), Hastrupexplores how the ‘ordinary’ of Indian Tamilvillage life was perforated by the tsunami, andthe other way around. In this act, she posits arelation between disaster and the everyday inwhich each figure is made to appear when seenthrough the other.

Careful discussions of post-tsunami housing,environmental forecasting techniques, aid andopportunity, causation, temporality andplanning, and the memorialization of thetsunami allow Hastrup to suggest that thevillagers of Tharangambadi have also engaged inthe work of ‘conceptualization’ after thetsunami. In this light, we learn that there is moreto remaking a home than shifting to a newhouse. Fishermen recast the tsunami in

pre-existing patterns of seasonal variationand climate change. Aid was distributedand negotiated through more generalunderstandings of authority and privilege.The tsunami provided some people withopportunities to engage with problems whichpreceded it; animosity and poverty were notsimply washed away. The formal memorialserected along the coast by the state andother agencies do not engage with the waysin which villagers recollect and remember thewaves.

Through these discussions, the everyday is‘unpacked’, emerging, like the tsunami, as aproduct of ‘figuration’. Life is shown to havebecome a matter of ‘weathering the world’ – forpeople to make it their own again – rather thanovercoming an intrusive and singular event. Thisapproach is compelling and attractive for itopens up the aftermath to agency, culture, andsociality – and, perhaps more importantly, tothought and thinking. I wonder, however,whether the terms ‘conceptualize’, ‘theorize’,and ‘figure’ can really be used, seemingly assynonyms, without elaboration and clarification.The self-evidence of these terms does not winthrough in the ethnography. The words of Tamilfishermen are few in the book as it is – theirwords on the conceptualization ofconceptualization are absent altogether.

Aside from some rather defensive commentsabout the ‘female bias’ (pp. 33–4) of the work(when the most substantial quotes are all frommen), the greatest opportunity missed, it seemsto me, and given the material presented, isunpacking the tsunami and the everyday ingendered terms. Material on gender lurksthroughout the text and raises many fascinatingquestions, but the analysis remains undevelopedand is never taken to a satisfactory conclusion.We have been told repeatedly that the fishermenhad a relationship, of sorts, with the sea at thetime of the tsunami. Those at sea at the timeoften barely noticed the waves. The story alsogoes that men were able to run from theapproaching wall of water and climb up trees tosurvive. The other side of survival, of course, isthat they left their women and children todrown. In the longer drag of the aftermath,what has happened to the everyday of genderand gender relations in relation to the sea,temporality, and kinship?

Such questions notwithstanding, there ismuch to recommend in this book, not least itssubtlety and persuasiveness.

Edward Simpson School of Oriental andAfrican Studies

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Hazan, Haim & Esther Hertzog (eds).Serendipity in anthropological research: thenomadic turn. xix, 332 pp., table, illus.,bibliogrs. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012. £65.00

(cloth)

In his foreword to this Festschrift for EmanuelMarx, Dick Werbner writes of Marx’s abilityto define and refine his work by setting theresults of his fieldwork against preconceivednotions of the nature of Bedouin life. Perceiveddifferences between ‘Bedouin’, ‘nomad’, and‘peasant’ were shown to have been shaped bysources and influences that Marx coulddocument from records, including those datingback to the Ottoman period. Werbneremphasizes Marx’s own life experience:‘refugees, immigrants and people on the moveas nomads loom large in his nine books, allwritten with a deep sympathy from his boyhoodexperience, being a refugee from Hitler’sGermany’. Marx, the first anthropologist to havebeen a recipient of the Israel Prize, was able touse his ‘Manchester School’ background toestablish the study of social anthropology inIsrael. His mentor was Emrys Peters, whoseBedouin essays he collected and published in aposthumous book.

Hazan and Hertzog’s introductory chapter(one of twenty chapters) describes the way inwhich the anthropological quest and time in thefield constitute a nomadic experience thattranscends boundaries and, through ‘shifts’ and‘transformations’, is ‘arrested and shaped in thepublished text ... turning lives into works’. Thefreedom to be able to exploit serendipity is,indeed, to the advantage of both the nomadand the anthropologist in the field, and theoccasional opportunity to revisit both field-siteand ethnography itself is examined. Interestingly,the initial and apparent honesty of informantsmay sometimes be reappraised during thatrevisitation, with subsequent revelations raisingother questions.

Amongst the groups living in Israel whoenliven the book’s pages are Yemenite andLibyan Jews, the Bedouin, and a group ofPalestinian women prisoners. The book includescase studies provided by Israeli and Arab-Israelischolars in Israel and elsewhere, while theTuareg and Puerto Rican spiritualist-witch healersgain inclusion as exemplars of nomadism. In themain, however, the stories of peoples whose‘nomadic turn’ has brought them to a life inIsrael make this a book of profundity, andillustrative of the extensive variety of humanexperience in one small country.

