Book Reviews
SINGLE BOOK REVIEWS
Food in the Ancient World. Joan P. Alcock. Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 2006. 276 pp.
S TA C I E M . K I N G
Indiana University
Food in the Ancient World describes foods produced and con-
sumed from the beginnings of Egyptian Predynastic (4000
B.C.E.) to the end of the Roman Empire (C.E. fifth century),
focusing on four civilizations: the Egyptians, Greeks, Celts,
and Romans. Joan P. Alcock’s sources of information are
Greek and Roman texts and Egyptian hieroglyphs, iconog-
raphy, and archaeology. Because the Egyptians, Greeks, and
Celts were later subsumed under the control of Rome, the
book concentrates most heavily on the Roman Empire.
After three lists, including biographies of classical au-
thors, bibliographic information for major sources, and a
timeline, chapter 1 provides summary information about
each civilization. Alcock reviews extant population esti-
mates and provides details about climate, natural environ-
ments, planting cycles, systems of land tenure, agricultural
practices, and patterns of trade (esp. of Rome).
In chapter 2, Alcock highlights individual foods, de-
scribing where, how, and by whom each was cultivated,
used, and consumed. The exhaustive list ranges from cere-
als, legumes, fruits, and meat to crustacea, beverages, weeds,
and dairy products. The chapter reads like a series of en-
cyclopedia entries, combining data from primary classical
sources and archaeology. Information about each civiliza-
tion is dispersed throughout the entries.
Chapter 3 describes food-processing techniques, cook-
ing methods, and technologies used by the Greeks, Romans,
Egyptians, and Celts. Alcock discusses the different settings
in which the elites ate as compared to members of the lower
classes. People in power viewed bars, taverns, hotels, and
ancient versions of fast-food restaurants with suspicion be-
cause of the subversive political discussions and competi-
tive drinking that often accompanied people’s visits to these
establishments.
In chapter 4, Alcock examines each civilization in more
detail. The author traces the development of agriculture, in-
troduction of new foods, and changes in food consumption
chronologically as they relate to major cultural historical
events. The author provides details about the political poli-
AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 108, Issue 4, pp. 883–929, ISSN 0002-7294, electronic ISSN 1548-1433. 
Association. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California
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cies that had effects on production and diet and weaves
in an interesting discussion about the relationship among
food production, economics, and the power of the elite (an
obvious bias of classical writings).
Chapter 5 focuses on the ways that foods were con-
sumed in daily meals and during special occasions. Alcock
discusses the categories of people that participated in re-
ligious ceremonies, banquets, and festivals; the materials
attendees were expected to supply; and other activities that
accompanied the events (courtesans, music, dancing, etc.).
This section is important for scholars interested in social
and material aspects of feasting. The chapter also describes
the foods associated with warriors and military, religious
ceremonies, funerary practices, and social taboos surround-
ing particular foodstuffs.
The final chapter describes the particulars (and pe-
culiarities) of Greek, Roman, Egyptian, and Celtic diets.
The author provides a brief overview of humoral theory
and its impact on diet in the ancient world. Although
Mediterranean diets were healthy and well balanced and the
Celtic diet depended on high-protein animal products, each
varied in quality depending on the season. The best foods
were often diverted to the army or market towns. Alcock
also summarizes paleopathological indicators of health and
life expectancy data based on skeletal analyses. People con-
tended with obesity, as well as dental problems and illnesses
stemming from nutritional deficiencies, from which the
poor suffered more often than the wealthy.
This book is an excellent basic reference for foods,
diet, and nutrition in ancient Egypt, Greece, Britain, and
Rome. However, the chapters and subsections often seem
disjointed because they are not tied together with intro-
ductions or conclusions. Alcock avoids in-text citation to
enhance the readability of the text, but this makes it less
user-friendly to an audience eager to see sources. Instead,
footnotes and a selected bibliography are compiled at the
end.
The four ancient civilizations are at times presented as
timeless and unchanging, which I think can be attributed
to the organization of the volume. Discussions of Rome,
Greece, Egypt, and the Celts are arranged by topic and,
in these short sections, it is difficult to go beyond essen-
tializing statements. My biggest disappointment with the
book was its title. The borders of the ancient world, to me,
C 2006 by the American Anthropological
884 American Anthropologist • Vol. 108, No. 4 • December 2006
extend far beyond these four civilizations in both time
and space. Although I would not assign this book as a text
for a class, I would use it as a reference for designing a
lecture on foods in ancient Greece, Rome, or Egypt, and I
would highly recommend it to an undergraduate writing a
term paper on a related topic. The volume is unique in its
level of detail, organization, and compilation of data from
various sources in one easy reference guide.
Political Ecology in a Yucatec Maya Community. E. N.
Anderson with Aurora Dzib Xihun de Cen, Felix Medina
Tzuc, and Pastor Valdez Chale. Tucson: University of
Arizona Press, 2005. 274 pp.
GARRETT COOK
Baylor University
E. N. Anderson’s readable study of Maya rural economy—
based on 14 months of fieldwork between 1991 and 2001,
and the collaboration of indigenous experts listed ambigu-
ously as “with” the author—explores development dilem-
mas in contemporary Quintana Roo. Culture is holistic and,
therefore, political ecology is about religion and morality
as well as environments, economics, and politics. Political
ecology based on the “free market” approach is dominated
by the interests of giant government-backed firms, does
not support little communities and sustainable economies,
and promotes the most serious unrecognized threat to hu-
manity’s future—the “worldwide rural environmental cri-
sis” (p. 211). Anderson reveals why development using this
approach fails, offers solutions to the rural crisis rooted in
local culture and tradition, and calls on us to move beyond
critical anthropology to identify alternatives to the neolib-
eral “free market” models that constituted the religion of
late-20th-century planning for development.
The “wise use” view—that traditional cultures of in-
digenous groups manage their environments effectively—
represents the best starting point for sustainable develop-
ment programs. In the village of Chunhuhub, each stage
of regrowth in the cyclically cleared and burned forest is
utilized for different resources. The forest, when properly
managed, produces more value than cattle ranching, yet the
government sponsors cattle. Successful, sustainable adap-
tations like the diversified Sosa farm (pp. 79–86) and the
Plan Forestal (pp. 100–109) demonstrate that wise use devel-
opment is practical and effective. Anderson follows James
Scott to argue that monocropping is the religion of govern-
ment planners. Controversy over development in Yucatan
is not about rational economics, then, it is a cultural—and,
ultimately, political—conflict, because there are entrenched
elite interests in monocropping. The key to wise use success
is the development of new forest products and new mar-
kets, so that the traditional system, working with its values
and knowledge base, might intensify production on its own
terms, in response to population growth.
Unfortunately the most able young people are leaving
Chunhuhub, and ecological knowledge is not being passed
on effectively. New churches and an emerging local version
of Mexican civic culture, which lacks the moral stance on
nature and balance of the traditional religion, are weaken-
ing the prospects for wise use development. Furthermore,
Mexican fatalism is an obstacle to innovation. “Rural and
impoverished Mexicans are so used to putting up with the
inevitable that they put up with the evitable as well” (p.
180). Chapter 7 explores the dilemma in developing the
most promising wise use resource, Maya ethnopharmacol-
ogy; here, Anderson possibly provides too much botanical
detail for nonspecialists and—in the ethically sound interest
of protecting Maya intellectual property—not really enough
detail for botanists or pharmacologists. Anderson finds that
there is no Maya entity to hold collective intellectual prop-
erty rights: “There is . . . no way of assigning a particular
remedy to ‘the Yucatec’ or any one community” (p. 193),
and Anderson cannot suggest a good way to create one. The
intellectual property issue remains a serious impediment to
both development and to ethnographic reporting.
Of failed Mexican government development plans, An-
derson notes funny little goofs like rabbit production but
“most extreme are the genuine tragedies of big dams and
cattle deserts—the results of plans so insane that they have
ruined half of rural tropical Mexico” (p. 210). The real im-
pediments to development are unfair terms of global trade,
lack of knowledge of marketing, and above all else lack
of accountability on the part of the elites that design the
plans. Locals view plans as election year devices: “Thus they
treat the plans as milpas: things to be cropped for a year
or two and then abandoned” (p. 209). On rare successful
plans, Anderson writes: “These latter they treat as orchards:
something to be cultivated and tended for the long run.
Orchards are, in fact, the prime example of such plans”
(p. 210), although the author has made it clear that sus-
tainable tropical wood industries, forest-based Maya phar-
macology, and diversified agricultural production of special-
ized tropical crops coupled with effective marketing would
and should extend this list. In a vision reminiscent of Alvin
Toffler’s electronic cottages, Anderson imagines combined
high- and low-tech forest-knowledge-based household in-
dustries revitalizing Chunhuhub and Quintana Roo.
This provocative book offers a compelling vision and
important advice to a new generation of development
experts. The writing is sometimes funny and sometimes
a little bit cranky, as when Anderson writes that “money
earmarked for things like clearing rain forest for cattle,
or providing pesticides and herbicides to farmers, is in-
finitely better spent on beer than on its intended goal”
(p. 208), but it is always forthright, intelligent, and original.
The Kuhls of Kangra: Community-Managed Irrigation
in the Western Himalaya. J. Mark Baker. Seattle: University
of Washington Press, 2005. 272 pp.
N E E R A J V E D WA N
Montclair State University
This book provides a comprehensive account of the per-
sistence and transformation of kuhls—the centuries-old

community-managed irrigation systems in the western
Himalaya—under conditions of intermittent environmen-
tal stresses and ever-increasing pace of socioeconomic
change. It accomplishes the task convincingly, with unusual
clarity and flair, utilizing an array of variables ranging from
endogenous factors, such as the size of the community and
internal socioeconomic differentiation, to exogenous ones,
including the role of the state and the relationship between
multiple kuhl systems. Drawing on in-depth fieldwork, the
synthetic theoretical framework comes alive with Mark J.
Baker’s extensive use of careful observations of diverse social
situations, practices, and beliefs that comprise the “warp
and weft” (p. 197) of the kuhl systems in the Kangra valley.
One of the principal goals of the book, which it success-
fully accomplished, is to extend the analysis of common
property regimes, especially their capacity for successful
management and durability, from an almost exclusive focus
on organizational features, such as the existence of written
rules, to their embeddedness in the regional social and po-
litical context. To this end, Baker crafts a complex “explana-
tory tapestry” (p. 20), weaving together theoretical insights
from such diverse fields as organizational theory, state-
society interactions, and rational-choice paradigm. The
analysis, based on the syntheses of an impressive amount
of biophysical, sociocultural, and political–economic data,
is remarkable for its coherence and the seamless narrative
it supports in the book.
A main achievement of the book is its explicit atten-
tion to scale, spatial as well as sociopolitical, in shaping
the heterogeneous institutional arrangements characteriz-
ing the kuhl regimes that have endured in the region. The
evolution and the dogged persistence of kuhl regimes can be
comprehended satisfactorily only through an understand-
ing “of the myriad ways in which kuhl regimes articulate
with the cultural, political, institutional, and environmen-
tal processes that together constitute Kangra’s regionality”
(p. 204). Moreover, as opposed to the often-mechanical
views of the functioning of self-contained “systems” that
proliferate in studies of common property resources, Baker
provides ethnographically rich and illuminating descrip-
tions of social interactions that are the lifeblood integrat-
ing and animating the dynamic practice of community-
managed water resources management and the relatively
stable configurations of ideas that sustain it.
The “inductive” approach followed throughout the
book helps avoid simplistic caricatures of such complex and
often internally divided entities as the state. Despite the
fact that “kuhl regimes constituted sites for pre-colonial
and colonial statemaking in Kangra” (p. 133), the state’s
role has not just been that of an interloper. In contrast, the
outcomes associated with the dialectical processes of state
making and community making are contradictory. At times,
the state’s role vis-à-vis the kuhl regimes is that of a facili-
tator, albeit in ways characteristic of its historically specific
composition and imperatives. For example, the state inter-
vention has, in some cases, led to the infusion of much-
needed resources into systems that were stressed because of
increased socioeconomic differentiation, whereas in others
Single Reviews 885
it has led to the atrophying of the local social organization
and capacity that had underpinned successful kuhl manage-
ment. The interdependence of kuhl regimes—which pro-
vides the much-needed redundancy of resources essential
for long-term sustainability in face of recurring environ-
mental perturbations—has also been undermined by the
state sponsoring of kuhl regimes.
In the last several decades, the kuhl regimes have un-
dergone significant changes. Again, with close attention to
detail, Baker demonstrates how geography and social in-
equities, including those of caste and class, intersect with
the broader economic changes in the region to produce dif-
ferential outcomes locally. In some cases this has translated
into a greater role for the state, which promotes specific
kinds of organizational responses such as kuhl committees.
Such committees have proliferated rapidly, often at the ex-
pense of the traditional authority enjoyed by kohli (water
masters).
The durability of kuhl regimes is rooted in the land-
scape features of Kangra valley, mainly its mountainous to-
pography, which circumscribes the scope for state interven-
tion, as well as in extant cultural institutions and practices.
The latter includes such ascribed positions as that of kohli,
and widely accepted notions of generalized reciprocity in
the rural areas. The relative lack of socioeconomic differ-
entiation in the region, as manifested in fairly equitable
land ownership, still overrides the divisive impact of in-
creased household participation in the nonfarm economy,
thus keeping alive the common interest in the preservation
of kuhl systems.
The book contains a wealth of information related to
the ethnographic, historical, and sociocultural aspects of
human–environment interactions in an important region
of South Asia. For this and its skillful integration of theory
and empirical evidence, it will be invaluable to colleagues
and advanced students alike.
The Osteology of Infants and Children. Brenda J. Baker,
Tosha L. Dupras, and Matthew W. Tocheri. College Station:
Texas A&M University Press, 2005. 178 pp.
JOANNE BENNETT DEVLIN
University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Exposure to the nuances of the subadult skeleton is a must
for all who study human remains. This reference provides
a framework with which to appreciate the growth and de-
velopment of the human skeleton. The authors draw on
tremendous field experience and analytical familiarity in
the bioarchaeology of subadult remains. As an extremely
affordable field and lab manual, this volume will facilitate
improved discovery, recovery, and interpretation of the im-
mature skeleton.
This book is divided into four parts: (1) bone biology
and archaeology, (2) the cranial skeleton, (3) the postcra-
nia (infracrania), and (4) quick reference materials. Part 1,
divided into two chapters, lays the foundation that is fol-
lowed throughout by reminding readers of the importance
886 American Anthropologist • Vol. 108, No. 4 • December 2006
of and the potential difficulties in recognizing subadult
bones. Chapter 1 provides cursory accounts of anatomical
terminology and bone development. Although brief, this is
appropriate given the likelihood that the majority of readers
are well versed in the adult skeleton. Nonetheless, the style
and overall approach of the text will support the novice os-
teologist. Chapter 2 contains an insightful presentation of
subadult specific excavation approaches and curation prac-
tices, with several illustrations and photographs from recent
fieldwork.
Intensive coverage is afforded to the subtleties of
growth and development in the skeleton through a system-
atic approach to each element. The focus on each bone be-
gins with a discussion of the features that exhibit variation
at major stages during maturation. Secondly, each bone or
significant portion of a bone is considered with respect to
other bones that possess similar features that may hamper
element identification. In addition, techniques useful in the
siding of the bone are presented. Often the authors make ap-
propriate and useful comparisons to the adult form. These
discussions are supported by labeled pen and ink drawings.
Many of these figures depict the element at multiple ages,
and when possible and appropriate, the illustrations are life
size.
The text follows the standard progression through the
skeleton, beginning with the cranial vault in chapter 3, fol-
lowed by chapters on the facial skeleton and the dentition.
Given the focus of this text, a discussion of the dentition
must include both deciduous and permanent, which the
authors do in great detail and with numerous illustrations
of each tooth. The authors promote a five-step approach
for the correct classification of each tooth: (1) tooth type,
(2) permanent or deciduous, (3) maxillary or mandibular,
(4) position tooth holds, and (5) right or left side, finally
arriving at which specific tooth is represented.
Moving below the skull, the authors dedicate part 3 to
the infracranial skeleton, which is divided into four chap-
ters beginning with vertebrae, followed by the ribs and
shoulder, the arms and legs, and the hands and feet. The
authors effectively focus on particular features or regions
that are significant in the subadult skeleton: for example,
the ilium, pubis, and ichsium are presented separately. In
addition, attention is drawn to the appearance of epiphy-
ses before, during, and following union. This portion of the
text is strengthened by the number of illustrations, both
left and right sides, which depict many of the bones in pre-
natal through adolescent forms. Part 4 consists of a single
chapter of reference charts to facilitate rapid element identi-
fication and general age estimation. Materials include tables
of epiphyseal appearance and union, dental crown calcifi-
cations, and comparative illustrations of long bones from
utero through juvenile period. Part 4 is undoubtedly, as in-
tended, a quick reference.
A presentation of the subadult skeleton can be a
difficult task given the dramatic changes that occur from
the fetal period through the juvenile years, however,
this book is fairly successful in providing straightforward
techniques to recognize subadult bones. The authors do
not promote detailed age-specific developmental events,
rather, their intention is to outline the general attributes
of bone maturation in a manner that can be effectively
used to improve discovery, recovery, recognition, and
identification of subadult remains. Although the authors
direct the readers to consult other developmental texts,
this book should be considered an affordable supplement
to any osteology library.
The Sweet Potato in Oceania: A Reappraisal. Chris
Ballard, Paula Brown, Michael Bourke, and Tracy Harwood,
eds. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005. 227 pp.
SHIRLEY LINDENBAUM
Graduate Center, City University of New York
The recent flood of publications on food and food
products—codfish, potato, salt, spice, sugar, coffee, and
chocolate—draws attention to the ability of foods to trans-
form the lives of both producers and receivers, to their shift-
ing status as luxuries consumed first in high society and
then by the masses, and even to the idea that the sensa-
tions themselves have a history. All these accounts, how-
ever, pivot around Western desires and tastes, or the links
between commodity consumption and global processes of
capitalist development. The Sweet Potato in Oceania is a dif-
ferent sort of venture. The West is not at the center of this
picture. As Chris Ballard’s masterly opening chapter notes,
the sweet potato “problem,” first defined by Douglas Yen in
1974, established a line of historical inquiry concerning the
apparently multiple introductions of the crop to Oceania.
James Watson’s earlier provocative contribution (1965) on
the nature of its adoption and impact in New Guinea set in
train a second, sociological wing of inquiry, the two lines of
research that still animate investigators some 30 years later.
The contributors to this volume now agree that the
sweet potato was first domesticated in the Americas, in the
broad area of modern Mexico, Ecuador, and Peru. Questions
remain, however, on the mode, direction, and chronology
of the transfer from the Americas to Oceania. Most agree
with Yen that human agency, rather than natural dispersal,
was the mode of transfer but contest arises about when and
by whose agency. Yen had proposed a tripartite rather than
a unilineal transfer: a prehistoric Kumara line from Peru
to central Polynesia, a Portuguese Batatas line of the 15th–
16th centuries from the Caribbean to Southeast Asia, and
the Spanish Kamote line from Mexico to the Philippines
during the 16th century. New Guinea forms the point at
which the three lines are said to converge.
The chronologies of the Portuguese and Spanish trans-
fers and the identities of the actors involved now draw
little fire. The case for the prehistoric Kumara line to
Polynesia, however, is still debated. Based on the work of
several authors in this volume, R. C. Green’s synthesis of
the evidence for the Kumara line of transfer extends Yen’s
earlier paradigm and proposes an initial introduction of

sweet potato to the Cook Islands at about C.E. 1000–1100,
followed by diffusion to Aotearoa, New Zealand, by C.E.
1150–1250, to Hawai‘i by about C.E. 1100 or 1200, and to
Rapa Nui by C.E. 1300. An introduction to Polynesia much
earlier than C.E. 1100 is said to be unlikely.
This first wave of sweet potato diffusion, associated
with the colonization of “outer” Polynesia, is followed by
a second wave involving a spread westward through cen-
tral Polynesia by Polynesian travelers and traders and the
European explorers and missionaries of the 18th and early
19th centuries. The sweet potato then traveled to Tonga and
New Caledonia by the 1770s, to Fiji by 1804, to Samoa and
Rarotonga by the 1830s, and, finally, to the southern Cook
Islands by the 1850s. Ballard predicts that future scholars
will fine-tune the details in Green’s persuasive reconstruc-
tion but will not embark on wholesale revision.
Disagreement continues over the timing and nature of
sweet potato’s introduction to island New Guinea. With
no direct archaeological evidence, this issue remains un-
resolved. The consequence of its arrival, however, provides
a heartier and more rewarding discussion. The huge popu-
lations in the central highlands encountered by Europeans
in the 1920s and 1930s were found cultivating sweet pota-
toes for their own subsistence, as fodder for their pigs, and
as their main wealth item, thereby contributing to impres-
sive forms of leadership and complex systems of ceremonial
exchange. Some now propose that this high degree of agro-
nomic and social elaboration could only have resulted from
an evolutionary process extending over many centuries;
others see the conversion to sweet potato as a revolutionary
event that led to the remarkable transformation of highland
societies. This latter position, first proposed by Watson, is
now generally accepted for the central highlands, although
the explanation fits the highlands fringe areas less well.
This is an exciting collection of chapters, for which
we have to thank Paula Brown, who in 2001 suggested to
Ballard that it was time to assess recent developments in
Oceanic sweet potato research. We are exposed to the find-
ings and research methods of a wide array of disciplines—
linguistics, archaeology, genetics, oceanography, compara-
tive ethnography, botany, and crop genetics. The maps and
variety of figures are informative and often elegant. The
stunningly precise 18th-century illustrations of sweet pota-
toes and yams on pages 66 and 67 are to Oceanic schol-
ars what Audubon’s illustrations are to birders (2003). The
sweet potato has recently made another quiet return voy-
age to the Americas where, in addition to its culinary use,
it can now be found as a decorative addition to window
boxes and street plantings in the streets of New York, and
perhaps elsewhere, extending the transglobal sweep that be-
gan some ten or 11 centuries earlier.
REFERENCES CITED
Audubon, John James
2003 Audubon’s Birds of America: The Audubon Society Baby
Elephant Folio. Rev. ed. Roger Tory Peterson Institute, ed. New
York: Abbeville Press.
Single Reviews 887
Watson, James
1965 From Hunting to Horticulture in the New Guinea High-
lands. Ethnology 4:295–309.
Yen, Douglas E.
1974 The Sweet Potato and Oceania: An Essay in Ethnobotany.
Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press.
The Struggle for Self-Determination: History of the
Menominee Indians since 1854. David R. M. Beck.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005. 290 pp.
BERNARD C. PERLEY
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
David Beck has successfully tackled the daunting task of
writing a tribal history. This volume is an excellent chron-
icle of Menominee tribal history from the reservation pe-
riod to today. The book is a meticulous documentation of
a long period of extensive tribal transformations through
which the Menominee people struggled to preserve and as-
sert their tribal self-determination. The narrative is a richly
detailed weaving of the social, political, and economic re-
lations between the Menominee and the non-Menominees
(to use Beck’s terminology).
This is the second volume of Beck’s two-part history of
the Menominee Indians and picks up the historical narra-
tive from the 1854 establishment of the Menominee reser-
vation to today. Beck adopts a historical writing method he
purports is a contribution to the recent trend that includes
native voices in the telling of tribal histories. This method,
Beck claims, is an important corrective to the “right” his-
tory, which privileges dominant society’s values and in-
terpretation on one hand, and the “left” history, which
identifies the enemy of Indian peoples “in imperialism and
capitalism” on the other. He criticizes both historical analyt-
ical positions as processes that objectify American Indians as
the “reactive participants” (p. x) or as museum objects. Beck
adopts a rhetorical strategy he refers to as “giving voice”
(p. xi) to the historical actors so “that the motivations of
both the Menominee and non-Menominees who partici-
pated in the history [can] be told” (p. x). Beck asserts that
this narrative strategy should not “simply add Native voice”
(p. xi) but, rather, “it must be part of the analysis” (p. xi).
Beck’s narrative is structured on parallel timelines (illus-
trated on pp. xii–xiii) that present the significant economic,
political, and social historical events along a horizontal axis
that can be read diachronically while the analytic domains
(economic, political, and social) and the Menominee and
non-Menominee relations can be read synchronically. In
short, Beck’s narrative goal is to provide a polyvocal and in-
tertextual “thick description” of the Menominee “struggle
for self-determination” (see title).
This history is a chronological presentation of events
that Beck argues are significant in Menominee history.
Within the chronological presentation, the author presents
a wealth of direct quotes from principle figures in the events
described. However, in the first half of the book the direct
quotes of non-Menominees greatly outnumber the quotes
from Menominee people. Menominee voices are relegated
888 American Anthropologist • Vol. 108, No. 4 • December 2006
to the status of reported speech of reported speech. What
puzzled me all the more is that Beck’s notes indicate he
had access to documents providing Menominee reported
speech. The first half of this history unfortunately privileges
non-Menominee voices over Menominee voices, thereby
falling short of Beck’s own goal of balanced representation. I
had hoped for more direct quoting of Menominee voices so I
could discern their motivations for myself as Beck promised
in his preface. I expected and would have welcomed the
Menominee voices in the Menominee language as a possi-
ble solution to Beck’s critique of other tribal histories. To be
fair, Beck does include more extensive direct quotes from
Menominee voices in the second half of this history.
As Beck points out, it is not enough to “simply add”
Menominee voices, they “must be part of the analysis”
(p. xi). The juxtaposition of voices in the second half of
this history fulfills Beck’s promise of not objectifying the
Menominee as “reactive participants” (p. x) or as museum
objects. Beck convincingly presents the Menominee as ac-
tive agents in the negotiations in oppression–resistance,
wardship–self-determination, and victim–agent relation-
ships. However, despite the affective intensity that such
struggles and negotiations entail, Beck’s polyvocal “thick
description” presents peoples and events dispassionately in
the practice of the presumed historical discourse of impar-
tiality. The most serious shortcoming of this history is its
failure to capture the intensity of Menominee experiences
of starvation, dispossession, destitution, anger, resistance,
and triumph.
Those criticisms aside, this is a valuable book for a
number of reasons. First, it presents a detailed history of
the Menominee tribe’s internal as well as external struggles
to assert self-determination and will be a valuable resource
for comparative studies of tribal histories. Second, the
interweaving of Menominee tribal history with Wisconsin
economic and political motivations as well as the shifting
goals of U.S. American Indian policy clearly illustrate the
unstable ground on which tribal self-determination is
asserted. And third, the extensive detail provided in the
narrative is clearly organized and presented. This book
provides an excellent case-study for upper-division courses
on American Indian self-determination.
The Gay Archipelago: Sexuality and Nation in
Indonesia. Tom Boellstorff. Princeton: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 2005. 282 pp.
A B R A H A M D . L AV E N D E R
Florida International University
Having taught human sexuality from a cross-cultural per-
spective to college students for over 25 years, I am always
pleased to see a new contribution to the literature, espe-
cially when an area of sexuality and a geographic area of the
world are brought together in a manner not previously ana-
lyzed. This book discusses the interaction of sexual identity
and national identity in the fourth most populous nation
in the world. The book also makes a major contribution
in studying sexuality in a nation that is over 90 percent
Islamic and has the largest number of Muslims in the world.
As the author, Tom Boellstorff, himself suggests, another
major contribution of this book is the geographical area of
study. He notes that previous studies have emphasized spe-
cific regions or groups rather than “Indonesia” as the field
site, whereas this book emphasizes the nation of Indone-
sia, possibly making this book the first ethnography of In-
donesians. This book can be read as a study of same-gender
sexuality and identity, with emphasis on how this sexuality
interacts with other variables such as nationalism. Or the
book can be read as a study of nationalism, with empha-
sis on the influences of globalization, the mass media, the
Western world, and other variables, with sexuality serving
as the subject of analysis. The choice is the reader’s.
This book is timely, emphasizing changing forms of so-
cial life in an era of globalization, a concept that is very im-
portant to the author’s analysis. Boellstorff invents the term
dubbing culture as a metaphor for conceptualizing contem-
porary globalizing processes. In the late 1990s in Indonesia,
dubbing of Western television shows was banned because
Indonesians were concerned that dubbing would blur the
line between Western culture and authentic Indonesian cul-
ture. This led to one of the greatest constitutional crises
in Indonesia’s history, hence the author’s contribution of
“dubbing” as a specific concept. He argues that dubbing is
particularly relevant to understanding gay and lesbian In-
donesians, and discusses how the Indonesian terms gay and
lesbi are transforming ostensibly Western concepts of “ho-
mosexuality.” He argues that concepts like “homosexual-
ity,” “sexuality,” and “gender” do not explain non-Western
realities (he also correctly states that they do not completely
and accurately explain Western realities). In effect, Boell-
storff argues for a rethinking of ethnography in a world that
is already globalized. From his perspective, even in a global-
ized world with Western hegemony, non-Western cultures
“are not doomed to the status of reruns” (p. 88). In effect,
simple translation is no longer sufficient.
The author specifies that this book is written for cul-
tural anthropologists, for those who “hang out with con-
temporary peoples” to learn how these people think and
live. While the author does not devote a specific section to
his research methodology, he does note in various parts of
the book that he has often worked as an activist; that most
of his fieldwork was with men because “as a man, spend-
ing time with women was more difficult: no researcher ever
has equal access to all social groups within a particular field
site” (p. 12); that his knowledge is based on participant-
observation and other qualitative methods; and that the
data is based on 22 months of activism and fieldwork over a
12-year period (1992–2004). He strongly believes that glob-
alization presents “a real need for qualitative studies of the
global” (p. 20). In this book, he is interested in asking new
questions and seeking new visions of social justice (p. 5).
Boellstorff does not hesitate to challenge domi-
nant themes within anthropology. He strongly criticizes

