Book reviews
Archaeology and prehistory
Byrd, Brian F. Early village life at Beidha,
Jordan: Neolithic spatial organization and
vernacular architecture. xiv, 442 pp., maps, gs,
tables, illus., bibliogr. Oxford: Univ. Press, 2005.
99.00 (cloth)
For almost half a century Diana Kirkbrides
investigations at Beidha in Jordan were regarded
as the quintessential example of early village life
at the southern end of the Fertile Crescent.
Preparation of nal excavation reports is always a
difcult undertaking, all the more so when the
eldwork was directed by one individual and the
task of drawing the threads of the synthetic
report are conducted by another who
participated in none but the last of the
long-running seasons. Brian Byrd is to be
commended for tackling such a massive task and
for the systematic and thorough nature of his
endeavours, this being the second volume
published by him after that on the much less
complex Natuan remains underlying the
Neolithic village.
As noted explicitly by Kirkbride herself, and
reiterated by Byrd in the introduction, the eld
methodology employed at Beidha was in direct
apposition to her earlier experience with
Kenyons narrow, deep sounding excavations at
Jericho, where not a single complete Pre-Pottery
Neolithic structure was exposed. The Beidha
excavations thus focused on providing extensive
horizontal exposures of the village to enable
investigation of community organization and
layout.
The report comprises eight chapters.
Chapter 1 examines current approaches to Near
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 675-724
Royal Anthropological Institute 2006
Eastern later prehistory. Chapter 2 focuses on
the site setting, history of excavations and the
general occupation sequence of the site.
Chapter 3 describes the methodology and
analytical tools employed. Chapter 4 presents
the stratigraphy and chronology, including the
problematic nature of many of the radiocarbon
dates for xing the precise duration of the
occupation, although the conclusion is that
the entire sequence relates to the Middle
Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB). Chapter 5 details
the construction methods and modications of
the individual structures from the different
phases. Chapter 6 examines variability,
continuity, and change in architectural layout
through the sequence, including the spatial
structure of the community. Chapter 7
synthesizes developments in community
organization and the utilization of space within
the village. Chapter 8 concludes by placing the
architectural results within the broader
perspective of developments in the Near East.
An abstract is provided in Arabic, while some
450 photos, plans, and gures provide copious
documentation for the text.
The most radical change compared to
Kirkbrides preliminary reports relates to the
presentation of the stratigraphy. Byrd simplies
matters by employing a three-fold model (albeit
with sub-phases), corresponding to what he
ultimately concludes to be the basic residential
architectural styles. These developed from the
round and curvilinear houses of founder Phase
A, through sub-rectangular structures in Phase B,
to the two-storey corridor buildings of Phase C.
Here, it is of some interest to note that the
partial preservation of upper storeys in the latest
phase had previously caused considerable
problems in stratigraphic assignment.
676 Book reviews
Byrd views the site as having been
continuously occupied throughout the Middle
PPNB, and believes that residential units
throughout were organized around the nuclear
family. He sees the shift from Phase A to Phase B
as deriving from the catastrophic burning of
most of the village, bringing about the
abandonment of highly ammable timbered
structures as a construction element. However,
architectural changes were tempered by other
mechanisms, and the fundamental trends
throughout the entire sequence included rst,
the increased discreteness of individual
households as the focus of activities and
production; and second, the appearance and
then expanded importance of distinctive,
signicantly larger corporate buildings (p. 128).
Furthermore, distinction between public and
private space increased over time ... storage and
production were spatially segregated from the
exterior and from most public portions of
domestic buildings (the upper storey). Hence,
access to knowledge regarding storage and
production was more restricted and well
controlled (p. 129). The upper storeys of Phase
C corridor houses were for eating, sleeping,
entertaining, and were physically separate from
the storage and production areas in basements.
This increasing compartmentalization of
activities reected more restricted social
networks.
The signicantly larger corporate structures
(most ostentatious in Phase A) are interpreted as
having functioned for supra-household
decision-making, ceremonial, and political
activities, in contrast to the more segregated
ritual/cultic area structures to the east side of the
site. Monoliths, large post holes, and massive
carved basins comprised signicant components
of such installations and structures, which also
lacked much of the refuse common in and
around domestic structures. Other public
architecture includes the village wall and steps,
which appear to have acted as a buttress for the
soft sandy sediments on the south side of the
settlement. Still, Byrd sees no real evidence of
overall village planning.
While some attention is paid to the spatial
distribution of furniture and some small nds
within structures, as well as patterns of garbage
disposal, detailed analyses must await another
volume. Byrd is to be congratulated for bringing
this volume to fruition, the results of which
document one of the most important Neolithic
sites excavated in the Near East.
A. Nigel Goring-Morris The Hebrew University
of Jerusalem
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 675-724
Royal Anthropological Institute 2006
Coe, Michael D. The Maya (7th edition). 272
pp., maps, gs, tables, plates, illus., bibliogr.
London: Thames & Hudson, 2005. 9.95
(paper)
Michael Coe published the rst edition of this
book forty years ago with the intention of
providing the public with a compact and
readable introduction to the Maya that people
could easily take with them when visiting the
magnicent Pre-Columbian ruins in southeastern
Mexico and adjacent countries of Central
America. That Coe is still improving the book
and that it is still a best seller testify to the
brilliance and endurance of both author and
subject. Just as an artefact, the present edition is
a denite advance over, for example, the
mid-course fourth edition (1987), with more
illustrations, including many in colour, larger
print type, and better paper capable of resisting
the sweaty hands of intrepid tourists. The
seamless coherency of the books subsequent
editions over the course of Coes productive and
deeply inuential career may derive from central
problems and themes he posed to himself and
his readers from the outset: How did the Maya
adapt to their natural environments over time?
What was the relationship between the Maya
and their neighbours as they emerged as
civilizations? What can we infer from the
elaborate artwork and inscriptions of the Maya
about their religion, politics, and social
organization over time? And what happened in
the ninth century AD in what Coe calls the
Central Area (the southern lowlands) during the
so-called collapse? I will touch on some of the
news in this edition.
Recent lake core analyses in the lowlands,
combined with sediment analyses from coastal
Venezuela, document several important episodes
of drought in rst millennium AD, and Coe
suggests that drought may have impacted some
signicant events in Maya history, such as the
collapse of the great city of El Mirador, a slacking
off of elite activity in the mid-Classic called the
Hiatus, and the ninth-century collapse in the
Central Area. Maize is an especially drought
sensitive staple, and no matter how this complex
relationship between climate and cultural
adaptation continues to play out, Coe is
certainly right to believe that the empirical
patterns will be central to our understanding of
Maya political economy.
The Maya lived in a world of many
civilizations, and they traded, allied, and likely
warred with their neighbours from the time of
the rst settled farming communities in the

Preclassic or Formative period. As an expert on
the earlier Preclassic Olmec civilization with its
major centres in the Gulf Coast lowlands
adjacent to the Maya lowlands, Coe has
consistently maintained that Olmec religious and
political institutions shaped and informed those
of the later Preclassic Maya. In this edition Coe
details exciting new Late Preclassic murals
discovered by William Satumo depicting Maya
kings and gods at the site of San Bartolo in
northeastern Peten. Coes student Karl Taube is
responsible for the analysis of the religious and
political symbolism of the new murals and he is
making a compelling case for the perpetuation
of the Olmec maize god as the pivotal deity in
Maya rites of royal sacrice and accession.
Coe calls the decipherment of Maya glyphs
over the span of his career a revolution, and
indeed this edition contains a rich tapestry of
ancient history peopled with kings, queens,
conquerors, reecting the advancement of our
ability to read the ancient texts. The challenge to
students of the Maya is how to assess the reality
behind the royal descriptions of events through
archaeological eld research. Updating a
perennial debate over the relationship between
the great Classic period highland Mexican city of
Teotihuacn and the Maya, Coe describes how
David Stuart recently showed that the warlord
Siyaj Kahk (Fire is Born) likely travelled from xiv, 125 pp., maps, tables, illus., bibliogr. La Paz,
the west to conquer the major Maya city of Tikal
in January of AD 378. Stuart identied a
monument inscription on Stela 15 at the site of El
Peru, ancient Waka, some 75 km due west of
Tikal, that placed Siyaj Kahk there eight days
before he arrived at Tikal. My current
archaeological research project at El Peru-Waka,
co-directed with Hctor Escobedo, is conrming
the signicance of Siyaj Kahks arrival there in
early January AD 378. Project epigrapher Stanley
Guenters reading of Stela 15 links the arrival of
the warlord with the accession of the local king
as a vassal. He and I also identied a second
Waka stela that not only discusses Siyaj Kahk
but also portrays him posthumously as a
Teotihuacano warrior some seventy years after
the celebrated arrival. Clearly the kings of El
Peru-Waka regarded their vassal status to Siyaj
Kahk with great pride and as pivotal to their
history. We continue to explore for further
archaeological evidence relevant to this episode.
The ninth-century collapse in the Central
Area is a fertile enigma that continues to inspire
the current generation of Maya experts as it has
all previous ones. Coe lists three major factors:
dense populations stressing the fragile tropical
environment; severe episodes of drought; and
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 675-724
Book reviews 677
warfare. Of these, warfare has become even
more prominent in this edition. Research during
the 1990s in the Petexbatun by Arthur Demarest
and the Vanderbilt project documented that
along the Pasin River, population pressure and
degrading environment were not major factors.
Rather, warfare on an increasingly destructive
scale brought down the royal capitals and drove
away those who could ee. In late 2005
Demarest reported the nal wholesale massacre
of royal courtiers at the palace of Cancuen,
southernmost major lowland capital on the
Pasin. Why the majority of Central Area Maya
fought themselves into total demographic
collapse remains an open question, but the
arrogance and short-sightedness of the ruling
elite surely played a pivotal role.
So the story of the Maya continues, and
Coes fresh take on it is engaging, accessible,
and authoritative. One may hope that he will
provide yet another recounting before the
turning of the great Maya cycle in 2012. There
will surely be new discoveries and insights to
relate.
David Freidel Southern Methodist University
McAndrews, Timothy L. Wankarani
settlement systems in evolutionary perspective.
Pittsburgh: Univ. Pittsburgh, 2005. $21.00
(paper)
The southern highlands of Bolivia in the modern
department of Oruro along the Rio Desaguadero
are a harsh, unforgiving environment. Although
arid, cold, and hypoxic, the region was the scene
of the development and persistence of a
remarkable archaeological culture Wankarani.
Thought to have existed from 2000 BC to AD
250, it is best known for its tell-like mounds,
some of which reach a height of eight metres,
and elaborate carvings in stone of the heads of
llamas. Despite these interesting features, little
systematic research on Wankarani had been
conducted until the 1990s, when Marc Bermann
of the University of Pittsburgh, his Bolivian
colleague Jos Estvez Castillo, and a number of
Bermanns graduate students initiated a series of
survey and excavation projects in the region.
In this slim monograph, Timothy L.
McAndrews takes on the task of describing
Wankarani culture and crafting an explanation of
its development and evolutionary trajectory. The
monograph, which is based upon McAndrews
1998 dissertation, is composed of seven chapters:
Theoretical background (chap. 1), Field
Royal Anthropological Institute 2006
678 Book reviews
methodology (chap. 2). Cultural context and
chronology (chap. 3), Environmental setting
(chap. 4), Wankarani settlement systems (chap.
5), Post-Wankarani settlement patterns (chap.
6), and The emergence and organization of
Wankarani village-based settlement (chap. 7).
Each is presented in both English and Spanish
on alternating pages. This dual-language format
has necessarily led to an economy of description
of project ndings. In compensation, some
useful data sets have been made available online
at the University of Pittsburgh Latin American
Archaeology Database
(http://www.pitt.edu/~laad), including the basic
data used for creating population estimates,
descriptions of ceramics and projectile points,
and a complete list of map data, site locations,
and other descriptive information.
The goals of McAndrewss research were to
(1) determine the degree of nucleation during
the sedentarization process; (2) examine
settlement location as a proxy measure of the
type of subsistence system; (3) describe the
growth of the settlement system; (4) determine
the degree (if any) of inter-site variability; and
(5) identify trends toward the establishment of
a settlement hierarchy (p. 1). His theoretical
orientation has been strongly inuenced by the
work of Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus, who
have pioneered the modern anthropological
archaeology approach to the origins of settled
village life in both Mesoamerica and
Mesopotamia. McAndrewss work is thus
profoundly processual and rmly grounded in a
cultural evolutionary perspective, and exhibits
both the strengths (clear problem orientation;
good articulation of theory, method, and data)
and weaknesses (primary reliance upon
adaptationist causality of cultural change) of this
paradigm. His project consisted of full-coverage
survey of two regional blocks and a sampling
strategy of an area between them. A single test
unit excavated at a key site provided additional
chronological control, new radiocarbon dates,
and a conrmation that mounds were likely to
have been occupied over hundreds of years.
The results of his research proved somewhat
mixed. Because McAndrews found no Archaic
period sites, no sense of the sedentarization
process could be determined. We have
Wankarani mounds with no apparent
antecedents. The absence of an Archaic has been
observed elsewhere in Bolivia (the Valle de
Tiwanaku; the Taraco Peninsula near Chiripa)
and is something of a puzzle since abundant
Archaic materials have been found in Peru in the
Rio llave interior. Villages were tethered to
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 675-724
Royal Anthropological Institute 2006
riverine contexts, suggesting an agricultural, or
agro-pastoral, adaptation, although confounding
this is a lack of non-mound Wankarani period
sites that may have served as seasonal pastoral
camps. Settlement system growth was
characterized by slow population increase and
village ssioning. Although some variability in
activity performance was observed, no
settlement hierarchy was identied.
I see this monograph as an important, but
incomplete, rst step in elucidating processes of
Wankarani cultural change. McAndrewss
research has identied the outlines of these
processes, but many questions remain. In part,
this is due to the limitations of survey data,
which only provide information on the nal use
of the mounds. I also suspect that aspects of the
sedentarization process are buried at their bases.
To address properly the questions he has raised,
excavation is necessary. I thus found it surprising
that no mention was made of Courtney Roses
dissertation excavations at nearby La Barca
(Household and community organization of a
Formative Period Bolivian Settlement, 2001). It
appears that McAndrews did not update his
dissertation to include archaeological and,
importantly, palaeo-environmental data
published since 1998. This is unfortunate
because Roses work as well as new data on
environment both support and challenge some
of his ndings and explanations of them.
Mark Aldenderfer University of Arizona, Tucson
McGhee, Robert. The last imaginary place: a
human history of the Arctic world. 296 pp., maps,
illus., bibliogr. Ontario: Key Porter Books, 2004.
$39.95 (cloth)
It is rare to nd a readable and engaging book
that deals with a variety of intellectual issues in a
broad geographical region and extensive time
frame yet proves well researched and
incorporates the personal experiences and
transformations of the author. With Robert
McGhees The last imaginary place we have
exactly such a viable contribution to the history
and anthropology of the Arctic. The books
subtitle calls attention to the idea that McGhees
project is a human history, and I trust readers
will be convinced that McGhee successfully links
the history of the Arctic to broader issues of
anthropological and humanitarian signicance.
One noteworthy advantage of this book over
other historical treatises of the Arctic is that it
considers the Arctic region as an interconnected
component within the rest of the human world.

Thus, the book brings the peoples and places of
the Arctic out of the exotic, and emphasizes the
role and effects of the developing world system.
This approach aids the author in his main task:
tracing the representations and images of the
Arctic as otherworld from ancient times to the
present. The major issue which is pertinent
across the Arctic and has a major impact on the
lives of its people is the view, mainly on the part
of peoples living outside the Arctic, that the
region is a wasteland useful only for extraction
of economically relevant resources. Concomitant
with this view is the position that Arctic peoples
are somehow living representatives of the Stone
Age. McGhee eloquently dispels both myths and
explores the reasons behind the contradictory
fascination and fear of the Arctic among
explorers, travellers, and others who have made
the Arctic their temporary home. Thus, the book
is useful for a variety of educational venues, such
as circumpolar anthropology, globalization and
colonization, and identity, beyond being an
excellent read for the educated layperson.
Alongside the books titular goal, McGhee
provides evocative and excellent discussions of
major archaeological discoveries in the Arctic
material and their implications, concise
summaries of the issues with which native
northern peoples have historically dealt, and a
presentation of the forces likely to bring future
change to the aboriginal peoples of the Arctic.
McGhee begins the book with a brief discussion
of the relationship between the expansion of
modern humans, technological developments
during the Palaeolithic, and the challenges and
conditions presented by the Ice Ages. This
preface adds a new idea to discussions of human
evolution and a claim for the universal
importance of Arctic adaptations for the
development of our species. The next chapter
traces the history of the Arctic in ancient
thought, displays superb scholarship, and
demonstrates the path dependency of
otherworldly representations of the Arctic over
the millennia. This argument is carried through
several other chapters of the book and provides
an overarching theme.
McGhees discussion of the importance
of hunting for Arctic peoples sustenance and
cosmology is presented in chapter 3, along with
a fullling overview of the archaeology of the
Tuniit and Inuit. The stereotypical image of the
Inuit is one of a people who have a long history
of adaptation to the high Arctic. The proof of this
view is the existence of Palaeo-Eskimo/Dorset
culture, or Tuniit. Those who accept this idea
would benet greatly from McGhees discussion
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 675-724
Book reviews 679
of the archaeology of the Norse colonization of
Greenland and Canada, and the expansion of
the ancestors of contemporary Inuit. McGhee
discusses Inuit oral history of their origin and
conquest of the region. This evidence, some of
which McGhee examined rst-hand, links the
peoples of northern Canada with the peoples of
Siberia and northern Europe. Similarly, McGhee
has an excellent summary of the history and
contemporary situation of the native peoples of
Arctic Siberia.
One can learn a great deal about the
medieval colonization of Iceland, Greenland, and
Northeastern Canada and how this colonization
affected the lives and cultural developments of
indigenous peoples from The last imaginary
place. This well-written contribution to Arctic
history and anthropology shows how Icelandic
and Greenlandic and Inuit historical narratives
corroborate the archaeological evidence. Several
chapters of The last imaginary place deal with the
exploration of the Arctic by Europeans and
Americans in search of various passages to the
Orient, sources of gold, whale oil, furs, ivory,
and national and personal glory. Without a
traditional concept of private property, Arctic
peoples were susceptible to the land-hungry
and destructive powers of colonization,
mercantilism, industrial development, and
settlement. McGhees nal substantive chapter
looks at the relationship between indigenous
Arctic peoples and their land and resources,
providing an instructive introduction to a large
body of literature on the topic of indigenous
rights and Arctic peoples.
John P. Ziker Boise State University
Moffat, Alistair. Before Scotland: the story of
Scotland before history. 352 pp., maps, plates,
bibliogr. London: Thames & Hudson, 2005.
18.95 (cloth)
Before Scotland is a good and engaging example
of a new kind of archaeology book, in which the
human story takes centre stage. Its title echoes
those by masters of previous generations,
Gordon Childes Prehistory of Scotland of 1935
(and subsequent versions) and Stuart Piggotts
Scotland before history of 1958 (and subsequent
versions). Each has taken the same brief: to give
an account of the land during the distant mists
of prehistory, before the time when there can be
a more secure history with actual known
place-names, persons, and dates.
In those old books, the material record is the
focus. Care and effort patiently tie the curiosities
Royal Anthropological Institute 2006
680 Book reviews

into a culture-history sequence; social inference overwhelming likelihood is that it goes

is necessarily restricted. A generation ago, much further back, all the way to the
calibrated radiocarbon dating transformed later arrival of the early pioneers after the
prehistory, and with it has come the ever-ner retreat of the last Ice Age.
knowledge of the sites and their specics. A far
more detailed culture-history can now be the
With the seabird subsistence economy of St Kilda
starting-point for an account concerned more
in the later nineteenth century, and the
with human lives and experiences. The singular
contemporary craft of making coracles with
material anomalies remain: the chambered tomb
canvas, it is made a lively part of the chapter,
(if tomb is indeed what the megalithic
titled The wildwood, on the Mesolithic hunter-
structure with human bones socially was) of
gatherers of some 10,000 and more years ago.
Isbister, with its bones of at least fteen
A good and imaginative range of modern
sea-eagles; the mounded burial place (if burial
and historic analogues are seen as pertinent to
is indeed the social word for this deposit) at
lively accounts of these ancient matters. But yet
Irthlingborough with the bones of 184 cattle. But
again, I am reminded of the paradox of recent
there is a condence now that we can make
relations between prehistorians and
sense of the meaning of these things rather than
anthropologists. Just as the prehistorians,
say nothing or unreliably speculate in an
starting famously in the New Archaeology of
imaginative but pointless way.
the 1960s, have been in urgent need of social
So we are given a strong and lively story
models, social models which the anthropologists
right through. As well as the famous old Scots
should know from their ethnohistories of
sites like Skara Brae and Cairnpapple Hill, we
societies so unlike those of the modern
visit Doggerland, the low-lying lands off the
Westernized world, we have found that
British Coast in early post-glacial times which
anthropologists had lost interest in these
were ooded over to become the Dogger Bank,
matters, and preferred instead to follow the
a famous shing ground in the North Sea. When
fashions of literary criticism, and the unhelpful
it comes to the Classical period, the Romans are
(to archaeologists) games of postmodernism.
presented as the rapacious and exploiting
Where can we offer the energetic and smart
invaders they were, rather than welcome
author of this book, a TV producer rather than
bringers of order, straight roads, and plumbing.
an academic, better and more systematic and
I would have enjoyed the corresponding
more soundly based social analogues than his
opportunity having been taken to present the
dependence on simple models of local
subsequent Dark Ages instead as the Bright
long-term continuity?
Ages. They are indeed dark, if Scotland is seen
The book uses the device of separate
as slipping beyond the radiating light of a
explanatory boxes, to say what ochre is and how
dimmer Mediterranean empire. They can be
widely it has carried human meaning, or just
bright if they are seen as a period of northern
how chronologies came to be BC or AD. The
advancement, a time of gold and high
publishers call these valuable and quirky. The
decorative arts, when the internal links between
too-cute and irrelevant ones that there are
the northern lands were a better engine of a
fossilized prawns near the summit of Everest
better advancement than had been the external
should have been quietly killed.
exploitations of an acquisitive Roman Empire.
Christopher Chippindale Rock Art Research
The renewed and productive enthusiasm for
Institute, University of the Witwatersrand;
a human story has instructive intellectual
Australian National University; Cambridge University
consequences. It strongly advances continuity
models over perilously long time-periods, as the
pursuit of human experiences relevant to the far
Palk a, Joel W. Unconquered Lacandon Maya:
past naturally tends to privilege any historical
ethnohistory and archaeology of indigenous culture
and near-modern accounts that seem sufciently
change. xxi, 318 pp., maps, tables, gs, illus.,
close in place. The annual guga (gannet) hunt
bibliogr. Gainesville: Univ. Press of Florida, 2005.
on the rock of Sulasgeir by men from the Isle of
$65.00 (cloth)
Lewis is seen as

This is the rst archaeological investigation of the

that rare thing, one of the last survivals of historic Lacandon Maya, and the rst study in
an ancient way of life ... the people of the historical archaeology of the Maya area that
Lewis claim that the guga hunt deals with a tribal society without permanent
goes back to the 15th century ... the structural remains. As the author notes, most