Fabietti describes his own ‘nomadic turn’from the discipline of philosophy toanthropology, with fieldwork ranging throughthe Arabian peninsula, Persian Gulf, Great Nefuddesert, and Baluchistan. Using Horace Walpole’scoinage of the term ‘serendipity’ in 1754, he tellsof his experiences in comparing his fieldnoteswith those of other writers, particularly withregard to Bedouin genealogies. This is a tour deforce of scholarly and entertaining writing.

Marx contributes an enlightening chapter,delineating the influence of time upon thechanging face of Bedouin fortunes in terms ofeconomic and political cause and effect on menand women in differing rural and urbanenvironments. Revisiting his own fieldwork, heillustrates the value of the movement of theanthropologist between stages of multiple visitsto the field and subsequent reanalysis ofresearch.

Hazan writes of a period during which aproject of ‘Renewal’ engaged with indigentcommunities in Israel during the 1980s. Hedescribes a particular community not alwaysfully cognizant or, indeed, accepting of its roleas grateful or needy recipients of a new ‘citizen’status in a city that acquired severalimprovements within an ameliorated urbansetting. Perceived by a charitable state agency ashaving experienced a ‘degrading past asresidents of an isolated neighbourhood’, theresidents are ultimately shown to have remainedrelatively ‘set’ within their previous life-stylesand cultural constructs, instead of becoming theexpected new bourgeoisie.

Eickelman’s study examines the pressures onsocial science, a struggle of intellectual passionand academic discipline where autonomy ismaintained against political advocacy and‘research for hire’. He writes: ‘Now it is not justthe views of the political religious elite thatcount but also the views of everyone else’. Hischapter is emblematic of the situation in theMiddle East today. He cites Bourdieu’s incisiveworks as ‘illustrating the balance between socialscience and charged politics in a time of crisis’.In particular, and presciently, he writes of the‘effect of mass higher education and itsrelationship with the practice of religion andpolitics’.

Hertzog, in relating her mother’s experiencein Auschwitz, provides a moving study of aHolocaust survivor’s reflections on her past. Theenormity of the experience on a young girl isindicated with the description of having one’shead shaved and then walking naked in front ofthe perpetrators. The narrative shift from the

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personal to the group becomes the consciencecollective writ large.

‘You stood there naked, naked in front ofthe ...’

‘That was already nothing ... nothing.’‘How could that be? They stripped

you naked and you walked around therelike some sort of ...’

Yes, like a what? Like everyone. That’s it.You get used to it. So I walked around. Sowhat? It passed ... when you’re in a group,so is it exactly the one standing there whomatters? He’s looking exactly at you? Hedoesn’t see anyone. He sees women asanimals ... I didn’t give a damn about him.As far as I’m concerned he humiliatedhimself.

The insights into such an enforced nomadicturn, with its tale of devastating loss,displacement, flight, and resettlement, togetherwith an admirable, indeed noble, forgiveness,contrast strongly with Jakubowska’s chapter onthe efforts made by Polish nobility to reclaimtheir lost property following the Soviet period.The latent/dormant anti-Semitism of the nobilityis mentioned, with its aristocratic disdaintowards those not of the same class, extendingto, and including, Jews and Russians. One iscompelled to beg the unaddressed questionregarding property lost forever by those whodisappeared in plumes of smoke at the end of ajourney with no return.

Rapport’s chapter unfolds with an elegantanalysis of ‘homeland’ and ‘the global guest’.He remarks that ‘what has a hold over thepopular imagination is not ... cosmopolitanism... but neo-tribalism promoting rights toindigeneity and primordial ties of blood to soil’,and that this trend seems to obfuscate other,nobler ideals of coexistence.

Abu-Rabia’s interesting analysis of Bedouinfolk medicine and the colour-related symbolismof dress, pastoral customs, and other patterns ofculture is enriched by research that is embeddedwithin an informant-cum-researcher withintimate local knowledge of the field.

Stewart’s painstaking research amongst theBedouin and Fallahin of the Negev and Sinaiprovides the chapter that most closely resemblesMarx’s own prodigious work in its detail andcoverage. The importance of water cisterns inthe area and notions of ownership contrive toenmesh the researcher in somewhat difficultsituations and decisions. The kinship patternsand lineages of the Bedouin are discussed,

compared, and contrasted, giving a fascinatingpicture of lives in transit, lives sometimesconstrained by state decrees and yet retainingtheir intrinsic characteristics as nomadic tribes,sub-tribes, with groupings of descent and vestedterritorial rights: ‘[T]he tribe may include somepeople who are not members of the clan, andthere may be members of the clan who are notmembers of the tribe’. One is immediately madeaware of the complicated nature of the study ofnomadic peoples, be they pastoralists orsubsistence agriculturalists.