anthropology’s emphasis on difference, writing that “an
unfortunate consequence of the focus on difference within
anthropology and cultural studies has been the ceding of
similitude to sociobiology and evolutionary psychology”
(p. 26). He is concerned with how “we in the West” decide
when two things are different or the same and states that
dominant theories of knowledge in Western academia,
with emphasis on differences, should be challenged. His
goal is to encourage a new paradigm for understanding
all sexuality in different cultural perspectives. Boellstorff
also argues that the notion of cross-cultural research must
be rethought because “crossing” frequently has already
occurred before the ethnographer’s research begins. He
states that the question of whether there can be a history
of sexuality is becoming more important because of
postcolonialism and globalization. Boellstorff’s challenges
might lead to some conceptual revisions, or they might be
controversial, or both. Regardless of one’s own views, this
is a stimulating and challenging book to read.
La domination masculine. Pierre Bourdieu. Paris: Seuil,
1998. 142 pp. (English translation, Masculine Domina-
tion. Richard Nice. Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2001. 133 pp.)
ABDELMAJID HANNOUM
University of Kansas
By 1964, Pierre Bourdieu imposed himself as a major social
scientist in France by publishing three books at once—all
three had to do with Algeria, a region that was marginal
in social science, and were written from within sociol-
ogy, a discipline that was marginal among the graduates
of the Ecole Normale. Also, at a time when intellectuals
were either Marxist or anti-Marxist, Structuralist or anti-
Structuralist, Bourdieu somehow managed to transcend the
first dichotomy and pioneered a whole dimension of social
analysis that he called “the symbolism of economic goods”
(1977), by which he meant that there is a symbolic dimen-
sion of economics with its dynamics that has real and ef-
fective effects on material goods. Yet Bourdieu remained a
social scientist with a heavy structuralist background. This
is as clear in his early essay on the Kabyle House (1979)
as it is in his most recent essay on Kabyle women (1998),
based on the same fieldwork he had undertaken in colonial
Algeria between 1958 and 1962.
La domination masculine makes an important contribu-
tion to anthropology not only because it offers an under-
standing of male domination cross-culturally but also be-
cause it places Bourdieu at the center of his analysis of the
Kabyles of Algeria. Neither contribution is unproblematic.
Bourdieu maintains that, despite various conquests, the
Kabyles of Algeria have kept almost entirely intact an an-
drocentric social organization. Although long shared by
Mediterranean societies, this structure is now found only
in weaker form in Europe. This makes Kabyle society, for
Bourdieu, an ideal place from which to grasp male dom-
Single Reviews 889
ination, despite the fact that the Kabyles themselves may
not recognize it. Bourdieu’s intent is to strip the legitimacy
from male domination through an historical investigation
of how it is perpetuated and made self-evident within the
domestic sphere, the school, the church, and the state.
According to Bourdieu, in these institutions a habitus
forms that perpetuates domination. From an early age, boys
are taken away from their mothers and initiated into the
world of men, for whom the concept of “honor” (so mas-
culine and antithetically feminine) is central. The public
space is believed to be a male domain and is, indeed, dom-
inated by men. Private, domestic space belongs exclusively
to women. Positions of authority and power, such as those
in politics and finance, are considered manly. Even when
women hold positions as nurses or teachers, these occu-
pations are seen as extensions of domestic roles. Bourdieu
neglects to note that Margaret Mead long ago articulated
this idea:
In every known human society, the male’s need for
achievement can be recognized. Men may cook or weave
or dress dolls or hunt hummingbirds, but if such activi-
ties are appropriate occupations for men, then the whole
society, men and women alike, votes them important.
When the same occupations are performed by women,
they are regarded as less important. [Mead 1949:125]
But, Bourdieu tells us, women remain, after all, as in
archaic societies, not only a means of communication and
exchange, as shown by Claude Lévi-Strauss, but also, more
importantly, a currency by which men preserve or enhance
their symbolic capital. One recognizes in this early femi-
nist anthropologists’ criticisms of the concept of “the ex-
change of women” (see Rubin 1975). Surprisingly, however,
Bourdieu pays little attention to the reasons why nations are
often written about and symbolized as feminine.
Bourdieu argues that there is no discourse on sexuality
among the Kabyles but, instead, a cosmic sexualized order.
He takes as an example the Kabyle house. It has masculine
parts, which are high, hard, right, and of course, better;
and feminine parts, which are low, soft, and left. Bourdieu’s
project is linked to Virginia Woolf in that it aims to question
those mythical categories that make male domination the
most natural, most effective, and most accepted form of
domination. It is also linked to Michel Foucault in that it
intends to examine the archaeology of the unconscious.
The strength of the division between male and female
appears self-evident and does not need to be justified, be-
cause it is not recognized. The division is of course arbitrary
and is not inscribed in the things of this world but, rather,
imposed on them. Thus, there is a room for a rival con-
struction using the same categories that construct objects.
The male body can also be constructed negatively by us-
ing the same categories of “soft” and “low” used to describe
the female body. The principle of male domination is in-
scribed in the body, which makes the sexual act itself an
act of domination and possession. Moreover, applying the
same categories of domination to themselves, women tend
to denigrate their own bodies. Female genitals in Kabylia are
890 American Anthropologist • Vol. 108, No. 4 • December 2006
considered ugly, even repulsive. Similarly, in France, many
women are unhappy with their bodies, because of images
imposed by the fashion industry. Male domination is so en-
trenched that women not only accept it as natural but also
see its absence as demeaning for them: For example, accord-
ing to Bourdieu, French women prefer older and taller men
whose signs of domination are visibly present. On the other
hand, when women in both France and Kabylia show signs
of domination in a relationship, they are denigrated. They
are believed to have reached low in their choice of a partner.
One has to investigate the rites in institutions to see
how the family, church, and state reinforce, accentuate,
and perpetuate male domination, Bourdieu contends. Thus,
if the Kabyle house, as Bourdieu maintains, is sexualized,
with both masculine (and, therefore, positive) and femi-
nine (and, therefore, negative) parts, the Kabyle nation is
written and told in feminine terms. It is in fact the Kahina,
the woman said to have resisted the seventh-century Arab
invasion, who for the Berbers today embodies their strug-
gle, their history, and, ultimately, their present (Hannoum
2001a). It is worth noting that Bourdieu does not refer to
any of the abundant literature about Kabyle women by
women anthropologists and historians, some of which con-
tains a rival representation of women.
Despite Bourdieu’s insistence that this book is based on
his fieldwork (again undertaken in colonial Algeria), most
of the literature that Bourdieu uses is U.S. feminist writ-
ing. This by no means makes his work a simple reproduc-
tion of an existing literature. Bourdieu uses his key concepts
(“habitus,” “symbolic power,” “symbolic violence,” etc.) to
differently and forcefully articulate feminist ideas and give
to them a new interpretation. By showing how the cate-
gories of the unconscious are formed and perpetuated not
only in domestic space but also in public space, Bourdieu
shows how habitus operates for both women and men.
Nevertheless, Bourdieu does not explain how the
Kabyles have kept intact an androcentric structure that has
changed everywhere else in the Mediterranean. The very
categories by which the Kabyles think of the world are Ara-
bic and are used not only in Algeria but also in the entire
Maghreb: hurma (sacrality), haram (sacred), nı̂f (lit., “nose,”
metaphorically it means nobility or the point of honor),
tahramiyat (devilish cunning), manyuk (screwed), qawwâd
(pander), and so forth. The name Kabyle itself is derived
from Arabic and has been used since the 1830s by the
French. By the end of 1830s, the Kabyles had been con-
structed by colonial power.
Bourdieu seems doomed to add to a long list of past
European misrepresentations. In the early colonial period,
it was believed that the Kabyles represented a primitive
democracy (Daumas and Fabar 1847; see Hannoum 2001b).
Then the Kabyles were believed to have preserved Greek and
Roman cities (Masqueray 1983). With Bourdieu today, the
same Kabyles preserve an old androcentric structure that
has changed everywhere else.
Bourdieu ought to have first deconstructed the cat-
egories regulating the discourse about the colonized
originally constructed to assure domination. As it is, he re-
veals mechanisms of one domination and perpetuates an-
other, which undermines his whole project.
The job of translator is often taken for granted and is
rarely mentioned in a review. Translators give their own
voice to the original text. They perform someone in another
language. Anyone who reads Bourdieu in French would
recognize the challenge his work poses for the translator.
Yet, Richard Nice has, for the most part, met the challenge.
However, there are occasional mistranslations. The word
connaissance/reconnaissance is always, except once, trans-
lated as knowledge/recognition, while a more appropriate
translation might be cognition/recognition. Nice also trans-
lates gouverner as “to be in charge”; a better translation
would be “to govern.” Most French references are men-
tioned in the English translation, but occasionally only
the French reference is mentioned despite the existence of
a translation. Overall, though, Nice’s highly skillful work
manages to reproduce not only the intent of Bourdieu’s
original work but also its style.
REFERENCES CITED
Bourdieu, Pierre
1977 Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
1979 Algeria 1960: The Disenchantment of the World, the Sense
of Honour, the Kabyle House or the World Reversed. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
Daumas, Eugene, and Maurice Fabar
1847 La Grande Kabylie: Études Historiques. Paris: Hachette.
Hannoum, Abdelmajid
2001a Colonial Histories, Post-Colonial Memories: The Legend
of a North African Heroine, the Kahina. Portsmouth: Heine-
mann.
2001b Colonialism and Knowledge in Algeria. History and An-
thropology 12(4):315–341.
Masqueray, Emile
1983[1886] La formation des cités chez les populations
sédentaires de l’Algérie (Kabyles du Djurdjura, Chaouia de
l’Aures, Beni-M’zab) (The Kabyles were Berbers from the moun-
tains of Kabylia, which include the Djurdjura, the Biban and
the Guergour ranges). Reedited by Fanny Colonna. Aix-en-
Provence: Edisud.
Mead, Margaret
1949 Male and Female. New York: William Morrow.
Rubin, Gayle
1975 The Traffic in Women. In Toward an Anthropology of
Women. Rayna Rapp, ed. Pp. 157–210. New York: Monthly Re-
view Press.
Symptoms of Modernity: Jews and Queers in Late-
Twentieth-Century Vienna. Matti Bunzl. Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 2004. 292 pp.
ULI LINKE
Rochester Institute of Technology
In this study on European modernity, Matti Bunzl traces the
exclusionary logic of Austrian nation-building after 1945
by focusing on the cultural dynamic of Jews and queers
in late-20th-century Vienna. More specifically, Bunzl an-
alyzes “the historical conditions that enabled the public
emergence of queer Jews” (p. 2). In the aftermath of World
War II and the Holocaust, the marginalization of what the

Austrian national imaginary had defined as archetypal Oth-
ers initially persisted. For most of the 20th century, as Bunzl
shows, the Austrian state perpetuated the stigmatization
and persecution of these subaltern groups. A radical turn-
ing point in the national body politic emerged during the
final decades of the last century, when ethnic and sexual dif-
ferences came to be celebrated and embraced by a nation
with postmodern and supranational (European) ambitions.
Bunzl documents the transformation in the public represen-
tation and self-understanding of minority groups, which in
the 1990s “became an integral aspect of the city’s lived real-
ity” and of a political field that now “invited the affirmative
articulation of Jewish and queer difference” (p. 5).
In three major sections, titled “Subordination,” “Re-
sistance,” and “Reproduction,” Bunzl traces the gradual
formation of a new cosmopolitanism that enhanced the
increasing visibility of Jewish and queer communities in
postwar Vienna. Bunzl describes his book as an “empirical
project,” based on “fieldwork and archival” research con-
ducted between 1994 and 2001 (p. x). The ethnographic di-
mensions are, however, somewhat thin. For instance, Bunzl
states: “In interviews conducted with Austrian Jews who
had returned to Vienna in the immediate postwar years,
experiences with antisemitism were a constant theme”
(p. 45). But what follows is not an account of concrete
memories. Rather, the text continues with general asser-
tions: “Narratives of such experiences were frequently set in
Vienna’s schools. There Jews were subject to unique forms
of surveillance that reinforced their identification as peren-
nial outsiders . . . painful experiences that occupied promi-
nent places in many postwar Austrian-Jewish narratives”
(p. 45). But what specifically were those experiences? In this
historiographic text, the author’s narrative voice prevails.
Despite the frequent mention of ethnographic interviews,
much of the manuscript is based on documentary materi-
als. Although the author aims to untangle the formation
of subjectivities, there is a disturbing paucity of the mul-
tiplicity of voices, life stories, and testimonial accounts by
individual subjects.
Although this book, as Bunzl states, is an attempt “to
advance an argument about the trajectory of modernity in
the German-speaking world” (p. 9), the study ignores much
of the relevant literature: works by Birgit Rommelspacher,
Uli Linke, Yasemin N. Soysal, Katrin Sieg, and Dagmar
Herzog, among others, are missing. I therefore find it pre-
sumptuous of Bunzl to speak of “silences” in the scholarly
literature, especially when these silences are partially fab-
ricated by the author himself. Such apparent gaps in aca-
demic engagement might account for specific intellectual
mishaps, such as the assertion that by a focus on the “symp-
toms of modernity”—Jew and queers in Austria—Bunzl
claims not to “restrict” himself “to the question of racial
Otherness” (p. 17). True enough. But in turn, he seems to
overlook that within the cultural discourse of nationalism’s
exclusionary project, the fabrication of difference operates
through a synchronicity of sexuality and race. During the
first half of the 20th century, specifically in fascist discourse,
Single Reviews 891
homosexuality was racialized as much as Jewishness was
sexualized and feminized. Race and sex were intrinsically
intertwined in central European nation-building (bolstered
by colonialism) and in the Nazi era. A chapter on these en-
tanglements seems to be centrally missing. A discussion of
such recombinant modes of Othering would have strength-
ened the analytic dimensions of the manuscript and shed
light on the perpetual synchronicities of Jewish and queer
subjectivities in Austria. Indeed, sexualization and racial-
ization are those operators of Western modernity whereby
certain subject positions are produced by and in specific
political fields.
Such a focus would have made sense in light of Bunzl’s
concluding insights, considering that Bunzl attempts to
document how the production of modern subjectivities
is inherently connected to the national project. The dis-
position toward either national homogeneity or pluralism
is, as Bunzl argues, a formative principle of the mod-
ern/postmodern state and “suggests a powerful continuity
between . . . the disciplinary apparatuses that produce and
sustain their subjects” (p. 217); today’s Austria is “char-
acterized by an affirmation of alterity that fortifies rather
than deconstructs Jewishness and queerness as categories
of subjectification” (p. 218). From this perspective, this is a
book well worth reading.
Holy Intoxication to Drunken Dissipation: Alcohol
among Quichua Speakers in Otavalo, Ecuador. Barbara
Y. Butler. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico press,
2006. 452 pp.
M A X I M I L I A N V I AT O R I
Iowa State University
Barbara Y. Butler’s book is an examination of changes in the
drinking practices of Quichua-speaking Runa in the small
Andean community of Huaycopungo (located in the can-
ton of Otavalo, in northern Ecuador) between 1977 and
2000. Specifically, Butler explores how the ceremonial con-
sumption of alcohol in Huaycopungo shifted from being
regarded positively, as an important means for religious
transcendence, to being viewed negatively, as a catalyst for
the community’s disintegration. Butler attributes this shift
to economic, social, and political changes that altered the
costs, both economically and socially, of ritual intoxica-
tion. Butler argues that individuals in Huaycopungo aban-
doned ceremonial drinking because it had become a drain
on the community’s economic resources and contributed
to an increase in social problems, such as spousal abuse. In
its place, Quichua speakers in Huaycopungo adopted prac-
tices of moderation, which Butler asserts contributed to an
improvement in the social and material prosperity of the
community.
Butler divides her book into two main parts: before
and after 1987. In 1987, Ecuador suffered a devastating
earthquake that left hundreds dead and many buildings
around the country destroyed. The people of Huaycopungo
892 American Anthropologist • Vol. 108, No. 4 • December 2006
interpreted the earthquake as a pachacuti (the Quichua word
for a “world reversal,” p. 231)—a sign from God that they
should stop drinking to the point of intoxication. Accord-
ing to Butler, prior to the earthquake many individuals com-
plained about the problems associated with public drinking
to drunkenness yet defended the practice as a central com-
ponent of their religious life. This pachacuti gave the inhab-
itants of Huaycopungo license to reevaluate and alter their
religious practices without betraying their sacred traditions.
Part 1 consists of a “traditional ethnography” (p. 21)
of the symbolism of ritual drinking in Huaycopungo based
on Butler’s dissertation and postdoctoral research in the
late 1970s and early 1980s. Butler reconstructs the peo-
ple of Huaycopungo’s idealized view of ritual drinking
as maintaining reciprocal exchange in their community
and distinguishing them from non-Indian mestizos. Ad-
ditionally, Butler demonstrates how this view was used in
Huaycopungo to justify alcohol consumption even though
it had begun to cause social and economic problems for
many individuals in the community. Part 2 is an exploration
of the social and economic costs of drinking based on short
field visits that Butler made to Huaycopungo between 1987
and 2000. In this half of the book, Butler examines how the
growing influence of Protestantism and Ecuador’s indige-
nous movement in Huaycopungo led community members
to moderate their drinking and renewed their interest in
other aspects of traditional Runa culture.
By combining all the phases of her research in
Huaycopungo into one book, Butler provides readers with
firsthand ethnography that spans almost three decades.
However, despite this strength (or, perhaps, as a result of it)
Butler’s book fails to provide a coherent and concise ethnog-
raphy of culture change in Andean Ecuador. There are sev-
eral reasons for this. First, Butler’s text is twice as long as nec-
essary because Butler often strays into extended discussions
of issues that, while being tangentially related to her main
argument, are better suited to footnotes. As a result, Butler
does not maintain a clear thread throughout the chapters
of her book. Second, the data in parts 1 and 2 were gathered
by Butler using different theoretical and methodological ap-
proaches during different time periods: Her research before
1987 (part 1) is based on a symbolic and hermeneutic ap-
proach, while her work after 1987 (part 2) is grounded in
economic materialism. The result is that there is no con-
sistent data baseline or theoretical framework between the
two halves of the book for examining the quality and quan-
tity of the changes that occurred in Huaycopungo. Finally,
Butler rarely treats the reader to the voices, rationales, or
thoughts of individual Quichua speakers in Huaycopungo.
Instead, Butler too often relies on essentialist portraits of
her research subjects as representatives of a generalized An-
dean perspective in which all Quichua speakers do “x” and
think “y” (e.g., see p. 190). Consequently, Butler fails to con-
vey the ethnographic complexity of the processes, practices,
and individual actions she studied.
Considering the above issues, I do not think that But-
ler’s book is suitable as a general text for anthropologists
interested in culture change. However, given the extensive
amount of data that Butler presents in this volume, this
book is a valuable reference for scholars and students of
Andean and Ecuadorian ethnography.
Gathering Hopewell: Society, Ritual, and Ritual Inter-
action. Christopher Carr and D. Troy Case, eds. New York:
Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 2005. 807 pp.
B E T H M CC O R D
Ball State University
Gathering Hopewell is an edited volume of 21 researchers who
endeavor to personalize Hopewell. The volume is dedicated
to Stuart Struever, an archaeologist with an impressive ca-
reer and a devotion to archaeology. The volume and the
work it presents are also impressive. The editors’ goal for
the book is to personalize and humanize Hopewell in a man-
ner that generalized structural or normative models do not.
Three themes are carried through each article to personalize,
contextualize, and generate interregional Hopewell interac-
tion from local scenes.
The scope of the work is comprehensive in the pre-
sentation of the data and use of theoretical models. Top-
ics cover social, political, and cognitive organization and
structure. Information on social roles, prestige and ranking,
clans, symbolism, gender, ritual gatherings, interaction, and
artifact-specific studies are presented. The research investi-
gates specific sites, artifacts, human remains, art, and raw
materials within multiple levels of contexts. In addition to
presenting overviews and critiques of previous work and
providing the reader with a foundation for Hopewellian
studies, the authors include new information. A compan-
ion CD contains numerous tables of raw data that will be
useful to future researchers.
While the work is impressive and will certainly play a
role in Hopewell studies across the eastern United States,
some of the interpretations require evaluation. Each of the
studies relies heavily on context, but some of the data pre-
sented from early excavations cannot support the interpre-
tations. For example, in chapter 7 the lack of chronolog-
ical knowledge and reliance on earthwork shape and size
from sites that were built and used over time negate some
of Christopher Carr’s conclusions concerning tripartite al-
liances. In chapter 3, Carr recognizes that different earth-
works served different functions, but the contents of sites,
whether artifacts or human remains, are nonetheless com-
pared equally. There is an inconsistency in building sta-
tistical models to test the data, such as Carr and D. Troy
Case’s exploration of leadership roles in chapter 5, and the
reliance on “reasonable estimates” in determining the size
of mortuary gatherings as Carr, Beau Goldstein, and Jaimin
Weets do in chapter 13. Wesley Bernardini and Carr’s review
of copper celts in chapter 17 relies too greatly on equat-
ing size to prestige. To personalize Hopewell, ethnographies
from the Eastern Woodlands provide comparative data for
Brett Ruby, Carr, and Douglas Charles’s work on community

organization and Chad Thomas, Carr, and Cynthia Kel-
lar’s exploration of totemic clans in chapter 8. However,
the cyclical nature of many ceremonies noted in ethno-
graphies is pointedly ignored when Carr, Goldstein, and
Weets determined gatherings are not cyclical in chapter 13.
Overall, the volume and individual articles are well struc-
tured. Some articles are concise and independent such as
Ruby and Christine Shriner’s study of Mann site ceramics
in chapter 15, but other articles such as Carr’s introduction
to social and political organization in chapter 3 are more
tedious.
The works contained in the volume present a re-
freshing view of Hopewell. The effort of all the authors is
commendable. The volume challenges long-held ideas and
provides descriptive reporting with cognitive models. Carr’s
reinforcement of the multifaceted nature of Hopewell and
demystification of an Ohio Core in chapter 16 is a radical
idea contra to conventional Hopewellian studies. The rich
presentation of insights to symbolic meanings of artifacts,
particularly Gina Turff and Carr’s presentation of panpipes
in chapter 18, certainly adds a personal dimension to
archaeological studies. The volume provides numerous
models and data for further testing. In all, the volume
expresses the rich nature of Hopewell, not only the material
remains but also the people who produced them.
The Emergence of Culture: The Evolution of a Uniquely
Human Way of Life. Philip G. Chase. New York: Springer
Press, 2006. 227 pp.
ELIZABETH WEISS
San Jose State University
Philip G. Chase’s main thesis is that “human culture is a
manner of governing behavior, one that coexists with ways
of doing so that we share with other species but that is
unique by virtue of its emergent nature” (p. 65). Chase
seems to be trying to divorce human culture from nat-
ural selection. He discusses how human culture is differ-
ent from animal culture because it emerges through so-
cial interaction, is based on coding that modifies behavior,
and cannot be understood at the level of the individual.
Chase uses examples of maladaptive cultures, such as the
Shakers’ celibacy vows, to emphasize how different human
cultures compare to cultures driven by natural selection.
Previously, anthropologists have explained maladaptive be-
havior through meme theory; that is, anthropologists pro-
posed that humans learn in part by believing others, which
has the negative effect of humans sometimes adopting mal-
adaptive behaviors.
To illustrate the cultural qualitative differences between
humans and other animals, Chase summarizes the litera-
ture on great ape research in language, tool use, and behav-
ior. His concludes great apes have the cognitive abilities for
coding behavior, but they do not display this type of cul-
ture naturally. He states that individual needs—rather than
behavior modification for group success—drive great ape
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behaviors. Although Chase provides a thorough summary
of ape research, he fails to convince this reader that the
difference between ape and human culture is qualitatively
different. Animal cultures are less encompassing and less
complex, but one can only understand behaviors, such as
dominance, maternal care differences, tool modification,
grooming, and hunting, within a group context.
If we accept Chase’s argument that the differences be-
tween human culture and other animal culture are qual-
itative, then the question of when the ability to have a
complex culture dependent on codes arose needs to be ad-
dressed. To answer this question, Chase turns to paleoan-
thropology and the evidence of language origins. Chapter 4
has an excellent review of the skeletal anatomy required for
language and the various fossils that display the anatom-
ical ability to speak. He also has a fine section on fossil
endocasts and the development of language areas in the
brain. From this evidence, along with the early stone tool
evidence, Chase determines that by the Middle Pleistocene,
hominids had the ability to use language and, thus, coding
that would enable complex culture.
With the above-mentioned conclusion, Chase states
there are three hypotheses on the cause for the unique
nature of human culture: (1) it is a by-product of human
evolution (e.g., Spandrel’s of San Marcos argument); (2) it
evolved to relieve anxiety (e.g., death); or (3) it was selected
for group benefits that encourage altruism. For Chase to
support the first two hypotheses, evidence of elaborate cul-
ture, such as rituals and symbolic artifacts, should be visible
at the same time that the ability for language appeared (i.e.,
the Middle Pleistocene). The group benefit hypothesis, on
the other hand, would take a long time to appear because it
relies on the emergence of culture from social interactions.
Chase tests these hypotheses with a review of the archae-
ological evidence of symbolic artifacts. He gives examples
of symbolic artifacts, such as ochre with crosshatched lines
and shell beads. All of the examples that he designates as
significant signs of symbolism come much after the Middle
Pleistocene (around 50,000 years after the end of the Middle
Pleistocene). Thus, he asserts that this supports the group
benefit hypothesis. However, there is a fallacy in that lack
of early evidence does not mean that symbolic artifacts did
not exist. Hence, we cannot say the other hypotheses are
invalid, just that there is no support for them yet. Chase
excludes all evidence of burials, which some may argue is
an essential part of elaboration of culture, and dismisses
some early questionable artifacts. He also attempts to dis-
tinguish between symbolic artifacts and those artifacts that
are purely iconic or aesthetic.
I should mention a few stylistic points. Chase several
times raises points that he then dismisses as not pertinent
to the subject at hand; these probably should have just been
removed from the text. This book is initially hard to follow
because of hair-splitting definitions of terms, such as coding,
culture, and behavior. Repetitive examples (e.g., cooperative
hunting) and phrasing (e.g., lively debate) deter from the
readability of the book. Statements of inability to evaluate
894 American Anthropologist • Vol. 108, No. 4 • December 2006
data, which occur after the ape and paleoanthropology
sections, deter from the reader’s confidence in the author.
Property and Politics in Sabah, Malaysia: Native
Struggles over Land Rights. Amity A. Doolittle. Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 2005. 224 pp.
ANDREW WILLFORD
Cornell University
This very welcome book offers important insights into the
logic of development in Malaysia, as well as its impact on
local struggles for land rights. Amity Doolittle has writ-
ten an exemplary work that utilizes ethnography, politi-
cal economy, and historical analysis. It skillfully demon-
strates the impact of colonial policies concerning native
land rights and commercial development on postcolonial
development discourses in contemporary Malaysia. From
the theoretical rubric of political ecology, Doolittle argues
that political rights (and struggles over identity) and land
rights often overlap and congrue.
The book opens with the seemingly inexplicable act
of burning nature reserve land by local people in Kina-
balu Park, Sabah. The media-driven political response to
the “senseless” act is to blame the “destructive” behavior
perpetrated by “backward” indigenous people. With this
vignette, Doolittle suggests a motif that will recur through-
out this study in which the modernist ideologies of rational
planning and development are predicated on an image of
the backward native who must be uplifted through state
intervention. We soon learn that in the colonial era, in the
context of Sabah, land laws were designed to protect natives
from their own purported improvidence. For example, W.
E. Maxwell’s influential statement on Land Tenure in 1884
comes to influence and limit the commercial use of native
land, while not prohibiting its acquisition by colonial in-
terests, thus influencing a paternalistic pattern of land use
for natives.
In addition to the discussion of what are called “pa-
ternalistic protectorate laws,” limiting native use of land
to subsistence and prohibiting the sale of the lands,
Doolittle also draws attention to the racializing myths of
indigenous cultivation that underpinned much legislation
and that produced a imagined polarity between the ra-
tional and scientific use of land in the name of devel-
opment, as opposed to the backward and irrational na-
tive worldview, with its purported destructive patterns of
shifting cultivation. The author deftly shows the ironies
in these ideological compulsions—for example, in the
Ladang Ordinance of 1913, forest destruction caused by
native shifting cultivation is limited whereas exemptions
for more destructive land uses by colonial tobacco planters
are protected by the law. Many such examples are given
in which the greater expenditure of environmental dam-
age is symbolically displaced through the blame on the
lesser expenditure of damage caused by native shifting
cultivation.
Through historical analysis, we come to understand
the legal and ideological parameters that influence land
rights claims by the Malaysian state in the name of moder-
nity and development. With ethnographic case material, for
example, in the study of the Govuton Native Reserve, we see
how the colonial codification of native land restricts con-
temporary native residents to “use rights” on reserve lands,
which ultimately restricts social mobility, credit, and cap-
ital accumulation. Moreover, Doolittle also presents much
evidence to demonstrate how the cultural logics and moral
economies of local residents often clash with the homoge-
nizing discourses of development and modernity, and their
enshrinement in legalized land-use patterns through state-
bureaucratic structures that manage reserve lands or, in
other cases, develop and compensate for appropriated na-
tive lands. The analysis, for example, of the oftentimes
conflicting relationship between statutory and customary
law in the reserve lands reveals not only the limits of
state power—and the failures of development discourse to
constitute its subjects completely—but also an entangle-
ment with statutory law, in some cases in the name of
customary law. This ultimately consolidates state power,
Doolittle notes, while, ironically, revealing its ideological
fissures. But in so arguing this important point, Doolittle
does not develop this insight to its full potential. By demon-
strating how the patronizing mindset of the government
makes itself felt through its Islamization and Malayaniza-
tion “civilizing” discourses, she notes that locals perceive
this heavy-handedness, yet even in resisting this, many are
insidiously incorporated into the political process that sub-
ordinates them. This is fertile ground for investigating the
ambivalence of contradictory ideological commitment and
the ultimately powerful ideological effects it can produce.
If, for example, state power and Malaysian modernity, as
Doolittle argues, are built on the perceived inadequacies
of native people, then, while Doolittle’s evidence is com-
pelling, one might expect that nationalist discourse is more
unstable than is intimated here, shadowed by its backward
others.
That said, this is an impressive, well-written, and
well-researched book that offers many useful insights into
the politics of development and resistance. It is also a
useful book for NGOs and activists, as it provides a useful
analysis of the term indigenous and how such a word might
come to embody different meanings in the long durée.
Pilgrimage and Healing. Jill Dubisch and Michael Winkel-
man, eds. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2005. 268 pp.
CELIA ROTHENBERG
McMaster University
This edited collection brings together ten studies at
the intersection of pilgrimage and healing experiences.
Ethnographically diverse and thematically coherent, the
collection is engaging and compelling, if not particularly
theoretically innovative.

