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this interpretation was pioneered by Haavio, Pentikainen probes more deeply, stripping away layers of Christian and medieval Scan- dinavian influence to expose a common core of ancient shamanistic practice and world view shared by Finns, their far-flung Finno-Ugric- speaking relatives, and other northern Eur- asian cultures. He insightfully links key points of similarity between Saami and Siberian sha- manism and, in turn, predominant themes in the Kalevala.

Some of the ambiguities of contemporary Finnish identity and attitude toward the Kal- cuala are treated in a brief concluding chapter. A more extended and, perhaps, reflexive dis- cussion of the political uses and reflections of folklore would be welcome here in view of Wil- son’s interpretation of the post-World War I1 transformation of Vainambinen from warrior- chieftain to shaman-sage in Finnish scholarship. However, this is a minor omission. Pentikai- nen’s exceptional interdisciplinary study will richly reward those interested in the dynamics of artistic creation and cultural construction, ethnic emergence and political nationalism, and shamanistic belief systems.

The Migration Process: Capital, Gifts and Offerings among British Pakistanis. Pnina Werbncr. Explorations in Anthropology (John Gledhill and Bruce Kapfcrer, series eds.). New York: Berg (distr. by St. Martin’s Press, New York), 1990. 404 pp. $56.50 (cloth).

KATHLEEN HALL University of Chicago

The experiences of peoples uprooted from their homelands provide anthropologists with a number of difficult challenges. For within these multiracial, multicultural societies where the connection between culture and homeland is severed, questions of boundaries, of identities, and of cultural continuity and change take on additional significance.

Werbner’s study attempts to come to terms with complexities in the lives ofone such pop- ulation-Pakistanis in Manchester, England. Her book is the culmination of research col- lected from 1975 to 1979, and supplemented at intervals during the 1980s. It is one ofthe most exhaustive studies to date of a South Asian diaspora in Britain.

The book is organized &to three sections (“Capital Accumulation,” “The Gift Econ- omy,” and “Conspicuous Giving and Public Generosity”), a breakdown that reflects Werbner’s theoretical framework. This frame- work lends “an alternative application of ex-

change theory to network analysis” (p. 206). Werbner’s ambitious aim is to link the various domains of activity-business, kinship, ritual, and politics-within what she designates as the Pakistani community. In so doing, she privileges the gift economy, following Mauss, as the generative force in the creation of the “moral bonds” that bridge these social do- mains:

As they accumulate capital, immigrants convert it into gifts and offerings in order to define a local moral community. They ritu- alise their social relationships with one an- other and objectify, through gifts and offer- ings, valuable relationships of trust, many of them forged in Manchester. [p. 31

Werbner’s aim is “to recover the dimen- sions of British Pakistanis’ lives often left out of broader analyses of racism and discrimina- tion.” Her focus is “the primary concerns of Pakistanis themselves.” For her purposes then, “the wider society forms a backdrop, sometimes harsh and menacing, against which British Pakistanis struggle to achieve [their] central aspirations” (p. 7). Having de- lineated her unit of analysis, she turns her at- tention to the systems of gifting that are inter- nal to the Pakistani community as she defines it.

The society that emerges from Werbner’s analysis of networks maintained through gift- ing and service exchanges, however, is not a single, homogeneous ethnic culture. Her de- scriptions and case studies weave a complex tapestry of many distinctive social worlds made up of peoples for whom Pakistan re- mains a focal point. Manchester Pakistani so- ciety is made up of several different ethnic populations distinctive in language, place of origin (Pakistan or India), and culture. Her analyses reveal the class and caste divisions that separate elite Pakistanis from poorer, less-educated “migrants” who live within a central residential cluster. She describes their distinctive lifestyles, friendship patterns, and participation in local associations as well as their exchange of gifts and services.

What is missing from Werbner’s intricate microanalysis is a notion of scale-a theory that would account for the shifting boundaries within the heterogeneous world she describes. Instead, she reifies the category “Pakistani,” and does not examine relationships that tra- verse this boundary. For example, Werbner describes relationships between second-gen- eration Pakistanis and British school friends that have evolved into business associations; yet this and other data are not analyzed within her general-theoretical framework.