Weingrod’s treatment of burial patternsfocuses on both customary interment and thereinterment of bones of those considered tohave been ‘heroes of Israel’, such as TheodorHerzl, the ‘father of modern Zionism’.

Greenberg’s use of the word ‘kaleidoscope’in the title of her chapter, the last in the book,serves to illustrate the resilience, movement,colour, and sometimes alarming changes thatoccur in the shifting political, economic, andemotional themes. Ultimately, however,Greenberg exposes the frailty of theethnographer’s reliance on the honesty andreliability of her informants. The spoken and thewritten word are liable to engage in their ownnomadic turns, and ‘writing culture’ is perhapsbetter for revisiting sites and texts in that questfor the absence of the subjective and thepresence of the objective.

Parts of the book are dark with the sorrow ofdisplacement, duplicity, and destruction. Othersreflect lighter realities, laying bare the copingmechanisms, subterfuges, and artistry thatcharacterize the human condition. Like atapestry, the book is in itself a work of varyingshades and patterns. The chapters constitute amosaic, displaying a design that is asmulti-faceted and rich as the variegated natureof ethnography allows. These essays revealcontents that are a worthy tribute to an eminentscholar, a man of courage and integrity.

Maureen Bloom Independent Scholar, Tel Aviv

Karlsson, Bengt G. Unruly hills: a politicalecology of India’s Northeast. xiv, 315 pp.,maps, illus., bibliogr. Oxford, New York:Berghahn Books, 2011. £55.00 (cloth)

In Unruly hills, Bengt Karlsson analyses theintersection between environmental and ethnicpolitics in Meghalaya and in doing so makes fourdepartures from conventional scholarship onNortheast India. First, Karlsson’s choice ofMeghalaya is significant. Interest in the erstwhileGaro, Jaintia, and Khasi Hills was high among

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anthropologists and linguists in the latenineteenth and early twentieth centuries andagain during the pan-tribal movement for aseparate hill state between the 1950s and the1970s, led by the All Party Hill Leader’sConference, yet since then Meghalaya hasreceived limited scholarly attention compared toother parts of Northeast India. As Karlssondemonstrates, this is hardly owing to a lack ofaction. The hills of Meghalaya have been the siteof intense contestation over natural resources,territory, and identity. They have been, andcontinue to be, unruly. The second departure isthe political ecology Karlsson utilizes to examinerelationships between the environment, society,politics, and capitalist development inMeghalaya. This directs readers to the diverseactors with a stake in natural resources and theirdivergent agendas and influences; the majorityof whom are tribals indigenous to the hills.Third, while the story is certainly a local one,Karlsson recognizes that the dynamics that affectenvironmental politics in the hills emanate ininternational and national spaces as much asregional and local ones. This matters becausescholarship on the Northeast is so often lockedinto assumptions about an isolated frontier, farfrom the impacts of transnational capital, centralgovernment machinations, and upwardsaccountability from the local government to itsbenefactors. Fourth, Meghalaya is not a frontierof passive indigenes being crushed by theonslaught of modernity. The various institutions,officials, activists, leaders, corporate employees,headmen, and even villagers take action andrespond to actions taken by others. It is alandscape full of contention, shifting alliances,and power politics. Most importantly of all, it isa landscape where resistance takes expected andunexpected forms. By the time readers reach theend of the book, the familiar cast of charactersparaded in most scholarship of the Northeast areunrecognizable.

At the core of the book is an argument aboutcapitalist expansion into the frontiers of colonialand postcolonial India. Expansion has intensifiedpressure on the environment in Meghalaya andthis has engendered struggles around particularenvironmental issues. Forests, the focus ofchapter 2, are studied through the ban ontimber-felling by the Supreme Court in 1996 andthe ways the ban produced clashingunderstandings of what constituted forest andwho had the rights to exploit it. This gives theauthor the opportunity to analyse the ways inwhich traditions are being reconstituted underchanging social and economic relations at the

local level. Chapter 3 looks at the disjuncturebetween imported property rights regimes in theGaro Hills and older land tenure arrangements.Here the author adopts a longer historical viewand provides one of the more completeaccounts of transformation in Garo society andits internal and external drivers. Chapter 4

focuses on the most contentious environmentalissue in Meghalaya: mining. Mining draws all theelements of the story together: local powerstruggles between the Khasi Student Union andthe government of Meghalaya; pressure from thegovernment of India and its Uranium MiningCorporation; the use of science in arguments forand against the project; and the retreat intoethnic identity politics as part of the oppositionto mining. In chapter 5, the author turns hisattention to traditional institutions of governancein Meghalaya, given legal standing under theSixth Schedule of the Indian Constitution, andalso given a new momentum through the normsof the global indigenous and environmentalmovements. Karlsson is not afraid to unsettleassumptions about traditional institutions andpolitical power, and this chapter is perhaps thestrongest in the book for the ways it details thecomplexity of natural resource governance.Chapter 6 draws all of this together into adiscussion of the relationships betweencapitalism, the environment, the state, thefrontier, and ethnic identity.