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 675-724

Royal Anthropological Institute 2006

historical archaeology in the Maya area to date
has focused on more complex communities with
indigenous and/or Spanish architecture, and
more complex archaeological features and
artefact assemblages.
The Lacandon lived in small villages and
hamlets of perishable structures in the remote
jungles of the southern Maya lowlands, and their
communities left few, if any, traces. Remaining
traces of these settlements include an occasional
historical report, increasingly scarce oral history
accounts, a few non-indigenous fruit trees
(mango, avocado), and scattered artefacts buried
beneath the litter and topsoil of the forest.
The rst ve chapters of the book explore
Lacandon history, archaeology, culture change,
demography, and settlement patterns, and
include a critical survey of the past research on
the ethnohistory and ethnography of the
Lacandon. The author draws on a large body of
historical and ethnographic material, and this
excellent review (and bibliography) provides a
valuable reference work. The Lacandon, who
descended from one or more early Colonial tribes
of the southern lowlands Chol, Kehache, Itzaj,
and perhaps other crystallized as a distinct
tribal group in the late eighteenth century, when
they are rst reported in historical accounts.
Chapter 6 enters new territory with the
account of the survey and excavation of several
sites in the Guatemalan Petn. The presence of
the Lacandon in the Petn in historical times is
poorly documented all the groups studied by
ethnographers are in Chiapas so the research
lls an important void in their history. Most of
Palkas sites are in the Pasin River/Petexbatn
region, where he excavated three sites (Caobal,
Matamangos, and El Mangal), as well as another
settlement near Tikal, in the Central Petn. The
artefacts, coupled with historic information,
indicate that they were occupied in the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The
surveys of the sites included the use of metal
detectors, and the excavations involved shallow
horizontal exposures of large surface areas,
which resulted in the identication of residential
areas and living oors with activity areas. The
following two chapters present a description and
analysis of the artefacts, and discuss their
implications for the reconstruction of Lacandon
behaviour, and transformations in their lifestyle,
economics, and material culture.
The archaeological materials allow Palka to
document Lacandon culture change over a
200-year period, providing a unique perspective
unmatched by any other researcher. Along with
other scholars who have studied the Lacandon in
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 675-724
Book reviews 681
depth, the author further dispels the notion of
the Lacandon as an isolated, degraded pure
descendant group of the Classic Maya, and adds
persuasive new evidence that, like any other
surviving Maya group, they have undergone
substantial cultural change. Moreover, the rich
inventory of trade goods recovered from the
sites include a variety of items from non-local
sources, such as bottles, ceramics, and metal
artefacts, some manufactured in North America
and/or Europe. This evidence of extensive
trading activities reects long-term engagement
with the outside world interactions with
traders, hunters, loggers, and other tribes in the
region, as well as visits to frontier settlements
further dispelling widely held notions that the
Lacandon were isolated and had few contacts
with outsiders.
The nal chapters address larger issues of
changes in Lacandon social life and the impact
of increasing interaction with the outside world,
and the resulting impact on their own social
organization, language, religious rituals,
ideology, and identity. These transformations are
having a dramatic effect, as many have left the
jungle for modern settlements, and only a
hundred or so survive in small residential
clusters in three main localities of the Lacandon
forest of Chiapas.
The production of the volume is nely done.
The text is thoughtfully organized and well
written, and lavishly illustrated with numerous
detailed maps, both of the Lacandon region and
of individual sites, and many high-quality ink
drawings and photographs of artefacts,
settlements, and scenes of Lacandon life. These
include illustrations of artefacts from the
excavations, as well as god pots from various
localities across the lowlands. The photographs
include many recent and archival illustrations of
Lacandon individuals and families, settlements
and houses, and a large collection of historical
and recent pictures of Lacandon material culture,
perhaps the most extensive ever published.
This superb study will be of interest not only
to Maya archaeologists and historians, but also
to archaeologists conducting research into tribal
groups worldwide.
Anthony P. Andrews New College of Florida
Pluciennik, Mark. Social evolution. 156 pp.,
illus., bibliogr. London: Duckworth, 2005. 11.99
(paper)
Mark Plucienniks Social evolution is published in
the series Duckworth Debates in Archaeology,
Royal Anthropological Institute 2006
682 Book reviews
along with books on topics such as the Roman
countryside, shipwreck archaeology, and state
formation in early China. Yet unlike some of the
others, it addresses both archaeological and
social anthropological issues. It covers ideas
from both elds, with both historical and
contemporary sources, and also thinkers like
Mandeville, Montesquieu, Herder, William
Robertson, and Adam Smith in the eighteenth
century. Plucienniks starting-point, however, is
really the seventeenth century, a case which he
has argued in recent, more specialized,
publications. Although he seems to
de-emphasize that period here, he does add to
consideration the suggestion that evolutionism
has its sources not just with intellectual
arguments and empirical observations, but also
with the dawn of colonialism and capitalism.
Space precludes him from taking this too far in
this book, but it is an idea worth thinking about
for both students and historians of
anthropological ideas.
In the nineteenth century, evolutionism
returned through the new disciplines of
archaeology and anthropology and their
newfound notions of culture. No doubt
constrained by his publishers word limit,
Pluciennik gives less space to this interesting
period than perhaps some readers would like,
but he explains briey the technological
sequences introduced by Thomsen, Nilsson, and
Lubbock, and the interplay between culture and
race, for example, in Herbert Spencers works. I so briey. That said, it should provide a clear
would have liked a little more on developments
of the time in Danish and Swedish archaeology,
as well as British archaeology, but what
Pluciennik does include is wonderfully clear and
engaging.
One of his best sections is that of the relation
between the ideas of gures such as Morgan
and their implications for the likes of the US
Bureau of Indian Affairs (tellingly, originally part
of the War Department) in the late nineteenth
century, and throughout he encourages
rethinking relations between theory and
practice. Yet there are periods and developments
missing, such as the debates between
monogenists and polygenists in the early
nineteenth century which were so important in
the institutional construction of anthropology
(e.g., the Ethnological Society of London versus
the Anthropological Society), and were also
signicant in light of wider debates then on
slavery and on the treatment of natives. Yet in
fairness, I acknowledge that this book is aimed
mainly at archaeology students, many of whom
might (in my view, erroneously) regard these
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 675-724
Royal Anthropological Institute 2006
things as peripheral to the understanding of
evolutionism for their eld.
The Boasians and neo-evolutionists of the
early twentieth century are covered in a little
more depth, and included are both
archaeologists like Gordon Childe and social
anthropologists like Steward and White. There
are also tantalizing comparisons to classical
Chinese and Hindu conceptions of evolution
(two of Plucienniks specialist interests in earlier
works), as well as reections on classic Western
social theorists, notably Marx. The mutual
inuence of archaeology as politics and vice
versa is a subject explained in the last chapter,
on the frameworks of social evolution. Here we
are treated to debates, for example, on
nationalism and archaeology, and on regional
diversity in broad categories like Mesolithic and
Neolithic. This contains original material, and
should be a delight for students to explore.
Pluciennik is explicit about the potential for
ethnocentrism in the history of ideas, and that
certainly is worth some thought on the part of
his readers.
In all, this is a wonderful little book for
undergraduates in archaeology and in social
anthropology. It introduces them to key themes
and key thinkers and to some of the larger
issues of the disciplines through their history
and as practised today. However, it is, inten-
tionally, a very short book, and its main failing
is that the issues it covers are dealt with ever
and inspiring introduction that will, one hopes,
encourage students to delve deeper into some
of the sources that Pluciennik summarizes. It
will also at least show them some of the names
and issues that the idea of social evolution
invokes, and challenge them to think deeper
about big ideas in archaeology and anthropol-
ogy and, of course, appreciate their historical
signicance.
Alan Barnard University of Edinburgh
Stringer, Chris & Peter Andrews. The
complete world of human evolution. 240 pp.,
maps, tables, gs, plates, illus., bibliogr. London:
Thames & Hudson, 2005. 24.95 (cloth)
The recent sensational discovery of a new type
of primitive hominid on the island of Flores,
one of the Indonesian Sunda Islands, marks for
many of us a turning-point in the study of
human evolution. The discovery highlights how
little we actually know about human evolution
in Southeast Asia, and the growing rapidity with

which our views need to be constantly revised
and updated. Perhaps this discovery marks a
new era in the study of human evolution one
of consolidation and strengthening of existing
paradigms, not only by new fossil nds, but also
by the application of relatively new molecular,
medical, chemical, and radiometric methods. We
are therefore in the midst of a new phase in
which we can further rene existing evolutionary
models, and develop new ones that are based
on our growing ability to obtain a vast array of
information from CT-scans, radiometric methods,
ancient DNA and taphonomical studies to name
but a few.
The complete world of human evolution by
Chris Stringer and Peter Andrews is written by
two veteran researchers in palaeo-anthropology
who have not only witnessed some of the most
signicant discoveries and breakthroughs in
human evolution during the last few decades,
but are also responsible for some of the major
paradigm shifts and phylogenetic
reconstructions in the discipline. It is a book that
will satisfy both non-scientists and lay readers as
a new popular science volume about human
evolution.
The books main strength is its excellent
colour pictures, plates, tables, and gures,
following a typical Thames & Hudson format
and layout. The textual part is at times very brief
but none the less succinct and offers the
essential information about some of the main
topics in human evolution. The chapters provide
a concise up-to-date account of all the major
aspects of human evolution, which all in all
gives the reader an excellent introduction to a
fascinating discipline in constant ux.
The rst section, titled In search of our
ancestors, contains chapters about human
variation, palaeo-anthropology, the geological
time scale, various archaeological methods, and
environments. This section provides the reader
with a crash introduction to some of the central
theoretical and methodological aspects that
underlie any palaeo-anthropological study such
as a brief introduction to radiometric dating
methods, excavation techniques, and
taphonomy. The second part of this section
provides six study cases from some of the major
fossil sites, such as Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, as
well as from non-African sites such as Rudabnya
in Hungary and Pas, alar in Turkey. These are
particularly informative as they provide the
reader with specic details about how fossils are
detected, excavated, and recorded, and by doing
so gives a glimpse into what it is actually like to
be out there in the eld.
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 675-724
Book reviews 683
The second section, titled The fossil
evidence, is straightforward with a
chronologically based structure. It deals with the
evolution of ancestral apes, australopithecines,
and the Homo lineage, and concludes with a few
chapters on the contribution of genetic studies
to the study of hominid evolution. The selected
chapters give a broad, brief state-of-the-art
overview about the fossil record. It is a
well-balanced section that not only offers
general information about the main fossils but
also supplies the reader with the essential
context, namely the main theories, debates, and
controversies that are associated with each nd.
Thus, Stringer and Andrews use their extensive
experience to juxtapose skilfully between
chapters that focus on a specic species and
ones that use a specic site, such as Gran Dolina
in Spain, as a focal point of discussion about the
early occupation of Homo in Europe and the
transition from Homo Heildenbergensis to the
earliest Neanderthals.
The third section, entitled Interpreting the
evidence, covers a mixed bag of topics that are
none the less essential to those who wish to
gain a holistic insight into some of the more
complex aspects in human evolution. It starts
with two chapters on the evolution of
locomotion and the evolution of feeding, moves
on to address the First Americans, followed by
ve chapters on tools, and the reconstruction of
human behaviour. The chapters on the evolution
of locomotion and feeding are in my opinion
central to human evolution and thus their
inclusion is particularly welcome.
In sum, this is a rst-rate up-to-date account
of the main issues of human evolution. The
book is enjoyable and is highly recommended
to those requiring a simple crash course into
the eld. For anyone who is interested in
human evolution and is looking for a
comprehensive overview, this is a good place
to start. It may also serve undergraduates as it
can help them to set straight their chronology,
fossil nomenclature, and geography and also
provide them with some essential references to
more academic sources on each of the topics
covered.
Ron Pinhasi Roehampton University
Trigger, Bruce G. Understanding early
civilizations. xiii, 757 pp., illus., bibliogr.
Cambridge: Univ. Press, 2003. 40.00 (cloth)
Understanding early civilizations is a
comparative study of seven early civilizations. It
Royal Anthropological Institute 2006
684 Book reviews
is a monumental work of twenty-nine chapters,
divided into three core sections which address
socio-political organization, economy, and
cognitive and symbolic aspects. The book has
well over 300,000 words of almost continuous
prose with no more than a scatter of
illustrations. It makes minimal use of section
headings within chapters and has no truck with
box features, diagrams, and so forth. Perhaps
conscious of the daunting prospect this
provides to readers who have become used to
ideas and data being served in bite-sized
chunks, easily digestible but providing limited
academic sustenance, Trigger suggests in his
preface that those primarily interested in
theoretical issues might like to read no more
than nine chapters four introductory
chapters, a chapter that summarizes each of
the core sections, and two concluding chapters.
Do not do this. Read every single word of this
book, even though you must sacrice a
substantial chunk of your life to do so. It is
brilliant in every respect.
While Trigger declares that the book took no
more than three and a half years to write, it is in
effect a life-times work for he notes that as a
nal-year undergraduate in 1959 he had written
an essay comparing ve ancient urban centres.
In this work he selects seven early civilizations to
compare: the Old and Middle Kingdom of Egypt
(2700-1780 BC); southern Mesopotamia
(2500-1600 BC); northern China in the late
Shang and early Zhou periods (1200-950 BC);
the Valley of Mexico in the late fteenth and
early sixteenth centuries AD; the Classic Maya
(AD 250-800); the Inca kingdom during the early
sixteenth century AD; and the Yoruba and Benin
peoples of Western Africa from the
mid-eighteenth century to the beginnings of the
colonial era in the late nineteenth century. To
make his comparisons, Trigger describes each of
these civilizations in detail, drawing on a wide
range of primary and secondary sources to
display an astonishing breadth of knowledge
and depth of insight. This allows the book to act
as a comprehensive source for information about
all aspects of these civilizations, irrespective of its
achievement with regard to cross-cultural
analysis.
Trigger debunks an array of what have been
inuential claims about early civilizations, such
as the arguments from Elman Service and
Maurice Godelier that these were theocracies
which relied on fear of the supernatural rather
than military force for control of the lower
classes, and Mircea Eliades argument for a
universal cosmic plan which inuenced the
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 675-724
Royal Anthropological Institute 2006
layout of cities and temples in all civilizations. He
replaces these grand claims with meticulous
attention to what the data actually tell us about
life in early civilizations, writing with an assured
and persuasive authority.
While explicitly about early civilizations, this
book is really about the nature of anthropology
and the nature of being human. Trigger is as
unhappy with extreme cultural relativism as he
is about rationalism, the proposition that
people of all cultures behave in basically the
same way with cultural variation being no
more than epiphenomenal. Rather than
trying to resolve this deep-seated divide in
anthropology by argument alone, he gets to
work by identifying the precise ways in which
early civilizations were similar and in which
ways they were different. He nds that both
similarities and differences were present and
rightfully declares that to ignore these
similarities out of loyalty to hoary dogmas of
cultural relativism or historical particularism
would be as misleading as to ignore cultural
differences in the name of unilinear
evolutionism (p. 274).
Some of the differences can be explained by
adaptation to different environments, notably
the different agricultural systems that were
employed. Others derive from idiosyncratic
cultural traditions, such as the specic art styles
developed by early civilizations, although there
was a surprising amount in common with
regard to subject matter. The similarities are
profound and far-reaching and cannot be
explained away by invoking similarities in the
pre-civilization chiefdom societies of each
region, as unilinear cultural evolutionists would
wish to do. Neither are they found just at the
economic and technological level: there are
striking similarities in cosmological schemes
that each civilization used to understand their
universe. Trigger concludes that to understand
how these similarities have arisen,
anthropologists need to pay greater attention
to how biological evolution has resulted in
certain psychological propensities within the
human species to think and behave in some
manners rather than others.
This book is a monumental work and a
magnicent achievement. It is not only a
turning-point in the documentation and
understanding of early civilizations, it is also
profoundly important reection on the nature of
anthropology and the nature of the human
condition.
Steven Mithen University of Reading

General
Arons, Nicholas Gabriel. Waiting for rain:
the politics and poetry of drought in Northeast
Brazil. xxvii, 251 pp., map, illus., bibliogr. Tucson:
Univ. Arizona Press, 2004. $36.95 (cloth), $17.95
(paper)
Very occasionally, a book happens along which
is so honest and raw in its treatment of an
otherwise dispassionate subject (in this case
drought) that it can move the reader to tears.
Nicholas Arons has accomplished just such a rare
feat in his poetry-studded narrative of the
reasons for, and the multi-layered reactions to,
the cyclical phenomenon of drought in
northeastern Brazil. In his carefully rendered
descriptions of the dusty towns of the inland
serto, as well as his recounting of the history of
what he terms concentration camps, where
thousands of refugees from the drought-ridden
interior gathered in coastal cities, Aronss words
deliver an emotional punch. He skilfully exposes
the seamy politics of this most poverty-stricken
region of Brazil, a land which from the moment
of colonization to the present has endured
endless hardship.
Certainly, the subject of drought is not a new
one to Brazilianists, and the wrenching poverty
which accompanies such cycles as well as the
dignity of the proud and resigned people of the
Northeast who withstand such deprivation have
been dissected by journalists and academics
stretching back for generations; one thinks
immediately of da Cunhas Rebellion in the
backlands, Ralph Della Cavas work on Padre
Cicero, and Robert M. Levines monograph on
the dbcle of the Brazilian militarys attempt to
rout the religious followers of Anthony the
Counsellor from their latter-day Massada at
Canudos. Anthropologists have also exposed the
injustices of this landscape (perhaps in English
the works of Nancy Sheper-Hughes and Candice
Slater are best known) while cinematographers
have rendered the region familiar through the
experimental cinema novo lms of Glauber Rocha
in the 1960s and, most recently, Walter Salless
Central Station (1998).
But what distinguishes Aronss account from
previous studies is his rare gift of writing with
a compelling immediacy which privileges
his position as novice in the region, while
simultaneously taking the reader along for the
ride. As Arons takes his rst steps towards
immersion into the culture of the Northeast, the
reader vicariously experiences his discomfort,
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 675-724
Book reviews 685
whether it is anxiety as he hitches a ride with a
reckless driver into the interior and recites every
prayer he can think of to survive the night,
laughter as he successfully avoids being dragged
off to whorehouses, or stupor as he reels from
his over-indulgences in beer-drinking (all in the
name of research). Numerous fascinating
characters people his narrative: the local poets
Patativa and Joo Bandeira who wrote in the
tradition of literatura a cordel (poetic chapbooks);
endless streams of women daily carrying water
from distant wells to their towns; dusty, often
lifeless, children who suffer so dramatically; and
the chain-smoking Dutch priest who ministers to
these poorest of the poor.
At the same time the reader is exposed to the
painful history of the region, especially the
remarkable droughts of the 1870s, 1930s, and
1990s, each of which killed thousands. Arons
claims not to be a Brazilianist, but he is clearly
well versed in the prinicipal historical events and
texts of the region as well as its literature and
cinema. More to the point, his observations are
all meticulously referenced with academic
precision.
With a consistent eloquence, Arons records
the reactions of the local people to their lives,
their resignation as well as their religious
fanaticism, and their sometimes violent
responses to the brutal reality of a federal
government that cannot (or will not) rectify
conditions to avoid the disaster of drought.
The matter-of-fact way mothers speak of their
infants death through hunger, the humiliation
of Aronss disgured friend by the local bosses
to whom he is serving dinner, the water-
diviners lack of interest in ofcial
weathercasts, are all beautifully handled in
exquisitely sharp relief.
If the resulting narrative is more poetic than
scholarly, the fault lies not with the authors
lack of background but with his literary bent.
Certainly the excerpts of local poetry which are
woven into the text are intended to reinforce this
impression. Considered by themselves, these
poems are sometimes amusing (as when Arons
asks a local poet to write a poem on
hand-washing and proper toiletting), but more
often than not, these snippets serve to reinforce
the impression of resignation so characteristic
of this part of Brazil.
One might imagine that the authors aim in
writing this book would be to arouse action, but
his conclusions perhaps only obliquely may be
considered a call to advocacy. Rather, Arons is
content to honour his new friends in the region
by re-creating in print the magical-surreal quality
Royal Anthropological Institute 2006
686 Book reviews
of the world in which they live. And, in that
goal, he succeeds magnicently.
Roberta Marx Delson The American Museum of
Natural History; Drew University
Biehl, Joo. Vita: life in a zone of social
abandonment. 404 pp., illus., bibliogr. London,
Berkeley: Univ. California Press, 2005. 21.95
(paper)
Joo Biehls book Vita: life in a zone of social
abandonment reads, in the best of
ethnographic fashion, like a mystery thriller. The
setting is a run-down philanthropic asylum in
southern Brazil that, during the years under
observation (1995-2003), harboured a motley
crew of elderly, physically handicapped, and
mentally ill patients as well as domesticated
street-dwellers and rehabilitated drug-users. Our
guide through this maze is Catarina, a wilted
beauty, sinking ever deeper into her wheelchair,
who tirelessly scribbles, in near-obsessive
determination, what she calls her dictionary.
Having discovered, in this presumably psychotic
patient, a cogent partner in dialogue, the
ethnographer begins to perceive the apparently
disconnected phrases written in her notebook as
the musings of a poetic subjectivity, seeking
desperately to be heard. Thus, the title of the
books introduction, copied from the opening
pages of Catarinas notebook reads Dead alive,
dead outside, alive inside.
By leading his readers through the thick
description of a single life, Biehl reveals a tale of
social psychosis, involving years of misdirected
government health policy, medical
incompetence, and the gradual disappearance of
the patients family. As he pieces together the
fragments of this womans existence rst
through Catarinas own narrative and then
through the careful tracking down of medical
records and family members we discover a
rural worker who, as a young bride, and still
caring for her invalid mother, migrates to the
outskirts of the state capital, where she and
other family members nd work in the shoe
industry. Complaining of persistent pain, and
suffering frequent falls, she is quickly let off from
work, becoming one more victim of the
countrys economic decline. Over the next few
years, her periodic admissions to the regions
different mental institutions register varied
diagnoses: schizophrenia, postpartum
depression, severe mood disorder. Catarina, her
relatives inform public authorities, represents a
hazard to society: she refused to nurse her
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 675-724
Royal Anthropological Institute 2006
premature baby (her third child), had burned
her husbands documents and other belongings,
and was known to attack people in at least
one instance, with a knife. The inevitable
solution: emergency institutionalization in
whatever facilities available. Despite such
damning documentary and visual evidence, the
author raises doubt in the readers mind: could
this pathetic gure be something more than a
raving madwoman the role assigned to her by
practically all concerned?
This Bildung tale, told by the Brazilian-born
author, raised in places and circumstances not
so different from those of Catarinas childhood,
is divided in two parts. During the rst,
reecting broad erudition, the author calls on
thinkers from Nietzsche to Lacan to ponder
the fate of ex-humans, left in zones of
abandonment such as the asylum he studied.
Here, his text dialogues not only with Catarinas
melancholy poetry, but also with the photos of
Torben Eskerod, who forcefully frames scenes of
utter abjection. In fact, despite the apt depiction
of a two-tiered health system that in many cases
condemns the Brazilian poor to sordid neglect,
this is the part I nd less interesting. The tone of
moral indignation seems to point an accusing
nger at just about everyone (state ofcials,
patients families, hospital and shelter
administrators, etc.), leaving Catarinas
anthropologist to restore humanity, both
metaphorically and materially, where all others
have failed. These somewhat existential musings
begin to make retrospective sense when Biehl
nally ventures outside the asylum,
encountering a surprisingly warm welcome
among the various members (brothers,
ex-husband, children) of Catarinas abandoning
family. Here, the analysis acquires proper
ethnographic nuance and the reader becomes
aware of paradoxical situations that go beyond
individual volition.
Further, it is in this second half that the
author realizes his stated ambition (inspired in
authors such as Arthur Kleinman and Byron
Good) to link personal experience and
meaning-making to large-scale power
processes. Evoking situations similar to those
one might nd in other Third (and even First)
World countries, Biehl paints a glum picture of
Brazils recent policies for the mentally ill: model
programmes that, paradoxically, promote
progressive exclusion. Representatives of the
neo-liberal government greet the health
movements pleas for de-institutionalization with
enthusiasm since community care involves so
much less nancial input. Progressive