Several themes run through the studies: the typical
combinative approach to healing used by those who have
access to a range of resources; the social fact that typi-
cally more women than men turn to alternative healing
resources, such as those available on pilgrimages; the rela-
tive autonomy of popular religious practices from formal,
institutionalized religious structures; the (post)modernity
of the ancient practices of both pilgrimage and healing;
and, finally, the complex ways that healing and pilgrimage
“work” for those inclined to engage in them. As a whole,
the chapters are at their strongest when ethnographically
demonstrating what healing means and how pilgrimage aids
in its achievement, and at their weakest when trying to un-
cover how the process of healing is universal and mecha-
nistic, centrally located in our brain’s chemical composi-
tion, and, thus, presumably (and problematically), outside
of culture.
The ethnographic diversity of the volume will be of par-
ticular interest to readers looking for a variety of examples
to use for teaching and comparative purposes. Four chap-
ters examine material from Catholic pilgrimage sites. Sid-
ney Greenfield and Antonio Mourão Cavalcante’s chapter
discusses a pilgrimage to a shrine of St. Francis in northeast-
ern Brazil undertaken after a cure attributed to the saint has
occurred, although the authors’ central interests lie more
problematically—and, in my opinion, less interestingly—
in the psychobiological mechanisms, such as altered states
of consciousness, that may have enabled the cure to take
place. While their observations on pilgrimage stem from
fieldwork and compelling ethnographic detail, their theory
of healing is based on decontextualized, biologically based
models that the authors accept as facts without questioning
their specific cultural constructions and that they hold to be
more true than informants’ beliefs. Lena Gemzöe examines
Our Lady of Fátima shrine in Portugal, focusing on the rela-
tionships among vow making, female pilgrims, the figure of
the Virgin Mary, healing experiences, and the pilgrims’ di-
alectical opposition to the official discourse of the Catholic
Church. Lindsey King looks at the role of the ex voto (an
offering to a saint or divinity, usually given in fulfillment
of a vow) for pilgrims at the shrine of St. Francis of Assisi in
Brazil, empowering them to circumvent formal Church in-
tervention and create and release a potent symbol of disease.
Simon Coleman looks at a Catholic shrine near Walsing-
ham, highlighting how pilgrims engage with its “sacral-
ized architecture” that embodies both myth and history to
achieve restoration.
Deana Weibel provides a compelling examination of
Catholic pilgrimage sites in France, but she also notes
the presence of many pilgrims at Rocamadour who are
not Catholic but “religious creatives,” people whom many
would describe as “New Agers.” Rejecting this label in fa-
vor of one she feels to be more useful and accurate, Weibel
highlights the ways in which the discourses of healing, ill-
ness, and pilgrimage intersect and stand distinct from one
another for religious creatives and Catholics. Lee Gilmore
also draws attention to those some may call “New Agers”—
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attendees of the Burning Man festival in Nevada’s Black
Rock Desert. Resistant to commodification and commer-
cialization and stressing self-sufficiency, attendees describe
feeling transformed by their time spent in the desert, which
culminated in burning a giant human effigy.
The four remaining chapters round out the collection’s
ethnographic offerings. Susan Sered examines three Rachel
cults in Israel, highlighting the relationships in Israeli soci-
ety between illness, women, and the role of female saints.
Jill Dubisch writes about the journey made primarily by
Vietnam War veterans on motorcycles across the United
States to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington,
DC, drawing out the healing experience as both deeply per-
sonal and political. Stacy Schaefer examines the use of the
Peyote plant in northern Mexico among the Wixárika peo-
ple. More convincing than biological models of neurons,
Schaefer argues that peyote and tobacco have been used to
create and uphold some culturally specific “deep structures”
of the Wixárika people. Larry Peters examines the practice
of pilgrimage among Tamang shamans as a way of provid-
ing community healing and a means of initiating shaman
candidates.
Certainly the collection could have benefited from the
inclusion of studies related to Islamic and Hindu pilgrimage
and healing practices. Yet, despite its obvious tilt toward
Catholic material, the ethnographic evidence presented is
nicely diverse, including not only “New Agers,” Catholics,
and Jews but also those engaged in secular pilgrimages and
healing experiences as well. The body–mind dichotomy is
alive and well here, at least in many of the chapters, and is
never fully resolved, but the collection does push us to ask
how we can conceptualize the workings and meanings of
healing in relationship to one of its most vivid locales: the
pilgrimage site.
Rethinking Commodification: Cases and Readings in
Law and Culture. Martha M. Ertman and Joan C. Williams,
eds. New York. New York University Press, 2005. 450 pp.
A L L E N W. B AT T E A U
Wayne State University
Commodification—the buying and selling of goods and
services in markets—is as old as civilization. As a named
problem, it consists of creating a cash nexus for objects and
activities that many think should not be offered for imper-
sonal sale: human lives, certainly, but maybe also somatic
materials, body parts, intimate services, sexuality, identity.
All of these have been problematically commodified. Every-
one opposes slavery, considered as the buying and selling
of human beings. Such matters as the existence of adop-
tion markets—the buying and selling of babies—also merit
clear-eyed, unsentimental appraisal.
Rethinking Commodification, an edited volume of 38
essays primarily by legal scholars, attempts this unsen-
timental appraisal. It examines current activities in the
appropriation and marketing of babies (“The Economics
896 American Anthropologist • Vol. 108, No. 4 • December 2006
of the Baby Shortage”), cell lines (“Moore v. the Regents
of the University of California”), sex (“Sex in the [For-
eign] City: Commodification and the Female Sex Tourist”),
culture (“Culture, Commodification, and Native Ameri-
can Cultural Patrimony”), and identity (“Kwanzaa and the
Commodification of Black Culture”), among many issues.
Although the diversity of chapters is matched by a similar
diversity of viewpoints, the overall tone is one of explo-
ration, rather than either approbation or condemnation.
The book uses Arjun Appadurai’s definition of com-
modity as “any thing intended for exchange” (p. 35). In
other words, the critical part of a commodity is not any
characteristic of its “thingness” but, rather, intentions and
exchange—the manner in which it enters into social circula-
tion, shared, if one wishes, in relationships of balanced, gen-
eralized, or negative reciprocity. Commodification is gener-
ally thought of as a diminishing of the constraints of social-
ity, although Appadurai’s definition suggests that it creates
new circuits of value.
The book consists of two parts: The first presents some
classical views of commodification in terms of markets for
babies, body parts, and civic obligation. Many of the chap-
ters here are drawn from the law and economics litera-
ture, although contrasting voices from Patricia Williams
and Martha Jane Radin, the former a journalist and the
latter a leading critic of the Chicago law and economics
school, are also presented: Williams examines the incon-
gruities of adoption procedures, while Radin discusses the
double binds created for relatively powerless agents in a le-
gal regime presupposing complete equality.
The second part of the book examines different cases
of commodification from a variety of theoretical perspec-
tives: cultural and intellectual property, identity, intimacy,
personal care, family relationships, body parts; the past (pat-
rimony), presence (intimacy), and future. On the frontiers
of commodification are futures markets anticipating or per-
haps driving upticks in the values of anything. An example
of this last is the Pentagon’s aborted proposal for a “Pol-
icy Analysis Market” in which investors (punters?) would
provide, through their investments, information on likely
trends. This touching faith in the infallibility of markets was
apparently impervious to the Enron debacle.
Although some of the chapters are predictably ideo-
logical, others offer new and insightful analysis. Perhaps
the best example of this is Deborah Stone’s chapter, “For
Love nor Money: The Commodification of Care.” Stone
makes the point that it is not the buying and selling of
services, so much as their rationalization that creates moral
hazards. Rationalization is a sequela to commodification,
in which something of value, having been placed on the
market, now finds its primary providers’ benefits dimin-
ished through corporate competition, today on a global-
ized scale. In Stone’s words, “The political and managerial
control of money is what restrained and changed the way
nurses, therapists, and aides cared for their patients” (p.
282). A good reason for laws against prostitution may not
be the elimination of the world’s oldest profession but,
rather, an inhibition of multinational corporate chains of
brothels.
In a concluding chapter, Joan Williams and Viviana
Zelizer note that commodification can often be liberatory:
When all that a woman owns is her body, the opportunity
to sell her sexual services, and to control the conditions
of and proceeds therefrom, is certainly a step up from the
chattel slavery of some marriages. Noting that markets are
very efficient in conveying the oppressive forces of race,
gender, and class advantage, the larger issue may be finding
ways to inhibit these forms of oppression. Until that day
arrives, restrictions on the efficient operations of markets
may be a necessary evil, at least from a law and economics
perspective.
Despite a wealth of insightful, provocative, and wide-
ranging chapters, perhaps what one notices most about Re-
thinking Commodification is its nearly complete Western ori-
entation. Although it examines instances of commodifica-
tion on all continents (sexual tourism by both men and
women in Africa and the Caribbean; markets in body parts
in South Asia), the relationships whose commodity status
is called into question seem to be relationships imposed
by Western and perhaps colonial regimes. This may not be
surprising in a book with only one contribution from an an-
thropologist (Appadurai). The Western–modern–industrial–
bureaucratic regime that commodification entails, although
certainly advancing all over the globe, is not, despite the
claims of its ideologues, the totality or perfection of human
possibility. Finishing this book, one wished for a similar,
distinctly anthropological riposte, perhaps titled along the
lines of Alternatives to Commodification.
Ciuliamta Akluit: Things of Our Ancestors: Yup’ik Elders
Explore the Jacobsen Collection at the Ethnologisches
Museum Berlin. Ann Fienup-Riordan, ed. Seattle: Univer-
sity of Washington Press, 2005. 420 pp.
JENNIFER KRAMER
University of British Columbia
What do museum objects mean to the descendents of those
who made them? Ciuliamta Akluit answers this question.
In 1997 eight Yup’ik elders and educators traveled to the
Ethnologisches Museum Berlin to see 2,000 Yup’ik objects
collected by Johan Adrian Jacobsen in Southern Alaska be-
tween 1882–83. They spent 15 days viewing the entire col-
lection and recorded over 50 hours of discussions in Yup’ik,
which were translated into English by Marie Meade. Ann
Fienup-Riordan, their guide and photographer, calls this
“visual repatriation” and explains “what we sought was not
so much the collection’s physical return to Alaska, but the
return of the history and pride that it embodied” (p. xviii).
Uniquely, the Yup’ik expressed gratitude toward the collec-
tor and the museum for caring for their objects. This bilin-
gually printed book is the product of their work. Its strength
is its exemplary status as participatory action research and
collaborative museology.

The chapters in this book reflect the actual experi-
ences of the Yup’ik in the museum storage room. On each
day, the elders turned their attentions to a specific museo-
logical category of objects and these objects elicited com-
mentary on names, functions, manufacturing techniques,
regional styles, and aesthetics and often inspired qulirat (tra-
ditional tales). For example, chapter 1 is titled “First day:
Tools for ocean hunting,” chapter 2 “Second day: Bows and
arrows for hunting and war, chapter 10 “Tenth day: Dance
regalia,” and so on. Sixty-six black-and-white photographs
aid the reader in visualizing the objects that the elders were
examining.
While ostensibly about material culture, this book
is really about people—their childhood memories of tra-
ditional lifeways, their experiences of assimilation, and
their hopes for cultural revitalization. In the introduction,
Fienup-Riordan provides biographies of each of the Yup’ik
who made the journey to visit their cultural patrimony in
Germany. The eldest, Wassilie Berlin, was 81 years old and
spoke only Yup’ik. His cultural background offers the reader
a glimpse of understanding in how far he traveled from his
home to do this important work.
The book gives the appearance of being quiet, but the
voices of the people are animated, proud, respectful, and full
of humor. The Yup’ik delegation transformed anthropologi-
cal material culture into moral teachings, ceremonial songs,
hunting lore, dance steps, and vehicles for cultural pride.
There is a lightness and joy in the telling that the reader
witnesses as each speaker is inspired to share their knowl-
edge about historical, contemporary, supernatural, ethical,
and genealogical subjects. But there is also sadness present,
because the elders recognize the quality of workmanship;
knowledge of the land, sea, and sky; ritual behavior; and
intricacy of values implicit in the objects made by their an-
cestors. From this recognition comes a palpable sense of loss
of a self-reliant way of being that ensured survival in a harsh
environment.
Because of the privileged access we are granted to
gentle dialogue, strong emotional reactions to the past,
and concrete lived experiences, one wonders what was
left out. Fienup-Riordan describes the conversations as
“lightly edited” (p. xxiii), but we also know how self-aware
the elders were in their determination to record cultural
knowledge for posterity. What part of the process of work-
ing together has been excluded? This is hardly a criti-
cism of this rich text, only a desire to hear more of the
logistics, personal exchanges, and actual experiences in
Germany.
The enduring message of this book is to listen to
the qanruyutet (teachings) of the ancestors and to return
to a way of “living within the drum” (pp. 111–115).
This is a meaningful metaphor on which the elders linger: It
is a way of living in harmony with one’s community and be-
ing true to Yup’ik identity. This theme is scattered through-
out the book but especially summarized in the last chapter,
which is tellingly titled “Fifteenth day: I have hope that
they gain more knowledge of who they are.” Herein, the el-
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ders reflect on their journey and how they wish their work
to inspire Yup’ik youth. One man expressed his feelings:
perhaps if [our young people] begin to look at pictures
and written explanations of these cultural objects, they
would start to understand how our ancestors lived and
survived for centuries. Once they begin to understand
that, they might begin to have faith in their cultural iden-
tity and turn to our old ways, seeing that our ancestors
lived rich and productive lives. [p. 171]
May the courage and generosity of these Yup’ik elders
and educators inspire others to such tasks of visual repa-
triation and cultural reclamation. This book would be a
valuable addition to any applied anthropology, material
culture, or indigenous knowledge course and should
encourage others to participate in collaborative museology.
The Secret Cemetery. Doris Francis, Leonie Kellaher, and
Georgina Neophytou. New York: Berg, 2005. 298 pp.
LY N N R A I N V I L L E
Sweet Briar College
Using the “language of stones and flowers,” authors Doris
Francis, Leonie Kellaher, and Georgina Neophytou wrote
an engaging analysis of visitors and mourners at six ceme-
tery landscapes in and around London. While conducting
the research, Francis and Kellaher were at the University of
North London. Today, Francis is a Research Associate at the
Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico,
while Kellaher is Principal Research Officer and Director of
the Centre for Environmental and Social Studies in Aging
(CESSA) at the London Metropolitan University. Georgina
Neophytou is a Research Associate at CESSA.
This book’s approach is unique among cemetery studies
because it focuses on the living visitors, not the permanent
residents. Through questionnaires, observations, archival
research, and interviews, the authors reveal what survivors
do when they visit the cemetery, and how the cemetery
helps the bereaved cope with their loss. Whereas most ceme-
tery studies focus on one religion, socioeconomic class, or
ethnicity, Secret Cemetery uses a wide range of examples. For
example, the authors discuss Jewish, Muslim, and Christian
(Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Anglican) mortuary
beliefs. They outline mortuary rituals for each religion, in-
cluding the preparation of the body, wake, burial, and the
first year of tending the grave.
In the first half of the book (chs. 1–4), the authors dis-
cuss metaphors that connect the cemetery landscape with
grieving and mortuary rituals. These include associations
between one’s domestic home and one’s final resting place,
nature (as evidenced through gardening) and the body. The
authors conclude that “graves and cemeteries, like other do-
mestic spaces . . . speak to relationships of power, ownership,
and agency” (p. 46).
In addition to studying the material culture of death
present at the cemeteries—flowers, memorial gardens, and
gravestones—the authors conducted archival research. For
898 American Anthropologist • Vol. 108, No. 4 • December 2006
example, a 1929 advertising brochure for the City of Lon-
don cemetery illustrated a popular euphemism. Instead of
discussing death, the brochure offered up nature as a pallia-
tive for grief, where the “charm of nature” served to “refute
human grief” (p. 41).
The authors concluded that class divisions were repli-
cated within the Christian cemeteries when the middle class
was encouraged to purchase a cemetery plot (decorated with
roses) in lieu of a country estate. In contrast, orthodox Jews
preferred “functional and austere” cemetery landscapes and
they did not “flower their people” (p. 51).
In the second half of the book, the authors demon-
strate how cemetery visits enable the survivors to mourn,
commemorate, and remember the deceased. In “Negotiat-
ing Memory” (ch. 5), the authors discuss long-term com-
memorative practices at the graveside. This includes in-
teresting practices, such as a Jewish daughter who short-
ens her mother’s self-composed and verbose epitaph to “a
woman of exceptional ability” (p. 109). The authors ex-
plore religious differences in mortuary rituals, from lim-
ited, annual visits to the grave (in the Jewish Cemetery)
to mandatory, regular visits (in the Cypriot Greek Ortho-
dox sections). In the next chapter, “Keeping Kin and Kin-
ship Alive,” the authors focus on how cemetery visits en-
able survivors to maintain relationships with deceased fam-
ily members and help transfer kinship ideology between
generations.
Chapter 7, entitled “Cemeteries as Ethnic Homelands,”
reveals how immigrants use the cemetery as a substitute
for their homeland through personalized burials, cultur-
ally instructive walks through the grounds, and graveside
rituals that link personal memories with culturally specific
rituals.
In the last chapter, “Change and Renewal in Historic
Cemeteries,” the authors discuss how older cemeteries are
reinterpreted as sites of community history and collective
significance (p. 198). They explain why older burial sites
that are no longer in use still have visitors who wish to visit
ancestral graves, to claim a sense of belonging to the past,
or to feel part of a generational chain. They also document
neglected cemeteries that are threatened by construction
and the reuse of Victorian-era graves.
The book’s helpful appendices contain the question-
naires used in the study and examples of cemetery deeds
and notes from cemetery visits. A table that summarized
the number of informants, and their ethnic and religious
backgrounds, would have been a useful addition.
It is ironic that despite hundreds of interviews, ques-
tionnaires, and firsthand observations of cemetery visitors,
the book is titled The Secret Cemetery. The authors explain
this in the last pages of the book: “Cemeteries . . . exist to
obscure the terrifying fact of death through ritual practice”
(p. 214). They continue, “All cemeteries, however, hold
secrets for present-day users and visitors to decode and
also to ‘plant’ for future generations” (p. 213). Whether
one sees cemeteries as “secrets” waiting to be decoded or
as accessible open-air museums, I hope more visitors take
the time to visit them and appreciate their rich cultural
landscape. This book would be a good guide for such a visit.
The Red Riviera: Gender, Tourism, and Postsocialism
on the Black Sea. Kristen Ghodsee. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2005. 226 pp.
J U L I E H A RT L E Y- M O O R E
Brigham Young University
Kristen Ghodsee’s The Red Riviera: Gender, Tourism, and Post-
socialism on the Black Sea is a fascinating ethnography of
women working at various levels of Bulgarian tourism.
The book revolves around the personal stories of several
women: Dora, a 42-year-old head chef; Svetla, a secondary-
school student preparing for university entrance exams;
Desi, a waitress who speaks five languages; Gergana, a young
mother and a chambermaid at a ski resort; Sonia, a 36-year
veteran of the Hotel Intercontinental reception desk; and
Prolet, the owner of a small tour company. Ghodsee relies
on trajectory adjustment theory to explain how women in
tourism were able to transition successfully to capitalism
(pp. 12–13).
Tourism was one of the few Bulgarian industries to
expand after the collapse of communism and the intro-
duction of a market economy and privatization in 1989.
Today tourism accounts for ten percent of the country’s
gross domestic product (p. 3) and, as the biggest gener-
ator of foreign exchange, it supports Bulgaria’s macroe-
conomic stability (p. 59). In contrast to much of the re-
search on global tourism, Ghodsee found that in postsocial-
ist Bulgaria, tourism jobs are relatively highly compensated,
high-prestige positions in relation to other employment op-
portunities. Job competition in tourism is fierce, but de-
spite high unemployment rates for men, women dominate
even upper management in Bulgarian tourism. The gender-
ing of tourism labor results in distinct benefits to women
rather than the economic marginalization that character-
izes women’s experiences with tourism in many other parts
of the world. Bulgarian tourism continues the socialist pat-
tern of gender-specific forms of cultural and social capital.
Under communism, men were funneled into technical edu-
cation and industrial work, economic sectors that declined
in the new economy; women were given general education
and filled most service-sector slots like education, medicine,
law, and tourism. In communist ideology, tourism employ-
ment was seen as a natural extension of women’s domestic
labor (p. 111), and the long off-seasons that characterize
sea and ski resorts allowed women time to attend to fam-
ily responsibilities. The state encouraged and paid for ad-
vanced professional training, higher education, and study
of foreign languages for female tourism workers. Interac-
tion with tourists provided opportunities to meet foreign-
ers, many of them Westerners, to practice using foreign lan-
guages, to gain some understanding of capitalist culture,
and to accumulate hard currency through tips. This gen-
dered cultural capital, Ghodsee concludes, “prevented men

with similar qualifications from entering the sector and dis-
placing women” when communism collapsed (p. 111).
Ghodsee’s emphasis throughout the book is on how
women in tourism have successfully weathered Bulgaria’s
capitalist transition; as she argues, the 18 percent of
Bulgarian women employed directly or indirectly in tourism
are a significant enough number to “challenge common
perceptions that Bulgarian women in general were more
negatively affected by the economic transition than men”
(p. 5). Oddly, though, the book concludes with a dis-
cussion of NGOs, their “political economy of begging”
(p. 165), and what Ghodsee calls “feminism-by-design” (a
play on the capitalism-by-design orientation of many devel-
opment projects). By focusing on microcredit, job-training
programs, and attention to domestic violence, gender dis-
crimination, and pornography, Ghodsee claims, NGOs de-
flect “attention away from the three key actors that are pri-
marily responsible for the disappearance of the social safety
net that once supported Bulgarian women and their fami-
lies: structural adjustment policies of the World Bank, the
stabilization programs of the IMF, and the complicity of
the Bulgarian government” (p. 167). Ironically, this is what
the book itself does by glossing over these key actors and
focusing the entire concluding chapter on the failures of
NGOs. While this discussion is compelling, it seems tangen-
tial to the rest of the book’s focus on how women “reallocate
stocks of capital” and “adjust their trajectories” under the
new economic system (p. 108).
Overall The Red Riviera is a very appealing book. Its
theoretical position is clearly explained and its use of
personal narrative is effective. Ghodsee’s description of
tourism under communism, where it was not constrained
by free-market competition and formed a crucial part of
socialist ideology and practice, is especially interesting.
The book will appeal to those interested in tourism, labor,
gender, and postsocialism, and because it is so accessibly
written, it will also work well for undergraduate classes.
Women in Tibet. Janet Gyatso and Hanna Havnevik, eds.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. 436 pp.
MARCIA CALKOWSKI
University of Regina
Offering an enticing array of such examples of Tibetan fe-
male agency as the subtle sarcasm of a medieval hermitess,
mediums who muffled their oracular voices during the Cul-
tural Revolution, another medium who channeled Chair-
man Mao, the assumption of a nun’s appearance as a radical
gender act, and the secret taping of protest songs by impris-
oned nuns, this book makes a very important contribution
to a growing body of literature on the lives and contribu-
tions of Tibetan women and to the ethnography of Tibet.
The book is divided into two parts. In the first part, which
addresses women in traditional Tibet, Helga Uebach draws
on ancient texts to gain insight into the lives of imperial Ti-
betan ladies, including the role played by the Tibetan em-
Single Reviews 899
peror Songtsen Gampo’s sister in securing her husband’s
country for her brother. Dan Martin identifies 11th and
12th century women spiritual leaders, including prophets,
lineage holders, leaders of popular religious movements,
lesser teachers, and nuns. Kurtis Schaeffer completes this
section with an examination of the earliest known Tibetan
woman’s autobiography: that of Orgyan Chokyi, a nun and
hermitess. Schaeffer observes that her prayer to be reborn
in a male body is coupled with her assertion that she would
make far better spiritual use of a male body than would any
man.
In the book’s second part covering modern Tibetan
women, Hildegard Diemberger’s discussion of female ora-
cles is particularly rich ethnographically. She describes con-
ditions that predispose individuals to become oracles, orac-
ular initiations, oracular accoutrements, trance states, and
recurrent themes in oracular practice. She traces the vicissi-
tudes of oracular status in post-1959 Tibet, from the crim-
inalization of oracles during the Cultural Revolution to a
liberalization policy categorizing them as acceptable prac-
titioners of local custom, and to their current ambiguous
status as possible criminals, potential counterrevolution-
ary activists, or useful resources for cadres seeking local
cooperation. Tashi Tsering’s invaluable nuanced accounts
of the lives of female medical doctors reveal, for exam-
ple, that an internationally renowned female doctor who
received formal Tibetan medical training in Tibet was de-
nied admission to the Tibetan Medical Institute in Dharam-
sala in 1962 by the Council for Religious Affairs of the Ti-
betan government-in-exile, on the grounds of her female
gender. Isabelle Henrion-Dourcy presents the biographies
of six female performing artists who gained celebrity sta-
tus during six different periods of recent Tibetan history:
an opera star, a folk singer, an epic bard, a specialist in
Chinese propaganda songs, an innovator (and defector) in
the Tibetan pop music genre, and a defector who gained
world renown after launching her musical career in exile. Al-
though the epic bard attributed her career success to the pos-
itive gender discrimination applied by the Chinese Com-
munist Party, Henrion-Dourcy does not find that gender
has played any particular role in shaping the Tibetan per-
forming arts. Henrion-Dourcy identifies the common con-
cerns in the lives of all six performers as the negotiation
of Tibetan identity and a professional career in contempo-
rary Tibet. Charlene Makley utilizes a performance-based
approach to investigate the basis of a strong local antipa-
thy directed to nuns in Labrang. She argues that whereas
monkhood is viewed as a superior masculine gender status,
nunhood does not represent the complementary case for
women. Rather, Makley asserts, nuns could be understood
as transgressing gender lines by emulating the renuncia-
tions of monks as well as their external physical appearance.
Thus, Makley views local gossip about nuns, which centers
on violations of celibacy vows, as indicative of an attempt
to reassign nuns to traditional gender roles. Because such
gossip about nuns is, however, prevalent in Tibetan com-
munities, Makley endeavors to contextualize local hostility
900 American Anthropologist • Vol. 108, No. 4 • December 2006
toward nuns in terms of an amalgamation of political, eth-
nic, historical, and economic pressures. The volume is com-
pleted with Robert Barnett’s analysis of women and politics
in contemporary Tibet. Barnett guides us through the intri-
cacies of the roles of female nationalist leaders in the theater
of Chinese politics and Tibetan perceptions of these roles, as
well as of two distinct strategies that Tibetan women have
publicly pursued: constructionist and resistance politics.
While outsiders and female nationalist leaders have opted
to focus on practical achievements approved by the state,
contemporary resistance politics has been mainly shaped
by nuns. Barnett observes that thus far only nuns “have
constructed a narrative of themselves as political agents”
(p. 356). Of particular note is Barnett’s conclusion that both
female nationalist leaders and resistance activists share a
commitment to asserting Tibetan identity and “collective
self-enhancement” (p. 365).
This fine volume will generate considerable interest
and, I expect, a demand for an even wider consideration
of Tibetan female agency that might include attention to
Tibetan businesswomen and, perhaps, the role of women
in the identification of male-reincarnate lamas.
Engaged Anthropology: Research Essays on North
American Archaeology, Ethnobotany, and Museology,
Papers in Honor of Richard I. Ford. Michelle Hegmon and
B. Sunday Eiselt, eds. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 2005. 263 pp.
KRISTEN J. GREMILLION
Ohio State University
The festschrift tradition lends itself to the production of
eclectic volumes whose chapters have little in common ex-
cept the fact that their authors share some degree of intellec-
tual kinship with the honoree. However, this volume tran-
scends the limitations of the form and stands on its own
merits as a collection of chapters on public anthropology
from a North American perspective.
All the chapters in this volume, assembled to honor
University of Michigan anthropologist Richard I. Ford,
are appropriate for inclusion in that they are clearly re-
lated to Ford’s work and are written by his students
and colleagues. The editors have done an excellent job
of ensuring that the volume is coherent in theme and
that the individual papers are of high quality (and
free of annoying typographical and grammatical errors).
Their introduction takes the form of an interview with
Ford that provides key background to the chapters that
follow.
The chapters, although not divided into sections, are
grouped according to which elements of Ford’s legacy
they emphasize: public anthropology, the U.S. Southwest,
the Eastern Woodlands, or museum collections manage-
ment. Throughout the volume, the authors acknowledge
Ford’s contributions to ethnobotany, ecological anthropol-
ogy, and the archaeology of trade and exchange. Most of
the chapters reflect the contemporary shift away from a
preoccupation with scientific standards of verification and
toward a more interpretative approach to anthropological
knowledge.
The first nine chapters deal with the archaeology and
ethnography of the U.S. Southwest. Chapter 1 is written
by an artisan rather than an academic, which sets a tone
of respect for the insights that descendent populations can
offer the archaeologist. In it, potter Felipe Ortega uses the
example of micaceous pottery, whose creation and use is
heavily invested with meaning, to illustrate the limitations
that he believes hamper archaeologists who work within a
materialist paradigm. In chapter 2, Michael Adler discusses
the collaboration of anthropologists and tribal representa-
tives in determining cultural affiliation, highlighting some
of the differences between the academic ethics of full dis-
closure and dissemination of data with the secrecy required
in traditional knowledge systems of the Pueblo peoples.
In chapter 4, Kurt Anschuetz contrasts Anglo-American
and Tewa concepts of “landscape”; like Adler, he is opti-
mistic about the potential for collaboration to enrich both
communities.
Aside from chapters 13 and 14 (by Catherine S. Fowler
and Claire McHale Milner, respectively), which highlight
museum collections, and Jeffrey R. Parson’s personal reflec-
tion on Ford as a colleague (ch. 15), the remaining chap-
ters address topics in North American prehistory. Chapter
3, by Severin M. Fowles, contrasts the Tewa ideology of fe-
male spiritual significance with the relatively limited role
played by women in ritual activities. The conclusions—
for example, that women lost some of their ritual im-
portance by shifting to solitary rather than communal
maize grinding—are well argued and consistent with avail-
able evidence (although old-style processualists may not
be convinced). In chapter 5, Heather Trigg and Debra L.
Gold use migration records to model population growth
in colonial New Mexico, concluding that later historic
population levels could only have been achieved through
considerable intermarriage between Spanish and Native
populations. Kelley Hays-Gilpin and Michelle Hegmon ad-
dress the puzzling scarcity of plant images in southwestern
art and show that some apparently abstract motifs may ac-
tually be stylized representations of maize. Paul E. Minnis
and Michael E. Whalen (ch. 7) present new data on feast-
ing at Casas Grandes. John D. Speth (ch. 8) and Stephen
Plog (ch. 9) both address the issue of trade and exchange
among southwestern communities. Speth’s analysis of ex-
change between the Plains and the Southwest argues con-
vincingly that the value of bison as a resource drew groups
of the Southern Plains into the competitive world of in-
terregional trade. In chapter 10, Katherine A. Spielmann
and Patrick Livingood identify constrasts in the meanings
and social uses of exotic goods in three North American re-
gions: Ohio (Hopewell), the Southeast (Mississippian), and
the Southwest. H. Edwin Jackson (ch. 11) presents a synthe-
sis on the role of the now-extinct passenger pigeon in south-
eastern subsistence. David Anderson’s chapter 12 argues the