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And can the experiences of these people be understood apart from the structures of racial and class inequality that encompass them within British society? Can the processes she describes in such detail-caste mobility, emergent class distinctions, and the rise of Pakistani brokerheaders with their “good command of English and the fine points of British etiquette” (p. 322)-be explained ad- equately if not located within the cultural in- terplay between British Pakistanis and mem- bers of the dominant majority? Werbner chooses not to examine these issues systemat- ically in this study. But the richness of her data deserves such attention.

Gender and Disorder in Early Modem Se- ville. Mary Elizabeth Perry. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990. 220 pp. 537.50 (cloth), $12.95 (paper).

MARIKO ASANO TAMANOI Univcrsig of Iowa

This book represents an excellent example of the rapprochement between history and an- thropology. It is about the city of Seville dur- ing the Counter-Reformation in the 16th and 17th centuries. During this period, the city ex- perienced what Perry calls “disorder,” that is, “religious schisms, developing capitalism, dramatic demographic changes, urbanization, the growth of a central state, and increasing imperial rivalries” (p. 177). The order given to this disorder by secular and ecclesiastical authorities, then, can be summarized as “the ‘natural order’ of God, Man, and Woman, ar- ranged in a hierarchy with women at the bot- tom” (p. 177). Perry thus aims to restore dis- order by listening to the voices of those con- trolled, particularly the voices of women. Her focus is on “those disreputable women” who occupied the liminal space of the city of Se- ville. This focus reflects Perry’s belief that “answers to questions central to social order may best be sought on the ‘outskirts of life’ ” (p. 9), because, as such a term as “legalized” prostitution implies, the existence of those dis- reputable women had to be legitimated by the authorities for the very purpose of social con- trol.

Chapters 1 through 8 of the book present the author’s dialectical approach to the lives of various groups of disreputable women in Counter-Reformation Seville, a city which of- fers a quintessential example of patriarchy in crisis. She deals with bigamists, single moth- ers, widows, abandoned wives, beatas, manly women, adulterers, fornicators, sodomites,

prostitutes, and poor women. The secular and ecclesiastical officials tried to strengthen their authority “through a political system that was closed to women, through guild regulations that multiplied to restrict the economic activ- ities of women, and through more careful en- closure of women in convent, home, or brothel” (p. 13). In other words, the officials tried to transform all women into “daughters of perfidious Susana” by constantly asking the question, what is Woman (p. 179). Many women participated in their efforts, but others “resisted with quiet subversion and noted the gap between gender ideals and the actual con- ditions of their rapidly changing city” (p. 13). It is here that Perry’s analyses of the women’s voices are most interesting.

For any historian or anthropologist, what Foucault has called “genealogical enquiry,” that is, a rediscovery of fragmented and sub- jugated knowledge, is a tremendously difficult task. Considering that Perry deals with the city of Seville some three centuries ago, she is largely successful in restoring the fragmented and subjugated knowledge ofwomen. Her use of a variety of historical records, including “art and literature from the period, Inquisi- tion records, laws and regulations, city gov- ernment papers, chronicles, legal documents, parish records, and a census of the poor” (p. 9), is extensive and vigorous.

I wish we could hear more of the voices of ordinary women, but I realize that the num- ber of women who actually appear in histori- cal records is limited. In addition, as Perry points out, the words of women appearing in those documents are often heavily edited, re- flecting not their own thoughts and emotions but the officials’ views of them. Hence, it is ex- tremely difficult to distinguish between nor- mative belief and empirical reality. The only solution to this problem is that, when we hear the voices of such remarkable women as Maria de San Jose-a nun who enjoyed “free- dom to think and to write and to redefine real- ity” (p. 8 7 ) - o r Gregoria Francisca-another nun, who described vividly “her love relation- ship with Christ” (p. 94)-we must also re- member that there were countless other women whose voices we cannot restore. De- spite these limitations, Perry’s efforts to re- store the voices of as many women as possible are commendable. The picture she draws of Counter-Reformation Seville-unlike the pic- tures by Bartolome Murillo throughout the book-is a very realistic one, with multiple faces of various expressions of men and women who lived in and survived disorder.