psychiatrists speak glowingly of new forms of
citizenship for the mentally ill, but are unable to
press through necessary reforms and alternative
services that might guarantee adequate home
care. The much idealized family, pat antidote to
institutionalized care, never seems to be quite
up to the mark. The net result is a growing
number of disorientated people either on
the street, or conned in unsupervised,
philanthropic (and suspiciously commercial)
shelters, run by unqualied volunteers in
Catarinas case, mostly reformed junkies
or born-again proselytizers.
It is profoundly ironic that, despite the
involvement of a small army of specialists
doctors, social workers, human rights
representatives, among others no one had ever
managed to arrange a neurological check-up for
Catarina, one that would have revealed the rare
genetic syndrome she, all her siblings, her
mother, grandfather, and a good many of her
over fty cousins, aunts and uncles were
carrying: Machado-Joseph disease. Until the
anthropologist came along, no one had thought
of taking the necessary steps that would connect
this indigent woman to the pioneer research
programme in the nearby university hospital that
specialized in exactly this disorder. Even more to
the point, this autosomal dominant disease,
typical of populations of Azorean descent, is
characterized by cerebellar ataxia (and
progressive physical paralysis); it is not known
to affect the patients mental health.
With the storys climax and dnouement, the
reader is provided with an object lesson of how
genetic knowledge, produced through the
intermingling of agencies (the authors and
Catarinas), renders a redenition of personhood
as well as a realignment of family ties. In this
particular biological complex, characterized by
the interplay of genes and environment shaping
Catarinas life cycle, ethnography stands as the
missing nexus through which reality is not only
understood, but transformed.
Claudia Fonseca Universidade Federal do Rio
Grande do Sul
Cr apanzano, Vincent. Imaginative horizons:
an essay in literary-philosophical anthropology.
xiii, 260 pp., bibliogr. London, Chicago: Univ.
Chicago Press, 2004. 13.50 (paper)
Following Serving the word, his recent book on
religious and legal literalism in America,
Crapanzanos new book is an investigation on
the faculty that, arguably, suffers the most under
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 675-724
Book reviews 687
a literalist hermeneutic. An elaboration of
Crapanzanos 1999 Adolph Jensen lectures, this
books concern is with the imagination, as the
work of both individuals and cultures. Here,
imagination is not taken to delineate some sort
of highly structured ideational material that
stands as the terminal result of a process, as it
does in tropes such as imagined communities,
the historical imagination, or the social
imaginary. Rather, this book takes as its subject
the act of escaping from obdurate, quotidian
reality, the attempt to cross the imaginative
horizons that stand between the here and now
and an only dreamed otherworldliness that is
beyond our ability to perceive because of its
spatial, temporal, or ontological distance.
For Crapanzano, the beyond of this horizon,
which is portrayed through the spatial metaphor
of the arrire-pays, or hinterland, is complex, for
two reasons. The rst is the common epistemic
anxiety that arises from the act of guring the
subjunctive, which is of interest only because of
its lack of existence. The second difculty
emerges from the rst, as this picturing of the
ephemeral beyond serves to reduce it; the very
act of conjuring and articulating the imaginative
brings it into the realm of the here-and-now, of
representation and of circulation, and hence
undoes that unreality that was the very source of
the imaginatives initial allure. Afterwards, the
imaginative qualities continue to exist only in the
form of an aura or penumbra attached to the
representation, if at all.
Despite the transient and otherworldly nature
of his subject, Crapanzano argues that the
imagination is suitable for ethnographic
investigation. He turns his attention to how the
imaginative is evoked, constructed, and situated,
and to how these instantiations of the
imagination reexively relocate the border
between the here-and-now and the beyond of
the imaginative (as well as retroactively
transform the already articulated imaginative
itself). Crapanzano eshes out this speculative
ethnographic project through a series of
montage-heavy meditations on elds that have
been of recent or long-standing ethnographic
interest, turning his attention to the between,
to the body, to pain, to trauma, to hope, to the
transgressive, to the erotic, to remembrance, and
(nally) to world-ending and to death. In these
chapters, Crapanzano engages in a series of
vertiginous comparisons, drawn not only from
his own eldwork in places such as Morocco,
South Africa, and Southern California, but also
from other sources in one instance the Apache
practice of speaking with names is set aside a
Royal Anthropological Institute 2006
688 Book reviews
snippet of Catholic Charismatic imagistic prayer;
at another moment a mid-twentieth-century
Swiss villagers psychic decomposition is put up
against Highland Papua New Guinea race-tinged
apocalyptic Christian narratives. Given the topic,
Crapanzano ttingly takes the arts as evidence as
well, addressing in passing modern dance,
Wordsworth, Navajo poetry, German Surrealism,
and Romantic landscape painting (to list
just a few).
Broad and insightful, the vast majority of
these discussions and juxtapositions are quickly
sketched out in a purposefully inconclusive
way the point is not to invalidate the
theoretical glosses on the ethnographic evidence
offered by the original reporter (although he
does offer glancing critiques of a wide range of
ethnographers and theorists, such as Victor
Tumer, Judith Butler, and Elaine Scarry as well
as Johann Gottfried von Herder and Georges
Bataille). Rather, the goal is to contrast how
the stances towards the possibility of the
imagination found in these cultures, theories,
and works are xed or open. This larger
discussion entails how, in these instances, the
imaginative is either an object of longing or of
dread (or at times both), and hence is foreclosed
or encouraged, and how in each instance this
constellation of sensibilities regarding the
imagination functions to shape the trajectory of
further exercises of the imaginative faculty.
There is a pleasure alone in reading each
of Crapanzanos chapters, and his erudite,
open-ended, and often purposefully
contradictory musings on these topics can well
serve as a tonic to anyone interested in ways in
which these topics could be fruitfully reframed;
those interested in phenomenological,
psychoanalytic, hermeneutic, and existential
approaches to anthropology will also nd
Crapanzanos virtuoso readings and critiques
rewarding. The true worth of this book, though,
is in bringing anthropological attention to a
faculty which, despite the near ubiquity of the
term imagination in the social science
literature, is rarely made the actual centre of a
thorough discussion of its own.
Jon Bialecki University of California, San Diego
Handelman, Don & Galina Lindquist
(eds). Ritual in its own right. vii, 232 pp., illus.,
bibliogrs. Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books,
2005. 15.00 (paper)
This edited volume, full of new and original
perspectives, makes an important contribution
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 675-724
Royal Anthropological Institute 2006
to the anthropological and historical study of
ritual. While ritual has been accorded a pivotal
role in theoretical approaches ranging from
Durkheimian functionalism, via political
economy, to symbolic analysis and performance
studies, rituals have all too often been explained
in terms of phenomena external to the ritual
itself. The usefulness of this book lies precisely
in the serious attempt to transcend the
long-standing, even hegemonic, focus on ritual
as a representation of broader social and
cultural orders.
In his introduction, Don Handelman makes a
strong case for making the inquiry into ritual
forms the basis for a comparative endeavour
orientated towards the integrity of ritual
phenomena as phenomenal (p. 3). Mindful of
the futility of searching for a singular denition
that can encompass all rituals, Handelman treats
ritual as a class of phenomena whose forms,
in greatly differing kind and degree, are
characterized by interior complexity,
self-integrity, and irreducibility to agent and
environment (p. 10). A key argument is that the
more complex rituals are in their interior
constitution, the greater their self-organizing and
self-sustaining capacities, and the greater their
capacity to produce change through their own
operations. Some of these ideas were introduced
in Models and mirrors: towards an anthropology of
public events (1990), but Handelmans thinking
has since developed into a fully
phenomenological position.
The authors of the nine substantive chapters
have responded in different ways to the
challenge to discuss ritual in its own right and
they are variously successful in their efforts to
push ritual studies beyond the limits of
representation. The two essays in the rst
section, Theorizing ritual: against
representation, against meaning, provide
incisive critiques of canonical studies of ritual
and suggest alternative ways of conceiving ritual
dynamics. Of special interest is Bruce Kapferers
theoretically savvy chapter on ritual dynamics in
which he develops a notion of virtuality,
conceived as a self-contained imaginal space and
as a method for entering within the process of
reality formation. The very disjunction of the
world of rite from its larger context is, according
to Kapferer, the key to the continuing vitality of
many rites. In his probing critique of
hermeneutic approaches to ritual, Don Seeman
notes that such approaches fail to confront the
radical alterity of pain as a dimension of human
experience. The suggestion that Levinass
writings on the uselessness of suffering hints at

a different phenomenology of ritual practice is
intriguing, and it will be interesting to see this
argument developed more fully.
In the section Experimenting with ritual,
Michael Houseman reects on an experiment in
which students were made to undergo a male
initiation rite invented by the author himself.
Given that the experiment was designed to
illustrate Housemans relational approach to
ritual, readers will not be terribly surprised to
learn that the efcacy of this ritual as with
ritual in general derived largely from the
relational entailments of the co-ordinate
interactions that it entailed. The discussion of
ritual condensation is lucid, and Housemans
approach resonates with the editors call for
making the interior organization of rituals the
prime locus and focus of study. The sole
contributor who rejects the claims of ritual in
its own right is Andr Iteanu, who argues
persuasively that among Orokaiva peoples of
New Guinea ritual is encompassed by exchange.
The essays in the sections on Ritual and
emergence: historical and phenomenal and
Healing in its Own Right: spirit worlds are of
more uneven quality. Pirosky Nagy provides a
rich historical analysis of medieval religious
weeping as an intimate ritual practised outside
of ecclesiastical control. Likewise, Galina
Lindquists discussion of soul-retrieval rituals
practised in neo-shamanistic New Age circles
moves into subtle realms of experience, stressing
how such rituals of the mind are vehicles for
re-constituting the self. Whereas Lindquist
pushes for a greater focus on ritual imagination,
Sidney Greeneld adopts an entirely different
approach in his account of healing rites
performed by Brazilian Kardecist-Spiritists.
Finding that the participants enter into a
trance-like state, Greenelds main concern is
to explain how hypnotherapy affects the
bio-physiology of patients by operating on the
cellular and even genetic level. Readers will learn
more about ritual dynamics from Andr
Droogerss re-study of a 1970s Wagenia (Congo)
boys initiation ritual. Given the titles promise
to treat ritual in its own ludic right, I was
disappointed to nd play and spontaneity
addressed in terms of a cognitive approach
invoking a rudimentary version of connectionism
and the parallel processing of schemata.
In the nal section, Philosophically
speaking, Robert Innis looks critically at the late
Roy Rappaports work, Ritual and religion in the
making of humanity (1999), offering a complex
but rewarding discussion of tacit logic and
embodiment. In the epilogue, Handelman
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 675-724
Book reviews 689
reects on the interface between ritual and its
social milieu, insisting that the self-organizing
qualities of rite work always through a ritual
imaginary that gives them relative autonomy
from their social surrounding. In sum, despite
the uneven quality of the contributions, this ne
collection of essays is a challenging and
provocative contribution to the study of ritual,
and certainly one that ought to change the ways
in which anthropologists conceive of ritual.
Kari Telle University of Bergen
Harper, Douglas & Helene M. Lawson
(eds). The cultural study of work. xviii, 481 pp.,
tables, illus., bibliogrs. Oxford, New York:
Rowman & Littleeld, 2003. 22.95 (paper)
The cultural study of work accomplishes what
well-edited volumes do: it introduces the reader
to a coherent representation of a vast literature
and does so in accessible, useful ways. Editors
Douglas Harper and Helene Lawson skillfully
select and frame the contributions of
twenty-three authors in terms of the place they
occupy in this nearly sixty-year-old sociological
investigation of culture in US work worlds. What
is unusual about the volume is the juxtaposition
of seminal scholarship from decades that may
span thirty, forty, or even fty years. Their choice
to display the eld in this way corresponds
clearly to the central mission of this volume as
set out in the introduction. By emphasizing the
ethnographic history of the study of work in
sociology, the editors guide the reader to see
how different themes have emerged as the social
context of the times has changed.
Nurtured rst at the Chicago School of
Sociology, the analysis of work cultures had, by
the 1950s, become an important area of study
within sociology. Studies of this time focused on
performers (like jazz musicians and teachers) in
relation to their audience, ideologies promoted
by medical schools about future careers, and
teamwork strategies in restaurants or in
operating rooms. With the social movements of
the 1960s, critical studies of work appeared,
including research about police on skid row
(reprinted here) and social welfare agencies that
rationalized their work (in the Weberian sense).
New concerns about deviant types of work
(strippers, prostitutes) and deviance (theft, drug
use) in normal work settings came to the fore
in the 1970s, some of which is included here.
Hochschilds (1979) well-known work on airline
stewardesses (reprinted here) introduced the
notion of emotion work, inspiring an important
Royal Anthropological Institute 2006
690 Book reviews
new stream of scholars to study how workers
adapt to various emotional states that may be
required of or suppressed by their work.
Not until the 1980s did gender become an
important focus within cultural studies of work,
spurred by the expanding range of occupations
in which women began to be encouraged.
Increasing numbers of feminist scholars also
gave rise to new investigations about the
struggles of women trying to balance work and
family, as well as the difculties for those who
perform domestic work and childcare for other
women. Contemporary studies of work are
revisiting many of the older, durable themes by
using new methods and new analyses.
The editors concern with an historically
informed scholarship of work shapes the entire
logic of the book. In each of the ve thematic
sections, the authors provide orientating reviews
of the literature addressed in that section.
Part I, Work as social interaction, involves
the ways in which social interaction exposes
formal and informal work rules and permits vital
communication and negotiation, all of which
may structure the environment and perception
of work. Part II, Socialization and identity, deals
with how people become socialized into various
occupations; how identities that relate to work
are created and how they vary; and how the
subjective experience of work varies across
different types of careers.
Part III, Experiencing work, encompasses
chapters that detail the practical
accomplishment of various tasks, how emotions
are managed, and how time shapes the
experience of work in different settings. In Part
IV, Work cultures and social structures, the
editors introduce studies that address the
complex and contested meaning of blue-collar
work, professional work, and service
occupations. This section is particularly
interesting because of the signicant degree of
recent change in these denitions and categories
of meaning. Finally, Part V is devoted to
Deviance in work, a long-time focus in the
sociology of work.
The editors note that today, scholars devoted
to the cultural study of work must attempt to
understand the forces of globalization are
these forces eroding working conditions and job
security? Are they changing ideas about work
itself? This concern, which is well known to
anthropologists, exposes the unfortunate extent
of disciplinary disconnection across elds that
are closely related sociology and
anthropology. For scholars in the anthropology
of work tradition, there are already dozens of
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 675-724
Royal Anthropological Institute 2006
cross-cultural studies engaging the problems of
globalization and work. This volume points to
the practical need for such parallel universes to
intersect, to cross-fertilize, and multiply in
productive, new ways.
Readers might wonder about the absence of
any explicit discussion of theory as it has evolved
among sociologists of work. Considering the
historical approach of this volume, it would have
been a wonderful opportunity to review, even
briey, how the frames of analysis have shifted
over time alongside the shift in thematic
concerns.
The cultural study of work is an excellent
introduction to the eld, a pleasure to read, and
with its organizational and editorial strength, a
volume that is likely to be of lasting value.
Katherine E. Browne Colorado State University
Kr amer, Karen L. Maya children: helpers at the
farm. xv, 254 pp., tables, gs, illus., bibliogr.
London, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press,
2005. 22.95 (cloth)
Over the past twenty years, interest in life history
documenting the pace and timing of life
stages has become an increasingly important
and productive framework guiding research on
human evolution and has highlighted an
important evolutionary puzzle: we have slow life
histories, in particular long life spans and a long
sub-adult period, but faster reproductive rates
than our slow life history would predict. Human
females have short interbirth intervals, bearing
offspring in quick succession; women regularly
get pregnant again before their weanlings are
nutritionally self-sufcient. As a result mothers
have multiple dependent offspring to feed and
care for over a long juvenile period. Researchers
are just beginning to address how much
offspring cost at different ages, how mothers
meet these costs without compromising
offspring survival, at what age children become
self-sufcient, and why it takes them so long to
grow up. Karen Kramers book, Maya children:
helpers at the farm, attempts to tackle some of
these questions.
Kramer begins by laying out the co-operative
breeding hypothesis, that human mothers are
able to increase their reproductive rates because
they receive help. Weaned offspring require
provisioning and caretaking and, unlike
lactation, those forms of help can be supplied by
individuals other than the mother. Kramer
discusses two important denitional and
methodological difculties surrounding helping

behaviour. First, what exactly is help and how is
it measured? Second, what is the motivation for
another individual to help and how much help
should they contribute? Kramer analyses the
anatomy of help and suggests that the
relationship between childrens work and their
parents fertility can be uncovered using models
drawn from wealth ows theory. The books
goal is to build a case about childrens helping
behavior and the role that children play in
subsidizing the cost of their parents continued
reproduction (p. 27). Kramers thesis is that as
children age, they become increasingly procient
at some skills but remain reliant on subsidies in
other ways. Even though children maintain a net
economic decit until their teenage years,
Kramer argues that their particular economic
contributions reduce the costs they impose on
their parents. Parents then reallocate that energy
to continued childbearing and support
additional dependants. Thus, children
themselves provide the help required for
co-operative breeding.
Kramer tests this prediction using
observational and demographic data she
collected during the early 1990s from an
agricultural population of Xculoc Maya living in
the Yucatan, Mexico. She devotes several
chapters to describing the ecology and
demography of her study group and her
quantitative observational data collection
methods. Her systematic approach provides an
excellent template for rigorous ethnographic
research in the eld that will be especially
valuable for graduate students. The soundness
of her quantitative data assures their value for
future comparative analyses.
In the last section of her book Kramer utilizes
wealth ows theory to analyse and interpret
Mayan household economics. Wealth ows
models are designed to assess parents
reproductive decisions by measuring the transfer
of resources and labour across generations.
This approach attempts to capture the cost
of children from the parents time budget
perspective (p. 139). Kramer begins by
examining how children spend their time and
nds that they begin to participate in household
domestic work as early as the age of 3 and their
economic contributions increase as they get
older. Because individuals at different ages have
different consumption and production proles,
Kramer argues that the age composition of a
family has important effects on parental fertility.
By the end of the last section it is clear that
wealth ows models do not address many of the
important co-operative breeding questions that
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 675-724
Book reviews 691
Kramer initially highlighted in the book. First,
co-operative breeding specically focuses on the
individual trade-offs that mothers, helpers, and
offspring face. Instead Kramer focuses on the
economic trade-offs that parents face, obscuring
the critical reproductive conicts of interest
between the sexes that inuence caretaking
effort. Second, the models aggregate the
production and consumption of all members in
a household, again concealing the different
trade-offs faced by each household member that
are especially important aspects of co-operative
breeding. Third, a pivotal part of co-operative
breeding is about who cares for and provisions
dependants. While Kramer briey summarizes in
chapter 6 the time children spend participating
in childcare activities, she deliberately excludes
childcare from her production and consumption
calculations. This omission underscores how
wealth ows and co-operative breeding models
are constructed from different, and often
divergent, theoretical platforms.
Maya children summarizes Kramers excellent
doctoral and post-doctoral work on household
economics with clear methodological guidance
for future ethnography. Her attempt to place
wealth ows models in a co-operative breeding
framework should stimulate future research
focused on the differences between these two
important theoretical perspectives.
Shannen L. Robson University of Utah
Nuijten, Monique. Power, community and the
state: the political anthropology of organisation in
Mexico. x, 227 pp., maps, tables, bibliogr.
London, Sterling: Pluto Press, 2003. 50.00
(cloth), 15.99 (paper)
Monique Nuijtens Power, community and the
state is an excellent ethnography and a
signicant contribution to a rich and increasingly
sophisticated literature on local rural politics in
Mexico. Located in a land reform community
(ejido), it examines the practices of local power
and patterns of organization which characterize
relations between holders of land rights
(ejidatarios) and agrarian bureaucrats. Nuijten
argues for a multi-sited and fragmented view of
power against top-down perspectives and an
over-reliance on caciqual (political bossism)
models of regional power relations, and uses an
analysis happily unencumbered by routine
assumptions about the way clientelism works, or
by normative views on the negative role of
corruption which disguise the instrumentality
and the meaning of corrupt practices.
Royal Anthropological Institute 2006
692 Book reviews
An account of village dynamics since the
agrarian reform reveals shifting loyalities and
alliances; while kinship relations remain
important, neither they nor party afliation
determines stable factions within the
community. Access to land is central and while
it is widely recognized that ejidal land rental,
sale, and inheritance issues have regularly
departed from agrarian law and instead reected
local relations of power, few studies have offered
such insights into the establishment of
alternative procedures and the re-invention of
governmental techniques which give the
ejidatarios considerable autonomy and security
(p. 90).
Nuijten argues that while modernist
organization perspectives would characterize the
conduct of affairs in the ejido as messy and
non-transparent, her practice approach to
organization shows patterning and ordering of
practice in gaining access to resources.
Moreover, organizing through personal
networks and attempting to resolve issues
through corrupt transactions enables people to
evade state intervention and control (p. 187),
while the idea of the state is reproduced
through expectations, imaginings of conspiracy,
the fetishization of ofcial documents, and the
ght against corruption itself.
A long-standing land dispute reveals
ejidatarios in a constant search for the right
intermediary, while agrarian bureaucrats are
eager to present themselves as such, in return
for payment and reafrmation of their status;
both parties are implicated in the logic of the
system. Nuijten notes that while intermediaries
might be expected to ll the gap between local
and higher levels (p. 5), what stood out here
was the lack of effective intermediaries: despite
investment in a succession of right
intermediaries, the ejidatarios case remains
unresolved. Here Nuijten develops an interesting
argument about how political cynicism and
hope co-exist despite repeated experience of
disappointment, through a discussion of the
state bureaucracy as a hope-generating
machine (paraphrasing James Fergusons
Anti-politics machine, 1990); gaps are never lled
but keep people moving in the hope that this
time, they will be.
The book displays the strengths of a localist
perspective, and arguably some of its
weaknesses; there is some neglect of the broader
processes within which these dynamics are
embedded. Since, within the bureaucratic
machine, it is so systematically the case that it is
only rational to pursue personalistic networks
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 675-724
Royal Anthropological Institute 2006
(p. 187), or that state intervention routinely
privileges such networks, with divisive effects
(p. 198), this begs closer consideration of the
strategic nature of these forms of intervention
and their instrumentality in reproducing unequal
relations of power. (There is some underplaying
of the signicance of the Mexican political
system as a one-party state, until the ruling PRI
nally lost the presidential elections in 2000
not in 1997, as stated on pages 153, 206, and
209, n. 3). While the nature and logic of these
relations are clearly portrayed, a sense of the
intentionality of power is missing.
A commitment to showing how ejidatarios
evade state power and carve out spaces of
autonomy within force elds that hegemonic
projects are neither coherent nor successful
rather neglects the effects of attempts to inscribe
them. In this, the analysis is reminiscent of James
Scotts Weapons of the weak (1985). Only right
at the end is there a brief discussion of recent
changes in Mexican politics, yet attempts to
establish neo-liberal hegemony involved
signicant reconstruction of the Mexican
national project and the position of ejidatarios
within it, and were accompanied by a
considerable degree of coercive force. The
broader context of the changes to agrarian law
discussed in chapter 7 the effective
privatization of ejidal land tenure thus
represented not only a new way of governing,
but also the transformation of ejidatarios from
social to entrepreneurial producers in an
attempt to inscribe neo-liberal normativity; this
was one of a range of neo-liberal policy
initiatives which have decimated the ejidal sector
and both changed and strongly reinforced the
constraints within which evasion and autonomy
are sought. From this perspective, the
hope-generating machine works to reproduce
depoliticization and subordination.
Kathy Powell National University of Ireland,
Galway
Ramnarine, Tina K. Ilmatars inspirations:
nationalism, globalization, and the changing
soundscapes of Finnish folk music. xxii, 262 pp.,
map, illus., musical notation, bibliogr. London,
Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2003. 17.00
(paper)
For Tina Ramnarine, Ilmatar, mother of
Vinminen, the musician-hero of the Finnish
national epic Kalevala, continues to inspire
music-making and musical change. This is
important because it reveals continuities in the