case for historic California groups as appropriate analogs for
prehistoric hunter-gatherers of the Southeast.
The chapters in this volume are diverse enough to
attract readers from many specialties while remaining true
to the common goal of celebrating Dick Ford’s career.
The range of interests and topics exhibited by the authors
accurately mirror the diversity of Ford’s contributions to
North American anthropology. This book is a fitting tribute.
A Prehistory of the North: Human Settlement of the
Higher Latitudes. John F. Hoffecker. New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press, 2005. 225 pp.
LISA M. HODGETTS
The University of Western Ontario
The arctic was the final frontier in the human settlement of
the globe, the last place on earth to be colonized by humans.
It was a chilly, inhospitable place for a naked ape. Its cold
temperatures, marked seasonality, and the limited diversity
of plant and animal resources represented major challenges
to human occupation. Yet many groups devised the means
to thrive in arctic environments. The sophisticated cloth-
ing, shelter, hunting implements, and transportation sys-
tems used by the aboriginal peoples of the circumpolar re-
gion are a testament to the ability of cultural innovation to
overcome physical limitations.
At first glance, the title of this book might suggest an
examination of the human occupation of the arctic follow-
ing the end of the last ice age. In fact, it is much broader
in scope, both temporally and geographically. It begins in
Miocene Africa with an ancestor shared by chimpanzees
and humans and ends with a discussion of how the Cold
War impacted the circumpolar region. The expansion of hu-
man settlement into progressively colder habitats provides
a novel lens through which Hoffecker views human evolu-
tion and the development of many archaeological cultures
in Europe, Siberia, and the North American Arctic. He traces
the anatomical and social developments of our tropical an-
cestors that allowed them to spread throughout the entire
northern hemisphere.
Hoffecker divides his discussion of human settlement
of the north into five main stages: the occupation of the
middle latitudes, the colonization of western Europe, the
Neanderthals, the dispersal of modern humans, and the
colonization of the Arctic. The early chapters focus on the
emergence of Homo habilis and Homo erectus and the dis-
persal out of Africa. They highlight the role of bipedalism,
more developed cognitive abilities, and an increasing di-
etary reliance on meat, which allowed hominids to leave
tropical woodlands and move into Eurasia. Subsequent
chapters deal with the early occupants of Europe, from
Homo heidelbergensis, whose anatomy and technology were
virtually indistinguishable from their African contempo-
raries, to Neanderthals, who displayed pronounced anatom-
ical adaptations to cold but left only limited evidence of
cold-related technologies. The book then moves to mod-
Single Reviews 901
ern humans, who maintained a warm-weather physique
but developed complex tools, tailored clothing, and shel-
ters allowing them to spread rapidly across the forests and
cold steppes of Europe and Siberia. The final chapters trace
the rapid colonization of the subarctic and arctic regions of
Europe, Siberia, and North America following the last glacial
maximum. They emphasize the importance of an increas-
ingly sophisticated hunting technology and trace a shift
from a broad-based terrestrial economy to a marine one.
This is a highly readable account, clearly intended
for a nonspecialist audience. To accommodate its broad
scope in a very reasonable 142 pages of text, it compresses
many details. It gives only brief mention to important
debates and entire archaeological cultures. Taxonomic
questions related to the study of hominid evolution are
largely ignored, as is much of the variability within the
archaeological cultures that are presented. However, this
does not detract from the great strength of the book, which
is to paint, in broad strokes, the journey of a tropical
ape to the far north. No other book places the human
occupations of the Arctic in such a deep temporal context.
In an age of increasing specialization within our discipline,
its wide-ranging coverage is refreshing. This exploration
of northern prehistory becomes an exploration of all of
human prehistory, emphasizing the interconnectedness of
people everywhere. Its long-term perspective also serves to
highlight the accomplishment of circumpolar peoples past
and present whose structures and carvings reflect a richness
of life that goes far beyond mere survival. This book
will appeal to undergraduates looking for an accessible
introduction to human evolution and the archaeological
cultures of the north. It also makes engaging reading for
anyone who specializes in a small piece of this very large
puzzle and wants to broaden their horizons.
Existential Anthropology: Events, Exigencies, and
Effects. Michael Jackson. New York: Berghan Books, 2005.
216 pp.
JENNIFER HASTY
Pacific Lutheran University
Michael Jackson’s latest book is a collection of medita-
tions on cutting-edge issues in anthropology, studded with
ethnographic vignettes from his diverse field experiences,
and collectively integrated through his own intersubjective
version of existentialist philosophy. Exploring such themes
as mourning, violence, organ transplants, indigenous land
struggles, and human rights, Jackson identifies the intersub-
jective forms of reason and practice through which human
beings understand and cope with events, reinventing them-
selves and their possibilities in the process.
While the chapters are full of insights into the spe-
cific plights of the particular groups and individuals Jackson
has studied, the most remarkable aspect of his ethnogra-
phy is the use of existential concepts in an adamantly retro
attempt to reground the comparative humanism of the
902 American Anthropologist • Vol. 108, No. 4 • December 2006
discipline. For Jackson, the objective of anthropology is “to
understand, through empirical means and expedient com-
parisons, the eventualities, exigencies, and experiences of
social being” (p. xxviii). The generality of this project points
to the price of reinventing universalism while remaining
mindful of poststructuralist and postcolonial concerns over
power, representation, and historicity. While the ethno-
graphic frame of “events, exigencies, and effects” widens
the lens of analysis to an unwieldy angle, Jackson brings
focus to his project by turning to central problems of exis-
tentialism. Time and time again, Jackson turns to Hannah
Arendt’s notion of “natality” to show how people bridge
the gap between freedom and determinism through “gen-
erative or initiatory” acts such as storytelling, ritual, play,
affective expression, and magical reasoning.
A writer of fiction and poetry as well as ethnography,
Jackson is a master storyteller. The “events” that inspire his
existential ruminations are conveyed in vivid detail with
careful sensitivity to the multiple experiences and perspec-
tives of participants. The chapters develop rhizomatically,
shifting through scenes and concepts, avoiding synthesis
and closure. As with existentialist philosophy, it seems it is
up to the individual reader to impute meaning to the cross-
cultural connections and reflections upturned in Jackson’s
fertile narrative. The effect is uneven. In chapter 5, Jackson’s
humorous commentary on having the same name as a con-
troversial celebrity in the United States sits uncomfortably
with Malinowski’s account of spells and magic—the point
of this juxtaposition remains unclear. In the next chapter,
however, theory and narrative coalesce in a powerful drama
showing how Jackson’s son worked through the grief and
existential crisis of losing his grandmother by improvising
ritual, narrative, and performative play.
Analytically, Jackson is at the height of his talent when
addressing the experiences and consequences of human
suffering. Conveying the stories of displaced and brutal-
ized peoples, Jackson dramatizes the social performativity
of voice and silence, how people use narrative to situate
their individual experiences in socially meaningful contexts
rather than allowing their tragic circumstances to isolate
and alienate them. In his critique of human rights discourse,
he points to the impotence of individualistic notions of sub-
jectivity and entitlement in complex sociocultural arenas
where people more readily turn to intersubjective strategies
of identity and survival.
Despite the ambitious title, Existential Anthropology is
not a manifesto for an entirely new and different kind of
anthropology but, rather, a call for a return to comparative
humanism. While this may be a laudable project, if we are
to follow in Jackson’s path, anthropology must come to
terms with the rather overwhelming critique of humanism
waged by structuralist and poststructuralist social theorists
over the past three decades. Overlooking such postexisten-
tial critics as Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault, Jackson
makes noble but essentialist claims about human nature
throughout the book. For example, “I take it as axiomatic
that all human beings need to have a hand in choosing
their lives, and to be recognised as having an active part
to play in the shaping of their social worlds” (p. 127). As a
foundation for professional ethics and progressive politics,
yes, such a commitment is crucial to the study of humanity.
As a universal social fact, however, the individual drive
for self-determination is highly contingent on political,
historical, cultural, psychological, and even circumstantial
factors. One might counter that human beings also have
a need for collectivity and belonging, forms of merged
identity that help them to share or shirk the burden of
difficult personal choices and relinquish sole responsibility
for their individual destinies. Herein lies the problem with
humanism: What counts as human is entirely up for grabs.
As a basis for reenvisioning comparative ethnography,
Jackson’s existential anthropology holds promise; however,
the theoretical challenges of poststructuralism deserve
careful consideration.
Looking Reality in the Eye: Museums and Social Re-
sponsibility. Robert P. Janes and Gerald T. Conaty, eds.
Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2005. 196 pp.
REBECCA J. DOBKINS
Willamette University
The authors of the nine case studies collected in this anthol-
ogy take as a premise that the mission of museums should
centrally include “social responsibility,” and that such a
mission can coexist with fiscal sustainability. The editors
begin with a widely shared observation that recently mu-
seums have tended to focus on one of two rarely overlap-
ping pursuits: showcasing market-driven blockbuster exhi-
bitions, with increased revenues and attendance as the goal,
or prioritizing community connections and relevancy, with
sustainability as the key goal. The idea for the book origi-
nated in a 2002 Canadian Museums Association panel on
museums and social responsibility, and the case studies are
predominantly from Canada with three others from New
Zealand and the United States.
The editors, both archaeologists, argue that the (West-
ern) museum world is currently engaged in a search for sig-
nificance. They contend this search grows out of dissatis-
faction with the West and its emphasis on a human–nature
divide, preoccupation with money as the measure of worth,
and misconception that markets create communities. They
assert that museums are privileged workplaces where an al-
ternative path can be developed, and that a socially respon-
sible agenda can lead to organizational renewal and sustain-
ability.
While the idea that museums exist for a social purpose
is not new, up until the last few decades that purpose in
the West has largely been to reify dominant ideology. In
the mid–20th century, the eventual transformation of some
museums was set into motion by formerly colonized peo-
ple who demanded that human remains and cultural trea-
sures be returned to their communities of origin. Two chap-
ters offer portraits of these transformations: one by Maori

museum professional Paul Tapsell about Maori ancestral re-
mains associated with the Auckland Museum and the re-
cent reclamation of control over those remains by Maori
people, and the other by Gerald Conaty and Beth Carter of
the Glenbow Museum in Calgary about the development of
a permanent exhibit about Blackfoot-speaking people. The
latter project was done in partnership with First Nations
communities and, for the Glenbow, represents a significant
departure from the process leading to the notorious 1988
exhibit The Spirit Sings: Artistic Traditions of Canada’s First
Peoples, which attracted protest by the Lubicon Cree who
were frustrated with lack of treaty negations and objected
to the corporate sponsorship of Shell Canada Ltd., which
was drilling for oil on Lubicon traditional lands.
In other articles, museum professionals working in art,
history, natural history, and science museums provide ex-
amples of how to proceed down an alternative path, with
great pragmatic detail about working with community part-
ners, corporate funders, and museum audiences. Notwith-
standing all the lessons of the volume, I believe the con-
tributors miss an opportunity for constructive self-scrutiny.
For example, while several authors link their institutions’
shift to socially responsible agendas to increased funding
from corporate and government sponsors, none provide
sustained attention to the implications of relying on such
sources for community collaborations.
There are also other significant unexamined assump-
tions in several of the chapters. One presumption is that
museums can discern what social change should look like;
they just do so by different means. There does not seem to
be consistent recognition in the volume that the process
of identifying goals for social change is a positioned one,
dependent on a theoretical understanding of the sources
of social problems. For example, several case studies fo-
cus on behavioral dimensions of social problems (e.g., the
antismoking program The Unfiltered Truth of the Liberty
Science Center in New Jersey; antidomestic violence exhi-
bitions in the Calgary Police Service Interpretive Center),
suggesting that social change can be achieved by individ-
ual “choices.” More holistically, The Human Factor exhibit
at the Royal Saskatchewan Museum attempts a very ambi-
tious interpretation of the historical, ideological, and eco-
logical factors that have resulted in the global environ-
mental crisis, and it posits itself as a form of “societal
therapy” to heal the human–nature divide. Ruth Abrams of
the Lower East Side Tenement Museum argues persuasively
that the historical perspective can be a powerful tool for
social change; her museum addresses larger societal needs
of immigrants as a fundamental dimension of its mission.
While the affirmation of museums as social change agents
is inspiring, the volume could have reached another level
by consistently elevating some of these broader issues to the
surface.
These minor improvements aside, Looking Reality in the
Eye brings together valuable case studies for museum pro-
fessionals involved in strategic planning processes and for
courses in museum studies, ethics, or applied anthropology.
Single Reviews 903
Applied Anthropology: Domains of Application. Satish
Kedia and John van Willigen. Westport, CT: Greenwood
Press, 2005. 376 pp.
C A R L A G U E R R Ó N - M O N T E R O
University of Delaware
The 21st century has witnessed a resurgence of inter-
est in academic circles on the ways in which anthro-
pologists could or should be involved with the press-
ing human problems that they document. This newly
heightened awareness is by no means uncontested. Some
anthropologists consider applied anthropology “one of the
frameworks for the discipline’s goal of pragmatic engage-
ment” (Rylko-Bauer et al. 2006:178). Others argue that an-
thropology should only be concerned with offering new
theoretical and ethnographic venues to understanding hu-
man problems. Applied Anthropology: Domains of Application
is a timely and welcome addition to this debate.
Applied Anthropology provides a very comprehensive
summary of the history of applied anthropology and its
connections and influence on academic anthropology. The
book is composed of an introduction and a conclusion by
editors Satish Kedia and John van Willigen, and nine chap-
ters, each addressing a particular domain of applied anthro-
pology. The editors convincingly demonstrate that applied
anthropology is not a recent “invention,” and that it has
been intrinsically linked to the development of anthropol-
ogy since its origins as a comparative science. The editors’
introduction also covers a discussion of the theoretical and
methodological contributions of applied anthropology.
Nine chapters address some of the most important do-
mains in applied anthropology. All of the chapters are simi-
larly organized. The contributors provide a useful historical
summary of the domain and its relevance today, in addi-
tion to its theory, method, practice, application, and current
trends. Case studies illustrate the scope of application of the
theories. Consistency in the topics covered is an essential as-
set of the book, although some authors offer more thorough
discussions of the theoretical development of their own
domain, thus merging praxis and theory more effectively.
Thomas McGuire, for instance, masterfully traces the the-
oretical roots of applied environmental anthropology from
cultural ecology to political economy to political ecology.
Similarly, Anthony Oliver-Smith provides a comprehensive
history of applied anthropological research in displacement
and resettlement.
Two chapters discuss development. Peter Little uses a
community-based conservation project among Kenyan pas-
toralists to illustrate current interest among development
anthropologists in addressing global issues such as biodi-
versity conservation, the impact of structural adjustment
programs, and global markets. He remarks that, to be ef-
fective, anthropologists must learn the language of policy
makers and macroeconomists. Oliver-Smith tackles the dif-
ficult issue of forced displacement and resettlement of pop-
ulations as a result of large-scale infrastructural projects,
904 American Anthropologist • Vol. 108, No. 4 • December 2006
using as case material hydroelectric dam projects. He also
indicates anthropology’s role as the foundational discipline
of development-induced displacement and resettlement re-
search (DIDR).
Three chapters address the related topics of food, nu-
trition, and health. Robert Rhoades argues that in only
25 years agricultural anthropology has become a strong
and viable domain. The importance of the anthropo-
logical view of agriculture as it relates to cultural be-
liefs and practices is illustrated with three cases from
the International Potato Center in Lima, Peru. David A.
Himmelgreen and Deborah L. Crooks highlight the in-
terdisciplinary nature of nutritional anthropology and its
impact on public policy. Three case studies document the
role of anthropologists in programs for low-income His-
panic families in Connecticut and Florida. The domain of
medical anthropology is reviewed by Linda M. Whiteford
and Linda A. Bennett. They emphasize the ever-present eth-
ical issues in their domain, and illustrate the effectiveness of
medical anthropology’s biocultural perspective with a case
study of the 1991 cholera epidemic in Ecuador.
Thomas McGuire addresses environmental anthropol-
ogy, using the subdomain of maritime anthropology—
specifically, the case of the collapse of the northern cod
stocks in the early 1990s—to pose the question of how to
effectively manage a communal resource. This case study is
also used to discuss the applicability of political economy
and cultural ecology to environmental anthropology.
Marietta L. Baba’s chapter examines the utility of an-
thropological knowledge and skills in business and indus-
try. This domain belongs to an older tradition with roots in
the 1930s when anthropologists participated in the inter-
pretation of working environments in the industrial sec-
tor. The author presents two case studies, one on using
the ethnographic approach to conceptualize new products
among working families in the United States and the other
on corporate organizational culture.
Nancy P. Greenman highlights how cultural acquisition
has formed the core of anthropological studies of education.
Anthropologists have contributed to the redefinition of lit-
eracy and to the specificity of how and what children learn
in every culture. Rather than using case studies, Greenman
focuses on career trajectories of accomplished educational
anthropologists Jane Schensul, Harry Wolcott, and David
Fetterman.
Robert C. Harman discusses how applied anthropology
can contribute to the field of gerontology and to a better
quality of life for the aged because of its holistic, compara-
ble, and emic nature. His case studies focus on malnutrition
and quality of care among the elderly in the United States
and Scotland.
Finally, in their concluding chapter, Van Willigen and
Kedia address future trends in applied anthropology. Read-
ers would have benefited from a lengthier discussion of the
changing power relations within the discipline, also cov-
ered in the conclusion. As the authors indicate, the his-
tory of academic and applied anthropology is the history
of power relationships between anthropologists and their
study subjects. Academic anthropology has responded to
this challenge by being reflexive; applied anthropology has
responded by producing work where anthropologists and
study subjects are engaged in a collaborative or participa-
tory relationship.
The contributors cite scholars from the United States
and abroad, and have conducted research nationally and in-
ternationally, and some of the case studies refer to interna-
tional projects. However, the focus of Applied Anthropology is
on the development of the subfield in the United States. Al-
though this is not by any means a shortcoming of the book,
it is worthy to note that it centers on the history, theoretical
and practical development, and present state of applied an-
thropology in the United States (and, to some extent, the
West). Anthropological application, theoretical approach,
and training are not the same worldwide. Anthropology in
other parts of the world is at once inherently theoretical
and practical, as scholars navigate the public policy, aca-
demic, and nonacademic worlds simultaneously (Guerrón-
Montero 2002).
Applied Anthropology is a thoroughly researched and
well-written book. It will be a very significant reference tool
for practitioners and academics in the United States and
abroad. Upper-level undergraduate and graduate students
will also find this book informative, comprehensive, and
approachable. Departments interested in expanding or im-
proving their curriculum to incorporate an applied compo-
nent will welcome the book, as the editors and some con-
tributors have been careful to identify areas where graduate
programs could focus their attention in training students in
applied anthropology, considering that students themselves
are asking to be trained with the “real world” in mind.
REFERENCES CITED
Guerrón-Montero, Carla
2002 Introduction: Practicing Anthropology in Latin America.
Practicing Anthropology 24(4):2–4.
Rylko-Bauer, Barbara, Merrill Singer, and John Van Willigen.
2006 Reclaiming Applied Anthropology: Its Past, Present, and
Future. American Anthropologist 108(1):178–190.
Tattoo: An Anthropology. Makiko Kuwahara. Berg Press:
Oxford, 2005. 288 pp.
MARK C. DIAB
UNESCO Asia/Pacific Cultural Heritage Cooperation and
Protection Office and Research Institute for Humanity and
Nature
Despite the simple but elegant title, Tattoo: An Anthropology
details the implicit sociocultural complexity of an explicit
art form and symbol of expression with which we are all fa-
miliar in a very overt way (if not anthropologically). Makiko
Kuwahara discusses a single aspect of cultural expression
and a single process: tattooing. The volume is the pub-
lished version of the author’s Ph.D. dissertation from Aus-
tralian National University. As she states in the introduction
(“The Corporeality of Tattooing and Identities”), the “study

examines how people situate themselves in the world, phys-
ically and ideologically” (p. 1). She states that the body is
both a social and cultural construct built within a social
and cultural context. The context for this ethnography on
tattooing is contemporary French Polynesia—specifically,
Tahiti.
Rather than deal with the reinvention of tradition and
ethnic identity as other studies (cited by the author) have
dealt with, Kuwahara focuses her examination on two as-
pects of tattooing: (1) the historical discontinuity (or in-
terruption) of Tahitian tattooing (because of Christian sup-
pression beginning from the 1830s and its revival in the
1980s) and the effect that this hiatus had on understand-
ing the practice of tattooing, and (2) the importance tied to
the spatiality of tattooing. By spatiality, the author explains
that tattooing and tattoos are situated and conceptualized
(by modern Tahitians) in an everlasting time and borderless
space.
The corporeality, or the body as a form of identity, is
an important aspect of this ethnographic work, highlighted
by the questions investigated in this work—namely, what is
the meaning of the body when related to tattooing? Why do
people mark the body? What are the consequences of this
marking? What is the relationship between the body, the
self, and the society? And do people get tattooed simply of
their own free will? (p. 3). These questions form the primary
research issues that the author investigates, and she does so
with great detail in the remaining chapters. Each question
is answered thoroughly and framed within an appropriate
and explicit theoretical paradigm.
Chapter 1 (“Discontinuity and Displacement: Place
and History of Tattooing”) outlines the history of Tahitian
tattooing and how it is entrenched within the ethno-
graphic social and cosmological system and its trans-
formation with European/Christian contact. Chapter 2
(“Practice and Form”) is explicitly materialistic in form and
simply describes the process, practice, motifs, and designs
of Tahitian and Polynesian tattooing and the basic trap-
pings of tattoo artists; this chapter provides a strong visual
impact with a suite of good quality field photographs of
tattoos. I was satisfied in being presented with both the
standard image of basic motifs and tattoo styles and im-
pressed with the visual impact and expertise of the artists
(not to mention the creative and imaginative design and
subject qualities). It is important to imagine both the his-
torical perspective and contextual influences on art styles:
What are their origins and influences and how pervasive
were design styles among different ethnic groups? I won-
dered how much influence tattoo motifs had on ceramic
styles and imagine prehistoric Lapita ceramics as basing ce-
ramic styles on tattoo motifs (or vice versa). Essentially,
a more focused discussion on the historical development
of tattooing would have been useful and, indeed, seems
essential.
Chapter 3 (“Marking Taure’are’a: Social Relationships
and Tattooing”) focuses on the “who” of the tattoo world
that Kuwahara associated with and that formed the ba-
Single Reviews 905
sis of her observations. She situates tattooing within a
community of tattoo artists. Most tattooists are men, and
Kuwahara discusses the idea of male taure’are’a or the im-
portance of adolescence and the creation of a sense of
self and ethnic identity that tattoos embody. Chapter 4
(“Exchanges in Taputapuatea: Localization and Global-
ization”) addresses the interface between the tattooists
and nontattooists and examines how knowledge and
ethnicity articulates and is transmitted with respect to
Tahitian identity. Chapter 5 (“Dancing and Tattooing at
Festivals: Tahitian, Polynesian and Marquesan Identities”)
explores geopolitical issues in French Polynesia and details
how the political manipulation of tattoo-based art festivals
is used to preserve the idea of French colonialism. Finally,
we venture within the confines of a unique context for
tattooing: the prison setting (ch. 6, “Inscribing the Past,
Present and Future: In Nuutania Prison”). In this chapter,
Kuwahara attempts to interpret the modification of tattoo-
ing based on style and motif as well as the use of tattoos as
a means of expressing inmates’ changed status in society.
This is expressed by the alteration or removal of a tattoo or
the refusal to have one.
As mentioned above, the author uses an explicit the-
oretical paradigm so important for situating any ethno-
graphic work within the discipline and understanding the
focus of the social issues being investigated. Kuwahara
places her theoretical paradigm directly within that of
Merlau-Ponty’s (and Husserl’s) phenomenology. The con-
cept of “corporeality” is fleshed out by citing the ideas of
Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu who give primacy to
the body as being the locus of social control. Recent feminist
theory is also an influence, in that the construction of both
sex and gender is the body, which creates networks of social
signification through messages and texts. Issues of ethnicity,
gender, and age are outlined thereby providing the reader
with a clear image of the concepts that run throughout the
book.
Her recording methodology consisted of field notes,
photography, video, and audio tape. Three primary field-
work excursions were conducted between 1998–2000 and
2002–03. The author discusses her personal anxiety of not
having a tattoo despite being pressured by the tattooists and
others with whom she worked and observed. She claims
that her body was constantly objectified within the realm
of gender, age, and skin color. Although she does state that
this duality and her refusal to get a tattoo both expanded
and limited her work, perhaps an unassuming tattoo in the
right (perhaps obscure) location would not have compro-
mised her principles. Indeed, as she noted, it would likely
have given her more subtle insight into the cultural ethos
and identity of tattoo artists and the weltanschauung of her
own research focus for over the past decade.
Critiques of the presentation and design of the book
are few and far between. Plates are appropriate and clear
and the length is not excessive. A larger text font would
have made for easier reading, but otherwise there are no
glaring copyediting or production problems. The concepts
906 American Anthropologist • Vol. 108, No. 4 • December 2006
are clearly presented as is the purpose of her research. The
results and the historical context are also well described.
I think the author’s research would have benefited from
another case study and context (in addition to the prison
case) within Tahiti to demonstrate the changing nature
of tattooing. Additionally, a comparison to another area
of the world (i.e., commercial tattooing in the “West,” a
North American Native group, or another Oceanic group,
e.g., perhaps the Maori) with this contextual detail would
have been welcome within the confines of a published book
(that may have some market value) rather than in an orig-
inal scholarly doctoral dissertation. I would also liked to
have seen some quantitative comparisons to design styles
and preferences—perhaps tables comparing the repetition
of styles and patterns and the distribution within Tahitian
communities based on gender and age ratios (i.e., males
to females, age groups) and outside the community in her
research areas, accompanied by maps of those styles and de-
signs. For example, where do they originate? How far back
in time can we track designs and motifs? Is there oral his-
tory regarding the antiquity of styles and their inspiration?
Do they appear on other media?
Finally, it is possible that some specialists in this field
may feel slightly frustrated that this work may be less
explanatory (or rigorous) with respect to theory (was there
more in the original dissertation?). Essentially, however,
I would highly recommend this book to cultural anthro-
pologists studying design and symbolic representation,
decorative arts and design, sociology of art specialists,
specialists in Oceanic anthropology, and undergraduate
anthropology students.
Final Days: Japanese Culture and Choice at the End of
Life. Susan Orpett Long. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i
Press, 2006. 287 pp.
NANCY ROSENBERGER
Oregon State University
In Final Days, Susan Long gives us a clear, sensitive explana-
tion of the changing attitudes and actions involved in the
process of dying in Japan. Through interviews with doc-
tors, nurses, families, and patients, Long paints a picture
of people coping with the technology of transplants, the
knowledge of prognosis, and the possibility of palliative care
while simultaneously using meanings from their historical
culture to figure out how to cope. Joining Margaret Lock’s
book on brain death, Long’s book fills a postindustrial niche
in a Japanese anthropology literature replete with books
on ancestors, funerals, and old age. Long is the right per-
son to write this book because she is an expert in Japanese
medicine and kinship and has done work with bioethicists
in a U.S. hospital setting.
Long’s main question is how Japanese finesse and shift
their historical cultural meanings around death in contem-
porary circumstances. This is framed within the larger ques-
tion of how Japanese ways of hierarchy, harmony, and con-
sensus fit with the “universals” of Western bioethics. Long
also compares Japanese practices with those in the United
States. These frameworks set up another question: What
does the autonomy of the patient mean in the bioethics
of dying in Japan? Early on, Long suggests the need for an
ethnoethics that considers behavior on the ground. Hav-
ing studied medicine and kinship in Japan for many years,
Long designed her research so as to capture the social ne-
gotiations that she knew occurred around the sick and dy-
ing. She represented the multiple participants in the dying
process, interviewing 20 patients multiple times and 14 pa-
tients once; 29 family members; 38 physicians of various
specialities; 14 nurses; and nine journalists, social workers,
and other relevant professionals.
Theoretically, Long uses the concept of “culture,” but
she defines it as conflicting ideals in a context of insti-
tutional and economic constraints (p. 149). She identifies
multiple “scripts”: ideal symbolic narratives that influence
decisions and represent alternative paths—some custom-
ary, some consciously constructed, and many under public
and private debate. Long avoids the concept of “discourse,”
which would have invited more attention to power differ-
entials among scripts.
Technological changes vie with concepts surrounding
the “good death” in Japan. Death should be peaceful and
calm (yasuraku ni), and death should occur with family
members—children and grandchildren—present so the dy-
ing eye can be met (shinime ni au). Long states that Japanese
have a “near obsession” about the latter, to the extent that
“ceremonial CPR” is given to keep the person alive until
the requisite people gather around the bedside of the dying
person. People wish to die quickly or else of gradual old age,
preferably on tatami (i.e., at home); yet the achievement of
such desires is fast receding in an age of cancer, chronic ill-
nesses, and high technology, whereby 78 percent of people
die in the hospital. The dying person should be taken care of
by doctors and family who are trustworthy and respect the
patient’s desires but also know the patient well enough to
make the right decisions on his or her behalf. One particu-
lar family caregiver should protect the patient, encouraging
them to fight with hope, while the patient should show a
grateful attitude.
Difficult questions flow from these ideals. Given the
strong pharmaceutical and medical equipment industry as
well as doctors’ training toward high-tech treatment, what
comprises a calm death or a death with dignity in contem-
porary Japan? How does a caregiver protect the patient from
unnecessary stress such as the knowledge of a terminal can-
cer diagnosis, yet respect the patient’s wishes, which are
only ever partially known? How is the contemporary good
death negotiated?
In chapters that focus particularly on changing atti-
tudes toward disclosure of terminal diagnoses, transplants,
and palliative or hospice care, Long’s main answer is that
doctors, families, and patients are willing to live with a