In departing from conventional scholarship,the book makes a major contribution to thestudy of Northeast India but also to the study ofenvironmental politics in frontier regions moregenerally. As such, Unruly hills may prove to bethe blueprint for similar approaches to otherparts of the region, especially given thecentrality of environmental questions in theNortheast. As scholarly interest in borderlandsreaches its zenith, Karlsson’s work should behighly valued among scholars interested in Indiaand beyond. This is an outstanding book for itscontent and the challenges it sets out to itsreaders.

Duncan McDuie-Ra University of NewSouth Wales

Pedersen, Morten Axel. Not quite shamans:spirit worlds and political lives in northernMongolia. xii, 250 pp., maps, illus., bibliogr.London, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press,2011. £17.95 (paper)

In this innovative, engaging ethnographicaccount of the complex social upheaval andontological uncertainties that characterized

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‘transitory society’ in the immediate aftermath ofthe collapse of state socialism in northernMongolia in the 1990s, Pedersen has cultivated atheoretically nuanced approach that providescreative space for his ethnographic material to‘speak back’ to the ready-made anthropologicalconcepts that seem, at first sight, to be mostapposite as explanatory tools. In an intriguingreversal, and building on the perspectivalapproach pioneered by Eduardo Viveiros deCastro among others, Pedersen allows space forthe complex ontology of multifarious Mongolianforms to suggest other possibilities of becomingin the world, subverting the tendency ofconventional anthropological and sociologicalanalysis to offer an interpretation premised onepistemological assumptions that themselvesremain unacknowledged and unchallenged.

Drawing on nearly three years of fieldworkbetween 1995 and 2001, Pedersen’s ethnographyexplores the complex interpenetration ofshamanist and postsocialist aspects of life in theremote community-collectivity of Ulaan-Uul inthe Shishged region of northern Mongolia.Attracted initially by the prospect of contributingto the ethnographic study of Mongolian Darhadshamanism, Pedersen was confronted by adeficit of ‘genuine’ shamans and the presenceinstead of gangs of youths intent on disruptionfuelled by vodka and uncertainty, violentstrongmen, and the proliferation of incompleteor ‘half-shamans’, individuals permanently stuckin the process of becoming shamans owing tothe lack of senior shamans to oversee their abilityto control and contain the insistent presence ofthe spirits. For Pedersen, this ‘study ofshamanism without shamans’ (p. 5) offers anopportunity to explore complex forms of socialand shamanic agency in the context of a societyin transition in which the escalation of economiccrisis, the perceived collapse of the state, and thesense of chaotic dislocation that accompaniesthis process of uncertainty and unpredictableoutcomes is characterized by one of ‘occultexcess’ (p. 8) in which the capricious forces ofpostsocialist transition and the invisible, labilepowers of spirits are understood as inseparableand, in significant respects, indistinguishablefrom one another.

While recognizing certain affinities betweenhis own material and the literature on ‘occulteconomies’, Pedersen provides a constructivecritique of the tendency of much of thisliterature to study occult phenomena onlyinsofar as they are explicable in terms ofanthropological categories that serve ‘as fixedand therefore “dead” containers of sociocultural

content and their purported political-economiccontext’ (p. 36). The way in which Pedersen’sown theoretical approach differs is succinctlycaptured in his inversion of the nowcommonplace anthropological assumption of‘the modernity of shamanism’ (following PeterGeschiere’s Africanist emphasis on the‘modernity of witchcraft’), favouring insteadwhat he describes as ‘the shamanism ofmodernity’ itself. This inversion, more thanmerely a play on words, provides Pedersen withthe conceptual space and clarity to privilege thelabile and amorphous ontological reality of theshamanic spirits in encompassing the experienceof the state as a ‘swarm-like multitude ofpolitical affects’ (p. 80) in the period ofpostsocialist transition. For Pedersen, thisshamanic imperative transcends the work ofshamans proper; instead, it is the immutabletransformative potentiality inherent within ashamanist ontology itself.