aesthetic and ideological representation of
Finnishness: Ilmatars inspirations were
instrumental in the musical construction of a
mythical national past and continue to shape
the global soundscapes of Finnish new folk
music (uusikansanmusiikki ). In examining the
construction of musical boundaries,
appropriation, the transformative power of
musical borrowings, and creative hegemonies
as well as musical multiplicity and uidity in
identity formation (p. 23) both historically and
ethnographically, Ramnarine uses the apparent
contradiction of new folk music to make one of
her central claims: Finnish folk music emerges
within the homogeneous space and time of the
nation, and nationalist ideologies distinguish
our music from their music. Thus, the perspectives, the second with ethnographies of
newness of new folk music registers the
persistence of nationalist ideologies as well as
creative, intercultural, deterritorializing
processes of musical borrowings from a global
sphere (p. 202).
As Ramnarine amply demonstrates, these
borrowings are nothing new. At least since the
creation of the Kalevala and the advent of Finnish
nationalism in the nineteenth century, Finnish
national music has drawn upon Western
(Germanic), Eastern (Slavic), and other
Finno-Ugrian traditions. Today, these borrowings
extend to Saami, Roma, West African, and
Cuban music, not to mention the well-known
phenomenon of Finnish tango. Thus, if Finnish
folk music emerged in the nineteenth century so
that a Finnish national identity could be
asserted in relation to Finlands immediate
neighbors (p. 43), Finnish new folk music,
involved as it is with issues of ownership,
commodication, and copyright, shows how
musical processes within musical practices
labeled national which involve musical
multiplicity and turning to traditions beyond
national boundaries, emphasize the point that
the nation is not a site of musical homogeneity
(pp. 195-6).
In moving beyond the truism that music
styles are hybrid, Ramnarine accomplishes a
great deal. She connects the activities of earlier
nationalizing elites like Ilmari Krohn, Armas Otto
Visnen, Elias Lnnrot, and Jean Sibelius to the Finno-Ugrianism and the other with certain
creative work of Finnish new folk musicians like
Vrttin and JPP as they negotiate global markets
and aesthetics. She resituates long-standing
ethnomusicological concern with European folk
music and the nation in the context of global
musical change and the world music industry,
brining full circle the musical construction of
difference between West and East and North and
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 675-724
Book reviews 693
South and recasting notions of musical
homogenization through her ethnographies of
musical agency. Finally, she brings a musical
dimension to some mainstream approaches to
the anthropology of Europe: interest in the
ethnography of institutions and the state,
post-socialist change and European integration,
transnationalism, migration, and diasporic
identities.
Ilmatars inspirations is based on eldwork
that Ramnarine did in the early 1990s, primarily
in the Folk Music Department at the Sibelius
Academy in Helsinki and the village of
Kaustinen, the site of an important folk music
festival. The book is divided into three parts, the
rst dealing with theoretical and historical
new folk music performance and transmission,
and the third with the alignment of new folk
music and the world music industry.
Throughout, Ramnarine represents Finnish folk
music as a mediation of Ostrobothnian
(primarily instrumental) and Karelian (primarily
vocal) traditions that originated in nineteenth-
and early twentieth-century nationalism and
were revived in the 1960s. New folk music,
Ramnarine shows, emerged in the late 1980s and
early 1990s as the result of individual musical
choices, the accelerating circulation and
exchange of music and musicians within Finland
as well as globally, and the intervention of the
state. In her ethnographies, Ramnarine gives
pride of place to the musicians making those
choices and in so doing meaningfully connects
changes in Finnish society and culture to
changes in musical sound.
That said, I wonder if Ilmatars inspirations
might have beneted from a deeper
engagement with the literature on
cosmopolitanism as a way of further overcoming
the limits of conceiving of both folk music as
national expression and ethnomusicology
as the study of music in place (p. 215).
Furthermore, Ramnarine often equates
borrowings from Estonian, Seto, Mari, and other
Finno-Ugrian music with borrowings from
Cuban or Senegalese music, for instance. These
are surely different, one having to do with
music industry expectations. At the same time,
both are not only borrowings but
appropriations, and I feel that Ramnarine could
consider the asymmetries and hegemonies
inherent in these processes in greater depth.
Finally, I am curious about how the politics of
multiculturalism in Finland relate to new folk
music, especially as Russian-language education
Royal Anthropological Institute 2006
694 Book reviews
is being emphasized in Karelia and Somalis
struggle to make a home in Helsinki. These
passing criticisms notwithstanding, Ilmatars
inspirations makes an important contribution to
the ethnomusicological and anthropological
literature and comes highly recommended.
Jeffers Engelhardt Amherst College
Samson, Colin. A way of life that does not
exist: Canada and the extinguishment of the
Innu. 388 pp., maps, gs, illus., bibliogr.
London, New York: Verso, 2003. 16.00
(cloth)
Samsons treatise on the living conditions of the
Innu of the communities of Sheshatshiu and
Utshimassits (Davis Inlet, Labrador, Canada) is a
timely and well-warranted appraisal of the
treatment of Aboriginal people within Canadas
liberal democracy. While written by a sociologist,
this book makes a valuable contribution to
anthropology by providing an apt example of
the effects of colonial assimilationist policies on
Indigenous societies. Furthermore, the writing is
clear and makes use of personal observations
and narratives intertwined with theory to create
an argument accessible to anthropologists.
The living conditions of the Innu of Davis
Inlet rst came to the worlds attention in the
1990s when the media began reporting on
epidemic levels of substance abuse and suicide
among Innu youth. Newspapers and call-in
television and radio shows were lled with
shocked Canadians trying to rationalize how it
was that Canada had neglected or forgot about
these people living in such a remote place and
trying to gure out how the Innu could allow
themselves to live in such deplorable
conditions. At the time I was working with
aboriginal elders in an area of the north on the
other side of the country, who were concerned
about the effects of studies on deviance in
northern communities on academic and popular
conceptions of northern lifeways. I was therefore
also concerned that Davis Inlet might become a
testing ground for what these elders considered
to be a multitude of predatory social science
studies relegating aboriginal people to data.
Samsons book provides an antidote for such
studies. His analysis of political extinguishment
places the Innus social problems within a
context that answers the questions that many
Canadians were asking. Furthermore, it expands
the examination beyond these initial questions
to the issues that Canadians were not facing,
forming the basis for an argument against those
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 675-724
Royal Anthropological Institute 2006
who believe that the only solution for the social
ills of aboriginal people is for them to assimilate
to the Canadian majority, and thus make the
extinguishment of their traditional lifeways a fait
accompli. Samsons long-term commitment (his
work began in 1994) to exposing the Innu
political situation is apparent in his frank
discussion of these issues of such tragic scope.
Samsons book proceeds by focusing each
chapter on how a different Euro-Canadian
institution has been imposed upon a people
who have never signed a treaty or given their
permission to be ruled by the Canadian state.
Whether it is through housing, education, legal
practice, religion, or health, the Canadian
government has assumed that it has authority
over the lives of the Innu. Each chapter could be
read separately as a case study of an imposed
institution on aboriginal lifeways, with chapter 6
on education and chapter 9 on justice standing
out as particularly demonstrative discussions
of the issues at hand. However, in order to
appreciate fully Samsons argument that political
extinguishment works at multiple levels, the
book needs to be read as a whole. He establishes
that the imposition of institutions is maintained
through the evolutionary assumptions of the
terra nullius doctrine of Canadian legal title, and
that each of these institutions has been forced
on the Innu for their own good so that they
might progress and enjoy the benets of being
Canadian. In response, as far as the Canadian
state is concerned, the only price for this
progress is the extinguishment of their
aboriginal rights.
While I question Samsons assertion that the
Innu have only recently undergone the types of
radical changes to their lifeways that other North
American aboriginal groups have had to endure
for centuries, I am convinced by the argument
that the attempts by the Canadian state to
extinguish aboriginal title works on at least two
levels. At the surface, which receives the lions
share of attention by Canadians, extinguishment
is about the politics of land, resources, and
money. At a deeper level, as Samson carefully
describes, there is cultural extinguishment an
extinguishment of jurisdiction and autonomy.
Samson argues that the disturbing images of the
living conditions of the Innu need to be
understood in light of the interplay between
these levels. As Innu attempt to nd some room
to resist the extinguishment of their political and
economic lives, they nd that the Canadian
state and its agents hold authority over the
institutions which would give them the
autonomy to do so effectively, and these

institutions are working under the assumption
that the Innu do not, or should not, exist. Under
these conditions, social problems can only be
understood not by asking how people can
allow themselves to live like this but with a
radical questioning of the assumptions upon
which Canadian policies towards Aboriginal
peoples are based (p. 340). Asking these
questions is important for any anthropological
study of the relationship between aboriginal
people and the Canadian state, and I
recommend this book for having done so.
Robert P. Wishart University of Aberdeen
Schiffauer, Werner, Gerd Baumann, Riva
Kastoryano & Steven Vertovec (eds). Civil
enculturation: nation-state, school and ethnic
difference in the Netherlands, Britain, Germany and
France. viii, 360 pp., bibliogr. Oxford, New York:
Berghahn Books, 2004. 50.00 (cloth), 16.95
(paper)
The collaborative research reported here asks to
what extent pupils studying in multi-ethnic
public schools in four northern European
countries adopt the dominant model of cultural
pluralism. The editors acted as supervisors for
research carried out by four other scholars in
four public schools, but authors and supervisors
visited each others school sites and discussed
the contrasts among themselves. Together, they
seek to discover the everyday manifestations of
what they call civil culture, or the competence
to operate successfully in social life and with
respect to the state. The result is
ethnographically perceptive and analytically
sophisticated.
In the rst section of the book, the authors
build up portraits of civil enculturation through
a series of contrasts: in school buildings, in ways
of teaching national history and cultural
differences, and in the place religion occupies in
the curriculum. This expository strategy works
well in building up a sense of the overall
country contrasts. For example, we learn how
Dutch belief in the validity of cultural differences
and their doubt as to whether newcomers can t
in leads Dutch teachers to focus on universal
ethics rather than cultural difference, because
references to ethics allows criticism of
immigrants values without claiming that Dutch
culture is superior. By contrast, British teachers
claim that pluralism denes Britain and in the
classroom they celebrate cultural and religious
differences. The differences are visible on school
walls, school texts, and in school life.
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 675-724
Book reviews 695
Language ideologies offer valuable
perspectives on these differences. In all four
countries teachers promote the national
language, but with different rationales. In
Britain, all languages are valid as elements of
community culture and Englishs only professed
advantage is instrumental. In the other three
countries, pupils are expected to speak the
national languages for additional reasons as
well: as how one becomes French, or as
necessary for participating in Dutch or German
civic culture.
The last section looks at how teachers and
pupils resolve conicts. Fine-grained contrasts
between Dutch and German cases are
particularly instructive because the two societies
are relatively similar. German ideas of national
belonging are more clearly exclusive of
immigrants than is the case for the Dutch, but
teachers erect us/them boundaries in both
classrooms. One particularly instructive contrast
involves Turkish pupils invoking Islam as the
normative basis for an argument. Both German
and Dutch teachers deem the reference
inappropriate but for different reasons: in
Germany because referring to Islam ipso facto
indicates insufciently independent thinking by
the pupil, but in the Netherlands because the
pupil thereby took insufcient account of other
students views.
In two brilliant nal chapters, Sabine Mannitz
draws on classroom conversations to highlight
each countrys internal contradictions between
cultural ideas of national belonging and formal
requirements of citizenship. Exchanges among
German and Turkish pupils point to the conict
between the postulate that immigrants should
culturally assimilate to German culture and the
claim that everyone should be allowed to
preserve a private sphere of distinct culture.
They also show a German propensity to draw
boundaries that exclude some categories of
people in order to include others: pupils argue
over where to draw these boundaries but they
agree they should be drawn. Dutch and British
inclusive notions of multiculturalism, by
contrast, permit Turkish pupils to claim that they
may retain Turkish identity while becoming
culturally equal citizens of Britain or the
Netherlands. In neither country, however, do
natives practise the inclusiveness that they
preach. The resentment at this contradiction is
greater in the Dutch than in the British school
because the contradiction runs deeper in the
Netherlands. French ideology is the only one
that directs pupils to ignore cultural differences,
and it is only in the French case that pupils do
Royal Anthropological Institute 2006
696 Book reviews
not seem to have taken on the dominant model
of cultural differences in the ways they speak.
The French model seems to be the least capable
of absorbing everyday perceptions of difference.
One might object to the studys
methodology: how can a small number of
observations in one school per country allow the
team to describe four distinct civil cultures? I
found the claims wholly convincing, and I
believe that I did so because (1) they resonate
with so much other evidence about each of the
four countries, (2) the authors tried to control
for variation on other dimensions as much as
possible (and are quite open about how difcult
this is), and (3) the authors are all distinguished
scholars on these questions in these countries;
we trust their insights. The result is a truly
innovative approach to contrasting ideas and
practices of building civil cultures.
John Bowen Washington University
Smart, Alan & Josephine Smart (eds). Petty
capitalists and globalization: flexibility,
entrepreneurship, and economic development. 317
pp., map, tables, bibliogr. Albany: SUNY Press,
2005. $70.00 (cloth)
This book brings together a series of papers
applying the petty capitalism concept to
enterprises in developing countries and countries
in transition. The editors dene petty capitalists
on page 3 as individuals or households who
employ a small number of workers but are
themselves actively involved in the labor process.
More in line with the modes of production
debate, they dene petty capitalists on the
following page as an intermediate category,
bounded by petty producers and subsistence
producers, on one side, and by real capitalists on
the other. This implies that a decline in fortunes
may result in proletarianization or
improverishment, because petty capitalists
become petty or subsistence producers.
Where should we draw the line between
petty capitalists and small and medium
enterprises? On page 7 it is suggested that the
small enterprises to which Piore and Sabel refer
in The second industrial divide (1984) are petty
capitalists. Until that book came out these petty
producers were mostly seen as threatened
with extinction, but regional ensembles of
interconnected small rms reliant on artisanship
could become increasingly important in
comparison to mass production.
The editors prefer an ethnographic approach
to the concept of petty capitalists. This approach
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 675-724
Royal Anthropological Institute 2006
emphasizes the meaningful experience of actors
(more) than other terms like entrepreneur or
family business. They admit, however, some
analytical limitations: petty capitalists operate on
the boundaries between capital and labour,
co-operation and exploitation, family and
economy, tradition and modernity, friends and
competitors. This raises the question whether
the petty capitalist concept is a useful analytical
concept and whether this approach really helps
to understand the phenomenon of micro and
small enterprises.
The book is based also on a proposition
concerning the future of petty capitalism. The
proposition is that petty capitalists benet from
globalization in an era where assembly lines are
deconstructed and scattered across the globe,
and where rapid and exible responses to
desires can make the difference between
economic success and failure. In fact this is a
hypothesis which needs to be rejected or
accepted after presenting the evidence in the ten
empirical chapters. This rst hypothesis is later
formulated as: petty capitalists have moved from
trying to survive to participating in the global
economy. The authors also see petty capitalists
as driving forces of the contemporary global
economy. They assume that when the conditions
are made more attractive, petty capitalists may
be among the pioneers in taking advantage of
globalization. This seems a second hypothesis
which needs to be tested.
Let us look at the different contributions and
see what evidence these cases provide for the
different hypotheses. All authors use the same
methodological approach and analytical
framework. Two of the twelve chapters are not
written by anthropologists and two chapters are
more theoretical. In the last chapter Michael Blim
discusses the moral signicance of petty
capitalism: it provides an alternative to societies
dominated by gigantic corporations. Similarly, in
chapter 2 Hill Gates looks to relations between
petty capitalists and the surrounding political
economies. She argues that there are ve
variants of petty capitalism: the domestic mode
of production, petty capitalism under the
tributary modes, proto-industrialization, petty
bourgeoisies, and the informal economy. This
distinction is not used in the rest of the book,
however. The editors provide a lengthy
introduction and the two geographers
contribute a chapter on Slovakia and one on
Taiwan. Adrian Smith studied petty capitalists in
Slovakia under the title Capitalism from below?
This is more a political economy type of analysis.
Jinn-yuh Hsus contribution on networks in small

and medium enterprises in Taiwanese
semiconductor industries shows that such
networks tend to be based on classmates and
friends rather than kin.
In chapter 3 Gavin Smith and Susana
Narotzky analyse an effective networked cluster
of small enterprises in Spain, using the industrial
district jargon. They take a historical approach
and consider the regional economy that they
studied as an embedded regional economy
where labour is mobilized as dependent
workers. The workers are often female
home-workers. The authors conclude that the
regional economy is made up of strategizing
petty capitalists and entrepreneurial workers
sharing a common local culture.
In chapter 4 Frances Abrahamer Rothstein
deals with the issue of exibility in the garment
industry in Mexico. She considers the
importance of having access to family and skilled
labour and uses the term petty commodity
producers for the class position of those who
are simultaneously capitalists and workers. She
ends on a pessimistic note, saying that
producers will end up working harder or will
be driven out of business by others.
Simone Ghezzi studies the importance of
de-territorialization in Brianza versus locality in
an industrial district in Italy. She nds an
industrial district with many small rms, mostly
family-run businesses. Some of those started as
artisans and became petty capitalists in due
course. Ghezzi describes the dilemma of many
of these petty capitalist producers. They cannot
hire workers and have no money to invest. At
the same time, she discovers that many try to
build their own business out of faith in loyalty.
Although Ghezzi uses the term petty capitalists,
she is really talking about small rms functioning
in a capitalist environment.
Hans and Judith-Maria Buechler refer to small
and medium enterprises in Eastern Germany.
However, some of the units studied are small,
others large or parts of larger companies. The
authors focus on the trajectories of specic rms
to predict the future success of rms under
capitalism in the European Community. In their
contribution the authors do not use the term
petty capitalists.
Donald M. Nonini calls his chapter Toward
a (proper) postwar history of Southeast
Asian petty capitalism. In fact he analyses in
particular the role of the state in Malaysias
industrialization process. He goes deeper into
the role of Chinese small business capital in
Malaysia and argues that Chinese petty
capitalists became the antagonistic other
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 675-724
Book reviews 697
against whom the Malaysian state dened its
development policies. Nonini argues that the
transformations of the petty capitalists in
Malaysia have been connected to policies for
different groups of the Malaysian population.
The last chapters discuss the importance of
labour standards and the solutions of labelling
(Tom ONeill for Nepal) or of fair trade (B. Lynne
Milgram in the Philippines). ONeill considers
the sector around carpet export as petty
capitalist, and sees exible specialization as the
context for petty capitalist expansion as
investment in labour cost is reduced by
decentralized micro production. Milgram
describes the example of female petty capitalists
who have entered the global craft market on
their own terms by forging linkages with
alternative trade organizations (fair trade).
The study shows an enormous variety of
petty capitalists. The editors noted already on
page 6 that even less than capitalism itself, petty
capitalism is not always the same kind of entity
or process. Most contributors use the term, but
they refer to very different types of enterprises as
far as size and history are concerned. Some of
these are based on family relations, some are
not. Some are modern, some are traditional, and
some are based on family (sometimes exploited),
others on friends. If that is the case, one
wonders what the distinguishing characteristics
of the petty capitalist concept are. Not all small
enterprises are petty capitalist. In that case it
makes more sense to start with a certain size
denition (micro, small, etc.) and study the
characteristics in different situations.
Subsequently the process of change, for
example through globalization, can be studied.
That would make the results much more
comparable with all kinds of studies carried out
by geographers, sociologists, and economists.
There are a number of interesting chapters in
the book. For example, Hsus concerning the
development of the semiconductor industries in
Taiwan and the importance there of classmates
and friends in networks, rather than kin.
Secondly, some authors make clear that
globalization means respecting international
standards, which often requires brokerage for
small entrepreneurs. Also the emphasis on
exploitation of family workers in small
enterprises is relatively new. Finally, the
contributions show the many faces of capitalism
by using ethnography as a method. The book
teaches us the diversity of economic systems and
their path dependency.
However, the book is also a typical example
of monodisciplinary (anthropological) thinking
Royal Anthropological Institute 2006
698 Book reviews
with no efforts to catch up with what other
disciplines have said on the subject of micro
enterprises, value chains, innovation, and
competitiveness. In the 1970s economists
thought multinationals were causing
globalization. In the value chain approach, these
multinationals only mobilize the chain, which
may be fed by small and medium enterprises.
What is new is that some chains (e.g. shoe
production in India) seem to be mainly small
enterprise-driven. That does not prove, however,
that petty capitalists are now really important in
these chains. That would require graduation and
formalization, or brokers mediating between the
local and international markets. Hence the cases
presented do not show the usefulness of the
terminology used, nor can they be considered to
lead to the acceptance of the two major
hypotheses.
Meine Pieter van Dijk Erasmus University in
Rotterdam
Vallely, Anne. Guardians of the transcendent:
an ethnography of a Jain ascetic community. 296
pp., plates, g., bibliogr. London, Toronto: Univ.
Toronto Press, 2002. 45.00 (cloth), 18.00
(paper)
To what degree do the roles of worldly social life
carry over into the monastic world? And, more
specically, to what extent and in what ways
do worldly gender roles project into
world-renouncers lives? Anne Vallely addresses
these questions in a study of nuns belonging to
the non-image-worshipping Terapanthi sect of
the Shvetambar Jains. Her research was
conducted over a period of slightly more than
one year at Ladnun, a Rajasthani town that
serves as a sectarian epicentre for the
Terapanthis. During this year she was in intimate
and prolonged contact with nuns and girls
preparing to be nuns, and the resulting book
provides an empirically rich and analytically
innovative window into a lifeway of
extraordinary restriction and discipline.
Jain ethics and cosmology set Vallelys stage.
In the foreground are non-violence and
asceticism, which together underlie a distinction
at the heart of Vallelys materials and analysis:
the contrast between the worldly (laukik) and
the transcendental (lokottar). She shows how this
distinction is idealized in the opposed images of
generous householder and restrained ascetic,
images that are ritually enacted in almsgiving, a
core transaction in the religious life of Jain
communities. In almsgiving, giver and recipient
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 675-724
Royal Anthropological Institute 2006
interact as stereotyped personages rather than
as individuals, and the symbolism denies that
exchange has taken place, with the result that
the ascetic recipient remains free of social ties to
the giver. Another key Jain ritual, one in which
much of the symbolism of mendicant-lay
relationships is compressed into a single
package, is the rite of initiation of monks and
nuns. Especially striking is the symbolic
juxtaposition of wealth and possessionlessness in
this ritual. As Vallely shows, the jewellery and
luxurious dress of the young women candidates
for nunhood make the all-important point that
world renunciation is meaningless if it is a virtue
made of necessity.
Beliefs about demonic possession bring
gender differences among Jain mendicants into
sharp focus. Vallelys materials show that
possession absolves the possessed individual of
inappropriate feelings by projecting them onto
another entity, and that sexual longings gure
prominently among these feelings in the case of
Jain nuns. Because of their allegedly more
emotional nature, nuns are seen as more
vulnerable to possession than monks. On the
other hand (and in apparent contradiction),
nuns are seen as sexually desireless, unlike
monks, who by contrast acknowledge and even
celebrate the difculty of conquering their sexual
desires. This means that nuns have no recourse
but to sublimate such desires radically into
fantasies about ghosts and demons.
The Terapanthi monastic community is rigidly
hierarchical and centrally controlled. As Vallely
shows, hierarchical values lend themselves well
to an intense devotionalism focused on
veneration of ones spiritual superiors, and
although devotionalism is devalued by Jainisms
public face, with its stress on ascetic values
alone, devotion often strongly motivates people
to adopt the ascetic path and undertake ascetic
practices. This brings us back to gender, because
nuns tend to be seen (and to see themselves) as
more inclined to devotionalism than the monks,
which in turn connects to stereotypes of
womens emotional and nurturing proclivities.
From the standpoint of the traditions public
values, this places nuns in a subordinate and
liminal position, never completely disentangled
from the worldly realm. Even their ascetic
practice is regarded as not fundamentally
different from the practices of religiously serious
laywomen. For the monks, by contrast, the
rupture is seen as much greater, because laymen
express piety largely by means of generous
giving, not ascetic denial. Because of this, male
renunciation is thus more highly valued than

that of nuns. Still, from the standpoint of the
traditions highest values, renunciation is about
release of the soul from worldly bondage, and
this is as true of women as it is of men.
These arguments are illustrated and
supported by excellent ethnography that
resonates with the spirit of friendship that Vallely
clearly developed with many of her informants.
She is particularly adroit at making use of
ethnographic vignettes as points of departure
into important issues. One of many examples is
her description of the nuns preparation for a
leading monks birthday celebration that she
then uses as an opening for a crucial discussion
of Jain devotionalism. I commend the book to
students of South Asian religions, whether or not
their special interest is Jainism, and to anyone
interested in the role of women in ascetic
traditions.
Lawrence A. Babb Amherst College
History and anthropology
Gold, Ann Grodzins & Bhoju Ram
Gujar. In the time of trees and sorrows: nature,
power, and memory in Rajasthan. xxv, 403 pp.,
illus., bibliogr. London, Durham, N.C.: Duke
Univ. Press, 2002. 18.50 (paper)
This book recounts perspectives of life as it was
lived by subjects not rulers in the former
kingdom of Sawar in Rajasthan (India). It is an
outcome of a collaboration between a US-based
cultural anthropologist and a schoolteacher who
is a resident of this region. Bhoju Ram Gujar is
not a shadowy research assistant here but a
co-author in the shaping of this work. In this
sense, the study breaks from existing, though
increasingly questioned, ethnographic
conventions.
Drawing on the oral histories of inhabitants,
the authors narrate a tale of conjoined natural
and social transformations spanning the period
from the 1920s to the 1990s. Much of the
information was obtained in the process of
enquiring into deforestation in this area. The
leitmotif of princely rule, despotic but
coterminous with an abundance of indigenous
ora and fauna, runs through the book.
The study is envisaged as a contribution to
scholarship at the intersections of nature (the
term being retained not for accuracy but for
ambiguity, complexity and uncertainty),
subaltern consciousness, and memory. The
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 675-724
Book reviews 699
rendition is energized by non-elite voices and
the book is composed of nothing but
memories, as the authors put it.
Since memory is the predominant resource,
a chapter is devoted to thinking and doing
memory. Here arguments that treat memory as
material traces, performative actions, an
autonomous arena and as both individually and
socially experienced are discussed as a
foreground to the substantive account of rule as
experienced in the princely era. The themes in
the following chapters are denoted by
single-word titles (Shoes, Courts, Homes,
Fields, Jungle and Imports) that gather
memories and events evoked in recall.
Transcripts of interviews are reproduced along
with comments by the authors.
The rule-of-the-shoe (and a nuanced
language about when to wear them and take
them off as well as shoe-beatings) expressed the
hierarchies of rulers over subjects in the
memories of the inhabitants. If shoe-beatings
decimated ones honour, acts of resistance
sustained it. Forced labour, oppressive grain
taxes (different for each caste), and prohibitions
(on wearing shoes or riding horse-back, for
instance) come to the fore in many a retelling of
the court as actor. Women remembered the
pre-dawn hours as the time for grinding our,
including grinding grain for the kings horses.
Carrying cots and delivering re-wood to the
castle were recurrent chores undertaken by
peasants during this era. Trees growing in the
elds could not be lopped, and the collection of
the rulers share of the harvest was an event
dreaded by the farmers. They could not cut the
crops till the harvest was estimated, and the
kings men took an inordinately long time in
carrying out the task. The wild pigs that the king
hunted could not be killed by the farmers even
though they ravaged their elds.
Not surprisingly, then, the demise of the
kingdom itself was spoken about as a time when
pigs who damaged crops could be hunted
without fear of reprisals. Under the new
democratic dispensation, described as the
rule-of-the-vote, trees were felled as the pursuit
of self-interest was unchecked.
Archival documents pertaining to the feudal
era scarcely focus on everyday objects such as
shoes and grinding stones. Practices that are
inter-semiotic between the domestic and feudal
domains are articulated in relation to these
everyday objects in this bottom-up account of
rule. Small voices are indeed magnied, giving
rise to a thick recounting of events that one does
not otherwise encounter. What I treasure from
Royal Anthropological Institute 2006
700 Book reviews
this anthropological listening and telling is its
illumination of what is not captured in accounts
of the regions history that are based on
settlement reports.
On the other hand, when I compare the
recounting of feudal taxation here with a
conventional understanding of the regions
history culled from revenue records, I am struck
by how the rich detail lls out an already
existing outline without changing its contours.
While the authors argue for multiple truths, their
effort speaks more directly to similar statements
that populate the narrative. The several
conversations reported are rarely conicting.
Moreover, allowing a small voice to the Sawar
rulers family would perhaps have extended the
range of polyvocal narration to those who have
been eclipsed in this story. An account from
below may be as limiting as an account from
above when meanings and subjectivities are
forged and negotiated in the twists of
interconnections.
Rita Brara University of Delhi
Mbembe, Achille. On the postcolony. 274 pp.,
illus., bibliogr. London, Berkeley: Univ. California
Press, 2001. 29.95 (cloth), 10.95 (paper)
On the postcolony analyses the phenomenology
and political economy of the African continent,
with a focus on francophone West Africa. At
present, Africans are grappling with the imposed
neo-liberal notions of good governance, civil
society, conict resolution, and transitions to
democracy. Mbembe emphasizes the
elementariness and primitiveness that makes
Africa the world par excellence of all that is
incomplete, mutilated, and unnished, its history
reduced to a series of setbacks of nature in its
quest for humankind (p. 1). He criticizes the
social sciences, particularly anthropology, for a
lack of engagement, resulting in representations
of Africa that are groundless assertions. African
scholars are viewed as being torn between
tradition and modernity. Mbembe uses
grotesque imagery, and cartoons, to characterize
the absurd in the African post-colonial
experience.
Mbembe advances the position that it was
the slave trade that thrust Africa into modernity.
He suggests that the colonial period, following
on the heels of the slave trade, was characterized
by phallic domination. For Mbembe,
postcolony is a term that problematizes the
autonomy of the African state in the
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 675-724
Royal Anthropological Institute 2006
post-colonial period. The colonys hegemony
was rooted in and maintained by violence.
The exercise of violence dehumanized the
colonial subject. To soften notions of
commandement, the colonialists engaged in a
civilizing mission to give the native a moral
education. However, the ultimate aim was to
acquire his/her labour (p. 27).
The emergence of the entrepreneurial class
around cash crops reected growing inequality
in African colonies, which was predicated on the
incorporation of these crops and mineral
resources into the world economy. This class
played a key role in the indigenization of the
state.
Although the post-colonial ruler was not a
total dictator, he did not hesitate to use violence,
silence dissidence, vanquish rebellions, or to
stage coups dtat (pp. 42-3). Some dictators
engaged in redistribution of resources; however,
on the whole, living conditions have not
improved in the post-colonial period, especially
since the scal crisis of the 1980s and the
implementation of structural adjustment
programmes (SAPs). SAPs often required
reductions in price supports, in the civil service,
and in social programmes, and privatization of
parastatals. This has resulted in challenges to
state structures in Congo, Somalia, Sierra Leone,
and Liberia (p. 49). Most of the continent has a
lack of access to new technologies, thereby
exacerbating the lag between the computer time
of global nancial operations and the historic
time of real adjustments (p. 53).
In the post-colony, there is an atomism in
power and decision-making, with conditions
being ripe for what the author calls private
indirect government throughout the continent.
This is characterized by barter in a cash
economy, the formalization of the informal
economy, and the replacement of salaries with
one-off payments, in which corruption is the
norm (pp. 82-4).
Mbembe invokes phallic symbolism to
describe the colonial experience in the
subjugation, domination, and dehumanization
of men, women, and children. There are further
implications for the exploitation and extraction
of Africas human, agricultural, and mineral
resources. The ruler is mythologized and
phallicized, his international image is
exaggerated, and he is granted large public
displays of respect to his personage in the
post-colonial context.
Through various permutations, Mbembe
denes the image of Africa. He characterizes
contemporary Africa as simultaneously a