much higher level of ambivalence than those in the United
States. Together they go through “triadic negotiations”: a se-
ries of verbal and nonverbal communications. The patient’s
character or social identity is a key component in family and
doctors’ decisions: Is the person strong enough to cope with
a transplant or a terminal cancer diagnosis, or will they just
give up hope and experience a death that is far from peace-
ful? Ironically, 77 percent of people polled would wish to be
told about their condition, but only 33 percent say they in
turn would tell their family members about their medical
condition; protectionism seems to vie with self-determined
individualism.
The way it usually works is this: A key person in the
family gathers a consensus from the larger family, then ne-
gotiates with the doctor, who will be the one to disclose
terminal conditions to the patient. Beset with choices in a
postindustrial world, families and doctors tend to err on the
side of treatment, following the dominant medical model
backed up by medical training and national health insur-
ance. Alternatively, the family and doctor might decide to
withhold treatment, as both find it difficult to withdraw
treatment once given. In Japan, advanced directives and
living wills are not widely known, not legally binding, and
usually seen as giving direction but not requiring partic-
ular action. Passive euthanasia (withholding or withdraw-
ing treatment) is technically illegal, although used, and
active euthanasia (hastening of natural death), although
rarely used, is legal under strict circumstances. Although
few and mostly Christian, hospices are growing in num-
ber, and according to Long, they are slowly adapting to
Japanese ideas about dying. Contrary to popular opinion,
Japanese doctors are often relieved when treatment is with-
held, sometimes feeling that families keep the patient alive
just to allay their guilt. Thus, conflict does occur but re-
mains unacknowledged by ethics committees, unlike in
the United States. Japanese doctors respect family decisions
more than U.S. doctors do; according to Long, U.S. pa-
tients’ families are seen as an obstruction unless patients
are incompetent to make decisions for themselves. Given
the emphasis on family, a wider range of examples from
Long’s interviews with 29 family members would have been
interesting.
Long argues that various scripts are available in Japan
besides the high-tech medical one, with the doctor and
equipment at the center of all decisions, and the paternal-
istic, surrogate family script, with family at the center in
decision making. Some people opt for the “developed na-
tion” script defended in Western bioethics, in which the
autonomy of the patient is key. Others follow a caregiver
script in which a compromise is reached between family
protection of the patient and respect of the patient’s indi-
viduality without full autonomy. Long provides a case study
of a Japanese man who disagreed with his wife and decided
against a heart transplant in the United States. (Brain death
was still not legal in Japan in 1996 and even now organs are
rarely harvested.) The book would have profited from more
Single Reviews 907
short case studies representing the other scripts as well as a
sense of how fully each was represented in Long’s sample.
Nonetheless, Long shows that contemporary Japanese have
choices.
Ultimately, Long emphasizes the caregiver script of
compromise between family care and full patient auton-
omy. She holds it up as the “less efficient yet . . . richer ap-
proach” that Japan has to share with the United States:
that tolerance for ambiguity can allow a compromise be-
tween historical patterns of relationship and modern ways
of death; that self, autonomy, and choice can be partial and
shared within the close social relationships of family—one’s
convoy through life, à la Sylvia Plath.
Long’s study has much to offer to the discussion of au-
tonomy in Japan. She could have used her material to define
this Japanese style of autonomy more clearly, for example,
by putting something other than capacity to make decisions
at the center of autonomy. Perhaps Long could develop ar-
eas of autonomy such as the continued ability to keep fight-
ing, the importance of self-reliance within a group, or the
ability to perform one’s appropriate role within a drama;
here the patient respecting the family’s right to make the
final decision.
In the end, Long should have returned specifically to
the question of bioethics and what Japan can offer to this
Western-centric field. Because she does not, the book’s les-
son seems to be directed at her U.S. readers in general rather
than to bioethnicists, and Japan gets held up as the model
that those in the United States should learn from, as it has
in the past. This contradicts Long’s well-argued points that
Japan has multiple scripts. In addition, although Long im-
plies that the United States has multiple scripts around dy-
ing just as Japan does, the depth to which the reader can
take the comparison between the United States and Japan
is never clear. Long does a good job of introducing vari-
ous statistics about dying in the United States. But from the
one U.S. case study given and other comments, the reader is
left with the idea that U.S. families are not part of decision
making—that in fact they may even be estranged from fam-
ily members at death. If the book is translated into Japanese,
more case studies or a discussion of the various scripts in
the United States should be added. Perhaps Long should
write another book about the ethnoethics of the U.S. way
of dying.
Long has made a worthy contribution to the literature
on death in anthropology and in Japan. Her book is not
only informative, it paints dilemmas and offers alternatives
that resonate with our own lives, our own deaths, and
those of our loved ones. Long’s book expands and brings
flexibility to the “universal” principles of Western bioethics
around the dying process. It opens the possibility that the
process of dying in the postindustrial world will not be
mandated by the Western philosophy or by biomedical
ideals but that, instead, it will be worked out in a reflexive
process including individuals, families, histories, and
bioethical principles.
908 American Anthropologist • Vol. 108, No. 4 • December 2006
Film, Ethnography, and the Senses: The Corporeal
Image. David MacDougall. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2006. 274 pp.
SARAH EVERSHED
Pitzer College
David MacDougall is an ethnographic filmmaker whose
work in India has focused on the topic of corporeality and
the ways children live their lives against the backdrop of
a boarding school. From his time spent in Northern India
at the Doon School, MacDougall produced five films cen-
tering on the children’s lives as neither part of “a homoge-
nous society, nor in a multiply fragmented global one, but
in both” (p. 106). MacDougall uses his most recent book,
Film, Ethnography, and the Senses: The Corporeal Image, to ac-
complish a variety of tasks: to explain the corporeal nature
of ethnographic film and the role of ethnographic film in
relation to textual explications; to explore the Doon School
Chronicles using the concepts related to social aesthetics;
to expose the difficulty of representing children in film; to
reconsider the Doon School after some temporal distance;
to consider the history of Indian photography in general;
to do a critical analysis of an early 1900s postcard photog-
rapher Jean Audema; and, finally, to explore suggestions for
the future of visual anthropology. His ambitious task is ex-
ecuted with precision, clarity, and a profundity that is rare
in theoretically astute books of such varied topics.
MacDougall begins the book with an insightful expla-
nation regarding the benefits of cinematic ethnography in
contrast to textual explications. He argues that the visual de-
mands understanding a “relation between seeing, thinking,
and knowing, and the complex nature of thought itself”
(p. 2). Thus, the cinematic should not be read as a linguistic
entity: Writing contains thought and experience whereas
photography contains looking and being; writing is cumu-
lative and film is composite; writing loses the nonverbal
aspects of communication, film exaggerates them. He goes
further to explain that film is constructed in a triangular re-
flexivity in which the photograph or film reflects the pho-
tographer in the “moment of their creation” and the pho-
tographer in turn has a relation to the subjects (p. 3). Film
does not have an indexical relation to real life. Rather, it
points out, describes, and judges life through utilization
of hyperboles and diminutives. Furthermore, in its open
endedness, the viewer is “at liberty to take from the im-
ages meanings that were never attached to them, perhaps
never even imagined by the filmmaker” (Taylor 1996:77).
His densely theoretical introduction equips the reader with
the intellectual sophistication necessary for the absorption
of the subsequent chapters.
MacDougall continues with an explanation of how art
connects the self with physical world. The “bodies in film”
he describes include the actor–subject, the spectator, the
filmmaker, and the actual body of film. He explains that
films are symbolic bodies: They have both physical com-
ponents and sensory–muscular–emotional responses. The
body of the film creates a level of corporeal identification
in spectators who may find themselves enveloped in the
mimetic qualities of the film and responding emotionally
and physically to the image on the screen. MacDougall ex-
plains that film should be a “constant interplay of stim-
ulus and bodily response between screen and spectator”
(p. 20). MacDougall skillfully explains the interactivity and
dynamism of film. Film, he argues, is autonomous from aca-
demic writing. In the early days of ethnographic filmmak-
ing, film was seen as auxiliary to the text with no inherent
importance. Yet this is an erroneous thought pattern, writes
MacDougall, because text includes only a select literate au-
dience, it is not multicultural because of its exclusivity of
symbolic language (i.e., written words), and furthermore it
loses sensory experience. In anthropological writing, the in-
dividual is easily lost, people become types rather than faces
or bodies, and writing creates distance from subject and en-
courages a vocabulary of abstraction. MacDougall describes
film as an open system, with inherent individuality; film
furthermore “situate[s] people in continuum of physical
space and material objects that is historically and culturally
specific” (p. 55). MacDougall’s most cherished characteristic
of film is its ability to synthesize a polysensual experience
in its imagery, sounds, sights, and utilization of synesthesia.
In short, writing is description, film is depiction.
MacDougall’s main focus is on the “aesthetic dimen-
sion of social experience,” which he criticizes is not ex-
plored widely in human sciences (p. 59). He suggests an
ethnographic future that focuses on embodiment and phe-
nomenology and a reflection on the process of seeing. He is
in line with his contemporaries such as Faye Ginsburg, who
argues that “films embody in their own internal structure
and meaning the forms and values of the social relations
they mediate” (1994:6). Both statements adopt sentiments
of phenomenology. MacDougall and Ginsburg both call for
an embodied filmmaking in which the meaning encodes
the being (as social relations and values). Although phe-
nomenology, as a quest for experiential knowledge, is fo-
cused on finding reliable data in a concrete way, it is driven
by a desire to expose the process and essence of conscious-
ness. Furthermore, it aims at returning the human subject
to the center focus, a reaction against positivist attitudes
(Eagleton 1996:51). Anthropological writing “entombs the
living” and decenters individuality, a trait worthy of dissolu-
tion (p. 45). MacDougall seems to imply that ethnographic
media, as the panacea to writing, is in need of a renewal in
phenomenological terms. His call for more aesthetics has
implications for the future of ethnographic media, which is
seemingly headed toward a state of high reflexivity; a state
that is in line with what MacDougall calls “the experience
of seeing” (p. 60).
MacDougall opens the next section with a chapter deal-
ing with the issues of filming children in both fiction and
nonfiction contexts. The basic fundamental problem, he
argues, lies in the reduction of children’s lives to formulas
that the adult mind can understand. Childhood, in effect,
is an experience of a distant Other, and this, he explains, is

problematic for filmic representation. MacDougall believes
that films about children are inevitably about how the adult
filmmaker perceives them. It is this distanced perception
that reproduces the myths (both positive and negative)
surrounding childhood. He explains the responsibility of
filming children is “to explore this otherness and superi-
ority against the grain of a more insidious sentimentality”
(p. 75). MacDougall despises the mode of sentimental-
ity, for good reason: It ignores thinking and agency. He
maintains that the most effective films are those that
show how children maintain ambivalence toward the
adult world (p. 76). The next two chapters deal with the
Doon School and how it played a role in the children’s
lives as an influence as well as a social landscape to be
influenced. He gives a brief account of the school’s origin
and structure. In the final chapter he explores some of
the films in the series in relation to each other and the
effect of making the films several years after they were
shot to temporally give distancing with respect to the
children filmed. The chapter concludes on a personal note,
demonstrating how the process of filming, editing the film,
and showing it to the children influenced MacDougall’s
own life. These chapters were in line with MacDougall’s
championing of the film as a process of self-discovery and
the necessity for self-reflexivity, because the film itself is
an emanation of the filmmaker’s mind and body, which
should not be separated with the knife of the Cartesian
duality.
The “Photographic Imagination” section focuses
initially on the photographic history of India. MacDougall
masterfully explores the class and caste issues surround pho-
tography and the photograph as a landscape for recognizing
disparity between ideal and evidential. He follows this chap-
ter with a fascinating, yet somewhat out of place, descrip-
tion of the postcards of Jean Audema, a colonialist photog-
rapher whose style, MacDougall argues, is slightly different
in its playfully posed nature. MacDougall argues, almost
convincingly, “his pictures suggest that he knew there was
much more to his subjects than photographs could reveal”
(p. 185). Yet MacDougall’s thin amount of information re-
garding the personal life and history of Jean Audema leaves
the reader feeling skeptical of MacDougall’s claims that
Audema was almost a “pre-post-colonialist” who cared
about the individuality of his subjects. Nevertheless,
MacDougall uses this opportunity to explore the tragically
dehumanizing effects of colonialist photography in his
attempt to find some scrap of humanity in the entire
archive of the time.
In the section titled “The Ethnographic Imagination,”
MacDougall opens with a brief history of visual anthropol-
ogy and its relation to the changes in anthropology and the
larger sociohistorical context. He makes the distinction be-
tween visual anthropology that “studies visible forms” and
that “uses the visual media to describe and analyze culture”
(p. 217). He continues to explore the topic of indigenous
media and its connotations for the future of visual anthro-
pology. He explores the unanswered question of “whether
Single Reviews 909
the visual can attain a more productive role in anthropology
as a medium of enquiry and discourse” (p. 224). MacDougall
concludes this chapter by explaining that anthropologists
need to learn how to “rethink anthropology through a vi-
sual medium” (p. 225).
MacDougall’s final chapter explores the history of vi-
sual anthropology and gives a detailed and prophetic de-
scription of where he thinks the visual should go—and it
is not in the direction of Heider but, rather, in the vein of
the experimental revolutions of Rouch and Marshall, who
freed themselves from the constraints of the Academy and
reinvented the visual image to encompass the essential el-
ement of performativity. His final statement explains that
the very things people originally thought were “the weakest
contributions of visual anthropology—its ability to conjure
up bodies and places and personalities—were actually its
strengths” (p. 273).
REFERENCES CITED
Eagleton, Terry
1996 Literary Theory: An Introduction. 2nd ed. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Ginsburg, Faye
1994 Culture/Media: A (Mild) Polemic. Anthropology Today
10(2):5–15.
Taylor, Lucian
1996 Iconophobia. Transition 69:64–88.
The Evolution of Cultural Diversity: A Phylogenetic
Approach. Ruth Mace, Clare J. Holden, and Stephen Shen-
nan, eds. Oxford, U.K.: Cavendish Publishing, 2005. 291 pp.
R I C H A R D M C E L R E AT H
University of California, Davis
KARI SCHROEDER
University of California, Davis
Studying the co-occurrence of ecological and other social
variables across societies—in an attempt to understand the
causes of human behavioral diversity—has a long history.
Within anthropology, many know the comparative method
better by the debates that shadow it: Galton’s Problem and
the “units of culture” debate. Within biology, similar de-
bates over species diversity have equally long histories, but,
unlike anthropology, biologists seem almost entirely unani-
mous on how to proceed. This edited volume, The Evolution
of Cultural Diversity: A Phylogenetic Approach, assembles the
latest efforts to apply tools built to aid comparison within
biology to cultural macroevolution.
It is worth noting that the borrowing of comparative
methods from biology is not plainly colonialist in its intent.
Ruth Mace states in the introduction, “Human adaptation is
about culture as much as it is about genes” (p. 1). The intent
is to take cultural dynamics seriously, not suppose genetic
evolution is an appropriate model of cultural evolution. We
may argue that the authors have not yet built a satisfactory
view of cultural evolution, but it is unfair to charge them
with not trying. It is also important to note that the authors
of some chapters actively disagree with others (e.g., about
910 American Anthropologist • Vol. 108, No. 4 • December 2006
the appropriateness of treating cultures as units), and this
kind of disagreement is healthy, we think.
The book is divided into two complementary halves.
The chapters in the first part of the book employ phy-
logenetic comparative methods to reconstruct cultural
phylogenies—“trees” of descent relationships among soci-
eties or cultural traits—and then assess whether cultural
evolution is plausibly treelike (exhibits phylogenetic sig-
nals). These cultural phylogenies are then applied to the
study of cultural adaptation in the second part of the book,
in which they are used mainly to address Galton’s Problem.
The ensemble is essential reading for a scholar interested
in pioneering research on the origins and maintenance of
cultural diversity.
Despite our general enthusiasm for the reconstruction
of cultural histories and the comparative method, we have
deep reservations about much of the work summarized
here. Criticism has been launched against the application of
the phylogenetic comparative method to cultures because
of strong evidence that cultures are not related through a
branching process; rather, cultural traits are subject to hor-
izontal transmission (borrowing) and cultural groups to fu-
sion. The phylogenetic comparative method makes sense
for species-level and higher taxa, because biological species
are generally independently evolving. If lineages are not
independently evolving, it is not useful to represent their
historical relationships as a tree.
Thus, the first part of this book attempts to build a
case for the vertical transmission of cultural traits and cul-
tural groups, an idea on which the application of the phy-
logenetic comparative method in the second part of the
book rests. Mace introduces the second half by saying that
vertical transmission was established in the first half, yet
their evidence for vertical transmission is unconvincing.
Subjects of study range from the Austronesian and Bantu
language families to basketry assemblages in California and
Turkmen rug styles. Evidence of nonbranching evolution
abounds. For example, the split-decomposition graphs of
the Austronesian (Greenhill and Gray) and Indo-European
(Bryant, Filimon, and Gray) language families show consid-
erable reticulation (nonvertical signature). Similarly, boot-
strap values and posterior probabilities for the maximum
parsimony (MP) and Bayesian Bantu language trees pro-
duced by Clare Holden, Andrew Meade, and Mark Pagel
show very weak support for deep relationships. Peter Jor-
dan and Stephen Shennan conclude that geography, rather
than linguistic affinity, is of primary importance in the pat-
terning of basketry traditions.
The lack of support for vertical transmission is even
starker when one considers the data tested. The language
families analyzed in this volume are more likely than oth-
ers to have evolved through a branching process, because
of their hypothesized recent and rapid geographic expan-
sion. Furthermore, most of the language phylogenies are
constructed with the Swadesh list, which consists of words
prechosen because they are resistant to borrowing.
The lack of support for vertical transmission is further
highlighted when the assumptions of vertical transmission
implicit in a tree are considered. Trees assume vertical trans-
mission. A valid test of treeness would compare the fit of the
data to a tree with the fit of the data to one or more nontree
models. Failure to directly evaluate nontree models of sim-
ilarity can lead to unfortunate conclusions. For example,
Mark Collard and Jamshid Tehrani construct an MP tree
of Turkmen rug characters and, given a Consistency Index
(CI) of 60 percent, infer that 40 percent of rug characters
are transmitted horizontally. CI only measures the conver-
gent reevolution (homplasy) in the tree; to infer that this is
a direct measure of the amount of cultural exchange seems
unfounded when homoplasy is already minimized through
the construction of an MP tree. In fact, an MP tree with high
CI values could easily be derived from randomly generated
trait data.
We have deep reservations, mixed with cautious
optimism about the second half of the volume as well.
But we expect that most scholars, like us, will have a hard
time accepting comparative methods based on cultural
phylogenies until the phylogenies themselves can be
better supported. We think there are two strong messages
going forward in this area of research. First, a lesson may
be learned from human population biologists who now
generally employ networks rather than trees to analyze
genetic data. We must at least directly evaluate network
models before assuming that trees are adequate. Second, in
biology, no method of historical reconstruction or compar-
ison would now be taken seriously before it was subject to
a test of its validity. This can be done through simulation,
wherein explicit models of cultural evolution are used
to generate data to which the analytical method can be
applied. While such tests do not tell us how evolution
actually works, they do tell us if the method is valid when
its assumptions are met, and in what ways it fails when
they are not. Additionally, such tests have the virtue of
forcing us to be explicit about the model(s) of cultural
evolution we are assuming. Given the lack of clear models
of cultural evolution in this volume (and elsewhere), we
think such an exercise will be well worth the trouble.
Mutual Life, Limited: Islamic Banking, Alternative Cur-
rencies, Lateral Reason. Bill Maurer. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2005. 217 pp.
G R E G O RY S TA R R E T T
University of North Carolina at Charlotte
The U.S. artist James Boggs draws money. He sketches one-
sided copies of U.S. and other national currencies, convinc-
ing waitresses and shop owners to accept them in payment
for purchases. After giving the recipient time to meditate
on the exchange, he sells the (“real”) change and the re-
ceipt to a collector, who then tracks down the bill’s new
owner to purchase the works, whose value has been created
in the process of transaction. The bill has been effectively
exchanged as currency not despite its obvious falsity, but
because of that falsity, because it was clearly not money at
all, but art.

Bill Maurer examines the oscillation of similar money
forms and practices through different frameworks of value.
He argues that alternative monies and systems of finance
demonstrate the fragility of monetary exchange as such,
which works not because it rests on a foundational sense
of value but because as practical systems of transaction,
its principals are engaged in ongoing conversations about
the place of exchange media within broader landscapes of
morality, theology, and “mutual life.”
The case studies Maurer uses to explore these issues
are Islamic Banking and Finance (IBF), an international in-
tellectual and practical project to free capital accumula-
tion from the taint of riba (interest), and a local currency
system in Ithaca, New York, called HOURS, which can be
used in payment for many types of goods and services and
even stored up in accounts at the local credit union. IBF
and HOURS practitioners justify the development of al-
ternative currency and finance systems as corrections to
“conventional” systems, which either violate principles of
local autonomy and community or distort exchange by
distributing unjust rewards. But each alternative is then
faced with conundrums regarding its alternativeness. IBF
discourse, although sometimes based on moral arguments
or the idea that contemporary advances in economic the-
ory are prefigured in the Qur’an as the articulation of God’s
own cosmological order, is nevertheless faced with the fact
that its avoidance of prohibited interest rests on techni-
cal operations indistinguishable from “non-Islamic” alter-
natives. HOURS, the result of previous experiments with
barter dyads and networks, pegs itself to the U.S. dollar.
This creates problems of equivalence when making change
at the Farmer’s Market or receiving pay in HOURS, for if
they represent the same sort of value, what is the point of
an alternative? And if they represent different sorts of value,
then can one reasonably expect to receive change in dollars
for an HOURS note spent?
Analysts on the “outside” of these practices often de-
ride such alternative financial structures as fakes, as ideo-
logical rather than economic projects. Maurer shows that
even practitioners question the foundations, definitions,
and senses of value encoded in alternative exchange sys-
tems, and that this questioning drives the system forward,
just as the endless questioning of terms and concepts in
the social sciences provides the motor driving the system of
intellectual and practical work. In fact, according to Mau-
rer, IBF and HOURS have no real inside or outside. Both
are based on readings of conventional finance, history, an-
thropological case studies, and sociological theory, so that
they “are part of one field, not two, and are densely in-
terconnected, indeed, constituted as separate objects by
their very interconnection and their attempt to purify their
constant hybridization” (p. 41). Far from being a liabil-
ity, it is in fact the “gimmicky quality” (p. 56) of curren-
cies like HOURS that makes them work as they “oscillate
between the various worlds they inhabit and construct”
(p. 57).
On a larger scale, these alternate financial systems act
as an illustration of the peculiar interconnectedness of an-
Single Reviews 911
thropology and its objects. The deeper argument of Mutual
Life, Limited is that “anthropology, like Islamic banking and
alternative currencies, is a series of experiments . . . with
the social significance and constitution of transactions”
(p. xv). When Maurer’s interlocutors urged him to read
Marcel Mauss or used Frank Capra films to illustrate IBF
ideals, it became apparent that anthropology stands on
the same ground as its content. Both our intellectual and
our practical activities lie alongside and inform theirs, but
ours can hardly be used to analyze theirs in a sense strictly
separate from their attempts to analyze themselves in the
context of “conventional” financial techniques, theologies,
or conceptual systems. These alternatives highlight that
conventional finance itself, along with the anthropology
that seeks to develop an adequate representation of it, is a
moral as well as a technical endeavor.
Ancient Middle Niger: Urbanism and the Self-
Organizing Landscape. Roderick J. McIntosh. New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 261 pp.
K E N N E T H G . K E L LY
University of South Carolina
The Ancient Middle Niger is a welcome addition to the ar-
chaeological literature on urbanism and complexity and
also serves as an excellent case study of the methodology
for the archaeological understanding of regions. Further-
more, it is about time that the important results of archae-
ological research on the African continent reach an audi-
ence wider than the usual suspects of regional specialists.
The book is a volume in the Cambridge Case Studies in
Early Societies series and as such should bring the remark-
able societies of the Inland Niger Delta to undergraduate
and graduate students as well as the interested lay public.
Roderick McIntosh’s readable and engaging tale is sprinkled
with anecdotes and asides that bring the continually reflex-
ive process of archaeological investigation to the forefront
and that demonstrate how theoretical, methodological, and
interpretive processes are all intertwined.
The Ancient Middle Niger is focused on understanding
and explaining the apparent incongruity of the rich archae-
ological evidence of complex societies in the Inland Delta
region of present-day Mali with the lack of evidence that
supports traditional hierarchical notions of state formation.
In essence the question as put forth by McIntosh is how
to explain the presence of “cities without citadels”—that
is, cities without the usual trappings one expects to find
archaeologically in complex societies, the so-called hall-
marks of complexity derived from Mesopotamian models
of urban complexity such as temples and despots and redis-
tribution. Could urbanism have followed a different path
from village origins to city life? What about pathways that
recognized heterarchical possibilities? How might broadly
held Mande cultural values be germane in these devel-
opments? Chapter 1 poses these basic questions and de-
scribes in very understandable terms the apparently stag-
gering task confronting two graduate students in 1977
912 American Anthropologist • Vol. 108, No. 4 • December 2006
(one of whom was the author) when they first set eyes on
the enormous mounds of Jenne-Jeno and its neighboring
sites.
Chapter 2 details the unique aspects of the environ-
mental setting of the Middle Niger where seasonal floods
radically transform the landscape and have led to cooper-
ative occupation of the landscape by a variety of special-
ized groups, including herders, fishers, and farmers. Fur-
thermore, a detailed understanding of the environmental
variability is presented, demonstrating that a very sophisti-
cated understanding of the importance of soil type, aspect,
and other characteristics extended over 2,000 years into the
past. Human activities have further transformed these land-
scapes in significant ways, and an underlying cultural eco-
logical perspective is present throughout the book.
Chapter 3 presents McIntosh’s theoretical model to ex-
plain how the Middle Niger developed its social and oc-
cupational complexity in a challenging environment with-
out developing coercive structures of authority such as are
usually posited. The model proposed is the “pulse model,”
which unites a growing number of specialists—herders, fish-
ers, farmers of various varieties of grains, blacksmiths, and
so forth—in a web of mutual interdependence yet permits
each group to maintain a traditional level of independence.
As the microenvironmental occupational specialists, each
identifying with distinct “ethnicities,” were cast together
in the microenvironmentally diverse basins of the Middle
Niger during oscillating periods of aridity and moisture,
strategies of mutual accommodation and tolerance devel-
oped as a way of overcoming unpredictable periods of re-
source unavailability. McIntosh argues that the archaeolog-
ical evidence of clustered settlements of specialists in the
Middle Niger corresponds to the presence during the his-
toric period of ethnically distinct specialists in the region
who relied on complex relations of interdependence; these
relations articulate within a set of what he calls Mande “core
concepts.”
Chapters 4–5 recount the specific archaeological strate-
gies that have provided the data with which to develop and
explore the pulse model for Middle Niger urbanism. Suffice
it to say, the large, deep Jenne-Jeno settlement mound has
produced a vast array of archaeological data, ranging from
the mundane pottery and grinding stones to evidence of
metalworking and other specialized activities. McIntosh
weaves these data into examples that help to support
the notion of heterogeneity at Jenne-Jeno. To further
explore the significance of the Jenne-Jeno urban complex
material, chapter 5 describes regional survey strategies
employed to investigate the complementary settlements of
the urban hinterland. The hinterland strategies identified
similar self-organized settlement complexity in the region
surrounding Jenne-Jeno, and similar regional perspectives
in adjacent regions are also described. The book closes
with a comparison of incipient urbanism in three areas—
Egypt, Mesopotamia, and China—with the Middle Niger,
demonstrating that the process of urbanism has been a
variable road, with particular regions each demonstrat-
ing some combination of heterarchical and hierarchical
processes.
Thicker Than Water: The Origins of Blood as Symbol
and Ritual. Melissa L. Meyer. New York: Routledge, 2005.
264 pp.
A N D R E W P. LY O N S
Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario
There are dangers in interdisciplinarity. The author of
Thicker Than Water is an ethnohistorian who wishes to an-
swer more questions about blood than many anthropolo-
gists would dare to ask. She ably demonstrates the salience
of gender opposition, complementarity, and antagonism in
the symbolism of blood in a sweeping cross-cultural analy-
sis. The faults in her argument reflect to some degree faults
in her sources. Many readers may not have the patience
to go beyond the first two chapters. This would be a pity,
because they are not really necessary to the argument pre-
sented later on.
Melissa Meyer suggests that because knowledge of
blood’s importance informs so many actions in so many cul-
tures, and because of the universality of red as a multivocal
symbol, the blood–redness complex should perhaps be con-
sidered as an example of gene and culture coevolution. The
latter concept leads to her use of Chris Knight’s (1995) some-
what bizarre theory of the sex strike, which assumes that
many aspects of blood symbolism may be traced to the Pa-
leolithic in the African Rift Valley shortly after Homo sapiens
emerged. The division of labor between women who had to
spend long periods nurturing their offspring and their men
folk who left the home base for extended periods to hunt
would have put women at a disadvantage but for their se-
cret weapon—menstruation. Because menstrual blood was
used as a negative sexual signal, the ability of women to syn-
chronize menstruation enabled them collectively to with-
draw their sexual services if they were not included when
hunters shared their kill. Thus began human society: the
incest taboo; dual organization; decoration with ochre; ma-
triliny, which preceded patriliny; and classificatory kinship
terminologies. Meyer admits that there is no evidence for
menstrual synchrony in the Paleolithic but considers that
Knight’s main error is to fail to appreciate that blood may
symbolize sexual antagonism. A symbolic opposition be-
tween men’s blood and women’s blood developed in the
context of the more patriarchal institutions that arose after
agriculture began.
Meyer reviews the literature on ideas of conception,
birthing rituals, and initiation as well as the rules and rep-
resentations surrounding menstruation. She wisely argues
that an understanding of folk ideas about human biology
and cosmology is necessary if one wishes to contextual-
ize life-cycle rituals. She rightly insists that cross-cultural
analyses should not ignore the perspective of both genders,
noting that there is a dearth of literature on female initi-
ation because of the predominance of male ethnography