Arranged in five chapters, Pedersen’s studycombines detailed description and theoreticalsophistication to explore, in ‘a “prismatic” way’(p. 221), several, partially overlappingethnographic scenarios. These encompass thecomplex historical and political transformation ofsocial life in northern Mongolia as a result ofboth Buddhist and communist regulatorypractices prior to the reconfiguration oflandscape and worldview following thedisappearance of the old socialist welfare state inthe 1990s. However, they also extend to detailedexposition of the significance of the Shishgedlandscape in refracting the inner topography ofDarhad persons, the complex ontology ofshamanic spirits and artefacts, and the social andpolitical efficacy of Darhad joking in postsocialistlife. The result, as Pedersen explains, ‘is anethnography of a community that sees itself asincurably labile; a chronicle of selves and bodieschanging uncontrollably in the face of occultforces that take the form of spirits, the market,and democracy’ (p. 5).

In conclusion, and lest it be assumed that theimportance of Pedersen’s ethnography residessolely in its innovative interrogation of‘shamanism without shamans’, it should also bepointed out that it offers a number of interestingperspectives on the anthropological analysis ofshamanism with shamans itself, best exemplifiedby his intriguing discussion of the complexmateriality of the shamanic gown (possession ofwhich distinguishes ‘genuine’ shamans from the‘half-shamans’ of Pedersen’s account), thespatial, temporal, and corporeal inter-layering ofshamanic bodies and entities, and the

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‘swarm-like’ presence of the shamanic spiritsthemselves in all their assumed multiplicity.

Damian Walter School of Oriental and AfricanStudies

Rollason, Will. We are playing football: sportand postcolonial subjectivity, Panapompom,Papua New Guinea. x, 250 pp., map, figs,illus., bibliogr. Newcastle upon Tyne:Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011. £39.99

(cloth)

It is occasionally suggested that sport is a sorelyneglected topic in anthropology, though arecent surge of interest would seem well on theway to rectifying this. Rollason’s innovativeaccount of football on the island ofPanopompom, Papua New Guinea, is anintelligent and nuanced contribution to thismovement – even if one ultimately senses thatthis is not, in fact, a book ‘about’ football assuch, so much as an attempt to use football as aprism for examining the ways in whichPanopompom people today seek to manage andtransform their sense of self in a globalizingworld. There is relatively little ethnographicdescription or analysis of the sport itself; thereader is instead offered fascinating reflectionson, among other things, the considerable effortsmade by one team to procure matchinguniforms; the occasional outbreaks of violenceon the pitch, provoking much soul-searchingand moral debate; and racializing discourses on‘natives’ as opposed to dimdims or ‘whitepeople’, for example as they figure in projects of‘development’.

The fact that football does not form part ofPanopompon ‘culture’, and indeed is explicitlyseen as external and foreign by Panopompompeople themselves, is central to the story beingtold here and precisely what makes itsperformance of such interest for all concerned.The knowledge of ‘custom’ that pervadesactivities such as ritual, canoe manufacture, orkinship relations is quite consciously opposed tothe ‘law’ that is held to govern football. For thisreason, playing football – or, more precisely,appearing to play football, that is, creating asatisfactory visual image for a real or imaginedaudience – is all about becoming ‘developed’,like the white people with whom the gameoriginates. The question being posed here, inother words, is not what the people ofPanopompom have done to football, in thesense of adapting or incorporating it into theirown local ‘culture’ (the act of contextualization,as it were), but rather what playing football has

done, or might do, to rework people’sunderstandings of their place in the world(which involves a kind of decontextualization).The discussions of the development industrycleverly tie football in to other aspects of life onthe island, for example through the concept of‘counterparts’, prevalent in developmentdiscourse, in which black people are trainedeventually to ‘replace’ white people. Inexamining how football makes them who theyare, Rollason develops an insightful analysis ofPanopompom subjectivity through the lens ofpoststructuralist critical theory, arguing thatfootball effectively disembeds subjects from‘culture’, conceived of as local and specific,displacing them from their past andrecontextualizing them as cosmopolitans. Assuch, his approach runs almost precisely counterto a dominant anthropological approach tosport at least since the classic film Trobriandcricket (1975), in which this gentleman’s game isthoroughly reworked to fit local cultural idioms.This leads to reflections on important broaderquestions about the practices of culturalcontextualization that lie at the core of theanthropological endeavour.