diabolical discovery, an inanimate image, and a
living sign (p. 240). Yet he grants Africa some
new possibilities: [W]e must say that is not
solely disorder, chance, and madness, but
emerges from a sort of violent gust, with its
languages, its beauty and ugliness, its ways of
summing up the world (p. 242).
Mbembes notion of commandement conjoins
the ideology of the colonizer and that of the
post-colonizer. Mudimbe, in The idea of Africa
(1994), views the continent as having been
invented by Western intellectuals in
anthropology, history, and philosophy. He
considers the incorporation of Marxist
philosophy as anti-colonial praxis, as a
disjuncture which allowed post-colonials to
grapple with their African roots. On the
postcolony provides a rather pessimistic
perspective that minimizes the agency of
non-ruling-class Africans and the post-colonial
potential for positive and sustainable social
change in the long term.
In addition to Mudimbe, more constructive,
related books include Shaws Colonial inscriptions
(1995), which examines the intersection of race,
sex, and class in colonial Kenya, and Carters
States of grace (1997), which explores religion,
labour migration, and identity among
Senegalese in Turin, Italy, and Touba, Senegal.
Such constructive yet engaged scholarship has
a signicant role to play in transcending the
post-colonial image of Africa.
Betty Harris University of Oklahoma
Murr ay, Colin & Peter Sanders. Medicine
murder in colonial Lesotho: the anatomy of a moral
crisis. xiii, 493 pp., maps, tables, gs, plates,
bibliogr. Edinburgh: Univ. Press, 2005. 50.00
(cloth)
In this monograph, Murray, an anthropologist,
and Sanders, a historian, successfully revisit the
gruesome medicine murders (the liretlo killings)
that occurred in colonial Basutoland (now
Lesotho) during the 1940s. The work is timely,
given the incompleteness of G.l. Joness 1951
report on these murders to government, and
also because the high court les, the only source
of primary data on these killings, is now
inaccessible to researchers. The authors draw on
these les and also on supplementary archival
sources and interviews they conducted with
surviving participants in these dramas.
Murray and Sanders contend that the widely
publicized medicine murders were the result of a
competitive contagion, sparked by the erce John Le Rougetel, accepted medicine murders
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 675-724
Book reviews 701
dispute between Mantebo and Bereng for the
position of paramount chief. The murders also
occurred against the backdrop of general
insecurity about chieftainship created by the
placing system, in which senior chiefs placed
their kin over subordinate chiefs to bring them
under control; administrative proclamations
which drastically reduced the numbers of
recognized chiefs; and treasury reforms which
cut the number of Native courts from 1,340 in
1946 to 121 in 1949. In these contexts chiefs used
powerful medicines, manufactured from the
esh and blood of living persons, to strengthen
their social power.
The determined colonial attempt to end
these murders, particularly by the High
Commissioner, Sir Evelyn Baring, created a
heightened sense of moral crisis, culminating
in the hanging of two of the countrys most
prominent chiefs, Bereng and Gabashane. The
authors suggest that Basotho saw this erce
reaction as conrming the power of human
medicine. They also show how chiefs and
nationalist groupings developed a
counter-narrative, which denied the use of
human medicine or involvement by chiefs in the
murders. The narrative blamed the police and
accomplice witnesses for framing the chiefs, and
for aiming to destroy the countrys natural
leaders, to pave the way for its incorporation
into South Africa. Murray and Sanders describe
the response by ordinary villagers as more
ambiguous: many were repelled by the killings,
but shared the belief in the efcacy and
importance of the chiefs medicine horns. Many
Basotho authors cast the murderers in the role of
tragic heroes.
The authors effectively debunk the
nationalist theory (shared by some historians)
that the killings were really a colonial
conspiracy. This view fails to account for the
mutilated bodies and the overwhelming
evidence presented in the trials. The colonial
authorities are also shown as committed to
keeping Basotholand under British rule and to
preserving chieftainship as a linchpin of indirect
rule. Unlike Jones, Murray and Sanders see the
effects of the legislative reforms on chieftainship
and the Native courts as having an indirect
rather than direct impact upon the killings.
Medicine murders actually increased in the
1950s; twenty-eight cases were reported as late
as 1968. But they were now instigated by
traders as much as by chiefs; became purely
a judicial matter; and a sense of moral crisis
disappeared. The new High Commissioner, Sir
Royal Anthropological Institute 2006
702 Book reviews
as a fact of life, and Leabua Jonathans post-
colonial government remained totally silent
about them.
The authors support their arguments with a
detailed statistical analysis of 129 court cases.
This exercise reveals that 109 (78 per cent) of
the 139 instigators were chiefs and headmen;
relatively few murders were directly attributable
to worries about recognition and the right to
hold court; the accomplices were motivated by
a sense of duty to obey the chiefs, compulsion,
and fear; and courts generally treated the
testimony of accomplice witnesses critically,
nding only 374 of the 1,042 accused guilty.
The monograph ends with a suggestive
comparison of the broader political
circumstances surrounding the Basutoland
medicine murders with those committed in
Swaziland during the 1970s and in Venda during
the 1980s. In the latter situations, where the
killings were condemned rather than denied,
chiefs were integrated with the dominant and
authoritarian political class.
Medicine murder in colonial Lesotho is lucidly
written and appropriately illustrated with
graphic photographs and interesting case
material. It provides a detailed and convincing
analysis, is exemplary in its use of court records
for reconstructing historical processes, and will
undoubtedly provide an extremely valuable
source for those who wish to understand the full
complexities of colonial encounters in southern
Africa. Unfortunately the monograph provides
only limited insight into everyday experiences of
chiey rule and into the cultural meanings,
rumours, and myths about medicine murder at
the village level. I also feel that broader
ethnographic comparisons and more provocative
theorizing could have enhanced its appeal to a
broader anthropological readership.
Isak Niehaus University of Pretoria
Salemink, Oscar. The ethnography of
Vietnams Central Highlanders: a historical
contextualization, 1850-1900. xxii, 383 pp.,
maps, illus., bibliogr. London, New York:
RoutledgeCurzon, 2003. 65.00 (cloth)
During the First and Second Indochina Wars the
conicting parties systematically manipulated
the ethnic groups inhabiting Vietnams Central
Highlands. Anthropological knowledge proved
serviceable for such objectives. This monograph
situates the production and (ab)uses of Central
Highland ethnography in a larger historical
framework. It highlights changing and
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 675-724
Royal Anthropological Institute 2006
intersecting spheres of interest (discourses),
economic, political, and military.
Salemink begins in the mid-nineteenth
century, before the French captured Saigon and
began to colonize Vietnam, and looks at early
studies by European missionaries and explorers.
Subsequent chapters follow a chronological
order. There are chapters on the French colonial
administration of the Central Highlands, the
inter-ethnic millenarian Python God movement
in the 1930s, the First Indochina War, the US
protectorate of the anti-communist Southern
Republic and its counter-insurgency strategies
for the Central Highlands, and the American or
Second Indochina War. In a nal chapter and
based on his own eldwork in the 1990s,
Salemink describes the changing circumstances
for ethnography after the countrys unication in
1975 under communist rule. Having examined
the ways in which the Montagnards were
studied, represented, and manipulated for the
last 140 years (until 1990), the author wonders
toward the end of his book, Do they need
ethnography? (p. 295). His answer is that in
contemporary Vietnam, his Highland informants
wanted ethnographic, non-state, narratives of
their circumstances to be told to the outside
world. In all the upland provinces that they
once populated almost exclusively, Central
Highlanders are now a numerical minority
(p. 295).
What the study brings into focus is a
recurrent struggle for hegemony between two
kinds of perspectives on the Central Highlanders,
each reecting a different set of intentions of
military planners, administrators, and so on.
One derives from efforts to appropriate the
Montagnards, whether to protect them from
the Vietnamese majority or to recruit them for
military operations. Ethnography serves here
to demarcate them as bounded entities, as
analogous to small nation-states. This Salemink
calls the relativist perspective, which considers
Montagnard values and customs in their own
right. The other perspective is an evolutionist
one. It reects intentions to deny any
signicance of the Montagnard way of life and
to integrate these communities into a larger,
modern, state, whether it is a colonial,
neo-colonial, or post-colonial socialist one.
Ethnography is a Foucauldian discursive
practice in this study. Classifying the Central
Highlanders, recording their customary laws,
and locating their settlements on maps had the
effect of representing them as spatially xated,
socially bounded tribes. That the Vietnamese
state today identies fty-three minorities is an

outgrowth of this. The Montagnards themselves,
as Salemink argues, did not originally perceive
themselves in this manner. Communities
practised shifting cultivation, inter-mixed
frequently with other groups, and members
were often unaware of their belonging to any
larger social entity. The ethnographic
imagination of bounded tribes did not only
assist ofcials and military planners, it actually
led the Montagnards to recognize themselves in
this way. With the growing presence of US
military advisers and troops, the ethnographic
tribalization transformed, to some extent, into
a pan-Highlander ethnicity movement. This
side-effect of ethnography is a headache for the
Vietnamese state still today.
Salemink manages to balance an abundance
of fascinating historical and biographical details
with a well-structured and accessible style of
exposition. All the praise notwithstanding, let
me add a brief critical note. This study gets so
preoccupied with context that it ironically ends
up taking context for granted. That is, the
author fails to address his own methodology
sufciently. When one contextualizes, is one
highlighting contexts or actually creating them?
As Salemink himself points out, both historian
and anthropologist have to rely on the same
historical sources when situating ethnography
historically. While his book is essentially about
the constructivist nature of ethnography, it does
not consider the constructivist nature of
contextualization. As a consequence, a whole set
of assumptions about the true nature of the
Montagnards is built into his contexts and
remains unreected. A too sharp distinction
between them and a modern state, whether
French colonial, US protectorate, or Vietnamese
socialist, runs through the book: uid versus
xed, unbounded versus bounded, exible
versus rigid, and so on. The question is not
whether or not these communities are uid,
exible, and unbounded; rather, to what extent
are they so? Saleminks historical perspectives
(contexts) on ethnographic perspectives
(contexts) do not consider the xed, rigid, and
bounded aspects of the Central Highland
communities, which may differ from those
favoured by bureaucratic states. One nal point
on context: the book examines the changing
historical contexts between 1850 and 1990, but
the front cover erroneously states 1850-1900.
This slip led me to wonder whether the colonial
context had not in fact become an
overdetermining reference point for the analysis
of later periods, as neo- and post-colonial. All
criticisms aside, Salemink has produced a
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 675-724
Book reviews 703
thoroughly researched and carefully argued
book.
Markus Schlecker Max Planck Institute, Halle
Smith, Shawn Michelle. Photography on the
color line: W.E.B. Du Bois, race, and visual culture.
xviii, 225 pp., plates, illus., bibliogr. London,
Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 2004. 57.00
(cloth), 16.95 (paper)
Photography on the color line considers the
participation of seminal African American
theorist W.E.B. Du Bois in the American Negro
Exhibit at the 1900 Paris Exposition. Smith
suggests that this was a formative moment in his
intellectual development. Du Boiss contribution
comprised of four photographic albums,
comprising some 363 photographs produced by
photographers who are now unknown, with
the exception of Thomas Askew, whom Smith
is able to identify. The lack of accompanying
text to explicate their signicance highlights
the cultural work that these visual images
performed in 1900, recognized at that time
as Du Bois was awarded a gold medal at this
exposition.
Smith argues that this emphasis on visuality
by Du Bois in 1900 provides new insights into
how his work developed to analyse the
problematics of race that have shaped African
American and diaspora studies to the present
day. This engagement with photography
enabled him to consider how visuality was
implicated in objectifying racialized difference
and, Smith suggests, how key concepts, such as
double consciousness and the veil, were
formulated through this objectied subject
positioned within particular historicized
dominant ways of seeing. She argues that Du
Boiss use of visual paradigms positions him as a
visual theorist on race, and informed all his
subsequent work. Du Bois utilized photography
to contest the prevailing hegemonic ideology
of scientic racism and its imposition of
essentialized racial hiercharchies that
underpinned the exploitation of African
Americans in the USA.
However, the constitution of this archive
without text is ambiguous and resistant to
present-day interpretation, and Smiths aim is to
recuperate the positionings of this visual cultural
work at that time as a counter-narrative to such
dominant racialized hierarchies. She achieves this
through a close analysis of how the archive is
constructed by Du Bois. Portraits of African
Americans in both frontal and side prole offer a
Royal Anthropological Institute 2006
704 Book reviews
mimesis of the visual taxonomies deployed to
inscribe and hierarchize the racialized subject
through photography. The subjects selected by
Du Bois are an African American middle-class
elite (or his notion of the talented tenth) whose
status and position are veried by these very
same visual procedures, used in the making of
taxonomies of race, to assert incontrovertible
evidence to the contrary. This counter-narrative
utilized not only class identities, but also diverse
individuals with physical characteristics that
transgressed the stereotypes by which normative
taxonomies of race were constituted, blurring
the colour line of the title. After presenting
individual portraits, the archive depicted this
elite within socialized spaces associated with the
material trappings and visual exteriorization of
the middle classes. These images of class were
constituted within a sentimental register of
home and domesticity that reshaped the
viewers expectations (and gaze) to subvert
hierarchies of race.
A feature throughout is the selection of
youthful individuals who offer new roles of the
African American and, perhaps as signicantly
and visibly, have no personal experience of
slavery, which is as a consequence relegated to
the past within this archive. Then images of
urban spaces without human subjects feature
that position the middle-class elite in their
prosperous milieu, distinguishing their status
spatially. A few nal photographs of run-down
urban spaces juxtapose the environmental
conditions of poverty of non-elite African
Americans to previous images in the album. The
absence of the impoverished African American
subject from these images, Smith suggests, is
a strategy to emphasize the conditions of
environmental poverty rather than to evoke for
the viewer through their presence the prevailing
normative racialized hierarchy.
Smith reects on the subordination of
women within this archive to male-dominated
middle-class mores of respectability. This
inscription of normative gender roles (and of
restraint and propriety) allied the African
American middle class with their white
counterparts and so, for both groupings, locates
sexual aberration in the lower classes. This tactic
provides a means to undermine the sexuality
embedded in racist representations through
a shared class subordination of women in
the construction of the patriarchial family.
Throughout, Smith argues that the Du Bois
archive cannot be considered in isolation but
rather must be related to other archives. The
next chapter provides a stark contrast in an
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 675-724
Royal Anthropological Institute 2006
exploration of photographic imagery of lynching
that maps out the extreme terrorizing and
disciplining of the African American body. Smith
argues that this is part of the dominant visual
archives of that period, deployed in the making
of a white collective identity and forged in the
extra-judicial complicities and brutalized power
of lynching by which individuals are located in
relation to the colour line, made immutable by
violence and maintained through the
reproduction of its imagery. It is this
immutability of the essentialized and racialized
subject that the Du Bois archive contests and
seeks to undermine.
Although Smith emphasizes the importance
of this archive to the development of Du Boiss
theorizing on race and seeks to excavate its
cultural work at the Paris Exposition, there is
a tendency in one or two places to read
backwards from his writings after 1900. This
gives a teleogical feel to the analysis that blurs
his progressive intellectual development within a
concrete historical trajectory. The conventions of
this archival imagery hint perhaps at more uid
dialectical processes and multiple positionings in
its cultural work which require a more situated
and detailed historical comparison of the Du
Bois archive in Europe, where the exposition was
held, and in the USA, where it was constructed.
The theoretical implications of the archive as a
frame of analysis also could perhaps have been
explored a little further authors such as Tagg
and also Alan Sekulas other writings on the
archive spring to mind. The contrast of the Du
Bois archive with the imagery of lynching
provides a stark dichotomy, but, in lacking other
archival comparisons, it misses a nuancing of the
differing kinds of cultural work of archives as
well as their interrelations. However, this book is
an original reection on the importance of
visuality in the theorizing of Du Bois and
highlights the diverse and complex ways in
which he problematized race and racialization.
Charles Gore School of Oriental and African
Studies
Method and theory
Barnhart, Terry A. Ephraim George Squier
and the development of American anthropology.
xvi, 425 pp., illus., bibliogr. London, Lincoln:
Univ. Nebraska Press, 2005. 38.95 (cloth)
For most non-archaeologists, non-North
American anthropologists, the name of Ephraim

George Squier is likely to have little or no
signicance. His survey and archaeological work
on the so-called Mound Builders of North
America is relatively well known to American
archaeologists, but other dimensions of his work
are known only among even more specialized
audiences. After his Mound Builders work,
Squier served as a diplomat in Central America
and in the Andes, and used his time in those
regions to make important early archaeological
contributions. He was also involved in some of
the early projects leading to the
professionalization of anthropology in the US,
including Smithsonian publications and the
American Ethnological Society, and contributed
to the then current debates on race and the
poly- or monogenesis of humanity. Although not
without faults, Barnharts study provides an
illuminating survey of Squiers lifework.
Barnhart set out to write an intellectual
biography of Squier, which he denes as
concerning itself with the origin and
development of ideas and with their
embodiment in the works of particular writers
and in the collective discourse of their era (p. 6).
The emphasis is thus strongly on the written
product, and indeed the research reected in the
text and citations is remarkable for its
thoroughness. Unfortunately, as a consequence
of this perspective, there is relatively little
exploration of the interactions of Squiers
personal life and work; the discussions that are
present (e.g. of his journalism and diplomatic
careers and how they enabled his archaeological
work) whet ones appetite for more, and it is
remarkable that Squiers nasty divorce and
consequent mental breakdown are relegated to
an epilogue. My own preference in intellectual
biography is to blend life and work in a more
balanced way. Furthermore, the latter part of
Barnharts purpose is relatively poorly
represented: the interplay of Squiers ideas in the
collective discourse of the time is only lightly
developed through most of the book.
The reader gets little sense of how Squiers
work ts with the projects of the Bureau of
(American) Ethnology, for example. The last
chapter carries the bulk of this component of the
work, contextualizing Squier in the American
School of Ethnology a cluster of scholars that
included Samuel George Morton, Josiah Clark
Nott, and George Robins Gliddon, and a body of
work centred on questions of race and genesis;
the term ethnology originated in 1848 in the
London Ethnological Journal. Squiers three
decades of activity in the American Ethnological
Society are noted he was its most active and
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 675-724
Book reviews 705
important member through the 1850s and 1860s
(p. 311) but if a reader lacks understanding of
the history of that institution, there is not much
offered here to remedy that. Perhaps the most
important contribution here is Barnharts
discussion of Squiers The serpent symbol, and
the worship of the reciprocal principles of nature in
America (1851) a little-known synthetic work
that attempted to demonstrate the psychic unity
of mankind. Barnharts discussion here (chap. 8)
lives up to the promise of intellectual biography
that he proffers, and the debate is one that
represents the period well.
In general, Barnharts writing is clear, but it
lacks excitement. There also remains, even after
editing, considerable redundancy at several
points a theme is restated several times in the
space of a few pages and there are sections
where the amount of detail distracts from the
overall narrative ow (of course, if one is reading
for those particular points, the detail may well
be appreciated).
Despite these aws, I recommend the book
for several reasons and constituencies. Those
interested in the history of American
anthropology and archaeology will nd in it
considerable detail not available elsewhere,
about a man who was one of the most
signicant gures in the mid-nineteenth century
but today is little known. That audience should
be able to readily ll in the gaps in context and
t the information in with other scholars works
on the Smithsonian, the Bureau of (American)
Ethnology, and other gures of the time such as
Constantine Ranesque and Daniel Garrison
Brinton. Barnharts book would be particularly
useful to those who teach on the Mound
Builders arguments, even in introductory
courses. Those interested in archaeological work
in Central America and the Andes will similarly
nd much new information here to broaden
their appreciation of work in those areas. But
perhaps the biggest surprise, to me, was the
contribution to studies of nineteenth-century
American race theory, which was central to the
emergence of anthropology and is seeing
renewed scholarly interest today.
Frederick W. Gleach Cornell University
Mauss, Marcel. The nature of sociology
(trans. William Jeffrey, Jr). xii, 93 pp., bibliogr.
Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books, 2005.
20.00 (cloth)
It is in some ways a little daunting to be asked
to review a book consisting of two essays that
Royal Anthropological Institute 2006
706 Book reviews
have been available to the interested reader of
French for in one case over a century and in
the other for almost eighty years. But the
appearance of these two essays (Sociology,
written with Paul Fauconnet, and published in
1901, and Sociology: its divisions and their
relative weightings, published in 1927) in
English for the rst time attests to the
continuing interest in Marcel Mauss and the
fact that re-readings of his work still provide
not only fertile ground for new interpretations
of the Durkheimian school in general, but also
a source of inspiration for scholars approaching
Mauss as a remarkably contemporary voice still
speaking in many ways to current issues in
sociology and anthropology.
This slim volume, the result of the after-hours
labour of the late American legal scholar William
Jeffrey, Jr, and prefaced with an extensive
introduction and useful bibliography by Mike
Gane which sets the two essays in the wider
context of Mausss thought and writings as a
whole, contains two of Mausss most signicant
methodological writings which demonstrate
that, at least up until 1927 and certainly within
French sociology, there was still considerable
anxiety about the exact scope and sub-divisions
of sociology and the feeling that without precise
clarication of these divisions and their relative
signicance, the subject could not be said to
have achieved a genuinely scientic status. While
this subject may now seem rather a dry one, it is
in fact highly signicant that the classications
set up by the editors of the Anne Sociologique,
most notably in the extensive reviews section of
the journal, still profoundly inuence the
internal structure of sociology, as a glance at the
contents page of any introductory text in the
eld will reveal.
But if read as if they were contemporary texts
in sociology, these essays reveal many other
aspects of Mausss work that have perhaps not
hitherto been stressed. These include his
understanding of sociology as the science of
institutions; the transitions and dialogic nature
of Mausss work, especially his complex
relationship with Durkheim, which mirrors in
some ways that of Freud and Jung; his
arguments not against psychology as such, but
with the confusion of individual psychology with
sociological explanation; his anti-philosophical
stance; and his recognition that some areas of
sociology that are still very under-represented
in terms of the volume and quality of work
devoted to them notably linguistics,
technology, and aesthetics are in fact essential
to the total sociological enterprise.
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 675-724
Royal Anthropological Institute 2006
But perhaps most interestingly, while one
does not immediately associate Mauss either
with politics or with applied sociology, these
essays reveal a keen interest in both. The last
chapter of his 1927 monograph printed here, no
doubt with the memory of the war still fairly
vividly present in his consciousness, is devoted
precisely to the issue of the true nature of
applied sociology, which Mauss interestingly
differentiates from what he saw as the social
work or civics dimension of American sociology.
In Mausss view, preguring the work of
contemporary French anthropologists such as
Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan, application must
arise from what the latter calls fundamental
anthropology, or in Mausss own words:
Science ... should be applied, but its
applications should not be confused with the
science itself. This being the case, the sociology
of politics becomes a legitimate part of general
sociology, and with it alertness to what today
would be called social movements, since there
is an entire domain, midway between action and
science, in the region of rational practice where
the sociologist can and should adventure.
Mausss work, certainly as revealed in this
slim volume, should be seen not as a completed
system, but as an unnished and not entirely
self-consistent project containing within itself a
mania for clear classications and demarcations,
an excessive rationalism, and a purism about the
nature of science, coexisting with a remarkably
modern ecological view of the self as part
of nature, a deep concern with the moral
implications of sociology, and an awareness of
the absences in sociology that his generation
had not been able to ll. It is perhaps these
contradictions that make it possible for him to
be claimed by the structuralists, on the one
hand, and the likes of Bataille, on the other,
while still remaining of interest to us now.
John Clammer Sophia University
Mauz, Marie, Michael E. Harkin &
Sergei Kan (eds). Coming to shore: Northwest
Coast ethnology, traditions and visions. xxxviii, 508
pp., maps, illus., bibliogr. London, Lincoln: Univ.
Nebraska Press, 2005. 19.95 (paper)
First presented at a Paris 2000 conference on
Northwest Coast ethnology by French,
Canadian, and US scholars, the twenty papers
in this collection are intended to represent the
most comprehensive overview since the 1990
Northwest Coast volume of the Handbook of
North American Indians edited by Wayne Suttles.