and male bias and also because female initiation is not al-
ways a collective project. Discussing male initiation rituals,
she stresses that male blood is shed in an attempt to imitate
the power of females, which is evinced by the loss of blood
in childbirth and menstruation. She criticizes Bruno Bettel-
heim and others who noted this pattern a long time ago, be-
cause they did not examine female initiation. Meyer follows
an interesting section on beliefs and practices surrounding
menstruation in non-Western cultures by an exposition of
misunderstandings of menstruation, their effects on Vic-
torian and Edwardian medical science, and their baneful
consequences for Victorian women.
The last major chapter deals with blood sacrifice, “real”
and symbolic, animal and human. The influence of Nancy
Jay’s Throughout Your Generations Forever (1992) is acknowl-
edged. Meyer discusses the Nuer, the Tallensi, Hawai‘i, the
Old Testament, West African kingdoms in the 19th cen-
tury, and medieval Christianity. She observes that blood
sacrifice inevitably demonstrates patriarchal connections
and purposes. Agnatic ancestors may be acknowledged and
the future of the line secured. By sacrifice the patrigroup
ensures its social reproduction: The pouring of blood in
sacrifice resembles the loss of female blood in biological
reproductive processes. Meyer follows Jay in comparing
three African kingdoms—Benin, Dahomey and Ashanti—
all of which practiced human sacrifice. Supposedly, Ashanti
human sacrifice was somewhat less bloody than the com-
parable rites in Benin and Dahomey because the Ashanti
were matrilineal and, therefore, somewhat less hierarchical
and closer to gender equality than comparable patrilineal
polities. As Harriet Lyons observed a decade ago in a re-
view of Jay’s book (Lyons 1996:91), it is a little improper
to compare R. S. Rattray’s scholarly accounts of Ashanti in-
stitutions to the horrified reactions of the British Press to
sacrifice in Benin, written as part of the justification of a
punitive expedition. The latter part of this chapter traces
the development of the medieval cult of the sacrament,
which became a focus of patriarchal power in the medieval
Church; it was also closely linked to myths of blood li-
bel, which were the excuse for frequent outbursts of anti-
Semitism.
The book’s argument might have been stronger if
more use had been made of the work of Victor Turner,
whose informant remarked, “Red things act . . . both [for]
good and ill” (Turner 1962:154). Overall, Thicker Than
Water has unusual virtues and striking faults, a fact that
made this reviewer’s task unusually difficult. It may attract
a considerable readership and it cannot be ignored by
anthropologists because it may have influence outside the
boundaries of our discipline.
REFERENCES CITED
Jay, Nancy
1992 Throughout Your Generations Forever: Sacrifice, Religion,
and Paternity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Knight, Chris
1995 Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture.
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Single Reviews 913
Lyons, Harriet
1996 Review of “Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice” by Catherine
Bell, and “Throughout Your Generations Forever” by Nancy
Jay. Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 8(1):90–94.
Turner, Victor
1962 Three Symbols of Passage in Ndembu Circumcision Ritual:
An Interpretation. In Essays on the Ritual of Social Relations.
Max Gluckman, ed. Pp. 124–173. Manchester: Manchester Uni-
versity Press.
The Moundbuilders: Ancient Peoples of Eastern North
America. George R. Milner. New York: Thames and Hudson,
2005. 224 pp.
R O B E RT R I O R D A N
Wright State University
George Milner has written a book on the eastern mound-
building cultures for the Thames and Hudson Ancient Peo-
ples and Places series that, while aimed primarily at the in-
telligent and interested reading public, will certainly find
considerable use in undergraduate and graduate archae-
ology courses as well. Milner’s descriptive narrative flows
beautifully, is almost jargon free, and is devoid of in-text
footnotes. Boxed inserts are scattered throughout the vol-
ume that elaborate on topical issues and important sites.
Milner’s stated intent is to show “how people lived at dif-
ferent times in the past, not the many details about pot-
tery, stone tools, and building remnants that fill technical
reports” (p. 8).
After an opening chapter that briefly sketches the en-
vironmental setting and the history of archaeological re-
search in the eastern United States (“A Heavily Forested
and Thinly Peopled Land”), the following two chapters ad-
dress the cultural foundations that underpin the eastern
mound-building cultures. The Paleoindian and Early Ar-
chaic cultures are discussed in a chapter entitled “Mobile
Hunter-Gatherers,” and Middle and Late Archaic societies
are covered in “Sedentary Hunter-Gatherers.” The treat-
ment of mound building begins there, with mention of the
Archaic shell-mound cultures along the coastlines and inte-
rior rivers, and short takes on the Watson Brake and Poverty
Point ceremonial centers as well as a few other southeastern
Archaic mound sites.
As archaeologists will expect, the heart of the volume
is devoted to coverage of the Woodland and Mississip-
pian periods. Chapters cover the Early to Middle Woodland
(“Builders of Burial Mounds and Earthworks”), Late Wood-
land (“Villagers Facing Great Change”), and Mississippian
(“Chiefs Come to Power”). The volume is rounded out with
a chapter on “Northern Villagers: Late Prehistory” and “A
Trail of Tears: Native and European Contact.” A short list-
ing of archaeological sites open to the public precedes the
notes, bibliography, and index.
For an area as large and culturally diverse as the eastern
woodlands, the sheer amount of material with which one
must be conversant—and current—is staggeringly large,
and the need to achieve a balance in the interpretations
presented must be daunting to prospective authors of new
914 American Anthropologist • Vol. 108, No. 4 • December 2006
syntheses like this one. Choices must frequently be made
between competing ideas, and Milner takes clearly defined
positions, usually providing his rationale for doing so. He is
not a fan of the overkill hypothesis. He notes the continued
ambivalence about the earliest occupation of Meadowcroft,
noting that its biological assemblage fails to fit the usual
ideas of a boreal environment. He supports lower popu-
lation estimates than many have favored, with respect to
both the number of people who lived at particular sites (he
estimates as few as 3,000 at Cahokia, for instance) as well
as the projections for the total population of the area north
of Mexico just prior to European contact (he suggests four
to six million). In a related way, he plays down the amount
of effort and societal involvement that mound building re-
quired, noting the “mischievous effect of big mounds on
the fertile imaginations of writers over the past two cen-
turies” (p. 145). He is very interested in the subject of lead-
ers and leadership in these developing societies. He believes
that, despite the existence of elaborately furnished graves,
Middle Woodland Hopewellian leaders lived much like ev-
eryone else, and that the Middle Woodland was a time of
“unusual harmony.” Mississippian chiefs are also cut down
to size: While a degree of social inequality is evident, he ar-
gues for “the very real limits of chiefly power—it was more
show than substance” (p. 160). I predict that graduate stu-
dents will echo that statement for years to come. Even the
importance of maize is shown to have varied temporally
and geographically, and Milner stresses that it cannot be
uniformly implicated with the rise of social complexity.
This is a beautifully produced volume, printed on heavy
glossy paper stock. It is illustrated with a selection of 20
color plates that depict both sites and artifacts, and 131
figures (plans and line drawings and black and white pho-
tographs). The latter include, by my count, 35 spectacularly
sharp images of sites under excavation before 1960, many
apparently reproduced from original negatives. These in-
clude depictions of the scary tunnel openings of 1897 into
the Carriage Factory Mound near Chillicothe, Hopewell
Mound 25, Modoc Rockshelter during its excavation, and
numerous WPA-era images including Carlston Annis, the
Robbins, Wright and Craig mounds, Bessemer, Moundville,
and Jonathan Creek.
This is the most concise account available of the last
2,000-plus years of eastern North American prehistory. It
will give equal pleasure to those who may casually leaf
through it or those who read it in detail.
Cultural Landscapes in the Ancient Andes: Archaeolo-
gies of Place. Jerry D. Moore. Gainesville: University Press
of Florida, 2005. 270 pp.
G O R D O N M C E WA N
Wagner College
Jerry Moore has written an important and fascinating book
that will compel many archaeologists who deal with the ar-
chitectural remains of complex societies to reconsider their
interpretive approach. Moore argues the need for develop-
ing an archaeology of place based within holistic anthro-
pology. In his introduction, he presents this volume as an
attempt to expand archaeological inquiries into the affec-
tive aspects of culturally defined and constructed spaces. To
demonstrate his thesis, Moore explores four sets of research
questions and answers them through extensive and highly
imaginative use of ethnoarchaeology.
The first set of questions, discussed in chapter 2, ad-
dress a fairly simple problem regarding the distribution of
houses in a community. He asks whether it is “possible to
reconstruct the spatial ambits of ancient voices? How might
the placement of houses reflect varying levels of social cohe-
sion and contention in nonhierarchical societies?” (p. 219).
Ethnographic data from a wide spectrum of modern soci-
eties indicates that the distance that sound travels in normal
conversational and whispered tones governs the spacing of
households constructed of sound-permeable materials. He
suggests that in tense social conditions spacing is greater
than in relaxed cohesive groups. Applying this to Forma-
tive Period Andean archaeological settlements, he sees a
tool for recovering social dynamics reflected in community
patterning.
Moving to a more complex question, chapter 3 consid-
ers the connection between religious authority and the built
environment. With the appearance of complex and monu-
mental architecture in the Formative Period of ancient Peru
that has been widely seen as religious in character, ques-
tions have arisen regarding the nature of the societies that
built these temples. Were these structures the products of
emerging theocratic states or do they reflect low-level egal-
itarian societies motivated by the religious authority of ec-
static shamans?
Moore’s ethnoarchaeological approach finds that
ethnographic data from contemporary shamans shows that
different forms of ceremonial architecture are associated
with shamans and formally structured canonistic religious
practitioners. Ethnographic shamans operate without any
ceremonial architecture in public areas like plazas or men’s
houses. Canonistic religious practitioners, in contrast, op-
erate within substantial ceremonial architecture. However,
canonists and shamanistic practice are not mutually ex-
clusive. He makes the important point that canonists can
and do incorporate shamanic practices within the frame-
work of their religious practice. Therefore finding vestiges
of shamanic practice is not evidence that ecstatic shaman-
ism was the primary basis of religious authority. This insight
will have important implications for the interpretation of
the political structure of Peruvian Formative Period societies
of the Chavı́n stylistic horizon.
Turning to another use of space as the venue for proces-
sions in chapter 4, Moore argues that the dynamics of an-
cient societies can be revealed by the cultural modification
of space. Processional pathways, especially those defined
by architecture, provide knowledge of the form of a public
event that can be useful even if its meaning and significance
have been lost. Studies of ethnographic data on processions

indicate that the organization of public displays reflects
how societies reiterate or challenge social relationships. Ar-
chaeologists should see a unification and interdependence
of data in a processional event that in other contexts would
be treated as separate categories. Processions incorporate
a suite of elements including architectural space, portable
representational objects, musical instruments, drinking ves-
sels, textiles, costumes, and other artifacts that when con-
sidered holistically represent past dynamic behaviors that
may not be evident if the elements are analyzed in isola-
tion from one another.
Memory and architecture are addressed in chapter 5.
Moore laments that the “house” has been studied in the
Andes as merely the material representation of the house-
hold, a passive container of human activities. In general
the house has not been considered as a place where soci-
eties encode and display statements about themselves. He
suggests that we should consider the existence of “house
societies” based on the existence of noble or royal houses,
which as they are at the apex of society reflect the most in-
formation about the society as a whole. He suggests the hy-
pothesis that large compounds found archaeologically on
Peru’s north coast, especially those at the Chimu capital of
Chan Chan, are evidence of house societies and that the
compounds functioned to encode memory of the past. The
architecture is testamentary documentation of the cultural
memories that a particular group wanted to preserve.
Moore’s archaeology of place opens new dimensions
and avenues that go far beyond the limitations of the
cultural materialistic approach. He shows with a stunning
clarity why archaeology must be holistic anthropology if
we are to understand the cultural dynamics of past societies.
Socialization, Land, and Citizenship among Aboriginal
Australians: Reconciling Indigenous and Western Forms
of Education. Raymond Matthew Nichol. Lewiston, NY:
Edward Mellen Press, 2005. 480 pp.
COLLEEN MARIE O’BRIEN
University of Georgia
While scholars have written extensively about indigenous
knowledge systems—most recently on their loss or trans-
formation amidst changing social, economic, and environ-
mental conditions—few have focused on the underlying ed-
ucational practices, and even fewer have addressed how his-
torically based power structures transform indigenous edu-
cational systems. Raymond Matthew Nichol addresses both
in Socialization, Land, and Citizenship among Aboriginal Aus-
tralians: Reconciling Indigenous and Western Forms of Educa-
tion, by examining issues of education and pedagogy among
Aboriginal Australians and offering alternatives for integrat-
ing traditional educational practices into current Western
models. Nichol, an anthropologist with over 25 years of ex-
perience in the Australian public educational system, sets
out to unravel the complex processes of Aboriginal cultural,
social, and economic exclusion that have helped to shape
Single Reviews 915
the educational system in Australia. Nichol supports these
views with anthropological, educational, and historical re-
search, including an ethnographic study based in the com-
munity of Murrin Bridge, New South Wales, Australia.
In the opening chapter, the author lays a foundation
for traditional learning styles among the Wangaaypuwan
and Wiradjuri, two Aboriginal groups of central and west-
ern New South Wales. Nichol explains that, in stark con-
trast to Western models, traditional educational practices
rely largely on a model of learning that stresses observa-
tion, imitation, and teaching through story and oral tra-
dition. Nichol follows this in the subsequent two chap-
ters with a case study on the school at Murrin Bridge
and a presentation of dominant educational research ide-
ologies. Chapters 4–7 form the backbone of the book, in
which he lays out a historical overview of the role of ed-
ucation in the lives of Australian Aboriginal populations
from the 1970s through the early 2000s, including pro-
cesses of culture contact, assimilation, self-management,
and resistance. Here Nichol discusses the role of educa-
tion as an agent of change and a vehicle for implementing
state policies, examining the issue within the scope of “cit-
izenship,” a process by which the Australian government
attempted to instill principles of obligation, involvement,
participation, and social action into its members. Chapters
8–9 provide an overview of the research derived from field-
work, interviews, and questionnaires among school teach-
ers, administrators, and government institutions. In these
sections, Nichol discusses the plight of indigenous edu-
cation via school policies and curricula at Murrin Bridge.
Drawing on this material in chapters 10–11, he provides
suggestions for how to reconcile indigenous and Western
pedagogy.
The most interesting part of the book explores the dif-
ferences between traditional and Western educational mod-
els and the implications for Aboriginal identity. The way
Nichol sees it, Native peoples developed holistic, contextual
educational models: holistic in that they met a greater range
of a child’s mental, social, and spiritual needs, and contex-
tual in that they existed within religious beliefs, commu-
nity practices, and the rituals of everyday social life. Here,
education promoted group cohesion, solidarity, coopera-
tion, and identity, thus encouraging children to become
fully functioning “members” of their culture. This social-
ization in turn maintained the system by providing order
and continuity, in particular by regulating access to knowl-
edge and information. Nichol criticizes the Australian ed-
ucational system, arguing that rather than providing Abo-
riginal children with a relevant and appropriate education,
it may have undermined their identity in an effort to as-
similate and integrate them into Western society. In this
vein, he asserts that “schools perform their function of re-
producing an unequal social order, of perpetuating social
inequality” (p. 134). Rather than helping children grow
and prosper in society, the system thus may have rein-
forced and maintained social inequalities as a form of class
control.
916 American Anthropologist • Vol. 108, No. 4 • December 2006
While at times the many topics addressed—ranging
from identity, culture, citizenship, society, race, and
hegemony—may seem disconnected, Nichol succeeds in
weaving them together by using education as a common
thread. His holistic approach to the Aboriginal educational
experience is one of the books greatest strengths and
anthropologists can learn from his method of combining
ethnographic and historical data together with practical
accounts from indigenous teachers and his own extensive
knowledge of the Australian educational system. Further-
more, while Nichol writes the book from the perspective
of Aboriginal Australians, many of the issues raised—such
as land change, power, and authority—have global ap-
plications. This book will be engaging to those readers
who wish to gain an understanding of the Aboriginal
experience of education as well as to practitioners who
want to incorporate traditional learning styles into Western
curricula.
Scenic Spots: Chinese Tourism, the State, and Cultural
Authority. Pál Nyı́ri. Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 2006. 134 pp.
R O B E RT S H E P H E R D
George Washington University
Anyone who has been to China in recent years, whether
as a researcher or tourist, has likely experienced tourism,
PRC style, an approach that undercuts assumptions about
seemingly normative ties between authenticity and cultural
purity or historical antiquity. Pál Nyı́ri’s Scenic Spots: Chinese
Tourism, the State, and Cultural Authority is a timely analy-
sis of the significant increase in domestic tourism in China
over the past decade and the role this plays in an ongo-
ing state project of nation building and modernization. As
Nyı́ri notes, tourism studies in anthropology and related
disciplines have more often than not focused on the im-
pact of foreign tourism on local places. Only in recent years
have researchers begun to pay attention to the role domestic
tourism plays in the traditional fieldwork space of anthro-
pology. With literally millions of Chinese citizens travel-
ing on vacation each year, Nyı́ri asks a simple yet crucial
question: Where are they going and why? In other words,
what makes a particular place a destination for both (state-
affiliated) producers and (citizen) consumers?
In China what gets toured and why, it turns out, is very
different from what European and North American tourists
are conditioned to seek. Nyı́ri begins with a brief overview
of travel in Chinese history, emphasizing a long tradition
of categorizing “scenic spots” (mingsheng) such as moun-
tains and other nature scenes based on how these scenes
were described by famous literati and other elites (p. 10).
While tourism was rejected as a “Western” practice during
the Mao years, revolutionary sites such as important birth-
places and battle scenes functioned as pilgrimage sites for
Red Guards. Following the 1978 “opening up” of China,
authorities initially emphasized foreign tourism. However,
since the early 1990s, domestic tourism has become a ma-
jor catalyst for further state-directed development, partic-
ularly in minority areas such as Tibet, Qinghai, Sichuan,
and Yunan. As part of this tourism boom, authorities have
revived and appropriated the concept of “mingsheng” to
mark new sites, ranging from nature preserves and zoos
to newly constructed “old towns” and historic sites such
as Mao’s Mausoleum (p. 15). This construction of destina-
tions is successful because the romantic ideal of travel as
a solitary pursuit has never translated well in the Chinese
context (p. 62). In contrast to an idealized Euro-American
pursuit of authenticity and a former Soviet Union emphasis
on physical exertion and selflessness, Chinese norms define
“good” travel as a correct interpretation of already marked
sites (p. 64). In particular, travel in China is grounded on
a “different way of approaching and responding to nature,
lacking the modern Western taboo on human intervention”
(p. 67). As Nyı́ri points out in his description of Ermei Shan
(Mount Emei) and Jiuzhaigou National Park in Sichuan, for
mainstream Chinese tourists, authenticity is not rooted in
purity of either nature or material culture: Cultural perfor-
mance is both expected and valued, rather than the realness
of everyday life (which, after all, many have plenty of expe-
rience with). Just as wilderness is not necessarily viewed as
pristine nature but simply as wild and therefore dangerous,
a good trip is not solitary and introspective but profoundly
social.
Nyı́ri firmly rejects the suggestion that Chinese are ex-
amples of “posttourists”—supposedly savvy travelers who
realize that pursuing the “real” is a fruitless quest and, there-
fore, accept the irony of commodification. Rather than get-
ting the joke and playing along, he argues that most Chi-
nese tourists quite willingly take part “in the rehearsal of a
high modern hegemonic discourse” (p. 84)—one that con-
firms, for example, Han stereotypes of “happy colorful” mi-
norities.
And what of resistance to this? Nyı́ri briefly notes the
emergence of a backpacker subculture among urban young
Chinese but dismisses it as insignificant, arguing that there
is little critique of marked tourist sites or focus on historical
context among these groups. This “self-service travel”
(zizhuyou), rather than functioning as an alternative to
state-orchestrated tourism, is instead framed as a modern
lifestyle choice, one that emphasizes individual “feelings”
(pp. 88–89).
Nyı́ri closes with a very brief discussion of a new phe-
nomenon: Chinese group travel to foreign destinations. Un-
fortunately, he devotes very little space to this important
topic, while hinting at the intriguing ways in which for-
eign sites are reworked within a framework of dishistori-
cized mingsheng, so that, for example, the River Thames,
Buckingham Palace, Madame Tussaud’s, and “London fog”
become some of the official “scenic spots” to visit in London
(p. 105).
Despite these limitations, this is an excellent, albeit
short, introduction to an exciting field of study, organized
and written in a way that makes the information accessible