This is a compelling argument, though onewonders about the untold stories that mightcomplement the portrait of football as genericand universalizing. Rollason emphasizes theessential similarity of football as it is played onPanopompom and elsewhere, including theUnited Kingdom, but occasionally hints atdifferences in, for example, playing style, andpursuing these further might lead the analysis ina different (if more conventional) direction. Amore detailed exploration of the history oforganized team sports, both in Papua NewGuinea and in Western Europe, would also helpto evaluate their degree of foreignness to theformer while embedding them in the modernistnation-building projects of the latter, and torecognizable ‘football cultures’ that mayultimately be far from homogeneous. Thecodification and standardization of football, likethe development industry, could presumably beconsidered as a part of the specific culturalformations of modern Western Europe, even ifthese now appear to many as global andcosmopolitan. The analysis of violence isintriguing, and neatly shows how strategies ofself-improvement are often condemned to fail,though I wonder whether on-field violencecould not also be seen as something akin to astrategy of resistance, to the modernizing projectand the hegemony of ‘law’. Recognizing themultiplicity of possible interpretations of the

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phenomenon of football might addethnographic complexity to what is neverthelessalready an insightful analysis, one which opensup a number of stimulating lines of inquiry thatsignificantly push forward the anthropology ofsport while also managing to extend wellbeyond it.

Harry Walker London School of Economicsand Political Science

Skinner, Jonathan (ed.). Writing the dark sideof travel. ix, 209 pp., illus., bibliogrs. Oxford,New York: Berghahn Books, 2012. £15.50

(paper)

Why do travellers seek out destinations marked byviolence and suffering? What is the allure of these‘dark’ sites, and how should they be represented?Do travellers’ encounters with the ‘dark side’ultimately lead to the commodification of humanmisery and a blunting of historical consciousness?Or might such encounters inspire human beingstowards greater sensitivity, creativity, and change?These are the central questions explored in thisunusual, yet thought-provoking, interdisciplinarycollection of essays.

Skinner probes the allure of such sites byreviewing the literature on dark tourism and‘thanatourism’. As he notes, while some scholarsargue that dark travel ‘has evolved for millennia,particularly out of the Christian cult of deathand preoccupation with pain and suffering forour sins’, others propose that its appeal stemsfrom particular changes associated with latemodernity. Dark tourism, he suggests, may besymptomatic of the affective estrangement thatcharacterizes everyday life in the ‘postemotionalsociety’ (Stjepan G. Meštrovic, Postemotionalsociety, 1997). Moffat, by contrast, questionswhether human beings are drawn to ‘thehorrific’ by an unsettling ‘morbid curiosity’, orby a ‘more compassionate desire toacknowledge the intensity of such atrocity’.Similarly, Isle argues that tourists’ attraction todark places may have less to do with a‘ghoulish’ interest ‘in death and disaster’ than itdoes with experiencing a sense of emotionalengagement and identification that can oftentake visitors by surprise. Though written fromdifferent vantage-points, all of these essaysprompt us to ask: Does the allure of dark travelprimarily stem from its ability to facilitate anencounter with a suffering Other? Or might italso derive from the way it entices, if notrequires, travellers to re-encounter themselvesthrough a searching interrogation of their ownmotives, desires, and emotions?

The idea that the appeal of trauma is linkedto quests for self-discovery andself-transformation is also richly explored in theessays by Egan, Elliott, Nagle, and Murphy.Murphy provides a moving analysis of Aboriginalwomen from ‘the Stolen Generation’ whoattempt to relieve their suffering by journeyingback to the childhood institutions in which theywere abused. While the journey is cathartic, shealso notes the pressure these women feel tosynchronize their personal narratives of sufferingwith public ones. This opens the door to a muchlarger set of questions regarding the politics ofrepresentation, a theme which is pursued withgreat nuance by other contributors to thevolume (Hepburn, Nagle, Cooke, Walker).

For instance, in examining how trauma is usedas a tourism marketing strategy in Belfast, Nagleexplores the precarious line betweenrepresentations of the city that promote a ‘socialamnesia’ and those that remain ‘too fixated’ onthe traumas of the past, thereby makingpossibilities for future peace and healing less likely.As he guides us through the debates surroundingthe branding of Belfast, he expertly captures thecomplex ways in which trauma can emerge asboth an impediment to, and a lucrative source of,value creation. Indeed, from my perspective, oneof the greatest strengths of this volume is that itdemonstrates how experiences of trauma take onmultiple forms of significance as both individualsand collectivities attempt to mobilize themtowards ends that are at once political, ethical,commercial, and even therapeutic.

Throughout these essays we discover thatdebates about the representation of suffering areintimately tied to the forms of value they areperceived as generating. This is renderedparticularly clear in the essays by Cooke andWalker. Both examine how dark travel writersnegotiate the tensions between upholding anethical commitment to memory anddocumentation, on the one hand, andperpetuating a highly profitable ‘pornography ofsuffering’, on the other.