The conference was originally intended to
coincide with Claude Lvi-Strausss 90th
birthday in 1999. He served as the honoree of
the conference and provided a brief account of
how his own interests in the Northwest Coast
developed. The focus is on the role of Northwest
Coast narrative traditions, both those recorded
from Native speakers and others constructed by
earlier anthropologists in the form of their
ethnographic reports, now also treated as
traditions. The twenty-seven-page Editors little light-weight, not unusual considering the
introduction provides a useful commentary on
the broader state of Northwest Coast research as
well as an introduction to the following papers.
The seven papers in the rst section, The
legacy of Northwest Coast research, set the
stage by reviewing the connections between
Lvi-Strauss and Boasian anthropology and/or
by reafrming Lvi-Strausss approach or their
own. Most useful here are the reviews by Regna
Darnell and Marie Mauz plus the bonus
inclusion of Frederica de Lagunas reminiscences
of her own intellectual travels between American
and European anthropologies, along with the
homage to her by her former student and
literary executrix, Marie-Franoise Gudon. (De
Laguna was unable to attend the conference and
died before the publication of this volume.) The
three papers in the second section, Texts and
narratives, by Judith Berman, Robert Bringhurst,
and co-authors Martine Reid and Daisy
Sewid-Smith, all well-practised in the study of
narrative traditions, provide a foundation for the
study of aboriginal narratives through their
detailed examinations of the logical structure
and everyday practice of story-telling. Sergei
Kans description of American tourism in
southeastern Alaska in the late nineteenth
century and Ira Jackniss description of the
Northwest Coast Hall at the American Museum
of Natural History, which Lvi-Strauss visited in
1941, leading him to proclaim Northwest Coast
as one of the highest forms of art, comprise the
third section, History and representation.
All these papers serve as appetizers for the
eight papers in the concluding section, Politics
and cultural heritage, which connect the
Lvi-Straussian and Boasian studies to current
Northwest Coast socio-political and
anthropological discourses. There are rst-rate
contributions here, including especially the rst
three papers by Richard and Nora Marks
Dauenhauer, Aaron Glass, and Bruce Miller. In
one way or another all the authors in this section
attempt to deconstruct earlier anthropological
reports while recording attempts at
reconstruction by members of Northwest Coast
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 675-724
Book reviews 707
communities. Earlier anthropologists are
criticized for codifying or entextualizing uid
social practices, turning processes into products.
Natives and some anthropologists today, on the
other hand, are busily trying to convert those
products back into cultural processes
appropriate for current social and political
conditions.
There is little to complain about in this
volume. A few papers might be considered a
large number included; a few references cited in
chapters never made it to the master
bibliography; and no explanation is given for
this particular selection of authors. The most
notable omission was Wayne Suttles (who sadly
passed away earlier this year).
Michael M. Ames University of British Columbia
Metcalf, Peter. Anthropology: the basics.
215 pp., map, gs, illus., bibliogr. London, New
York: Routledge, 2005. 9.99 (paper)
Although introductory textbooks in social and
cultural anthropology have been used for
decades by grateful undergraduates, the more
concise format seems to be a more recent
phenomenon. Around half a dozen very short
introductions to anthropology have been
published in English in the last few years, which
indicates the existence of a market for this kind
of book. Perhaps efforts to introduce
anthropology as a school subject are beginning
to pay off; perhaps the attention span of
undergraduates is shorter than it used to be; or
the cause may simply be that university reforms
force teachers to compress their courses. Be this
as it may, the fact is that one can now choose
among a fair number of books which offer less
than a fully edged introductory textbook, but
more than just a selection of tidbits.
Peter Metcalfs Anthropology: the basics is
slightly too long to be considered a very short
introduction (ten chapters, 200 pages), but it
has similar aims to Peter Just and John
Monaghans Social and cultural anthropology: a
very short introduction (OUP, 2000), Hanns Teach
yourself social anthropology (McGraw Hill, 2000)
and my What is anthropology? (Pluto, 2004),
namely to bring new students quickly into the
anthropological way of thinking through
concepts and cases, thus facilitating the
understanding of more difcult texts; and to tell
interested outsiders what anthropology is about.
Introductory books of this kind should give
the novice reader a sense of the history of
Royal Anthropological Institute 2006
708 Book reviews
anthropology, they should describe some of its
glorious moments of discovery and central
theoretical controversies, and they should offer a
reasonable number of illustrative cases; in brief,
this kind of book should give the reader
something to think with, but also something to
think about. Metcalf does all this, covering
structural-functionalism, Marxism, culture and
personality, structuralism, and more, and
introducing Nuer, Trobrianders, Tikopians,
Bemba, Atoni, and others; but his potted
histories are scattered throughout the book and
rarely show how ideas have developed (an
exception being the two chapters on African
political systems and the relationship between
anthropological theorizing and colonialism). In
general, I nd the book to be less cumulative
than others on the market. This may not be a
aw, since it makes it possible to read chapters
in a non-linear order, but it is slightly
disconcerting to have a page or so on the
history of the four-eld approach in American
anthropology stuck in the middle of the book
(p. 87), several chapters after the account of the
transition from late Victorian to modern
anthropology.
Written in a very accessible style, the book
covers most of the central subject areas in
social/cultural anthropology, with a slight
preference for traditional rather than modern
contexts. Unlike other authors, Metcalf draws
on his own ethnography (from Borneo) only to
a limited extent, spreading out the canvas
wide, and he also repeatedly invokes the
experiential world of the North Atlantic student.
At its best, the book is able to create that sense
of wonder and surprise which is so essential for
the motivation of young students soon to be
confronted with texts that might appear both
arcane and tedious. The book effectively
demonstrates why it is that gender, death, and
nature can be studied as social constructions
(he actually says that they are social
constructions), it shows that kinship works in
many ways, and why it is that ethnographers
need to be reexive in order to keep their own
cultural bias in check.
Much has been written about the differences
(or lack thereof) between the American and
British/European anthropologies. Metcalf pays
little attention to the issue (and when, on page
92, he speaks of other national traditions of
anthropology, he mentions only newly
emerging nations, neglecting Russian, Japanese,
Dutch, and other signicant non-anglophone
anthropologies), but his book may in itself
suggest an emerging difference. He is extremely
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 675-724
Royal Anthropological Institute 2006
careful not to offend the sensitivities of his
readers by using language that might be
perceived as racist or sexist (where Europeans
tend to be more careless), and the book is also
strongly normatively slanted, full of liberal (in
the US sense) political views. Metcalf repeatedly
draws explicit moral conclusions from
small-scale societies, rarely noting how cruel,
violent, and oppressive many of them have
been. Whereas a more even-handed or neutral
view of traditional societies would have been
proper in most European countries, this
eagerness to convey a set of moral values
alongside the intellectual content may tell us
something about the ideological situation in
the USA.
Anthropology: the basics is a good read, with
instructive boxes and useful summaries, and it
will doubtless whet manys appetite for more.
Thomas Hylland Eriksen University of Oslo/Free
University of Amsterdam
Rapport, Nigel. I am dynamite: an alternative
anthropology of power. xvi, 283 pp., illus.,
bibliogr. London, New York: Routledge, 2003.
21.99 (paper)
Locating agency in social scientic texts can be a
difcult task. More often than not, when the
source of agency is apparently missing, it will
eventually and almost inevitably turn out to be
supra-individual. And while many of us assume
that agency lies somewhere between the devil
(individuality) and the deep-blue sea
(society), the default setting remains
predominantly oceanic. There have always been
those who have taken the less popular course in
locating agency fairly and squarely in or with the
individual, and in recent years the champion of
this cause has been Nigel Rapport, who during
the last two decades has continued to
foreground the primacy of the individual in the
construction of social phenomena. However, in
this, his most substantial work so far, he
ingeniously develops earlier arguments and
confronts and responds in typically elegant
prose to many of the most trenchant criticisms
of his work to date.
I am dynamite is in three parts. In Part I,
Propositions, Rapport sets out in some detail
his standpoint, in terms of ontology,
methodology, epistemology, and, signicantly,
morality. Above all else it is, avers Rapport, the
multi-selved individual, unique, generative,
transcendent, powerful, that constitutes the
ultimate reality in understanding social life. In

ignoring the individual, anthropologists cannot
do analytical or interpretative justice to the
complexities of social life. Rapport is quick to
point out that this is not to dismiss the reality of
the social, but rather to locate its generation
entirely in the work of individuals. He argues,
persuasively, for a shift in emphasis in accounts
of individuals actions from a reliance on
because explanations to in order to motives,
admitting that human intentionality cannot and
should not be precluded or, worse still, occluded
by reference to social structure or some such
illusional construct.
Furthermore, in the individual lies the locus
of power, and for this reason, among others,
Rapports assertion that the individual is prior to
all other possible sources of agency is a moral
necessity. An important means of securing ones
individuality is the generation and
accomplishment of ones life-project, a term
which remains (intentionally?) ambiguous, in
that it manifests both is and ought qualities. It
is in pressing ahead with his or her life-project
that the individual manifests power. Rapport
draws explicitly on the existentialists, and it is
from Nietzsche that his novel theory of power
derives. It is Machtgefuhl a term used by Leslie
Chamberlain to describe Nietzsche, and meaning
a clear sense of ones own power and of the use
to which ones talents should be put that
constitutes the axis around which this book
turns.
Indeed, Rapport offers Nietzsche as the rst
of his four biographical examples, or
Illustrations, in the second part of the book,
and a large proportion of I am dynamite
(including, of course, its title) is a celebration of
the philosophy of Nietzsche, from whom
Rapport derives much that is foundational to his
worldview. Given the extent to which Nietzsche
has been misrepresented and misunderstood, it
will be interesting to see, following Rapports
account, whether his stock now rises among
anthropologists. The second and third
illustrations are drawn from the lives of
individuals personally known to the author: Ben
Glaser, his stepfather and Rachel Silberstein, a
friend he met while sojourning in Israel. These
are messier narratives and, for me, more
satisfying and convincing accounts of the
life-project. While there is considerable empathy
in Rapports portrayal of these individuals, it is in
the fourth illustration, his account of the British
painter Stanley Spencer, that I nd the most
interesting and compelling example of
Machtgefuhl. Spencer, Rapport demonstrates,
remained throughout his life his own man.
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 675-724
Book reviews 709
Drawing thoughtfully on the life-projects
presented here, Rapport demonstrates an
approach to doing anthropology which is good,
in the sense of being both morally and
interpretatively strong. One hopes that others
will further this work by embarking on their own
projects in individual anthropology. Rapport
draws on an extraordinary range of authors, not
only from anthropology, but from philosophy,
psychology, the biological sciences, literary
criticism, and so forth. I am dynamite is
contentious and controversial in equal measure
but is never less than engaging. Like all
signicant work, the book raises as many
questions as it answers and it is sure to provoke
considerable debate among academics and, one
hopes, students. I am dynamite is a passionate
and persuasive work, not only extolling but
clearly demonstrating the virtues of taking the
individual in all of her or his complexity as the
starting-point for doing anthropology.
Furthermore, it represents a considerable
contribution to the liberal and humanist
traditions and so deserves a wide readership.
Peter Collins University of Durham
Social anthropology
Allen, Catherine J. The hold life has: coca
and cultural identity in an Andean community
(2nd edition). xv, 296 pp., maps, gs, illus.,
bibliogr. London, Washington, D.C.:
Smithsonian Institution Press, 2003. 15.50
(paper)
The subtitle of Catherine Allens excellent book
is not inaccurate, but it suggests both more and
less than the book delivers. This is especially true
for the second edition reviewed here.
Certainly, the book examines cultural
identity in Sonqo, a small indigenous
community not far from Cuzco, in southern
Peru, as well as the role of coca, and of
alcohol, in the Sonqueoss lives. However, the
book is more centrally an elegiac description of
transformations that Allen observed in Sonqo
between her rst eldwork in 1975 and her 1985
return to the eld. The even greater
transformations that occurred between 1985
and further visits in 1995 and 2000 are
described in the fty-page epilogue which
distinguishes the second edition from the rst.
In broad outline, the transformations that
Allen describes are familiar ones. Increased ease
Royal Anthropological Institute 2006
710 Book reviews
of transportation and communication permit
and promote a once isolated indigenous
communitys integration into the larger
surrounding, and global society. Increased
integration into the market economy, spurred by
a state actively pursuing neo-liberal policies,
leads to changes in crops, crop rotation,
organization of labour, and social organization.
More particular to the region are government
responses to the global war on drugs that
restrict transportation of coca leaves within Peru,
limiting traditional patterns of access and
consumption.
Allens repeated eld visits and long-term
involvement with the community permit an
outstandingly thick description of peoples lives are central to a more complete understanding of
and the effects of change on them. Allen rst
describes the dense network of meaning within
which the Sonqueos lived, and the ways in
which their physical, ritual, and social lives were
interwoven, to locate individuals within a
cosmology intimately linking place, community,
and daily life. Her discussion of ritual and
pilgrimage are particularly effective. The
extended eldwork also lets Allen track
individuals and families over twenty-ve years,
describing the ways in which childrens lives
diverge from those of their parents. She is also
able to show the numerous paths that those
divergences take, including migration from
Sonqo to Cuzco, and, in Sonqo, changes in
residence patterns, in home design, patterns of
reciprocity, and, ultimately, changes in religious
practice, language, and ethnic identity.
Moreover, although the links between all the
changes are not worked out in detail, the book
highlights to great effect the interrelatedness of
change occurring in different areas of peoples
lives.
The reader is always intensely aware that
Allen is describing real, three-dimensionally
realized people so that it is impossible to see
change as an abstract process with no human
meaning or impact. She repeatedly shows the
ways in which peoples hopes are fullled or
confounded, their expectations met or dashed,
and the manner in which the structures that
provided meaning and motivation for their lives
are supported or corroded.
The intense human scale and the neness of
Allens description are among the books
signicant strengths, but there are also
weaknesses. The central narrative of community
lost makes some aspects of Allens descriptions
seem romanticized. Allen makes an impressive
case that Sonqueos lives were encompassed by
a web of meaning, but, as the books shows, life
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 675-724
Royal Anthropological Institute 2006
was hard, mortality rates were high, and some
people, at least, took rapid advantage of the
new opportunities presented to them. With
regard to coca and alcohol, Allen effectively
describes traditional drug use. As seems typical
for autochthonous drugs, use was ritualized,
sacralized, and integrated into daily life. Allen
also describes how the conjoined decline of
community and desacralization of alcohol led to
its abuse. However, other than placing the drugs
in the regions history, Allen leaves largely
unaddressed the question of why Sonqueos
consumed coca and alcohol as they did. There is
little discussion of the drugs qua drugs or of the
Sonqueoss view of their effects. Both questions
the use of both drugs in Sonqo, and, in the case
of alcohol, of what changed over time. This
latter question is particularly important given
the apparently related rapid growth of
alcoholism and teetotal evangelical Protestant
sects in Sonqo.
Finally, in Allens attempt to describe
changes impacts on so many aspects of
peoples lives, it sometimes feels that bits and
pieces of description, though rich and thick, are
stuck on rather than carefully worked in to
create a work that is more integrated in a stylistic
sense. This is particularly true of the epilogue.
The weaknesses, however, are minor. Overall,
this is a ne ethnography that adds to the
literature on the region, on drugs, and on the
impact of the outside world on localized
peoples.
Dan Bradburd Clarkson University
Banerjee, Mukulik a & Daniel Miller.
The sari. vii, 277 pp., plates, bibliogr. Oxford,
New York: Berg Publishers, 2003. 26.99
(cloth)
The sari is a refreshingly unorthodox book about
clothing that focuses on the contemporary sari
not as an object of clothing but as a lived
garment in an India transformed by pockets of
rabid consumerism and by the needs of a large
and vocal middle class whose dress is a constant
reinvention of the meanings of modern and
rational.
The book tells us the multiple stories of
women rich and poor, urban and rural
immersed in this modern life where the sari
plays such a crucial role. It relies on many voices,
some articulate and others difdent, to explore
why the sari in India is the most commonly
worn dress and evokes so many contradictory

feelings. The strength and charm of this book is
the ease with which it distils in an extremely
readable, vivacious, and often witty manner the
ethnographic perspectives set within a broader
context of social, political, and religious changes.
The writing is never laboured but on the
contrary remains uent, light, and pointed.
There are indeed few footnotes and scarcely any
discussion of fashionable theories. The authors
are supported in their narrative by
breathtakingly beautiful photographs of women
in their saris that immerse the reader in the
tactile, sensual, emotional, intimate world of
feelings.
Each of the twelve chapters can be read as a
separate unit and not necessarily in the order
presented, since this is not a history of the sari.
Throughout the book we read about Minas
encounter with the sari, as a young wife eager
to please her in-laws and much later as a
condent sari-wearer who criticizes women who
wear the suit (shalwar-kameez). The second
chapter describes the intimacy of the sari, which,
unlike any other garment, is dynamic, moves
with the body, is constantly on stage, can
support or betray, and has a profound effect on
the way a woman perceives herself as an
individual. Chapter 3 analyses the wardrobe as a
mirror of a womans personality, with each sari
embodying a moment in life. Chapter 4 explains
how wearing a sari constitutes a turning-point
for an adolescent in the same way as a teenager
learns how to drive a car. It also explores the
saris association with sexuality.
Chapter 5 argues that although ancient texts
display an ideal of societal control over women
and their sexuality, many strictures regarding
Hindu womens clothing are enforced by
women over other women. Chapter 6 looks at
the working sari in todays India, where many
urban women work outside the home. The sari
as the working womans dress, from
policewomen to Indian Administrative Service
ofcers, blends notions of comfort and
functionality. But its meaning is ambiguous and
contextual: at work it may signal conformity, but
it can also full a function of power dressing for
many women. Chapter 7 shows the intimate
bond between saris and their wearer as they
grow old together: women tend to change their
taste in saris as they grow older, leaving younger
ones to wear bright colours and richer textures.
Chapter 8 recounts the dilemmas of two women
on what particular sari to wear, the rst one
before a crucial board meeting and the other,
her domestic help, before stepping out to work
in this persons house.
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 675-724
Book reviews 711
Chapter 9 takes us to three different settings
opposing buyers and sellers of saris, where the
act of buying emerges as something involving
skill and knowledge and stimulating both
anxiety and pleasure. Chapter 10 explores the
development of branding and the impact of
major companies as well as the dilemmas of the
contemporary handloom sector, caught between
a need to serve the mass market and a more
expensive taste for craft saris. Chapter 11 surveys
some of the major arbiters of taste, from politics,
lm, and television soap operas, while making
the point that fashion in saris is not the main
incentive to the sari-buyer. Chapter 12 looks at
the future of the contemporary sari and asks
whether it will be overtaken by the
shalwar-kameez or become a purely ceremonial
dress like the kimono. The authors suggest that
the sari will survive as the only Indian formal
dress, an elevated status to which no other
garment can aspire.
This is in short an excellent book where the
authors truly master their material and succeed
in conveying their own enthusiasm for the topic.
It will be of interest to a broad cross-section of
readers interested in clothes and fashion, as well
as to social scientists, who should appreciate a
book which manages to be both readable and
rigorous.
Nira Wickramasinghe University of Colombo
Chatty, Dawn & Gillian Lewando Hundt
(eds). Children of Palestine: experiencing forced
migration in the Middle East. xiii, 274 pp., maps,
gs, tables, bibliogrs. Oxford, New York:
Berghahn Books, 2005. 45.00 (cloth), 17.00
(paper)
Children of Palestine is published as part of a
series on forced migration which features
thematic volumes on generic refugee issues (e.g.
impoverishment, psychological wellness, agency
and ethics, asylum-seekers) and volumes
dedicated to particular refugee populations.
Focused on Palestinian refugees one of the
largest groups of ethno-territorial refugees the
world has seen in recent decades and the
longest-standing refugee population known
today the volume features a generic angle (the
impact of forced migration on the lives of
children) and a regional comparative approach.
Its ve main chapters cover Palestinian refugees
in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the West Bank, and
Gaza, respectively.
Children of Palestine is a highly structured
volume. Its ve main chapters follow a distinct
Royal Anthropological Institute 2006
712 Book reviews
thematic mould which obviously reects the
volumes epistemological origins. In 1998 the
Andrew Mellon Foundation approached the
Refugee Studies Center at Oxford with a
suggestion to organize a study of the impact of
forced migration on Palestinian refugee children
in Gaza. The Centre designed a larger
comparative project that would cover refugee
communities in the ve locations. A third of the
volume (parts of the introduction plus three
appendices covering pages 181 to 265) informs
the reader of the elaborate procedures prepared
for the project. These included a research
strategy, complete with conceptual and
methodological guidelines; hiring local (mostly
Palestinian) researchers; organizing a preparatory
workshop in Cyprus; establishing a project
newsletter to facilitate communication between
co-ordinators (Chatty and Lewando Hundt) and
researchers in the eld; and devising a
mechanism through which researchers sent
periodic progress reports to the co-ordinators
and the funding bodies.
The result is a methodical and fact-lled
book. An indispensable contribution to the
historical record of Palestinian refugees, Children
of Palestine will certainly prove valuable for
care-giving organizations as well as national and
international agencies seeking to transform the
dire state of Palestinian refugees. This
notwithstanding, this top-down research project,
funded by metropolitan bodies wishing to
empower victims of a large-scale tragedy in the
periphery, mimics some of the characteristics
alluded to in recent critical assessments of
humanitarian intervention in disaster areas: the
knee-jerk scramble for analytical order; the
emphasis on transparent, reproducible
methodology; the concomitant assumption that
a well-structured comparative approach is the
most productive way of teasing out similarities
and differences between sub-cases of what is
ostensibly a single phenomenon or category.
This comment is not restricted to procedures
of inquiry. It speaks to the analytical, theoretical,
and political heart of the Palestinian refugee
problem and its potential solutions. Palestinian
refugees became refugees as a result of a
particular process: Zionisms colonization of
Palestine and Israels deliberate policy during the
1948 conict and immediately after it of securing
as much territory as possible with as few
Palestinians as possible. But history, including
the experience of the Palestinian refugees, did
not cease to evolve in 1948. For one thing, the
states and territories where Palestinian refugees
ended up displayed vastly divergent policies
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 675-724
Royal Anthropological Institute 2006
towards them. Jordan granted them citizenship
and freedom to settle anywhere. Syria denied
them citizenship, restricts their freedom of
association, speech, and movement, but is
relatively lax in terms of employment
opportunities and education. Lebanon, where
the fate of Palestinians has been subject to
invasions and incursions on the part of Israel
and Syria, oscillates between draconian
restrictions on residence, employment, and
political freedom for Palestinians and
hyper-liberal licence afforded to them to create
semi-autonomous territorial enclaves. The West
Bank, controlled by Jordan from 1950 to 1967
and a part of the kingdoms administrative orbit
till 1988, but otherwise controlled by Israel since
1967, saw various transformations of conditions,
rights, and limitations imposed on Palestinian
refugees. This culminated in dramatic
deterioration caused by the militarization of the
Israeli occupation since the beginning of the
Oslo process in the early 1990s. Gaza, where
incredible space limitations seem to have been
the dominant factor ever since 1948, likewise
changed hands between Egypt (194956,
195767), Israel (19489, 19567, 19672004), and
versions of Palestinian rule since 1994, creating a
continuum of unending, worsening hardship for
the Palestinian refugees.
Given their common memory of loss,
treating all Palestinian refugees as a single entity
is morally and politically understandable. But
given the historical, political, and economic
variations experienced by the sub-communities
during the last six decades, is lumping them
together analytically justied?
Many of the previous surveys and studies of
Palestinian refugees were psychologically or
psychiatrically inclined, inevitably using Western
concepts of selfhood, suffering, and trauma.
Children of Palestine successfully moves away
from this by presenting a multi-disciplinary,
ethnographically rich approach which looks at
children in the context of their familial,
communal, and societal environments. In each
of the ve territories, researchers identied
approximately twenty families, then proceeded
to collect life histories of members of at least
three generations since 1948. These were then
integrated into a series of descriptive statements
of the communal history, main problems,
coping mechanisms, and scopes for the future
which characterize the community.
Children of Palestine is a highly convincing
and often heart-breaking chronology of
suffering. Specic but highly representative,
selective but fundamentally factual, each chapter

