tween economy and reproduction should be preeminent, there is a puzzling lack of reference to many relevant works on this subject.

A discussion of peasant societies in contemporary agrarian states, which emphasizes, in my view mistakenly, an ethnographic view, similarly fails to incorporate insights on the history of peasant economies from a considerable number of important works and suffers from the absence of a diachronic perspective on the process of underdevelopment. Nor (odd again in a work that ostensibly gives priority to the role of population) i s there much attention to the determinants and consequences of peasant reproductive strategies, which, of course, are difficult to understand except in a historical framework. After these criticisms, it may seem strange to say that this is a worthy and interesting book. But, its authors commitment to an evolutionary approach and their effort-if, in my view, occasionally problematical-to integrate general theory and ethnographic data, make it a useful contribution to ongoing debate among those of us who share an evolutionary perspective. Criticism, I hope, is just a healthy part of such debate.

individual and culture are essentially i n conflict. . . .The study of paralysis is a splendid arena for viewing this struggle of the individual against society. . . . The disabled represent humanity reduced to its bare essentials (pp. 4-5). The Body Silent is autobiographical but not an autobiography. It generally follows the progress of his illness from the initial symptoms through the various stages of treatment toward what he calls entropy. Murphy shares with readers his thoughts and feelings about his increasing immobility, drawing on his perspective as an anthropologist and dialectician. For exammple, when the neurologist informed him that he had a tumor at the top thoracic section of the spine, he comments that this is where the Mundurucu, among whom he did fieldwork in 1952 and 1953, locate the soul, lossof which is the major cause of illness. An anthropological discourse on theories of disease, intrusive objects, curing, and so on, follows. In the process, he cites Susan Sontags Illness as Metaphor, the classic science-fiction movie lnvasion of the Body Snatchers, and Levi-Straws theory of the structure of mind, and concludes that Tumors are a metaphoric breach of order, an assault upon both flesh and thought, and I had a big one right in the spot where my soul would be, if I were a Mundurucu (p. 33). Later, when he compares the euphoria he felt for several days following spinal surgery to the kind of religious experience he felt in boyhood following confession and again during the student strike at Columbia in 1968, he discusses Turners notion of cornmunitas with its sense of immediacy and closeness to others. Throughout the book Murphy moves from discussions of his own experience to that of the disabled who are, he argues, afflicted by a malady of the body that is translated into a cancer within the self and a disease of social relationships. They have experienced a transformation of the essential condition of their being in the world. They have become aliens, even exiles, in their own lands (p. 11 1). He examines the fears, myths, and misunderstandings society has about disability and the pain and damage it inflicts on the physically impaired: The disabled in America are pulled back into themselves by their own sense of loss and inadequacy, an impulse to withdraw that conspires with their devaluation by society to push them further into isolation. Add to this the fact that they confront a physical environment built by people with whole bodies, and one may well wonder how any of them manage to break out into the world. But they do, and in increasing numbers (pp. 135-1 36). Based on a review of the literature and on fieldwork with paralytics done by him (in his wheelchair) and his wife, Yolanda, and two graduate students, Murphy reports on the struggle for autonomy the disabled have been waging in American society. He concludes that The intensity of purpose required by the drive for autonomy makes the successful people unusual. . . . But no matter how well they may become assimilated into society, their struggle sets

The Body Silent. ROBERT F. MURPHY. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1987. XI+ 242 pp., notes, bibliography. $17.95 (cloth).
KENNETH KNSlNCER Bennington College The Body Silent is a powerful, profoundly disturbing book written with wit and wisdom by one of anthropologys finest iconoclasts. It is, according to Murphy, a continuation of his The Dialectics of Social Life (Basic Books, 1971) in which he investigated the eternal contradiction between the norms and meanings of culture and the ebb and flow of social activity (p. 230). In Dialectics he says that dialectical thought is. . . the perception of existential contradiction (pp. 228-229) and that the basic issue confronted by dialectical thought i s the estrangement of mans existence (p. 87). Dialectics was his excursion in anthropological theory; The Body Silent examines his journey from a little muscle spasm in 1972 to life in a wheelchair as a quadriplegic in 1986. Murphy calls it the social history of a paralytic illness. . . [which] has been an education of sorts, for in my passage into paralysis I have discovered the ebullience and power of the rage to live, which is really what this book is all about (p. 3). Although The Body Silent is a deeply personal narrative of his illness, it is first and foremost an ethnography on paralysis and paralytics in American society in which Murphy is both the ethnographer and the principal informant. But Murphy-the-dialectician has an even broader agenda-the human species: The relationship between society and its symbolic standards for acting and evaluating, on one hand, and the strivings and interests of ordinary people, on the other, are not neatly adjusted to each other and mutually supportive. Rather, the

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them apart from their able-bodied fellows. They have a different history and follow a separate agenda; they remain part of the Other. Their otherness, however, is positive and creative, for their self-assertion is a profound celebration of life (pp. 160-1 61). The ontology of the paralytic, argues Murphy, is encapsulated in its highest form in the battle of lifes wounded against isolation, dependency, denigration, and entropy, and all other things that

pull them backward out of life into their inner selves and ultimate negation. This struggle i s the highest expression of the human rage for life, the ultimate purpose of our species (p. 230). Thus, as in all good ethnographies, Murphy has taken us from the examination of specific individuals in specific societies to a contemplation of their significance for understanding humanity. The Body Silent is an important and significant contribution to the anthropological literature.

Volume 15 errata
15(1), p. 87 In Carole Browners article, sentence beginning on line 3 should read: All female and male informants were also asked to name any herbal or other remedies or techniques they knew for the following reproduction-related events: to treat infertility, to prevent pregnancy. . . . In the same article, sentence beginning on line 17 should read: More men than women indicated that they knew no remedies for any of the eight reproductive health conditions under study, but equal proportions knew about either one or none (54 percent versus 52 percent); the distribution was nearly the same for both men and women with knowledge of more than one problem (Table 1).

15(1), p. 88

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