Of the nine essays gathered in this collection,some are truly excellent and others are lesscompelling, mostly for stylistic reasons. Yet all ofthe contributions are thought-provoking. In fact,reading this collection has the quality ofparticipating in a journey. The greatest insightsand discoveries come from actively exploringand mapping out the fertile connectionsbetween the different essays. If readers arewilling to do this, they will, I think, ultimatelyfind that the book provides a very stimulatingengagement with both the dark side of travel,

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and the dark side of travel writing. It wouldcertainly be an interesting text to include incourses on the anthropology of tourism, as wellin courses on travel writing and literature.

Jenny Huberman University of Missouri-Kansas City

Story-telling and myths

Knowlton, Timothy W. Maya creation myths:words and worlds of the Chilam Balam. xv, 231

pp., figs, illus., bibliogr. Boulder: Univ. Pressof Colorado, 2010. $55.00 (cloth)

After the Spanish Conquest of Yucatán, anumber of manuscripts were written in classicYucatec Maya that preserved some of the MayaClassic and post-Classic knowledge into the earlycolonial period. Some of these manuscripts werecollectively called the Books of Chilam Balam,which are distinguished from one another by thetown in which they were found.

The most well-known and well-published ofthese documents is The Book of Chilam Balam ofChumayel, named for a town in southernYucatan, and Bruce Knowlton has taken on thetask of untangling the pre- and post-Conquestinfluences on three myths contained within thisimportant manuscript. With a knowledge ofYucatec Maya, Maya epigraphy, Roman Catholicdoctrine, and ecclesiastical history, Knowlton hasrelated these myths to their Classic, post-Classic,and ecclesiastical influences, and illuminated theknowledge that enabled the people of Yucatánto understand the meaning of these texts in theircolonial context. As a consequence, he hascontributed much to understanding thehistorical circumstances that affected thecreation, perpetuation, and preservation of thecultural knowledge embedded in theseimportant documents.

Chapter 1 introduces the book withKnowlton’s methodological approach. Heconsiders mythological texts themselves as adiscourse by which cultural knowledge emergesthrough negotiation between historical andsocial verbal-ideological systems that result inshared meanings. His research first involvedrendering the myths in a style that fits thenatural discourse features of classical YucatecMaya. Then he analysed these myths using thefeatures internal to the texts themselves andtheir relationships with other manuscripts. Thesefeatures formed the shared knowledge necessarythat their authors used to compose the text, and

that their audiences needed to understand itsmeaning. This knowledge had its origin amongthe Classic and post-Classic Maya and some of itwas integrated into the religious transformationof post-Conquest society.

The remainder of the book unpacks thecontent of this knowledge. Chapter 2 is a briefoverview of ancient Maya society andcosmology. Chapter 3 provides the historical andecclesiastical context of the Maya documents ofthe colonial period and provides the reader withan understanding for the forces of what waspreserved and why.

Chapter 4 consists of the analysis of the firstmyth (the Katun 11 Ahau Creation Myth),examining it in the context of the social andcultural upheavals of the colonial period. Thismyth is unique in that it is found in otherdocuments of the period, and the appendix ofthe book provides a concordance of sections ofits content found in either or both the Book ofChilam Balam of Tizimín, and the Pérez Códice.

Chapter 5 analyses the ‘Ritual of the AngelsMyth’ and Chapter 6 analyses the mythconcerning the ‘Creation of the First People andthe Origin of Death and Disaster’ as dramatizedin the Itzá song of the collapse of the ancientcity of Chichén Itzá. This chapter discusses thecolonial approach to suffering, illness, and deathand evaluates interpretations of indigenousontologies that existed during the pre-Hispanicand colonial eras.

Chapter 7 analyses the ‘Birth of the Uinal’, asong set within the 260-day Maya divinatorycalendar (the Tzolkin). This myth juxtaposesMaya and Christian cosmologies in a synthesisthat Knowlton says undermines the claims ofEuropean clergy and catechism texts that divinetruth excluded Maya voices.

Chapter 8 concludes Knowlton’s analyseswith a reflection on the complex influencesaffecting Yucatec creation myths in the colonialdocuments and with suggestions for futureresearch.

The references to Christian themes in theBooks of Chilam Balam have led some scholars toassume that Christianity contaminated thesemyths. Knowlton, however, shows that there aremany more similarities to the cosmogony of theancient Maya in these texts than a superficialconsideration of their post-Conquest referencesto Christian doctrine might suggest, and hedemonstrates that the relationship is far morenuanced than one might think. It is thuspossible to untangle the ancient Maya, colonialMaya, and Christian cosmologies in these textsbecause the Inquisition did not control the

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content of handwritten texts as it did forpublished books.

This book is a very important contribution toMaya studies, especially for the study of thecolonial documents and myths, and for studiesof ancient Maya epigraphy. It has great relevanceto Maya linguists and epigraphers, but it is mostappropriate for specialists who have considerableknowledge of the Maya languages, mythology,and epigraphy.