of the book unfolds the endless saga of
Palestinian plight. Some of it is obviously unique
to Palestinians and their tragedy, other parts are
reminiscent of impoverished, de-developed and
dehumanized communities in the Third World or
in slums nearer world metropoli.
Informative and often gripping, the
predominantly descriptive volume, however,
seldom soars in terms of analytical insight. One
exception is Randa Farahs chapter on Jordan,
where the predicament of Palestinian refugees is
represented in a particularly dynamic and
insightful manner. In spite of the fact that the
volumes introduction already includes a
historical background for each of the ve
locations, Farahs historicization of the
community of Palestinian refugees in Jordan is
fresh and analytically astute. Her literature review
(pp. 912) and note on methodology (pp. 924),
as well as her ethnographic accounts, are
likewise lucid and suggestive, moving effortlessly
between the micro picture painted through
individual memories and vignettes, and the
broader stroke of history and politics within
which they belong. Her discussion of physical
and social space is particularly illuminating,
creating an interesting foreground for her
comments on coping mechanisms.
The Palestinians generally and Palestinian
refugees in particular are still struggling to have
a voice in world politics. In this respect, an effort
such as Children of Palestine, with its effective
emphasis on bringing forward testimonies and
observations of refugees as interlocutors, is a
welcome contribution. It would have been even
more effective intellectually and politically had
the vivid accounts emanating from the eld
been bracketed by more rigorous theoretical and
analytical introduction and conclusion.
Dan Rabinowitz Tel-Aviv University
Coronado Suzn, Gabriela. Las voces
silenciadas de la cultura mexicana: identidad,
resistencia y creatividad en el dilogo intertnico.
371 pp., gs, illus., bibliogr. Mexico: CIESAS,
2003. (paper)
During the 1980s, Guillermo Bonl, one of the
more relevant and inuential Mexican
anthropologists, reasoned that as a consequence
of the failure of the imaginary Mexican national
project that had been expounded by the social
elite since the independence of the state, the
unavoidable task of Mexican social
anthropologists was to re-analyse the country
via the analysis of the links between that
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 675-724
Book reviews 713
imaginary Mexico and the real one. Two decades
hence, and using considerably different
epistemological tools and methods from those
which were employed by Bonl, it would seem
that this is what also inspires the work of
Gabriela Coronado, who, from the perspective
of the social narrative, examines the complex
relationships existing between indigenous
peoples, to whom she always refers as Indian
peoples, and mestizos, amid the convergence of
different layers of self-identication in the
burgeoning national identity, that of a
contemporary Mexico which is not bound by
its past.
Following Bakhtins heteroglossical principles,
Coronado picks out the social interactions in
each cultural manifestation, which qualify as
some sort of text of inter-ethnic dialogue. This
is the same dialogue which not only classies
Indians and mestizos as different ethnicities, but
also assumes as a starting-point that the national
social hegemony has been facilitated thanks to
the deliberate silencing and marginalization of
one of the parties the Indians. Whilst giving
credit to the creativity of the Indian population
in the formation of the new country, the author
forgets, as if it had never existed, the third pillar
of the national project, namely African
immigrants. She attempts to lter contemporary
Mexican society through the lens of an
interdisciplinary conceptualization which is, at
times, subordinate to the presumptions of the
textual and semiotic analysis itself.
Notwithstanding this, it is tempting to
imagine the Zcalo, the central plaza of Mexico
City, and by extension that of the entire country,
as a narrative space where the symbols of the
nation are imbued with new meanings thanks to
the appropriation symbolic as much as
physical of the space by representatives of the
excluded party: groups of Indians who
commemorate on a daily basis the traditional
dances of the concheros, those who sell cheap
traditional trinkets, or the Zapatista army,
looming in the distant southeast. In the
judgement of the author, this appropriation
presupposes a reconguration of these
symbols, most notoriously in the case of the
national ag, which masks the displacement of
Indians from their position of primacy when,
during the Colonial period, the pre-hispanic
Templo Mayor was conned to a corner of the
square, half-hidden behind colonial buildings,
the Cathedral and Palacio Nacional.
If the historical interaction between two
civilizations, Spanish culture and Mesoamerican,
somewhat simplistically conceived of as being
Royal Anthropological Institute 2006
714 Book reviews
homogeneous cultures, has been basically a
relationship of dominance and subordinance,
the application of a fractal logic, which
articulates more subtle and varied levels of social
complexity and inter-ethnic interaction in
comparison to an analysis of society as a whole,
allows us, according to Coronado, to understand
a new dialogical version of local histories in
which the Indian groups must incorporate the
other, represented by the mestizo, in the
process of creating a new indianidad. This is
analysed in its various manifestations via an
ethnography which is broad and generalized
when looking at the Zapatistas and which is ne,
detailed, and illuminating when it concentrates
on the social processes which accompany the
creation of new local identities in the district of
Cuetzalan, in Puebla state.
Beyond the problematic elimination of the
subtleties of indigenous identities, subsumed
within the generic label of Indian peoples, and
the no less problematic analysis of behaviours
inferred from texts produced in, and for,
different contexts from those in which they now
nd themselves, the author manages to show
how Mexicos indigenous past seeps from every
pore of its national identity, crossing the chasm
of a hegemonic discourse which it has always
sought to deny, by the placement of the Indians
in a remote and mythical past. In this sense,
Gabriela Coronado conceives of her text as part
of a healing rite for a nation which has been
ailing ever since it condemned Mesoamerican
culture to the shadows. This being the case, the
demand that Mexico develop a non-exclusive
and more balanced national identity implies that
the aforementioned culture be placed in the
light for all to see. For this to happen, Coronado
converts herself into a loudspeaker of
inter-ethnic dialogue, clearly enunciating the
words of those who could not be heard because
they were speaking in whispers.
Pedro Tom (translated by Rafael Bloom)
CSIC, Centro de Humanidades, Madrid
Fuller, C.J. The renewal of the priesthood:
modernity and traditionalism in a South Indian
temple. xx, 207 pp., gs, tables, bibliogr.
Oxford, Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2004.
17.95 (paper)
The renewal of the priesthood by C.J. Fuller
revisits, revises, and extends an ethnographic
study undertaken by the same author in 1976-7.
It examines recent patterns of socio-cultural and
geographic mobility among the Brahman priests
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 675-724
Royal Anthropological Institute 2006
who work in the Sri Minakshi Sundareshwara
Temple, one of southern Indias largest temples,
relating these changes to the priests
self-conscious embrace of traditionalism,
understood (following Eisenstadt) as the
selective reclamation of older legitimating
symbols as hedges against new symbolic orders
(p. 160). The books ethnographic core is framed
by an argument about the necessity of
approaching modernization not through abstract
universalisms rationalization, for example but
through its culturally inected forms and the
folk understandings of the modern that arise
from those processes. Fuller thus maintains,
contra Giddens, that priests ideological
investments in traditionalism are integral to the
social and cultural project of modernity.
The book opens with Fullers recollection of a
1976 encounter with a priestly family in Madurai;
it is quickly followed by a description of that
family in 2001, at which point several members
had relocated to the United States. There, they
served as priests in a newly constructed temple,
also dedicated to Minakshi, in suburban Texas.
Fuller notes that, at least for one of the priests,
Sanskritic scriptural education had been a key
factor in obtaining the overseas post. This setting
trope introduces the conundrum that Fuller
seeks to unravel in the book, namely how and
why aspects of the priesthood have changed
over the past quarter-century, particularly in
terms of the value that has come to be assigned
to Sanskritic education over that same period.
The grand, much-delayed renovation ritual for
Madurais Minakshi temple in 1995, described by
Fuller in the same chapter, serves as an iconic
sign (in all senses) of this renewal. It is a
renewal, moreover, that Fuller in his earlier work
had not anticipated, given the socio-economic
decline and demoralization among priests that
he documented in 1976-7.
In the ve chapters that follow, the global
horizon recedes as Fuller seeks to account for
the improved status of Minakshi temple priests.
He examines patterns of priestly labour (chap.
2), family and domestic life (chap. 3), and
education (chap. 4), paying special attention to
the growth of schools dedicated to Sanskritic
education and to priests increasing interests in
such training. Chapter 5 deals with recent
political developments, especially the impact of
modern state formation and Hindu nationalist
ideology on temple activities in Tamil Nadu. In
the books nal chapter, Fuller assesses current
debates on modernization and concludes: in
the work and lives of the priests, we ... have a
case study of ... not only how modernity can

engender traditionalism but also how
traditionalism can constitute and promote
modernity while simultaneously emphasizing
the divine authority of tradition (p. 167).
The book, which is admirably free of jargon,
is a useful ethnographic study that, paired with
Fullers earlier work, offers an extended case
study of an important priestly community in
southern India. Fullers documentation of new
forms and spaces of Sanskritic education is
particularly welcome, as is his dissection of the
recent rise of Hindutva in southern India.
Perhaps because I live and work in a state
(California) that has a large population of
Non-Resident Indians and correspondingly large
numbers of Hindu temples, I would like to have
seen more attention to the transnational
processes and institutions that are responsible
for, and impacted by, priests increased mobility.
The book begins by invoking globalization
through accounts of the unexpected
conjunctures that it occasions, but apart from
dismissive comments about notions of global
modernity there is very little subsequent
discussion of the forces and institutions, be they
political, legal, economic, or cultural, that
mediate globalization and render traditionalism
into a mobile and dynamic ideology. How, for
example, does the mobility now experienced by
Minakshi temple priests compare with that of
other priestly communities? How do temples
dedicated to Minakshi outside India compare
with those in India? Is Minakshi, herself,
re-imagined or re-framed in the course of her
transnational peregrinations? What sorts of
transnational resource ows do Sanskritic
training institutions rely upon? What other
transnational circuits do priests participate in?
These are just a few of the questions that Fullers
engaging study invites.
Mary Hancock University of California, Santa
Barbara
Gill, Lesley. The School of the Americas:
military training and political violence in the
Americas. xviii, 281 pp., illus., bibliogr. London,
Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 2004. 14.50
(paper)
In this important, well-written and timely book,
Lesley Gill turns a spotlight on the School of the
Americas (SOA), a US Army counter-insurgency
training centre for Latin American militaries.
During its fty-year existence, SOA has produced
60,000 alumni, many of whom are implicated as
the principal perpetrators of human rights
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 675-724
Book reviews 715
abuses. Gill pulls back the curtain on the making
of a repressive hemispheric military apparatus,
and, simultaneously, exposes the linkages
between increased military violence and
neo-liberal programmes. Gill argues that these
linkages are the basis of US empire in the
Americas.
Gills multi-sited, transnational ethnography
illuminates empire formation by exploring the
experiences and perspectives of three groups:
US military trainers and Latin American students
at SOA; coca-growing Bolivian and Colombian
peasants; and US activists aiming to shut down
SOA. Traversing the frontiers between torturers,
victims, and protesters, Gill vividly maps out the
poles of subjugation and opposition that
constitute the force elds of US military
imperialism.
Gill begins by connecting military recruitment
and retention to broader issues of culture and
power. She captures the pushes and pulls of
recruitment by juxtaposing the different
experiences of trainees and their families as they
move between a Latin American landscape of
dispossession and repression and an American
culture of consumption. Latin American militaries
provide the primary avenue of social mobility for
the lower middle class, and professional soldiers
are a caste-like group largely insulated from the
consequences of the social dislocations that they
uphold. SOA training is the surest route to
military promotion and success. The integration
of trainees and their families into an American
way of life is integral to the SOA experience. Gill
argues that this broader SOA experience creates
the shared worldviews and personal relations
amongst Latin American and US personnel that
consolidate US hegemony.
Gills primary foci are human rights abuses
by SOA graduates and oppositional movements
of Andean peasants and US activists. Chapter 7,
Disordering the Andes, argues that both the
heightened military violence and the
dispossession and displacement of coca-growing
peasants in Chapare, Bolivia, and Putumayo,
Colombia, reect a shift in the post-cold war US
militarys strategy away from the communist
threat and towards a war on drugs. This shift
provided a new rationale for bloated military
budgets and continued US intervention.
Consequently, SOAs new mission was to train
soldiers from prime coca-producing areas for this
new war on drugs. The consequences for
ordinary coca-growing peasants caught between
the structural violence of neo-liberal economic
programmes and military violence was tragic.
This tragedy, however, fuelled powerful
Royal Anthropological Institute 2006
716 Book reviews
opposition movements, especially the Fuerzas
Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) and
Bolivias Movimento Hacia Socialismo (MAS). Gills
treatment of their evolution enhances our
understanding of the shifting political landscape
that, for example, recently propelled the rst
indigenous peasant leader, Evo Morales, into
Bolivias presidential ofce.
Demonstrating the necessary connection
between military violence and neo-liberal
economic programmes, Gill exposes the key
political vulnerability of SOA. Chapter 8,
Targeting the School of the Assassins , long ignored, Gill has produced a book of
examines the development of the movement to
close SOA. Activists rooted in earlier liberation
theology and solidarity movements formed its
core and steadily exposed the connection
between SOA and human rights abuse. Two key
moments put SOA on the political defensive. In
1996, activists disseminated recently discovered
SOA training manuals for inltrating unions,
peasant associations, and community
organizations, and targeting political and peace
activists for assassination. In the late 1990s, SOA
Watchs web page listed all SOA graduates, thus
enabling human rights groups to connect
alumni to documented cases of abuse.
Under increased public pressure, Congress
slashed SOAs funding in 1999. SOA rebounded
by launching a public relations campaign that
highlighted its new human rights training
programme and by opening its doors to social
investigators such as Gill. Chapter 6, Human
rights and wrongs, examines this programme.
Gills participant observation during a week-
long human rights programme in 2000
exposed the pervasive cynicism and contempt
for human rights talk among participants, as
well as their scrupulous avoidance of social
justice issues, accountability concerns, and US
military policy. The programme distanced SOA
discursively from its cold war past. Yet SOA
trainees continue to be selected based on their
success at neutralizing internal enemies.
Andean soldiers, for example, must
demonstrate progress in the war on drugs,
measured in terms of the number of arrests,
searches, seizures, cocaine pits destroyed, and,
in Colombia, by the dead bodies that the
security forces produce (p. 158).
Gill expands the denition of impunity to
weave these disparate but connected stories
together. More than the absence of
accountability, impunity is embedded in the
process of social differentiation ... that extends
from the military and powerful civilian elites to
the oppressive economic policies of international
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 675-724
Royal Anthropological Institute 2006
nancial institutions (p. 13). Consequently, her
book opens up new horizons in our
understanding of social change enacted from
above. She argues that impunity-fuelled violence
is necessary to maintain the particular form of
capitalist political and economic order in the
Americas (p. 239). Further, she contends that
ordinary people facing or witnessing extreme
social dislocations and violence will continue to
demand an end to state-sponsored terrorism
bankrolled and organized by the United States.
By mapping connections that others have for too
immense political and theoretical importance. It
should be required reading for anyone
concerned with peace and justice in our time.
August Carbonella Memorial University of
Newfoundland
Leopold, Mark. Inside West Nile. x, 180 pp.,
maps, gs, illus., bibliogr. Oxford, Santa Fe:
James Currey Publishers/Sch. American
Research, 2005. 45.00 (cloth), 16.95
(paper)
Mark Leopolds Inside West Nile endeavours to
explain why the post-colonial history and
imagery of the northwest of Uganda have been
so dominated by war and instability. The last
decade has seen sporadic guerrilla opposition to
Yoweri Musevenis regime there, in the early
1980s the brutality of the Obote II government
caused the near depopulation of the area, while
Uganda in the 1970s was dominated by West
Niles most infamous son, Idi Amin. Leopold has
produced a valuable addition to the literature on
the anthropology of conict, but one which
emphasizes the analysis of the historical context
of contemporary unrest more than the lived
experience of those affected by violence.
The logic behind this approach was
essentially pragmatic. Leopolds research in
Uganda coincided with a major upsurge in rebel
activity, so that he was almost totally conned to
the major town of the region, Arua. With
traditional eldwork out of the question, and not
wishing to focus on refugees, Leopold chose to
explore the evolution of the image of West Nilers
as people of violence. In his opinion, the
guerrilla opposition within West Nile to the
current government is primarily a response to
administrative neglect and suspicion, which in
turn results from outsiders perceptions that
West Nile is somehow not really of Uganda, and
that West Nilers are instinctively prone to
violence.

Leopold attempts to show that external
powerholders have repeatedly projected violence
onto its victims, narrative creating reality by
constantly depicting West Nilers as uncivilized
savages who are the source of their own
marginality and misfortunes. He attempts to
escape this false coherence and causality by
telling his story backwards. His major task, of
course, is to convince the reader that Idi Amin is
unrepresentative of West Nile culture. Leopold
notes that almost all writers on Amin emphasize
his origins, a Kakwa/Lugbara/Nubi from West
Nile, in explaining his character and behaviour.
Some accounts claim that Kakwa practised
human sacrice and cannibalism; others argue
that by growing up in a stateless society, Amin
lacked the civilizing inuence of chiey rule. But
mostly, writers have stressed Amins adopted
Nubi identity. The Nubi were originally southern
Sudanese soldiers from various ethnic groups
who were incorporated into the British imperial
army in Uganda in the 1890s. The Nubi were
regarded by British ofcers as true warrior stock,
noble savages, who would keep the politically
threatening southern Ugandan mission boys
under control. The Nubi population was
constantly replenished throughout the colonial
period by recruits from West Nile, who
frequently took on this supplementary identity
as a means of expressing their resentment
against southern Ugandan assumptions of
superiority. Leopolds analysis of the
complexities of West Nile identity is particularly
rich. He shows skillfully how liminal the region
has been in the modern era, a border country,
economically marginalized, linguistically and
culturally closer to the Congo and Sudan than
the rest of Uganda. Amins antagonism to
educated elites, his poor education, and his
aggression are all, Leopold implies, a product of
West Niles modern history, rather than inherent
characteristics of West Nile culture.
The bulk of the book attempts to analyse the
emergence of West Niles exceptionalism, its
persistent association with violence, savagery,
and separateness. This is largely achieved,
though one could argue that Kigezi in southern
Uganda was just as peripheralized by the
colonial economy, that Bunyoro in western
Uganda was viewed by Europeans with at least
as much antagonism and suspicion, and that
Acholi suffered more from pre-colonial slavers
and Egyptian imperialists than did their West
Nile neighbours. What really distinguished West
Nile was that it began the colonial period as part
of the Congo Free State, was then transferred to
Sudan, before nally joining Uganda at the start
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 675-724
Book reviews 717
of the First World War. This peculiar
constitutional history is crucial in explaining the
areas lack of integration with the rest of
Uganda.
Ultimately Leopolds argument that West Nile
is more victim than perpetrator of violence is
largely convincing, though the book might have
addressed in more detail West Nilers views on
violent crime and concepts of honour and
retribution. Moreover, he probably
underestimates the extent of justied resentment
felt in the rest of Uganda at the horrors
committed by Amins West Nile soldiers in the
1970s. Finally, it is not at all clear that the
technique of writing history backwards avoids
the risk of narrative coherence. Reverse
chronology makes it less likely that by-ways and
dead-ends will be explored. None the less, this is
a ne book, engagingly written, carefully
researched, and open about its unavoidable
limitations.
Shane Doyle University of Leeds
Mabilia, Mar a. Breast feeding and sexuality:
behaviour, beliefs and taboos among the Gogo
mothers in Tanzania (trans. Mary S. Ash). xi, 139
pp., map, illus., bibliogr. Oxford, New York:
Berghahn Books, 2005. 36.50 (cloth)
This book, a rewritten Ph.D. dissertation, about
the interrelation between breast-feeding and
sexuality, is based on thirty months eld
research (from 1989 to 1992) among the Gogo, a
Bantu-speaking agropastoral people living in
Dodoma region in Tanzania. The study was part
of the paediatric implementation project with
CUAMM, Doctors with Africa, an Italian NGO in
which the overall aim was to assess the paradox
that 50 to 60 per cent of Gogo children under 5
years of age suffer from (modest) malnutrition in
spite of the prolonged breast-feeding practice
that often continues until the child reaches the
age of 3.
Using ethnography and survey-based
research methods in a Gogo rural community of
close to 4,000 people, focusing on 114
breast-feeding women and their infants,
Mabilias study seeks to discover the cultural and
social organizational elements which interact
with the infant feeding methods and to identify
the consequences of such factors for a childs
development and health. Inspired by Vanessa
Mahers (edited volume) The anthropology of
breastfeeding: natural law or social construct
(1992), Mabilia goes beyond the biological niche
of breast-feeding and gives a rich and thorough
Royal Anthropological Institute 2006
718 Book reviews
analysis of the interrelated and inherent
relationship between the physiology (nature) of
breast-feeding and the behaviour (culture) of the
nurturing mother and the nurtured child.
The breast-feeding practice among the Gogo,
as in much of eastern and southern Africa, is
characterized by the child having access to the
mothers breast whenever it desires until
suddenly at the age of 3 it is weaned. Mothers
milk is, however, complemented with mixed
feeding, i.e. millet porridge, often from the age
of 3 months, which impoverishes the advantage
of exclusive breast-feeding.
The complex cultural logic of the breast
feeding system and how the many post-partum
taboos partly guide but also dictate the nursing
mothers behaviour especially her sexual
behaviour rest on the notion that body uids
such as mothers blood, semen, and mothers
milk have the ambiguous capacity to create life
through sexual intercourse, but also to cause
and transmit sickness, evil, and even death.
Thus, maternal milk turns bad when such
social regulations are transgressed by the
mother. Consequently, if the nurtured child gets
ill with a prolonged diarrhoea, the mother may
be accused of killing her own child because she
has had extra-marital sexual intercourse.
Conversely, if the child grows well, it is perceived
as evidence of the mothers moral worth, far
beyond her role as a mother.
In the last chapter, Mabilia draws on Mauss
and argues that breast-feeding and the
circularity of giving and receiving milk, i.e.
good milk : good nurturer = right quickly, and without revision. Much of what she
growth : good mother (p. 103), can be
conceived as the gift. The use of Mausss
theory seems a bit too far-fetched, not because it
is difcult to see the nursing mother as a
gift-giver, offering her maternal milk (the
supreme gift), or to see the nursing child as the
receiver. In Mauss, however, the receiver of the
gift must, sooner or later, reciprocate with a
counter-gift. Although Mabilia argues that the
child, by sucking the maternal milk, reproduces
the mothers milk, giving milk, receiving milk,
to have milk again (p. 114), this seems to entail a
symbiosis rather than an instance of Maussian
reciprocity.
The tension between tradition and (modern)
changes becomes obvious in the critical voices
of the elderly women when they admonish
young mothers whenever they transgress the
rules and obligations of the breast-feeding
system. The study would also have gained much
if such counter-discourses, as well as social
encounters between young women and their
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 675-724
Royal Anthropological Institute 2006
male partners, who are almost absent in the
analysis had been given more space. The
ethnography of wicked women, and the fact
that women throughout much of Africa are
easily blamed often through sexual shaming
for the spread and distribution of infectious
diseases, as well as for the ill-effects of
modernity, is disturbing.
The male-dominant political ideology of
breast-feeding, which puts a heavy toll on the
otherwise overburdened reproductive female
body leaving men without much responsibility
is a dangerous and risky cultural model. The
increasing mobility among the young and
sexually active generation and the high
prevalence of HIV/AIDS should have spurred
more reection.
Such criticism notwithstanding, the book is
to be highly recommended for students of
international public health, African health
professionals, as well as for (upper-level) courses
in African culture, medical anthropology, and
the anthropology of body and gender.
Liv Haram Nordic Africa Institute, Uppsala
Mead, Margaret. The world ahead: an
anthropologist anticipates the future.
x, 348 pp., illus., bibliogr. Oxford, New York:
Berghahn Books, 2005. 50.00 (cloth), 16.95
(paper)
Margaret Mead is the Jack Kerouac of
anthropology. She wrote an enormous amount,
wrote is forgettable, but occasionally there is real
brilliance in it. Also like Kerouac, Mead
chronicled the American road, but whereas
Kerouacs road was geographic,
transcontinental, Meads was temporal, the
American national trajectory from its immigrant
past to its space-age future.
The current volume is the sixth in a series
devoted to Meads work on contemporary
Western cultures. The world ahead presents
twenty-ve essays (from the period 1943-77) that
the editor, Robert Textor, considers most
directly relevant to Anticipatory Anthropology,
that is, which treated the future systematically
(p. 1). Yet there is much that is not systematic in
these essays, most of which were written for
public occasions and audiences, and address
such topics as the family, peace and war, social
security, urbanization, and the life cycle, all
understood in terms of Meads ideas about the
increasing pace of social change in the modern
world. What strikes the reader above all in these