to nonspecialists and appropriate to undergraduate courses
in contemporary China as well as to tourism studies.
Farmers and Townspeople in a Changing Nigeria:
Abakaliki during Colonial Times (1905–1960). Simon
Ottenberg. Lagos, Nigeria: Spectrum Books Limited, 2005.
373 pp.
DANIEL JORDAN SMITH
Brown University
Relatively few ethnographic monographs seem genuinely—
much less primarily—aimed at an audience in the place of
study. Simon Ottenberg’s account of colonial Abakaliki in
southeastern Nigeria is a striking and unusual example. Ot-
tenberg, a preeminent anthropologist of the Igbo people in
southeastern Nigeria, explains in the preface his purpose-
ful decision to publish what he describes as his “last ma-
jor work” at a Nigerian press to increase the readership in
Nigeria. Primarily a historical narrative, Farmers and Towns-
people in a Changing Nigeria offers a multifaceted and de-
tailed description of the emergence and growth of Abaka-
liki, a backwater town at the northern edge of the Igbo-
speaking region. Ottenberg undertook the fieldwork that
forms the basis for the book in 1960. His history of the
town relies on a combination of interviews and observa-
tions from 1960, archival research, and published scholar-
ship, mostly by Nigerian researchers. The tone of the book
is “old school” in the sense that the author is relatively ab-
sent in the text and the perspective is very much a bird’s-eye
view, presenting a description of history, social organiza-
tion, political dynamics, and cultural practices in an objec-
tive style. Because the book covers such a long historical
period (at least compared to an account of an ethnographic
present), in-depth individual life histories and engrossing
community case examples are not possible. Yet there is a
degree of detail, precision, and complexity with regard to
the description and analysis of social organization that re-
calls the masterful accounts of the best mid-20th-century
anthropology. The extent of Ottenberg’s information and
the sheer scope of his study are impressive, and reading his
account is a reminder that new generations of anthropolo-
gists rarely achieve this level of comprehensive knowledge
about the places they study.
In my view, the book makes four substantial contribu-
tions to the literature. First, it provides a unique and fine-
grained analysis of the extension and mechanisms of colo-
nial authority in a relatively remote region of the conti-
nent, demonstrating with remarkable complexity and pre-
cision both how colonial power functioned in a system
of indirect rule and how Nigerians adapted to, adopted,
and co-opted colonial practices for their own purposes. Sec-
ond, Ottenberg reveals the multidimensional ways in which
colonial institutions shaped independence movements and
postcolonial Nigerian politics, governance, and culture. The
history of Abakaliki shows that not all of these legacies
were negative. Indeed, the book is commendable for the
Single Reviews 917
balance with which colonial influences are described, eval-
uated, and criticized. Third, the book offers an unusually
meticulous account of the emergence of an African town.
During the period Ottenberg covers, Abakaliki was trans-
formed from a settlement of just a few hundred people that
could hardly be characterized as “urban” into a large and
expanding town that would eventually become the capital
city of Ebonyi State. Ottenberg traces the growth of the town
in its economic, political, and social dimensions, providing
a natural history of urbanization in an African colonial con-
text that offers both exhaustive empirical material and ev-
idence that will be useful for comparative analysis. Fourth,
as the title suggests, Farmers and Townspeople in a Changing
Nigeria focuses specifically on rural–urban dynamics in the
evolution of Abakaliki. As is true in many contexts of ur-
banization, the nature, scope, and substance of rural–urban
relations are crucial for understanding the social history of
the town and the processes of change taking place in the
surrounding and interconnected rural areas. Ottenberg of-
fers a detailed and insightful perspective on these processes
utilizing unusually rich data.
Ottenberg explicitly shies away from theory in the
book, preferring to document the history in a dispassionate
and descriptive account. However, I believe there is much
fodder for theoretical analysis in the monograph, and I
wish that Ottenberg had been more willing to suggest
and explore some of the theoretical implications of his
material. I wonder whether the relatively descriptive
nature of the book is driven not only by its historical
focus and Ottenberg’s anthropological lineage but also by
his expectation that the book’s primary audience will be
Nigerian. One suspects that as with Meyer Fortes, whose
accounts of the Tallensi have reputedly been invoked
to settle local disputes about “tradition,” the people of
Abakaliki will find Ottenberg’s account of their town to
be an invaluable resource. The style and tone of the book
leave the impression that the author anticipates such a
possibility. I have little doubt that the people of Abakaliki
will be proud of this book, and that is surely an important
legacy.
Unconquered Lacandon Maya: Ethnohistory and
Archaeology of Indigenous Change. Joel W. Palka.
Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005. 319 pp.
N O R B E RT O . R O S S
Vanderbilt University
In Unconquered Lacandon Maya: Ethnohistory and Archaeology
of Indigenous Change, Joel Palka rightfully attacks the im-
age of Lacandon Maya as direct descendents of the classic
Maya who inhabited the Maya ruins of lowland Chiapas
(Mexico) and the Petén (Guatemala). Instead of being an
isolated indigenous group frozen in time, Palka describes
the Lacandon Maya as a more or less cohesive tribe strug-
gling to make a living within the “tribal zone” of colonial
and postcolonial Mexico and Guatemala.
918 American Anthropologist • Vol. 108, No. 4 • December 2006
The author is rather ambitious in his goals:
The following pages discuss variation in Lacandon so-
ciety through time and how these changes came about
through discrete historical, cultural, and geographical cir-
cumstances. The research . . . demonstrates how and why
Lacandon Maya culture changed through time by com-
paring their distant past with recent ethnographic con-
ditions. [p.4]
This goal is worthwhile as little is known about the forma-
tion and transformation of southern Lowland Maya groups
during colonial times. As a result a more detailed account of
the different Maya groups in the area, their emergence, and
their transformations through interplays of self-chosen iso-
lation and interethnic relations is much needed. However,
there are several caveats to such a goal. First, close to no
archaeological research has been conducted on Lacandon
Maya sites and only a fraction them have been identified.
Second, given the lack of large settlements, identification
of these sites is very hard. Finally, the facts that most of
Lacandon Maya material culture perishes fast in the rain-
forest and that ceremonial sites could differ markedly in
distance and kind limit the possibility of archaeological
research.
For all these reasons, Palka’s focus on historical archae-
ology of the Lacandon Maya is to be applauded. Yet these
very same reasons make the above outlined goals of un-
derstanding cultural change among the colonial Lacandon
Maya almost impossible. As a result, the most important
contribution of this book is not in the area of archaeology or
research conducted by the author but in bringing together
different authors working on the subject of cultural change
among Lacandon Maya from the colonial time (de Vos) un-
til today (Bruce, Boremanse, and McGee). This is of specific
interest to the novice, as it allows easy access to informa-
tion, some of which is already out of print or only avail-
able in Spanish. However, it is the archaeology of Lacandon
Maya settlements that experts were waiting for. This would
have constituted novel knowledge and working more exten-
sively along these lines might have provided new and much
needed insights into the history of lowland Maya. It is here
that the book falls short of its goal. Trying to encompass too
much, Palka gives up his focus on historical archaeology of
the area, the topic I for one was most interested in. In one
and a half chapters, Palka presents mainly field note–type
descriptions of pilot studies. In fact the author notes on sev-
eral occasions that more research is needed, and it was this
“more research” that I hoped to find in this book.
As is, Unconquered Lacandon Maya has little to offer
for the expert, who is very likely to be familiar with the
sources used by Palka. As stated, the archaeological data
are limited and do not provide information beyond what
is already known.
All in all, the approach of the book—or, rather, the
research outlined at the beginning of the book—is laud-
able. However, the author does not live up to his own
high standards and expectations. The book might be a
helpful tool for the novice to get acquainted with lowland
Maya history. It does not offer many new insights to the
expert and one hopes to see Palka focusing more on the
archaeological research he started among the Lacandon
Maya.
Global Pharmaceuticals: Ethics, Markets, Practices.
Adriana Petryna, Andrew Lakoff, and Arthur Kleinman,
eds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. 301 pp.
NINA L. ETKIN
University of Hawai‘i
Health disparities worldwide are attributed in large mea-
sure to differential access to resources, including pharma-
ceuticals. Decisions in drug discovery and distribution are
increasingly based on economic return, rather than on af-
fordable treatments for diseases that affect the most people
and that are responsible for the most morbidity and mortal-
ity. Direct-to-consumer marketing contributes to the med-
icalization of lifestyle, while some equally needy markets
are ignored. Paradoxes prevail: The continued use of drug-
resistant antimalarials contributes to escalating death rates,
the industry fails to make low-cost drugs available, and
antidepressant sales increase among economically disad-
vantaged populations whose arguably more urgent health
needs are not met.
The editors envision the globalization of pharmaceuti-
cals as a nexus, “a complex web of transitions that is a multi-
scaled movement with political, economic, and ethical di-
mensions” (p. 20). The ethnographically based individual
contributions to this volume explore the economic, cul-
tural, and scientific processes that underlie expansion of the
pharmaceutical industry and how health disparities emerge
from and are exaggerated by market-driven medicine. These
authors instruct us how community identity and health
are influenced by the nuanced and complex intersections
of “Big Pharma,” NGOs, government regulations, and indi-
viduals. The issue of who receives treatment echoes through
every stage of pharmaceutical production, from preclinical
testing to human subjects research, merchandising, distri-
bution, prescription, and consumption.
The AIDS epidemic has drawn especially heavy criti-
cism about the expense of treatment from professional and
lay sectors. In a Ugandan case study, Susan Reynolds Whyte,
Michael Whyte, Lotte Meinert, and Betty Kyaddondo de-
scribe access disparities based in power and position. On
the same theme, João Biehl explores Brazil’s AIDS program,
which has been widely praised as an inspiration to interna-
tional medical activism. His critique applauds the success of
the program and also reveals that inequities in access still
exist, especially for Brazil’s urban poor.
Andrew Lakoff analyzes the market manipulation of
antidepressants in the context of Argentina’s economic cri-
sis in 2001. He illustrates how pharmaceutical marketers
connect authorized knowledge to clinicians’ prescribing be-
haviors, thus blurring the boundaries between clinical sci-
ence and capitalism. Similarly, Kalman Applbaum reveals

how best clinical practice is invoked by U.S. pharmaceuti-
cal marketers in Japan, where the increasing prescription
of new antidepressants represents agent-driven expansion
of global markets. In a chapter on psychotropic pharma-
ceuticals, David Healy examines how the industry shapes
clinical and lay perceptions of mental illness in the United
States and England: Marketers create or increase product de-
mand transposing conventional educational programs and
celebrity endorsements to the domain of research; for ex-
ample, Healy illustrates how psychiatric disorders are reified
and their treatments promoted by clinical trials and ghost-
written articles in symposium proceedings and professional
journals.
Anne Lovell describes how France, once strongly op-
posed to pharmaceutical treatment for addictions, in 1996
became the first country to introduce a synthetic opiate
as the first-line treatment for problem opiate use. She fol-
lows the history of the marketing of an addiction phar-
maceutical that has become a primary source of revenue
in France. Veena Das and Ranendra Das’s ethnography in
Delhi neighborhoods explores connections between practi-
tioners and households, taking issue with terms such as self-
medication and noncompliance, which, they argue, patholo-
gize the actions of poor people and draw attention away
from how “global and national policy, regional markets,
and livelihoods” (p. 172) shape patterns of pharmaceutical
use.
The accelerating growth of the pharmaceutical indus-
try rests on an expanding foundation of human subjects
research, which increasingly draws on populations in low-
income nations. Adriana Petryna considers the ethical im-
plications of the globalization of commercial clinical trials
and examines the interplay of international, state, and eco-
nomic domains.
This volume contributes to the literature of phar-
maceutical anthropology, reinforcing a portrait of the
pharmaceutical industry as a business that is concentrated
in a handful of large commercial entities that invest heavily
in research and marketing. The range of themes is narrow:
for example, three in the volume deal with the same sub-
ject of psychiatric medications. Timely issues that are not
covered include (re)emergent infections and the evolution
of drug resistance, to which pharmaceutical marketing
contributes heavily. The individual chapters are strong
scholarly, and primarily anthropological contributions. I
recommend the book for libraries and for academics and
other professionals.
Beyond Black and Red: African–Native Relations in
Colonial Latin America. Matthew Restall, ed. Albu-
querque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005. 303 pp.
A N G E L A C A S TA Ñ E D A
DePauw University
Challenging historical accounts from colonial Latin
America, this collection of essays utilizes new methods of
Single Reviews 919
research to uncover alternative interpretations surrounding
African–Native relations. While the nine chapters recognize
evidence of hostile relationships between African and Na-
tive peoples, they also highlight the complexity inherent
in these encounters. Editor Matthew Restall describes this
approach as the hostility–harmony dialectic. Within this
analysis, Restall identifies cultural areas that include iden-
tity, community, and culture change in which this hostility–
harmony dialectic is reproduced. What were the major
factors that influenced African–Native relations? How did
colonial powers manipulate these subordinate groups?
What tools did African and Native communities use to con-
test their positions? And what impact did African–Native
relations have on colonial society? Along with presenting
evidence to support historical notions of a hostile relation-
ship between these groups, the chapters in this anthology
offer new insight into the field of colonial Latin American
history by shifting the focus from the colonizer to the in-
teraction between subaltern groups.
Given the multiplicity of locations within Latin Amer-
ica to evaluate the relations between African and Native
communities, this analogy does a thorough job presenting
a broad range of examples as well as evaluating the spe-
cific context in which each case study is conducted. These
include such diverse geographic and topical areas such as
Florida, Colombia, Brazil, and Mexico, while focusing on is-
sues of identity, marriage, labor, and miscegenation. A com-
mon theme binding the chapters together is the struggle
experienced by both African and Native groups in colonial
Latin America. Both groups suffered within the colonial sys-
tem, which sought to create antagonistic relations between
Africans and Native peoples. Ultimately, the differences be-
tween each group were filtered out as each had to confront
the harsh realities inherent in their struggle to survive, as il-
lustrated in Kris Lane’s chapter on the experiences of African
and indigenous peoples in mining camps throughout colo-
nial Spanish America.
Writing on the military experiences of African and Na-
tive soldiers, Ben Vinson III and Matthew Restall analyze ex-
amples of conflict and collegiality between the two groups.
They note the various roles colonial military service played
for each community, highlighting differences in region and
type of region as influencers on group identity in Mexico.
For many of these groups, military service became a mech-
anism to gain access to privileges and control over indi-
vidual and group identities. Likewise, Native peoples and
Africans also used the Spanish legal system as illustrated in
Renée Souldore-La France’s chapter on Colombia. Acts of re-
sistance by both Native and African groups are highlighted
through an analysis of the use of language in court doc-
uments. Complaints of exploitation, property claims, and
abuse by priests are all examples of court cases that reflected
the use of the colonial system as a tool for resistance by Na-
tive and African peoples.
By illustrating the complexity inherent in African–
Native relations, this research also advances new interpre-
tations on the process of mestizaje (the mixing of races), a
920 American Anthropologist • Vol. 108, No. 4 • December 2006
concept essential to understanding historical and contem-
porary relations in Latin America. Restall argues that cre-
olization is an applicable model to describe the continual
African–Native interaction illustrated in three main areas
defined as interculturation, informality, and chronic inten-
sification. The chapters in this anthology support this ap-
proach by offering new evidence to better understand the
construction of multiracial populations and interethnic re-
lationships found today in Latin America. For example, Stu-
art B. Schwartz and Hal Langfur’s chapter on Brazil examines
the colonial process of ethnic labeling and the creative new
categories produced via African and Native contact. Simi-
larly, Norma Angélica Castillo Palma and Susan Kellogg an-
alyze the impact of multiracial societies in central Mexico.
Their chapter demonstrates the flexible and multidimen-
sional nature of racial categories, illustrating how free Afro-
mestizos cultivated stronger indigenous rather than African
links to their heritage and identity. Moreover, their recon-
struction of economic activities and social lives help un-
cover the everyday lived experiences of these historically
marginalized groups.
Beyond Black and Red is a significant study on marginal-
ized peoples, their histories, and their forms of conflict and
cooperation. Moreover, it contributes to our understanding
on the promise and limitations of colonial documents by
reinforcing the need for a more holistic reinterpretation of
African–Native relations. The nine chapters compiled in
this anthology, while not dismissing the presence of hostile
African–Native relations, illustrate the fluid and sustained
interaction between these two groups. This anthology is
a valuable collection that highlights the diverse social,
political, and cultural responses of African and Native
populations to unique local and national contexts.
Liquid Relations: Contested Water Rights and Legal
Complexity. Dik Roth, Rutgerd Boelens, and Margareet
Zwarteveen, eds. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University
Press, 2005. 313 pp.
NAMIKA RABY
California State University, Long Beach
In editing and contributing to this book, Dik Roth, Rut-
gerd Bolens, and Margareet Zwarteween have pulled off a
difficult task of bringing together a treasure trove of cross-
cultural data from a social science perspective on the glob-
ally critical field of water resource management. With a
larger and justifiable focus on irrigation management (given
that the largest quantity of the world’s water is in this do-
main and also perhaps influenced by the area of expertise
of the majority of contributors to this volume), it also cov-
ers domestic and industrial use of water and ecological and
policy implications of intersectoral water transfers. Liquid
Relations argues convincingly for context specific solutions
to water resources management. This work is satisfying to
the anthropology audience at many levels.
Illustrating that “the devil is in the details,” this work—
which includes ten well-integrated case studies representing
diverse geographies from Africa, Asia, and the Americas—
depicts the complexity and dynamics of sociocultural con-
texts and their impact on water resources management. This
complexity covers gender, ethnicity, and social class in the
context of exercising water rights. It illustrates the relevance
of case studies often dismissed in applied settings as anec-
dotal and argues the case for the relevance of insightful
ethnography in the understanding of water management
issues in such settings.
Taking this bottom-up approach, Liquid Relations argues
against universal solutions imposed by international de-
velopment agencies for managing water resources, which
have proven time and again to be technically driven so-
lutions, bureaucratically imposed by central governments
and, therefore, unsustainable.
At the center of this discussion is an examination of
what water means to communities. The multivalent sym-
bolism of water and its perceptions as a community resource
is broadly applicable to non-Western paradigms while its
perception purely as a commodity that is capitalistic market
driven is a Western artifact. Given its scarcity and there-
fore the need for finding sustainable management solu-
tions, these two viewpoints are often counterposed as pol-
icy solutions (with an ethnocentric bias toward the latter
approach) in international development programs. Liquid
Relations shows the futility of such an approach.
Addressing further the issue of on-the-ground complex-
ity and diversity, Liquid Relations examines the following
dimensions of water resources management: impact of irri-
gation on other types of water use, indigenous perceptions
and use of water, groundwater and its conjunctive use, and
national water policies. This in turn builds up to a holistic
framework for examining water rights as a sociolegal con-
struct. In addition, this social complexity in any given con-
text generates a multiplicity of such rights and a principle
theme of the book is the politics and power dimensions of
the “haves” and “have-nots” in this contested domain of
water availability, scarcity, control, and accessibility. Differ-
ent case studies examine the outcomes when such rights
are usurped, rights are legislated on to unreceptive cultures,
and when biparty negotiated outcomes are arrived at. Cen-
tral to this discussion is the distinction between the con-
cepts of “categorical rights that are attached to persons and
property objects and concretized rights embodied in social
relationships” (p. 7). The interplay between these two types
of rights and the need to understand the resulting hybrid is
the focus of the book.
Each chapter also points out the critical role of
community-based organizations in countervailing the in-
equitable tendencies of the market-driven approaches of
international development programs. Such organizations—
including water user associations, village development
committees, cooperatives, and NGOs—have historically
maintained the participatory demand-driven dimensions of

community water resources management by giving access
to the poor and the marginalized. Such groups presented
in this work include women, urban renters, smallholder
farmers, and sharecroppers. One chapter in particular, enti-
tled “Routes to Water Rights,” addresses the practical impli-
cations of such a strategy for irrigation management trans-
fer programs.
Liquid Relations is also a larger commentary on the
relentless process of culture change and modernization
and their unequal impact on different segments of a
community. In addition to its contributions to the field of
anthropology of water resources management, legal and
political anthropology, and community management of
water resources, it is also a highly readable addition to
the literature in these fields and therefore could serve as a
textbook for courses on these topics or on the related topic
of international development.
Being Góral: Identity Politics and Globalization in
Postsocialist Poland. Deborah Cahalen Schneider. Albany:
State University of New York Press, 2006. 211 pp.
M A RY S I A G A L B R A I T H
University of Alabama
Being Góral is an important contribution to ethnographies
of postcommunist East and Central Europe. The mono-
graph explores the ongoing and changing significance of
class hierarchies and ethnic identity among the Górals of
Żywiec, Poland. The author uses this case to illustrate the
declining significance of the nation-state relative to local
and global levels of political and economic organization,
and the weakening of national identity relative to local
identity and global integration. The Górals are an interest-
ing group because they are defined both from within the
community and by Poles outside of the region as a dis-
tinct ethnicity, but one that has never aspired to political
autonomy. Although the Górals are most strongly associ-
ated with farmers in remote mountain villages, the study
explores the varied uses and portrayals of Góral identity
within the small city of Żywiec, where two elite classes, the
prewar elite and the neocapitalists, compete for local power
within emerging democratic structures and globalizing mar-
kets. Deborah Cahalen Schneider deftly weaves a portrait
of the Górals of Poland via analyses of local history, public
discourse, key events such as Pope John Paul II’s visit, and
the particular experiences of the many Poles she knew and
interviewed.
Schneider makes the risky but effective choice to high-
light her ethnographic analysis of past and present class
conflict in Żywiec before detailing her theoretical framing
in relation to other studies of class, ethnic identity, and
postsocialist reforms. Thus, her criticism of the “transition
paradigm”—as she calls the assumption of a unidirectional,
uniform progression from state socialism to a more effec-
tive capitalist world system—is especially convincing when
Single Reviews 921
it follows her description of the messy, particular effects of
Góral encounters with global business interests.
Similarly, she begins her chapter on elite class struggles
with only a brief overview of Karl Marx’s and Pierre Bour-
dieu’s treatments of class, saving her more detailed consid-
eration of earlier studies until she has outlined class hier-
archies in Żywiec under socialism and postsocialism. Her
case material helps to illustrate her contention that, con-
sistent with Bourdieu’s claims, class is as much a matter of
social and cultural capital as it is a matter of economic cap-
ital. Schneider also makes the point that this case is distinct
from many other core–periphery studies of class conflict in
colonial contexts in that it occurs within Europe and in a re-
gion with a history of small-scale capitalism, and it involves
different ethnicities that are nevertheless all “white.” Be-
sides showing the links between this region and other parts
of Poland as well as Poland and other Central European na-
tions, Schneider makes a convincing case for comparisons
with other nation-states at the periphery of Europe such as
Spain, Portugal, Greece, and Ireland. She identifies particu-
larly compelling contrasts with Maddox’s study of changing
class power dynamics in the Andalusia region of Spain.
A strength of the study is the attention it pays to his-
tory; Schneider considers the effects of Poland’s various
periods of occupation and autonomy on the Żywiec re-
gion and shows how Żywiec resistance to pronational cam-
paigns has contributed to the declining significance of the
nation-state. This section further challenges the transition
paradigm by emphasizing ongoing cultural and structural
factors, including elements of class, the region’s location at
the periphery of centers of power, and Góral reliance on
family and community networks. She also argues that re-
cent market reforms further limit the significance of the
nation-state relative to local identities and global capital-
ism. Focused primarily on events up to 1995, the book
leaves open the question of what has occurred since then,
particularly in light of Poland’s membership in the Euro-
pean Union in 2004.
Schneider emphasizes that elites who vie for power in
postsocialist Żywiec evoke ideals of both “traditionalism”
and “modernism.” The prewar elite and the neocapitalists
employ these idioms in different ways, sometimes pitting
them against each other and sometimes suggesting their
complementarity. She also considers the ways in which
nonelite classes employ conceptions of Góral identity both
in their everyday lives and in contestations with members
of the elite classes. She makes good use of her own diffi-
culties finding a place to live in Żywiec and case studies
of two households to show how different class positions as
well as the relative strength of kin networks can lead to very
different access to opportunities in the emerging capitalist
economy.
In sum, Being Góral provides a valuable view into life
in postcommunist Europe by focusing on ethnic identity
and class conflict expressed through the idioms of tradi-
tionalism and modernity.
922 American Anthropologist • Vol. 108, No. 4 • December 2006
Quintana Roo Archaeology. Justine M. Shaw and Jennifer
P. Mathews, eds. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2005.
308 pp.
JOHN E. CLARK
Brigham Young University
For over a century, Quintana Roo has been the slighted sis-
ter of Maya archaeology. Everyone knows she is in the hall,
but few ask her to dance. This modest book hopes to change
her dance card and restore some balance to archaeologi-
cal reporting. By size, Quintana Roo represents a fifth of
the Maya lowlands, yet only three sites (Cobá, Tulum, and
Cozumel)—out of thousands—consistently appear in pop-
ular summaries of Maya archaeology, and then only as a
postlude to Classic civilization or a prelude to the Spanish
Conquest. Missing are at least two millennia of history for
tens of thousands of people who were part of the lowland
Maya story. This book is the first broad treatment in English
of the archaeology of region.
The 22 contributors to this volume hope to fill the ar-
chaeological void between Belize and Yucatan by present-
ing fresh data for sites recently or currently under investi-
gation. They have put together a useful reference book with
new information, but not one that will alter the status quo
anytime soon. The data are still too ungrounded, underil-
lustrated, and raw to bring Quintana Roo into the larger
picture. The book is best appreciated for groups of chapters
dealing with separate projects, or topics, rather than as a
synthetic or comparative work.
Following a comprehensive bibliographic chapter by
Marı́a José Con Uribe of past work and of the scores of re-
cent projects carried out in the state the past decade, the
remaining 14 chapters are organized by area: north, cen-
tral, and south Quintana Roo. The coverage is uneven, with
six chapters devoted to the northern sector around modern
Cancún, four chapters to the Yo’okop region of central QR,
and four miscellaneous chapters for the south. Important
sites described in the book include T’isil, San Gervasio, and
San Angel in the north; Muyil and Yo’okop in central QR;
and Margarita, Lagartera, Kohunlich, and Dzibanché in the
south. These were large and magnificent cities during the
Classic period, and with roots in the Preclassic.
Because of its design as do-it-yourself-synthesis, the
book’s importance will depend on what individual read-
ers bring to it. Three chapters deal with art: murals and
sculpture from San Angel, carved stone monuments from
Yo’okop, and four-stone altars for the southern region.
Three chapters address issues of ceramic chronologies and
cultural history but only one illustrates sherds. Changing
settlement patterns and population swings are described
for the Yalahau, Yo’okop, and Chetumal Bay regions. As
an outsider to the archaeology of Quintana Roo, I most
enjoyed the three chapters that offered some comparative
analysis, all of them dealing with southern Quintana Roo.
Laura Villamil and Jason Sherman compare the urban pat-
terns of dispersed and nucleated settlement at Margarita
and Lagartera, contemporaneous and neighboring cities.
Enrique Nalda compares Kohunlich and Dzibanché, two
cities located 30 kilometers apart. Contrary to his expec-
tations, he did not find the expected evidence that the
larger city of Dzibanché dominated the smaller Kohunlich.
Finally, Thomas Guderjan’s summary of the developments
around Chetemal Bay is useful and, I hope, signals the direc-
tion future studies in Quintana Roo will take: comparative,
synthetic, and simplified for outside consumption. The ear-
liest sites in each region date to the late Middle Preclassic
and the latest to the Late Postclassic. Better documentation
of the earliest sites will help track the spread of sedentary vil-
lage life and ceramics from Belize and the Peten into north-
ern Yucatan. One surprise in the various site descriptions is
that the earliest ceramics in Quintana Roo are more related
to those from Komchén of northern Yucatan than to those
from Belize or the Peten.
This is a book by experts, writing like experts, for
experts. To get the most out of the book, one must be
familiar with local phases, ceramic complexes and types,
and architectural styles. As a representative of the supposed
target audience—outsiders blissfully ignorant of Quintana
Roo archaeology—I read the book to discover what I
should factor into my understandings of the lowland Maya
story. The answer is: very little, at the moment. Most of
the exciting finds in Quintana Roo illustrated in Mexican
publications are not represented in this book. For those left
with a hunger for more Quintana Roo archaeology after
reading this book, I recommend the popular treatments and
color photographs in Arqueologı́a Mexicana (nos. 14, 54, 76).
Totems and Teachers: Key Figures in the History of
Anthropology. Sydel Silverman, ed. New York: AltaMira
Press, 2004. 258 pp.
JACK GLAZIER
Oberlin College
Anthropologists teaching courses on culture theory or the
history of anthropology and others concerned with these
topics will welcome the second, revised edition of Sydel
Silverman’s valuable book. Originating in a lecture series
at the CUNY Graduate Center in 1976, Totems and Teach-
ers appeared in 1981 and remained in print for nearly 15
years. The book does not pretend to be comprehensive, and
the editor acknowledges “glaring omissions” of major an-
thropologists owing to financial constraints restricting the
project. The lectures examined the lives and works of an-
thropological luminaries, no longer living, as interpreted
by prominent scholars who, in most cases, were students or
colleagues of the subjects. Reappearing in the new edition,
the eight original eponymous chapter titles and contrib-
utors are Franz Boas (Alexander Lesser), Alfred L. Kroeber
(Eric R. Wolf), Paul Radin (Stanley Diamond), Bronislaw
Malinowski (Raymond Firth), Ruth Benedict (Sidney W.
Mintz), Julian H. Steward (Robert F. Murphy), Leslie A.
White (Robert L. Carneiro), and Robert Redfield (Nathaniel