Dean E. Arnold Field Museum of NaturalHistory, Chicago

Uzendoski, Michael A. & Edith Felicia

Calapucha-Tapuy. The ecology of thespoken word: Amazonian storytelling andshamanism among the Napo Runa. xiv, 245

pp., tables, figs, bibliogr. Chicago: Univ. ofIllinois Press, 2012. £34.00 (cloth)

The work of Amazonian anthropologists fromClaude Lévi-Strauss onwards has resulted in arich ethnographic literature on the diverse rangeof vivid and infinitely creative stories producedby Lowland South American societies. However,to date little has been published on the natureand significance of the story-telling process forAmazonian cultures. Furthermore, ‘oral’story-telling traditions such as those found inAmazonian societies continue to be perceived bymany as somehow inferior to the writtentraditions of the ‘Western’ world. In the presentpublication, Michael Uzendoski and EdithCalapucha-Tapuy set out to address these issues,drawing upon perspectives from French andBrazilian structuralism, ethnopoetics, andethnomusicology, as well as from their extensiveknowledge of story-telling practices among theNapo Runa, a Quichua-speaking people of theEcuadorian Amazon.

Uzendoski and Calapucha-Tapuy observe thatQuichua story-telling, unlike the written storiesof the ‘West’, is ‘somatic poetry’: an embodiedexperience that draws its power as much fromthe performance of the story as from the wordsuttered. For this reason they suggest that merelytranslating and transcribing Quichua stories intotext is insufficient to communicate fully theexperience of witnessing the telling or singing ofa story. The authors attempt to overcome thisdifficulty in several ways, the most intriguingand successful of which is a website via whichreaders can access audio and video footage ofstories mentioned in the book. They argue for amore nuanced approach to the study ofstory-telling in non-Western cultures, one thatdoes not assume hierarchical oppositions of the

type ‘Western/non-Western’, ‘literacy/orality’, or‘civilized/primitive’. Instead, they considerQuichua stories not to be ‘inferior versions ofHomer or Shakespeare’ but rather story-tellingtraditions in their own right. The storiesrecounted in the book are also used asconvenient springboards for discussing othertopics, including perspectivism, originnarratives, and female ‘shamans’ in Quichuasociety.

Uzendoski, as an American socio-culturalanthropologist, and Calapucha-Tapuy, as atranslator and native of the Napo Runacommunity, contribute different perspectives,attributes, and approaches to produce auniquely thorough and convincing analysis ofAmazonian story-telling traditions. They combinetexts and recordings of Quichua stories andsongs with ethnographic accounts of themoment they first heard these stories: who wasthere, under what conditions the stories weretold and for what reason, how the stories werereceived and understood by other onlookers.The effect is to emphasize the principal messageof the book, that Quichua stories and songsconstitute an integral element of Quichua life,and that to remove them from their context andturn them into ‘things’ (such as ‘Amazonianfolklore’ or ‘MP3 files’) is to isolate the storiesfrom that which gives them meaning. Anotheradvantage of the book from the point of view ofthis reviewer is the effort on the part of theauthors to appeal to a wider audience beyondthe confines of (Amazonian) anthropology, andthe clear, direct writing style (which Uzendoskihas developed into something of an art form)facilitates this process.

My quibbles with this fine volume are minor.I felt that the accompanying website was aninnovative and extremely useful resource, onethat has the potential to reach a far wideraudience than most academic books can hopeto achieve. However, apart from a brief (anddifficult to locate) reference in the introductorychapter, the website was barely mentioned inthe text. Given that comparatively fewanthropologists are taking advantage of theInternet’s potential to present ethnographic datain new and exciting ways, it seems a terribleshame to me that Uzendoski andCalapucha-Tapuy are content to hide their lightunder a bushel. Furthermore, given that one ofthe explicit aims of the text was to problematizethe orality-literacy divide that is taken for grantedby so many authors, I was surprised to findnothing about the influence of literacy amongcontemporary Quichua (alluded to in the book)

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upon story-telling practices, not to mention therole of these practices in efforts to transmit NapoRuna culture to the next generation, many ofwhom lead hybrid lives that are increasinglydominated by Hispanic influences. I also foundthe frequent typographical errors in the bookfrustrating, particularly in those parts of the textthat had not previously been publishedelsewhere.

Nevertheless, these issues do not detractfrom the wider achievement of this volume, onethat ought to adorn the shelves not only ofAmazonianists and ethnomusicologists, but alsoof anyone, anthropologist or otherwise, who isinterested in the history and practice ofstory-telling in all its various, equally beautifuland equally valid forms.

Emma O’Driscoll University of Kent

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review of sailing on the sea of love - the music of the bauls of bengal

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