essays is Meads willingness to make
authoritative pronouncements, some of which
seem astute, and others, ill informed,
contradictory, or erroneous.
Take, for example, a 1962 essay on The
psychology of warless man. The premise is an
interesting one: that nuclear weapons having
made wars between nation-states impossible,
humanity will have to gure out how to live
without such wars. For Mead, the problem is
primarily one of social change. When
international peacekeeping bodies replace
national armies, she asks, what sorts of
institutions will evolve to control local-level
violence? Yet despite repeated assertions that
war is primarily a social phenomenon, and not a
mere matter of hostility and aggression (p. 83),
Mead also describes it as originating in mans
primitive impulse to protect his women and his
children (p. 81). And in the end, Mead is
worried more by the psychological than the
social consequences of a warless world: how
are young males going to test their mettle in nomade: cosmologie, personne et territoire dans le
this unprecedented situation (p. 84)? Despite the
self-condence with which she puts forward
sociological and psychological generalizations,
the whole adds up to less than the sum of its
parts, precisely because the parts are
contradictory. And yet there are ashes of
brilliance in this essay, as when Mead describes
the social solidarity of the modern nation-state in
terms that anticipate Benedict Andersons
Imagined communities (1983): organized
invocations of their imagination bound men to
... fellow citizens whom they had never met
(p. 80).
Other essays justify the editors claims about
Meads skill as a futurist. Her statement on
ageing and retirement, delivered as testimony to
the US Senate in 1968, is not only cogent and
comprehensive, it remains as relevant today as it
was then. Not only are there sensible
social-democratic prescriptions on income
security and medical insurance, there are
anthropologically informed suggestions on the
range of variations possible in relationships
between older and younger persons, on cultural
factors affecting ageing, and on life-long
learning.
Meads most coherent account of American
culture was the 1942 monograph, And keep your
powder dry, reprinted as the second volume of
this series. The insights she articulated there, on
the relationship between Americas immigrant
history and its family structure, and between
American moralism and child-rearing practices,
reappear in these essays to good effect. But so
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 675-724
Book reviews 719
also does her willingness to shoot from the hip,
and to generalize on the basis of little apparent
evidence other than her own experience. The
results are worth reading, but one must know
how to separate the wheat from the chaff. Since
Meads death, one hears anthropologists lament
that we no longer know how to engage a public
audience the way she did. We need to
remember, however, that having access to an
audience does not guarantee that one knows
what one is talking about.
Richard Handler University of Virginia
Poirier, Sylvie. A world of relationships:
itineraries, dreams, and events in the Australian
Western Desert. xi, 303 pp., maps, plates,
bibliogr. London, Toronto: Univ. Toronto Press,
2005. 42.00 (cloth), 20.00 (paper)
This is a revised version of a book originally
published in French entitled Les jardins du
dsert occidental australien (1996). It is based on
three years eldwork in Balgo (Wirrimanu) and
nearby outstations in the northern part of the
Gibson Desert of Western Australia, part of the
larger Western Desert.
Balgo was established as a Catholic mission
in 1939, populated by desert Aborigines, most of
whom identify in broad socio-linguistic terms as
Kukatja and Walmatjari. The population of the
Balgo area totals approximately one thousand.
Administrative authority was transferred from the
Catholic Church to state government in 1984.
Catholic inuence has continued, involving
mutual accommodation between the Church
and Aborigines (for whom priorities have
included maintenance of ritual life, high levels of
mobility, and return to outstations from the
1980s). Bureaucratic administration of what is
now called the Balgo Hills Aboriginal
Community has not been a priority for
Aborigines, and has consequently been difcult
to achieve. Nationally, Balgo has at times been
seen as a problem and a dangerous place for
health, education, and other government
(mainly non-indigenous) staff, who have been
periodically removed. It is telling that the
community ofce is located in the town of
Kununurra, several hundred kilometres to the
north.
Though readers sensibilities about history, as
well as objective circumstances, make it difcult
to write about the Aboriginal world as if it were
autonomous, in a place like Balgo this seems
more plausible than in a rural town or city. In
Royal Anthropological Institute 2006
720 Book reviews
the main, this is the strategy Poirier adopts
producing a worthwhile combination of
ethnography and analysis. While approximately
the rst half of the book hews fairly closely to
the themes of other Australianist and Western
Desert ethnographers (particularly Fred Myers)
landscape as medium of social relations;
personal identity as composed of relationships
among people, place and dreaming; the
negotiated, exible, and permeable quality of
social relations the second half deepens our
understandings of desert social practice and
cultural themes through a close focus on dreams
and dreaming, with implications for Australian
and wider comparison.
The creative dimension of Tjukurrpa or
Dreaming, by now a key concept in
Australianist ethnography, is everywhen (as
W.E.H. Stanner put it), continously present and
part of daily life. Western Desert Aborigines
(among others) recognize dreaming in sleep
(kapukurri) as closely linked to and a means of
interaction with this vital dimension (see Robert
Tonkinsons Aboriginal dream-spirit beliefs in a
contact situation, in Ronald Berndt (ed.),
Australian Aboriginal Anthropology, 1970). In order
to enhance receptivity, they emphasize keeping
the body open (tintirrpuwa, going through or Canberra: Pandanus Books, 2005. $85.00
permeable) and use massage techniques to
achieve this. Indigenous notions of dreaming
also feature a concept of travel by the spirit
(kurrunpa), hence its lightness. Dreams may be
shared, a further indication of the permeability
among persons and across different states (e.g.
communication between living and the
deceased, between human and non-human
beings).
Poirier gives many examples of dreams and
discusses how people are socialized to be
receptive to the possible signicance of dreams
in their daily lives: their potential as a kind of
continuously available messaging system. This
extends recent Western Desert ethnography,
which has pointed to the importance of
contingency, possibility, permeability, and
negotiability as fundamental dimensions of
social practice, apparently contrasting with
indigenous insistence on permanence (Law),
but actually providing means for constant
reinterpretation of how things are. Poirier also
points to the need to understand the element of
human agency in indigenous ways of encrypting
reinterpretation and innovation. She pursues this
topic through an analysis (in chapter 6) of ritual
transformation, principally the dream-inspired
reformulation of mythic pathways, actions, and
identities of gures celebrated in ritual, as
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 675-724
Royal Anthropological Institute 2006
indigenous expression of politics and historicity.
Throughout the book Poirier emphasizes the
theme of rhizomatic relatedness among all
entities and agencies of the dwelt-in world, an
indigenous cosmology which does not entertain
the bounding off of human from non-human,
nature from culture, or the relevance of dreams
from daily life.
In conclusion, Poirier returns to other
dimensions of Aboriginal reality. She observes
that, on her last visits, Balgo residents have been
completely absorbed in sorry business,
large-scale mourning for deaths, many resulting
directly from suicide, violence, and accident,
often alcohol-fuelled, as well as poor health.
While sorry business is an enactment of social
responsibility in indigenous mode, the rst and
last chapters remind us of the profoundly
difcult issues facing remote communities like
Balgo, where active endogenous social life does
not simply persist unmodied.
Francesca Merlan Australian National University
Regan, Anthony J. & Helga M. Griffin
(eds). Bougainville before the conflict. xl, 566
pp., maps, tables, gs, illus., bibliogrs.
(cloth)
The island province of Bougainville is the
furthest from Papua New Guineas capital, Port
Moresby. Geographically it is part of the
Solomon Islands; mission links reinforced that
nexus, and many of the 200,000 people argue
that their black skins signal deeper differences
from the redskins in the rest of the country.
When PNG applied to join the United Nations
in 1975, the national delegation (sponsored by
Australia, the colonial power) was led by Ebia
Olewale, who had entered Parliament as a
Papuan separatist. A rival delegation was led by
Father John Momis, member for Bougainville
and de facto chair of PNGs Constitutional
Planning Committee. Frustrated in their drive for
autonomy within PNGs new constitution,
Bougainvilleans were demanding separate
independence.
So fragile was the countrys unity that many
citizens including many in Bougainville did
not know where Papua New Guinea might be.
In these circumstances, Momis might easily have
represented PNG and Olewale a delegation of
Papuan separatists. The crisis that produced the
actual alignment was the development of
Panguna copper mine in Bougainville, the main
source of PNGs domestic revenue and an

essential element of the countrys
independence. But the mine also outraged the
dispossessed landowners, who resented the
environmental damage, the ow of benets to
PNG, and the inux of young, single redskins
to operate the mine.
Panguna fanned the embers of Bougainvilles
sense of separateness. Deft footwork by the
national politicians averted secession, but
landowners grievances accumulated until 1988,
when Francis Onas militants sabotaged the
mine. As violence escalated, so did the claims of
the Bougainville Revolutionary Army (BRA) and
the ambitions of political leaders. Savage and
confusing civil war raged for eight years until a
New Zealand-mediated truce initiated the
rebuilding of peace. By then an economic
embargo and guerrilla warfare had wrecked the
islands cash economy and social services. PNGs
Defence Force, the BRA and the (anti-BRA)
Bougainville Resistance Movement all fractured.
The national government lurched between
economic and political crises, the insurgents
failed to win diplomatic allies, and both sides
suspected Australias actions and inactions. It has
taken eight years of patient negotiation to
rebuild a provincial government and restore a
measure of civility.
The case for secession insists that
Bougainvilleans differ from other Papua New
Guineans, culturally and ethnically as well as
geographically and in the pigmentation of many
Bougainvilleans. Bougainville before the conflict
addresses the question: Was Bougainville
somehow inherently different in the combination
of its mini-cultures? Or was it just another slice
of Melanesia, a microcosm that reected the
ethnic diversity of Papua New Guinea and the
wider region? (p. xxviii).
This ambitious volume is handsomely
produced by Pandanus, the pre-eminent
publisher of Papua New Guinea studies. With
support from Australian aid, Rio Tinto, and the
Australian National University, it is helpfully
illustrated, and the editors and contributors have
lavished affection as well as professional care on
the project. What is most impressive is not their
(inevitable) failure ultimately to answer the
headline questions, but their exhaustive and
many-sided investigations. Its twenty-eight
chapters include natural and social sciences,
colonial and post-colonial history, and many
participant accounts, mainly by Bougainvilleans.
It is impossible to summarize the richness of
these studies, memoirs, and vignettes. James
Taniss reections (Nagovisi villages) are typical
of the honesty and emotional power of many
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 675-724
Book reviews 721
chapters. He left university to join the BRA,
fought through the war, engaged in peace
negotiations, and served as a minister in
Bougainvilles post-war government. He parted
company with the mystical Francis Ona when
the latter boycotted the peace process. In 2004,
ignoring seven years of peace-making, Ona had
himself crowned king of independent
Bougainville. His ally, Noah Musingku, another
fantasist and creator of fraudulent pyramid
schemes, became Prince David. Having
described this hubris, Tanis reviews the pre-war
circumstances of Nagovisi and the land disputes
that led to Onas supremacy and nally to his
descent into absurdity.
This is not a run-of-the-mill monograph. Like
other perceptive writers, Tanis raises more
questions than anyone could answer. He asks
about the nature of PNGs stake in Bougainville;
he ponders Australias interests in Panguna; and
he wonders what unseen forces global and
regional contributed to the tragedy. He
concludes with the most radical of all questions:
After gaining political independence from
colonial masters, do all third world nations enjoy
only brief periods of real independence? Must
they all then experience civil wars and
revolutions and go bankrupt and join the queue
awaiting solutions from elsewhere?
Donald Denoon Australian National University
Rydstrm, Helle. Embodying morality: growing
up in rural northern Vietnam. xx, 232 pp., tables,
illus., bibliogr. Honolulu: Univ. Hawaii Press,
2003. 45.00 (cloth)
This monograph is a study of the different ways
in which girls and boys learn to demonstrate
good morality in Thinh Tri, a rural commune in
northern Vietnam. The main protagonists are
nine girls and four boys, the oldest of whom
was 13. Extensive use is made of transcripts of
recorded interactions between the children and
other family members. Rydstrm understands
morality as a social practice that needs to be
performed appropriately. Central to her approach
is a focus on the bodily dimension of learning, a
dimension that is crucial for the dissimilar
expectations of girls and boys. The author makes
frequent reference to Bourdieus work on practice
and the body as an important element in the
learning and enactment of symbolic schemes.
Inspired by the attentiveness of local residents to
the childrens genitals, she draws on Derrida,
conceptualizing Thinh Tri as a phallocentric
community. The villagers, she argues, think of
Royal Anthropological Institute 2006
722 Book reviews
femaleness with reference to maleness as Other,
unmarked, or simply as not male. In this context,
I found the notion of girls as blank slates
interesting. While boys embody their fathers
lineage, girls are like unwritten pieces of paper
who require a more intensive upbringing.
In the central chapters 4 and 5, we learn
about the important Vietnamese concept tinh
cam (lit. feelings) and that this is primarily
applicable to girls. Rydstrm conceptualizes tinh
cam as a social practice whereby one
demonstrates good morality. It is about social
competence, the skills required to accommodate
oneself to others and avoid confrontation. Boys,
on the other hand, learn to put their foot down.
In a later chapter, this contrast is shown to be
reected in different body styles. Women carry
their bodies in a nimble manner, while men
move conspicuously and occupy much space.
The book also includes sketches of different
historical contexts in which female morality was
dened, embodied, and evaluated. The author
nds both changes and continuities, but more of
the latter. In another chapter, we are given a
brief account of the contemporary educational
system at primary school level. Here, the author
looks mostly at textbooks and nds very similar
roles of assertive boys and submissive girls.
On the whole, I was not convinced that
Bourdieus theory of practice was put to good
use. That boys and girls learn to behave
differently in Vietnam and that body postures
and bodily metaphors matter in this context is
all rather obvious. The male-centredness in
Vietnamese culture I felt was often drawn too
crudely. Bourdieus work could have inspired a
more subtle and complex account. The problem
also derives in part from the authors rather
elusive use of key concepts, especially morality
and tinh cam. This surfaces already on page 3,
where she writes that morality is a social
practice and a few sentences further down,
The relationship between social practice and
morality is a dynamic one. Is morality a social
practice or something else to which it has a
dynamic relationship? Later we learn that
practising tinh cam is a social practice and that
the actor thereby demonstrates good morality.
At other places tinh cam seems to be
synonymous with morality. Also, to argue that
tinh cam is an almost exclusively female concern
is rather daring, I think. This may reect the
authors better access to female informants.
Another shortcoming is that the author tends
to take statements of her adult informants on
morality, education, and socialization almost at
face value. This is one of the most important
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 675-724
Royal Anthropological Institute 2006
domains in which socialist educational
campaigns have raised awareness over decades.
On the other hand, the few places where
Rydstrm briey muses on the impact of
Marxism-Leninism on local notions of
socialization, she fails to account for the
continuities or overlaps with Neo-Confucian and
French colonial education. Despite these
shortcomings, Embodying morality offers an
interesting and detailed account of early
childhood in late socialist rural Vietnam. As such,
it will be of interest to those working in Vietnam
and those working with children elsewhere.
Markus Schlecker Max Planck Institute, Halle
Salamandr a, Christa. A new old Damascus:
authenticity and distinction in urban Syria. xii, 199
pp., map, illus., bibliogr. Bloomington: Indiana
Univ. Press, 2005. 15.95 (cloth)
The long international demonization of the
Syrian state has also left us with few scholarly or
popular studies of the country. This gives
Salamandras study additional importance, and
she has chosen an interesting topic. Based
mainly on eldwork between 1992 and 1994, the
book focuses on the notion old Damascus as
both a market commodity and a factor in claims
to social superiority made by the well-to-do.
Salamandra has chapters on the history and
class demographics of the contemporary city,
gender and display, and the partial
redevelopment of sites in the old city. Her
strongest material comes in her penultimate
chapter on the practices of identity assertion
and boundary construction, which peak during
Ramadan. Here we learn of class snobberies. As
one woman explains, the poor fast out of belief,
but elite Damascenes fast as a mode of
distinction (p. 95). Indeed, the deeply secular
biases of many well-to-do Syrians is suggested
by the fact that the only reference to political
Islam in the book appears when a librarian
suggests the media and public culture during
Ramadan contribute to support for Muslim
fundamentalism (p. 101).
We also learn that Ramadan involves a
month-long competitive consumption spree for
Damascene elites and that Ramadan socializing
has begun to spead beyond the home, into the
young but burgeoning world of Syrian public
culture (p. 98). Well-to-do Damascenes often
break the fast in expensive restaurants with
ostentatiously nostalgic dcor and cuisine.
Salamandra describes these settings, and the
foodstuffs, well. Yet she makes no systematic

attempt to locate their clientele sociologically in
terms of numbers, family background, wealth,
or actual social relations with others of their
class, and those richer and poorer than
themselves. Equally we are offered little on the
evolution of these new nostalgic styles, and less
on the scale and politics of the service sector of
the economy. Rather, Salamandras argument
proceeds with brief, interesting examples linked
by assertion. It is lively, but ethnography lite.
Watching Syrian TV at home during Ramadan
is another aspect of the evocation of old
Damascus. Salamandra gives a good account of
the mix of documentary lms on old houses,
customs, and food specialities, folkloric song
and dance programmes, and historical soap
operas serialized throughout the month. TV
schedules suggest how notions of authencity,
tradition, and old Damascus are contradictory
and contested. The government, after all, is
necessarily committed to the idea of
homogeneous national culture while favouring
individuals with particular regional, sectarian,
and class interests. Old city nostalgia is attractive
because the purported honourable, innocent
past contrasts with a corrupt present. Nostalgia
also allows some people to celebrate a rooted
Damascene identity, thus distancing themselves
from their Alawi rulers, and the rapidly growing
city that has always been home to a jumble of
peasants and refugees, the latest eeing Iraq.
Throughout the book Salamandra locates
Damascene opinion (p. 109) via the comments
of a number of well-known public gures,
mostly middle-class professionals of varied family
and political loyalties. Yet she fails to ponder the
pundits social location, though each has played
a long, active role in shaping the old Damascus
idiom. Rather, her upper-middle-class or
intellectual informants (p. 4) slide into a broad,
problematic, category better glossed here as the
well-to-do. Salamandra herself variously
describes them as the elite, Damascene elites,
old leading families, big families, notables, tradition. As we know, songs and dance are
and socialites. The labels most often refer to
people with family connections to the former
Sunni aristocracy and haute bourgeoisie, but
Salamandra seems also to have included more or
less everyone she talked to as participants in a
quite homogeneous old Damascus discourse,
among them the otherwise unlocated librarian
mentioned above, a Damascene English
teacher, and an Alawi friend. Studying up is
always difcult for anthropologists; studying up
without a clear methodology is a nightmare.
In short, Salamandra seems to have neither
the information nor the inclination to offer an
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 675-724
Book reviews 723
analysis of class politics, yet this undermines her
interest in the relation between the old
Damascus discourse and status competition. We
are offered no case material, family histories, or
statistics to indicate what actual resources, or
sources of power, are contested by whom, in
what settings, with what results. Nor do we ever
even begin to glimpse how the old Damascus
discourse has beneted, or been used to harm,
other afuent people who may be Shite,
Christian, newly rich, Aleppine, or cousins who
share a family name.
Salamandras interest in the old Damascus
discourse, coupled with her focus on, roughly,
scions of families notable during the French
Protectorate tends to conceal the past thirty-ve
years of dictatorial rule by the Asads. It ignores
the fact that everyone in Syria who has a
modicum of wealth has also had, of necessity, to
compromise with the regime. In effect,
Salamandras book has become a further
example of the very phenomenon she set out to
study. However, if A new old Damascus is read in
tandem with Wedeens Ambiguities of
domination: politics, rhetoric, and symbols in
contemporary Syria (1999), then Salamandras eye
for cultural detail and her quirky writing style
can add quite a feel for understanding
well-to-do Syrians today.
Nancy Lindisfarne University of Oxford
Topno, Sem. Musical culture of the Munda
tribe. xiv, 589 pp., maps, illus., bibliogr. New
Delhi: Concept Publishing, 2004. Rs900
(cloth)
Tribal music is a much neglected area of study in
the anthropology of India. This book by Sem
Topno is an attempt to ll this existing gap in
the literature. Consisting of six parts, the book
provides a comprehensive coverage of all facets
of Munda life, linking it to their musical
popular forms of amusement in tribal societies.
Music is the reection both of cultural history
and of everyday life experiences of the Munda
people. The perception, conceptualization, and
articulation of ideas, attitudes, values, and
emotions of the Munda people get expressed
through their music, and the contents of their
songs are derived from the natural world and
social environment (p. 5). The author feels that
the nature of song and dance in a particular
society is determined by the economic resources,
social cohesiveness, and political structure. He
further suggests that all auspicious occasions in
Royal Anthropological Institute 2006
724 Book reviews
Munda life social, economic, religious, and
political are celebrated with some sort of
accomplishment of music and dance.
Music grows out of life and is deeply rooted
in the cultural tradition of the Munda. The
making of music and its rendering through
performance is a continual process in which the
perceived stable features of socially organized
environment are continually created and
sustained. The three musical activities, that is,
singing, dancing, and playing of musical
instruments, are important features of Munda
musical tradition. Besides its role as a means of
amusement, Munda musical tradition is the
storehouse of the experience, knowledge, and
wisdom of the community. In music the
experience of the perceptual world attains the
status of a temporal character and its quotidian
features mingle with the celestial. It is in this
form that music carries the deeper meaning of
life. A piece of music, however, cannot be
perceived in isolation, for it is related to a wider
system. The author describes a variety of Munda
musical instruments: wind, string, and
percussion. While wind and string instruments
are used in all the occasions excepting dance,
percussion instruments are used only during
dance. Every dance has its selective set of
musical instruments. All the musical instruments
in this community are handled by men, barring
a few exceptions.
The music and dance of contemporary
Munda society do not conform to traditional
forms and style. In many Munda villages,
traditional songs and dances are no longer
performed. The author feels that the inuence of
modern education and the impact of Christianity
and Hinduization together have deteriorated the
Munda musical tradition. The Munda of today
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 675-724
Royal Anthropological Institute 2006
are an alienated and divided lot. They are fast
losing their self-esteem and cultural identity. The
age-old musical tradition of the Munda is slowly
but surely on the verge of extinction. In a
changing scenario, even the performers are
treated as backward and uncivilized by so-called
enlightened community members. Though all
the musical instruments are still in use,
traditional forms, styles, and rhythms have been
replaced by modern ones. The traditional songs
and dances have further lost their melody and
rhythms. In fact, the melodious sound of the
dumang is no more heard on a regular basis in a
Munda village.
However, it would have been better had
the author provided full details of the
bibliographical references. One nds many
incomplete references, while the details of some
of the cited references are not found in the
bibliography. Many of the references in the
bibliography are not refered to in the text.
Surprisingly enough, the author has not given
adequate coverage (only on pages 56773) of
one of his major arguments as to how there has
been a degeneration of musical culture among
the Munda. For a better understanding and
appreciation, the author should have included
photographs of the instruments used by the
Munda. The book contains rich ethnographic
data, but these are not matched by a supporting
conceptual and theoretical framework.
However, those limitations do not detract
from the merits of the book, which will give its
readers an awareness of the rich cultural fabric
of the Munda while furthering their
understanding through the inclusion of many
original songs of the community with their
English translation.
Deepak Kumar Behera Sambalpur University