Tarn). Only the Malinowski chapter by Firth derived from
a prior lecture. Silverman has preserved both the brief but
instructive texts of discussions following six of the lectures
and the biographical profiles of the distinguished contrib-
utors. The most substantial editing occurs in the shortened
paper by Tarn on Redfield and the addition to that section
of a new, more cogent paper by Eric Wolf. Also new is a
chapter on Margaret Mead by Rhoda Metraux and Sydel
Silverman.
While the totemic metaphor might suggest uncritical
partisanship, Silverman and her colleagues have generally
provided even-handed assessments of their subjects. Dia-
mond’s encomium to Paul Radin comes closest to pure de-
votion, and in the subsequent discussion he concedes noth-
ing to Lesser’s persuasive critique of Radin.
By contrast, Firth’s admiration for Malinowski is not
unalloyed. He dismisses Malinowski’s penchant for grand
generalization because it inhibits explanation of cultural
variation. Firth also finds Malinowski’s economic anthro-
pology insufficient in many respects. Likewise, Mintz
writes appreciatively but critically of his first anthropology
teacher, Ruth Benedict, from whom he parted theoretical
company early on. Although convinced that she was right
in her conclusions about cultural coherence, order, and con-
straint, Mintz observes that Benedict provided no method-
ology or practical research strategy for operationalizing her
views. He is also critical of her indifference to history.
By 1981, most of the featured ancestral figures
had achieved a scholarly apotheosis. Paradoxically, many
influential perspectives had become so much a part of
the discipline that their original provenance was ignored.
Totems and Teachers helps to reconnect germinal ideas to
the lives and careers of their originators. In this way, the
book coheres by presenting sociocultural theories as more
than abstract concepts and models. The nine celebrated fig-
ures in Totems and Teachers advanced the discipline through
achievements occurring at particular historic periods within
a context of biography, institutions, conflict, and profes-
sional relationships. Totems and Teachers admirably explores
these configurations and enhances understanding of some
of our most influential forebears. It also provides a timely
reminder of the genuine courage of predecessors such as
Boas and White; each faced costly opprobrium and retalia-
tion for opposing the political and religious orthodoxies of
his time.
Murphy’s illuminating discussion of Steward, particu-
larly during his Columbia years (1946–52), is emblematic
of the book’s intent. Steward had long since abandoned the
distributional approach of his teacher, Kroeber. He took in-
stead a radically different course toward materialism as well
as toward cause–effect relationships in culture that owed
something to the teaching of Robert Lowie. Steward exer-
cised great influence in the Columbia anthropology depart-
ment, which in turn influenced him. The Boas legacy, still
palpable in the early postwar years, emphasized a kind of
cultural realism fully compatible with Steward’s outlook.
His anthropology also suited the times and the sensibilities
Single Reviews 923
of his students, many of whom—including Sidney Mintz,
Eric Wolf, Marvin Harris, and Murphy himself—were re-
turning veterans whose young lives had been shaped by
economic depression and war. A perspective emphasizing
the determinism of food scarcity or power or material privi-
lege resonated with their experience and politics. Benedict’s
ethereal and poetic cultural patterns, although not her plea
for social justice, seemed more relevant to a former world.
Silverman reminds her readers that in the 25 years
since the first edition of Totems and Teachers, five of the
original eight contributors—Stanley Diamond, Raymond
Firth, Alexander Lesser, Robert Murphy, and Eric Wolf—
have passed to the other side, joining the ancestors about
whom they wrote. The reappearance of Totems and Teachers
fittingly renews their scholarly memory.
Archaeology of Asia. Miriam T. Stark, ed. Malden: Black-
well Publishing, 2006. 364 pp.
R O WA N F L A D
Harvard University
This volume commendably provides English language
access to the burgeoning literature on Asian archaeology
and contributes new perspectives on these data. As is
always the case with edited volumes, it is difficult to do it
justice in a short review.
The chapters are divided into four thematic sections.
The first concerns the sociopolitics of archaeological prac-
tice and interpretation in three regions: Southeast Asia (with
discussion of China, Korea, and Japan), the Korean Penin-
sula, and Japan. The second section concerns “formative
developments”—specifically, the origins and spread of agri-
culture. It comprises two chapters: an outline of the evi-
dence of plant domestication in East Asia and a discussion
of the spread of farming diasporas in Southeast Asia. The
third section concerns the emergence of complex society.
Of the four chapters, three focus on various aspects of early
China, and one addresses a more macroregional scope by
examining trajectories in China, Korea, and Japan. Finally,
the last section concerns peripheries of ancient states with
chapters on the following: (1) frontier relations in Han-
Dynasty southern China, (2) nomadic states in Mongolia
and Inner Asia, (3) South Asian foragers that participated in
larger regional systems, (4) the spread of Buddhism as an
ideological system beyond political borders, and (5) South
Asian imperial landscapes.
The volume’s diversity is both its main strength and
weakness. Taken as a whole, it introduces readers to Asian
data that relate to a variety of important archaeological
questions. For example, the recent plant domestication data
contributes to discussions of this topic in other geographi-
cal contexts. Furthermore, focus on concepts such as “impe-
rial landscapes” (Carla Sinopoli) and “identity formation”
(Gideon Shelach and Yuri Pines) similarly place Asian data
in a comparative framework. Perspectives included range
from evolutionary–processual approaches (Liu Li and Chen
924 American Anthropologist • Vol. 108, No. 4 • December 2006
Xingcan) to those that focus on explicitly “postprocessual”
issues, such as discussion of the discursive spaces within
which interpretations of Japan’s past are placed (e.g., Koji
Mizoguchi). The volume is self-consciously a collection of
articles that provide entry into these and other topics and
together compose “an archaeology of Asia”—which appar-
ently was the original title of the book, and the loss of the
indefinite article in the published title is actually a disservice
to the reader.
It is a disservice because the volume cannot compre-
hensively represent the entirety of Asian archaeology. The
collection’s diverse articles lack strong integration, partic-
ularly among the four themes. Section 1 is internally co-
hesive, but considering the inclusion of South Asian papers
elsewhere, a shortcoming is the lack of any treatment of the
sociopolitics of archaeology in South Asian contexts. Like-
wise, section 2 seems incomplete for the same reason. The
third theme is relatively coherent and interdigitates well
with some articles in other sections because of the over-
lapping geographical focus of the various chapters, all of
which treat the traditional core of civilization in China’s
Yellow and Wei River valleys. The topics relate to the dis-
cussions in the first section, to the outline of agricultural
origins in the second section, and even to the discussion of
peripheries of Chinese empires found section 4. Otherwise,
the chapters in section 4 are generally not integrated with
the remainder of the volume.
A corollary of this problem is the very loose definition
of Asia as conceived in this volume. Articles deal with vari-
ous parts of East, South, Southeast, and even Inner Asia, but
most of Central Asia, and Southwest Asia are more or less
unmentioned. At one point in the introduction (p. 7), East
and South Asia are said to be “one region,” although the
meaning of this is unclear. Furthermore, the potential for
drawing links between the regions of Asia that are discussed
is not reached, and issues that are dealt with well for East
Asia (such as the origins of agriculture and the sociopolitics
of archaeological practice) are not discussed for South Asia
at all.
The volume contains a few inconsistencies or question-
able statements as well. For example, whereas Sarah Nelson
(p. 40) and Miriam Stark (p. 4) suggest that Jomon ceram-
ics are the earliest in the world, Anne Underhill and Junko
Habu point out (pp. 124–125) that there may be multiple
regions with equally early pottery production in mainland
East Asia. Secondly, the statement that the earliest dates for
bronze metallurgy in Asia come from China (p. 9) overlooks
earlier bronze production in West Asia. Anatolian arsenical
bronzes almost certainly predate the earliest alloyed copper
objects in China, which Liu and Chen place in Majiayao
culture contexts circa 3100 B.C.E. (p. 164). Furthermore,
additional inconsistencies are evident in the format of the
citations in the various chapters and transliteration conven-
tions in both the references and the chapter texts. Although
these detract somewhat from the usefulness of the citations
in some chapters, they do not affect the readability of the
text.
As an introductory text, Archaeology of Asia is a valu-
able resource for its intended audience (upper-division
undergraduates, according to the introduction by the
series editors) and for researchers, including those who
work in Asia. Although some experts might find certain
summary sections a little superficial, generally speaking
the contributions are richly informative and theoretically
sophisticated.
Ishi’s Brain: In Search of America’s Last “Wild” Indian.
Orin Starn. New York: W. W. Norton, 2005. 352 pp.
REGNA DARNELL
University of Western Ontario
The story of Ishi, the last Yahi Indian, has become inextri-
cably linked to continuing evaluation of the moral valence
of Boasian anthropology in its heyday. Both among anthro-
pologists and the general public, Ishi has come to symbolize
the high cost paid by Native Americans for manifest destiny
as rationalized by their conquerors. But Orin Starn is careful
to maintain the ambivalence, contextualizing Ishi’s story
within “the anthropology of that time” (p. 140). When
contrasted to the California ranchers and farmers who
exterminated remnant bands of local Indians, the rescue
efforts of Alfred Kroeber, Thomas T. Waterman, and Saxton
Pope to make a viable home for Ishi at the Hearst Museum
of the University of California at Berkeley may seem
salutary and well intentioned. But the unintended conse-
quences of their appropriation of Ishi as scientific object
and “informant” become more salient when read against
contemporary ethical standards. Moreover, life in “civiliza-
tion” exposed Ishi to tuberculosis, which took his life in
1915, a mere four years after he became a cause celebre.
Ishi the person remains elusive. He was not a reflexive
man, said very little about his previous life, and was invari-
ably polite to those who helped him construct a new one.
If there is a devastating critique, it does not arise from Ishi
himself. Starn’s story of Ishi’s romanticized notoriety sets
the context for his expose about the fate of Ishi’s brain after
an autopsy that Kroeber tried to prevent. That Ishi’s brain
was separated from his body and sent to the Smithsonian
Institution for study by physical anthropologists has only
recently become public. Motives and many details still
remain obscure.
Starn personalizes his quest for the truth about Ishi’s
brain. The reader peers over his shoulder at the trail to
Ishi’s past, in life and after death. Starn sharply criticizes
Theodora Kroeber’s 1961 book, imbued with “wifely love
and loyalty” (p.161) and whitewashing Kroeber’s actions
and emotions. Starn simultaneously acknowledges her so-
cially resonating critique of the genocide of California In-
dians, with Ishi as its symbolic icon. He is considerably less
reflexive about his own standpoint. For the professional
reader, the narrative often drifts into being more about
Starn than Ishi or his brain. Nonetheless, Starn also per-
formed the detective work necessary to locate the brain at

the Smithsonian, after multiple denials and contradictory
alibis, and to begin the saga of its repatriation. Despite the
permissibility of joint repatriation under NAGPRA, Ishi’s
bones ultimately were repatriated to the nearest linguistic
relatives of the Yahi rather than to the local Maidu who had
long sought justice for Ishi’s remains as the contemporary
stewards of his homeland.
Starn compares other cases of Native American repatri-
ation, “atonement and reconciliation” (p.168), amassing an
implicit global indictment of the physical anthropologist’s
arrogance in claiming the “unambiguous . . . prerogative”
to study such remains “in the name of science” (p.180). The
repatriation story is inseparable from “twenty-first century
identity politics” (p. 277) and thus remains incomplete,
because it will always be read in some context, invoking the
possibility of infinite recursion. This rhetoric may resonate
for introductory students or the general public, but the
value of the book for anthropologists rests in exposing the
errors, omissions, and cover-ups that refract disciplinary
myopia and self-castigation. Starn has served us well by
laying out this story and by the tenacity with which he has
pursued its tendrils.
Anthropology and Consultancy: Issues and Debates.
Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathern, eds. New York:
Berghahn Books, 2005. 146 pp.
MELISSA CEFKIN
IBM Almaden Research Center
Opening with a question underlying anthropology’s
philosophical imaginary—“what is our position as anthro-
pologists in the worlds that we study?” (p. 1)—Anthropology
and Consultancy: Issues and Debates explores the experiences
of anthropologists who have intersected with development
projects in Papua New Guinea (PNG). This work promises
instructive contributions to the rethinking of ethnographic
work, the nature of anthropological knowledge, and the
potential of anthropological engagement in the context of
globalized late capitalism.
The eight authors pose questions of their work as con-
sultants to or in interaction with governments, NGOs, and
corporations on projects regarding such areas as economic
development, mining, and biodiversity conservation. As
the authors conducted ethnographic research independent
of the development projects they describe, their reflec-
tions on the question of positioning are framed largely
through comparisons between their work as consultants
and as “mainstream,” “non-consultative,” or “pure” an-
thropologists. While the difference between academically
positioned anthropological research and consultants who
are contracted for the purposive application to policy and
solution designs is clear, the very difficulty in appropriately
naming this distinction speaks to the challenge and import
posed by the opening question.
One productive comparison is that of differing
conceptual dimensions of understanding and practice. John
Single Reviews 925
Richard Wagner argues that the kinds of knowledge pro-
duced in the context of development work are differently
valued. The biological diversity conservation effort he ex-
amines unraveled because of inadequate understanding of
local communities. Yet he suggests that knowledge support-
ing promotional uses and meeting political expectations,
in this case biological and ecological information, trumped
the kind of anthropological understanding that might have
helped overcome those challenges.
Revealing the immediacy with which personal aspects
of positioning are experienced, several authors explore how
their relationships with people in the sites of their work
were felt to have shifted when they were there as consul-
tants, intersecting with intractable questions of moral and
ethical positioning: Does work for outside interests com-
promise anthropological standing? Are generalized state-
ments of cultural difference always harmful, even when in
the interest advocacy? Is “mainstream” ethnography pa-
ternalistic, extractive, and a more compromised form of
engagement?
Richard Scaglion offers a curious take on such is-
sues. Having previously researched customary law and le-
gal change, he was hired by the government of PNG for
a project to integrate Melanesian customs into the na-
tional legal system following independence from Australia.
Scaglion provides an engaging tale of the many conceptual,
legal, administrative, and logistical challenges he faced.
He illuminates the kinds of constraints imposed by con-
sulting. He also reveals, however, a simplified view onto
the problematic posed by the question of positioning. His
description of his changed status from a fieldworker on a
tight budget who “lived a life much like my hosts” (p. 54),
eating, waiting in line, or flagging down a passing car for
transportation, to a privileged government official with a
budget, a car, and political pull bespeaks a sense of discom-
fort. He concludes with a description of his return to the
field, again as a “pure” anthropologist having shed the ti-
tle and position of government agent and thus assuaging
the guilt that dogged his consulting experience, as if the
only privilege anthropologists need be concerned with is
that made apparent through face-to-face interactions with
participants at the time of the fieldwork encounter.
Pamela Stewart and Andrew Strathern’s hopeful asser-
tion that the volume examines both dilemmas and oppor-
tunities of anthropology and consultancy (per the title of
their introduction) is somewhat forestalled by such treat-
ments, suggesting that it is less the positioning of anthro-
pologists that is under examination and more so uniquely
that of the consultant. Paige West, in an article that won
the American Anthropological Association’s Anthropology
and Environment Junior Scholar Award, provides a valuable
advancement toward the aspirations of the editors. While
not employed directly as a consultant, West’s ethnographic
work became enmeshed with that of an NGO for wildlife
management. She offers a trenchant critique of how NGOs
adopt the language and knowledge claims of anthropology.
She aptly exposes a fundamental dilemma: the desire for
926 American Anthropologist • Vol. 108, No. 4 • December 2006
anthropological work to be seen as relevant while at the
same time judging particular interpretations and uses of an-
thropological concepts and knowledge as insufficient. Im-
plicit in her article is a critique of anthropological expertise
and the question of what role actual anthropologists must
play as carriers of that expertise.
Stewart and Strathern state that they do not view
consultancy as a “special domain of enquiry, different from
others” (p. 21) and that reflections on consultancy “speak
in an urgent way to issues in anthropology at large” (p. 21).
This volume opens the door to the possibility of pushing
beyond a rehashing of problems attendant to “applied”
work and, instead, theorizing across “pure” anthropology,
consulting, and other forms of engaged anthropological
practice to probe what can be learned from the dilemmas
and to ask what these practices offer the ethnographic en-
terprise and anthropological understanding more broadly.
A Genetic and Cultural Odyssey: The Life and Work of
L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza. Linda Stone and Paul Lurquin.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. 227 pp.
KAJA FINKLER
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
This is an unusual academic book. By means of the life
and works of one scholar, L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza, the
authors present an overview of the four-fields approach—
archeology, linguistic, biological, and cultural—to anthro-
pology. Using this methodology, Cavalli-Sforza attempts
to create a unified theory of human physical and cultural
evolution by focusing on population genetics, human
migration, and development of language and complex
societies.
Moreover, we learn a great deal about all the subjects on
which Cavalli-Sforza has made contributions—including
bacterial genetics and, of course, human genetics, which
he began studying in 1952. Subsequently, Cavalli-Sforza fo-
cused on population genetics to also explain physical vari-
ations and their causes within and among human groups.
Linda Stone and Paul Lurquin interweave Cavalli-
Sforza’s biography, intellectual interests, and debates
among the views of his detractors with a lucid presentation
of genetics and the ways in which it illuminates, according
to Cavalli-Sforza, human and cultural evolution. In doing
so, the authors’ present interesting details about Cavalli-
Sforza’s life. The excursion into Cavalli-Sforza’s youth gives
the reader a glimpse of modern Italian history and Ital-
ian scientific florescence during and especially after World
War II. In the discussion of Cavalli-Sforza’s collaborations
with French scholars, we learn about the history of the
1968 student upraising in France and how it has affected
Cavalli-Sforza’s collaborative efforts there. In the presen-
tation of these historical interludes the point is made
that Cavalli-Sforza was not interested in politics, yet he
seems to have been on the side of all politically correct
issues.
The authors anticipate all possible criticism of Cavalli-
Sforza’s work. He has been accused of being a racist and
the authors claim that he is not; they point out that arche-
ologists, linguists, and biological anthropologists have ac-
cepted his various theories, including the single theory of
human origins, which hypothesizes that all human beings
living today have common ancestors who emerged out of
Africa about 70,000–100,000 years ago. Cultural anthro-
pologists have contested his work. The authors attribute
this rejection to the postmodern perspective, lucidly ex-
plained by them, which has presumably dominated cultural
anthropology.
Cavalli-Sforza regards cultural and biological evolution
as closely interconnected. One need not necessarily sub-
scribe to postmodern theories of science to reject biological
reductionism in explaining social and cultural processes.
A cultural evolutionary approach, arguably, tends to leave
out a contextualized understanding of a people’s economic
and political history, social processes, human agency, and
all that distinguishes humans from other primates, includ-
ing our unique ability to manipulate complex symbols. It is
difficult to accept biological reductionism that suggests, for
example, that similar to genetic drift, cultural drift has led
to the prevalence of religiosity in the United States (p. 107).
There seems to be an inherent contradiction in Cavalli-
Sforza’s work as depicted in this book regarding his concepts
of race. Cavalli-Sforza argues, as I believe most anthropol-
ogists would, that race, as it is popularly understood, has
no validity; yet Cavalli-Sforza’s Human Genetic Diversity
Project tends to emphasize the biological differences be-
tween populations, notwithstanding the single origins the-
ory. We have a common ancestor, and we are genetically all
the same, but still we are not because this project seeks to
find biological differences among the world’s populations.
A major criticism of contemporary emphasis on people be-
ing delimited by genes is that such biological markers may
lead to a racist ideology, no matter how benign the inten-
tions of the investigators may be.
Indeed, biological differences may exist amongst vari-
ous breeding populations, as for example human leukocyte
antigen vary among groups, as noted by the authors; but ge-
netic markers impose a biological fixity rather than fluidity
on human groups, especially in the age of globalization and
mass migration. We may simply be switching from defining
differences among populations on the basis of invisible
rather than visible biological characteristics, which may
lead to creating new social communities, using genetic cri-
teria. The authors note that Cavalli-Sforza has been accused
of exploiting indigenous populations among whom genetic
studies of isolates are often done. In defense of Cavalli-
Sforza, the authors stress that the project has not patented
any genetic materials and that it is highly transparent.
The book is recommended to anthropologists who are
committed to the four-fields approach in anthropology and
to students in any field interested in learning about the
intellectual life and growth of an exceptionally prolific
scholar.

The Woman in the Shaman’s Body: Reclaiming the
Feminine in Religion and Medicine. Barbara Tedlock.
New York: Bantam Dell, 2005. 350 pp.
M A R J O R I E M A N D E L S TA M B A L Z E R
Georgetown University
Barbara Tedlock is an engaged anthropologist who practices
what she studies. For many years she has embodied the
empathetic feminist scholar who bridges many boundaries,
especially indigenous insider–intellectual outsider, popular
writer–academic. Her latest fascinating monograph is the
mature work of a confident scholar, bringing many dis-
parate pieces of evidence together in a sweeping summary
of the integral role of women in religion and medicine
through many centuries.
Tedlock reclaims the significance of balanced, gender-
salient power in many “traditional” and “contemporary”
healing practices based on spirituality. Drawing from di-
verse references and experiences, she concludes that gender-
sensitive spiritual and healing equality “does not mean
sameness” (pp. 281–282). While she may occasionally over-
stress the importance of women, this should be seen as
a corrective, not a fault. Particularly moving passages de-
pict her upbringing, including visits to the log home of
her wise, nonconformist Ojibwe grandmother-medicine
woman. Tedlock’s life exemplifies the familiar pattern of
thirst for Native knowledge skipping a generation. She also
endured a serious childhood illness, an early sign of the
widely recognized need for future healers to suffer to more
effectively perceive and receive curing ability. Her educa-
tion deepened with anthropological training and initiation
in a contrasting (Mayan) cultural context. In Guatemala,
she and her anthropologist husband Denis Tedlock learned
lessons of partnered, gender-complimentary energy as well
as the importance of social and psychological perception in
shamanic holistic healing. Tedlock’s strongest evidence of
early female shamans comes from the magnificent Mayan
temple complex in Yaxchilán, where a Lady of the Jaguar
Shark Lineage resides in richly symbolic stone portraiture.
She also suggests that a woman buried during the Upper
Paleolithic at Dolnı́ Vestonice (Czech Republic) with a fox,
flint spearhead, and red ochre was a shaman. Later graves
from the Far Eastern Neolithic reinforce female shaman
connections somewhat less circumstantially, given the long
ethnographic record of female and male shamans in Siberia.
In an analytic leap to the famous fertility figurines of the
Paleolithic (e.g., Venus of Willendorf), Tedlock intriguingly
explains they could have been used by midwife-female
shamans as teaching models.
Comparative at a time when many ethnographic stud-
ies are rooted in specific cultural contexts, Tedlock regales
readers with personal experiences in Mongolia as well as the
Americas. In 1999, she found rapport with a well-known
charismatic shaman, Bayar Odun, and saw her adapted
spirit-calling séance. The shaman evoked (the text clev-
erly says “took possession of”) a spirit that “howled like
Single Reviews 927
a wolf or growled like a bear” (p. 61). Tedlock widens our
debate on “possession” by refuting the predominance of
male hunter-shamans in Northern Asia. Her targets include
arm-chair historian Mircea Eliade and psychologist Geza Ro-
heim. She convincingly warns against essentialist theories
claiming men are more likely to experience “soul flight”
while women are more prone toward possession. Occasion-
ally, séances could be discussed with fuller local or regional
context. She mentions a Buryat shaman who wears braided
fringe covering the face “so as not to frighten the audience”
(p. 48). Historically, in many Siberian séances shamanic
dress served more to attract spirits, and elaborate head-
dresses with veil-like fringe became realm-demarcating pro-
tection for the healer and spirits. Séance participants were
more active than the word audience implies, and some spir-
its were deliberately frightening.
Several chapters revisit other controversial issues—for
example, one chapter brings new insight into old debates
about psychedelics. A telling case depicts Andes women
who use the San Pedro cactus and whose creative altars (ac-
cording to Bonnie Glass-Coffin) include paired objects with
masculine and feminine healing powers. Creativity is pro-
ductive theme, with women harnessing and weaving their
vital powers derived from eroticism, menstruation, and
fertility. “Menstrual taboos” and “couvade traditions” are
interpreted by building on the pioneering work of Thomas
Buckley and Alma Gottlieb. Somewhat more challenging
are Tedlock’s correlations concerning cross-culturally simi-
lar Goddess figures, women prophets, and her (albeit non-
judgemental) use of the word cult. Some correlations bridge
(others may say elide) contrasts in the social and politi-
cal settings of shamans who work in such diverse contexts
as urban Korea or village Siberia. I particularly enjoyed
her description of the widespread phenomena of shamanic
“gender switching, bending, blending or reversing” (p. 250).
In sum, Tedlock has shifted the way we view the fem-
inine in diverse historical and current shamanic practices
by daring to be strategically cross-cultural. She concludes,
“This is an exciting time for those of us who study, work
with and practice as shamans” (p. 282). Her optimism is
warranted, given the millennia that various shamanic be-
liefs have survived through the creativity of shamans. It is
poignant, given the historical record of frequent repression
of shamanic practices. Although references are generously
made, several attribution details and anthropologists (Mary
Douglas, Joan Koss-Choino, and Galina Lindquist) could
be better incorporated in a second edition, because this
book is likely to become a classic.
Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last
Soviet Generation. Alexei Yurchak. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2006. 331 pp.
J O H N P. Z I K E R
Boise State University
Arguing from a critical semiotic perspective, Alexei
Yurchak’s book explains how the end of the Soviet Union
928 American Anthropologist • Vol. 108, No. 4 • December 2006
was utterly unexpected yet not fully surprising. The book
is a major contribution to the ethnography of postsocialist
Eurasia because it traces the historical, linguistic, and social
processes that produced forms of art, discourses, meanings,
and social networks that characterized late Socialism. Be-
yond that, it shows how and why the end of the Soviet
Union was a major blow to the rituals, morals, rules, forms
of art and music, humor, and social associations that had be-
come predictable and seemingly immutable during the last
Soviet generation. The book is valuable as a critical theoreti-
cal overview of major postmodernist writers, and it is a satis-
fying explanation of why the Soviet Union collapsed when
it did and why the collapse was so fast. I recommend this
book for upper-level undergraduates, graduates, and pro-
fessionals who are interested in political process, discourse,
and postsocialism.
Yurchak attacks the abovementioned problem by ex-
plaining to the reader the significance of prevalent para-
doxes, ambiguities, twists, and incongruities, giving the
reader a rich ethnographic window into the lives of the last
Soviet generation (those born in the 1960s through 1980s).
The sample of people highlighted in the book lived in sev-
eral urban settings, focusing particularly on Leningrad (now
St. Petersburg) but also including others such as Yakutsk and
Novosibirsk. The homogeneity of the socialist system para-
doxically allowed for an incredible degree of agency among
the last Soviet generation, and Yurchak’s account describes
the interconnectedness between the system with its author-
itative and circular discourse and the creative activities, art,
and discursive and social forms people living in the system
produced.
The central paradox of the book—termed “Lerfort’s
paradox,” after Claude Lerfort, who described the conflict
between theoretical ideals and the practical concerns of po-
litical authority in a modern nation-state—is applied in the
Soviet context as the conflict between the progressive ide-
als of liberation under Communism and the practical issue
of total control to prevent dissent and counterrevolution.
Yurchak traces the history of the Communist party’s author-
itative discourse in the book to show how the language of
control went from innovation to maintenance and homo-
geneity. It was Joseph Stalin who played the major role as
“external editor” of state discourse until near the end of his
life, when he emphasized “natural laws” and a “pragmatic
model” of language with the effect of increasing normaliza-
tion of discourse. For example, Yurchak describes how ev-
erything from party speeches, images (of Lenin), and other
rituals, such as voting and May Day and Revolution Day
parades, became hypernormalized in the 1950s. Another
related set of concepts in the book is the difference be-
tween “constantive acts” and “performative acts,” drawing
on the ideas of linguist John Austin and critical readings of
his work. Constantive acts can be true or false. Performa-
tive acts can only be successful or unsuccessful. Rejecting a
binary opposition of speech utterances, Yurchak describes
what he calls a performative shift in the discourse of late So-
cialism. For the average citizen, the concern was not with
the literal meanings of the “authoritative discourse” (from
Mikhail Bakhtin). Rather, by performing the expected role
at Komsomol (Communist youth league) meetings, for ex-
ample, participants established connections that allowed
for more creative sociality. Such informal associations were
not in opposition to the authoritative discourse and formal
governmental structures, but they were part of a “mutually
constitutive” process.
What Yurchak terms “deterritorialized milieus,” for ex-
ample, were social networks that depended on socialist val-
ues that supported, ironically, critical thinking and liberal
work shifts as well as production of technological items such
as short-wave radios and reel-to-reel recorders. Unlike so-
cialist activists and dissidents who were engaged with the
Soviet authoritative discourse largely on the constantive di-
mension of “clear truths,” most normal people created a
particular common sociality that was not interested in the
system. Rather, they created new collectivities, relations,
and pursuits after “deep truths” with their own ethnical
dimension, vocabulary, and style of communication. An
example of one of these is the music tusovka, a noninstitu-
tionalized milieu where people acquired, shared, and played
music and that was based on shared values of hanging out,
sarcasm, and a lack of any political theme. When Mikhail
Gorbachev added the voice of external commentator back
into the Communist Party’s authoritative discourse, the dis-
course was no longer homogeneous and immutable, and
the creative worlds and meaningful forms of sociality of
late socialism began to lose their frame of reference.
Yurchak has given us a great inductive work in which
we get to know several characters who were professionals,
students, musicians, and laborers. The book helps us
arrive at a better understanding of what kind of freedom
the people of the last Soviet generation had and how it
developed.
Historicizing Online Politics: Telegraphy, the Internet,
and Political Participation in China. Zhou Yongming.
Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2005. 290 pp.
SHARON CARSTENS
Portland State University
Will the Internet change China? More specifically will it
create opportunities for the free exchange of ideas and po-
litical participation necessary to support the development
of democratic reforms and civil society? Or will the con-
tinuing strict control of communication systems by the
Chinese government limit the potential emancipatory ef-
fectiveness of this new technology? In Historicizing Online
Politics, Zhou Yongming argues that these commonly asked
questions about the impact of the Internet in China are
overly narrow and miss the complexity of Internet usages
in China by both Chinese citizens and their government.
Through a comparative examination of the political uses of
telegraphy in late-19th- and early-20th-century China and
the Chinese Internet today, Zhou demonstrates that it is not

only that technology changes things, but also how technol-
ogy is used in specific historical contexts that matters.
In the first half of the book, Zhou chronicles the rela-
tively slow acceptance of telegraphy in the 1860s by the late
Qing government who feared that foreign control of this
new technology might add to unfair Western advantages.
Although other studies have claimed that telegraphy was
rejected because of conservative Confucian views of West-
ern science and popular beliefs in the negative geomantic
effects of telegraph poles, Zhou skillfully counters these ar-
guments and describes how demonstrations of the strategic
uses of rapid communications between the Chinese govern-
ment and troops at its borders led to rapid construction of
telegraph lines, under Chinese control, in the 1880s.
Primarily used for official government communica-
tions in its first 15 years, telegraphy increasingly served as a
conduit for expressions of alternative political opinions and
political mobilization following the 1894 Sino–Japanese
war. Zhou carefully traces the close relationship between
the advent of telegraphy and the development of mod-
ern Chinese newspapers, whose foreign ownership allowed
them to print information and opinions previously under
strict government control. While newspapers initially re-
lied on telegrams to print more current news and informa-
tion, they later featured the publication of public or circular
telegrams that often expressed dissenting views on govern-
ment matters, such as a joint telegram to Beijing in 1900
signed by 1,231 influential figures that protested the Em-
press Dowager Cixi’s attempt to replace Emperor Guangxu.
In the following decade, political elites used telegrams to
organize and advance causes such as constitutional govern-
ment, significantly opening up avenues for political partic-
ipation outside of official government circles. Nevertheless,
Zhou points out that the move toward constitutional gov-
ernment supported by newspapers and public telegrams was
eclipsed by the 1911 revolution, which propelled the coun-
try in different directions. And he offers this as a caution-
ary tale about similar assumptions of the Internet moving
China toward democracy.
China embraced the Internet in the 1990s much more
quickly than it had the telegraph a century earlier. No longer
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fearing foreign control of this new technology, the Chi-
nese government viewed the Internet as a tool of modern-
ization that could enhance communication between gov-
ernment offices and agencies and expand opportunities to
spread government messages, such as through the People’s
Daily Online Strengthening-China Forum. With the rapid
expansion of online access through home phone dial-ups
and cyber cafés, the government focused its efforts on the
control of online information rather than trying to con-
trol users. Thus, individuals in charge of websites and bul-
letin boards have been required to police their content.
Zhou provides detailed information on a range of diverse
Chinese websites and online writers including three differ-
ent intellectual websites; several politically oriented writers
with no official connections; and a military-focused web-
site with strong nationalist and antiforeign messages. Ex-
amining the history of these sites, their range of political
messages, and government responses to them, Zhou ob-
serves that while the Internet has expanded political ex-
pression for Chinese writers, allowing them to voice opin-
ions not found in government-controlled print media, self-
censorship remains critical, for writers know that any sug-
gestion of organized antigovernment dissent will bring swift
retribution.
The final chapter compares the impact of the telegraph
and the Internet on Chinese political expression and par-
ticipation during these two distinct periods, both marked
by strong nationalist sentiments and rapid socioeconomic
change. Zhou argues that the public telegraph was more
effective in mobilizing public opinion and action than
the Internet because the messages of its elite writers were
more highly respected and because there was more free-
dom to publicly organize than is currently possible. Here,
as throughout this book, Zhou’s carefully articulated ar-
guments bring both complexity and clarity to the ques-
tion of the relationship between new forms of information
technology and the nurturing of civil society, whether in
China or elsewhere. Lucidly written, Zhou’s analysis aptly
demonstrates once again the fruitful combination of his-
torical and contemporary analysis in addressing key social
issues.