S I N G L E R E V I E W S

Creole Transformation from Slavery to Freedom: His-torical Archaeology of the East End Community, St.John, Virgin Islands. Douglas V. Armstrong. Gainesville:University Press of Florida, 2003. 448 pp.

JAMES A. DELLEKutztown University of Pennsylvania

This volume makes novel contributions to the historical ar-chaeology of the Caribbean in three areas. Topically, it ad-dresses change within a free-black community that existedseparate from, although socially and economically inter-twined within, the Caribbean slave-based plantation sys-tem. Theoretically, it uses the concept of “cultural trans-formation” to analyze the process of creolization in theCaribbean from the early 18th through the 20th centuries.Finally, methodologically it combines GPS surveying tech-niques with more traditional archaeological mapping andexcavation methods and uses functional rather than formalanalysis in examining the activities that took place withinhouseholds.

Topically, the case study analyzes the historical experi-ences of the East End Community of the Caribbean islandof St. John, part of the U.S. Virgin Islands. The remote andarid East End of St. John was never particularly suited toplantation production of either sugar or cotton, so it devel-oped into a small group of provisioning estates that suppliedthe urban centers and plantations of the Danish and BritishVirgin Islands. By the early 19th century, the provisioningestates, which in the 18th century were listed as the prop-erty of “white” heads of households, were subdivided intosmall plots and distributed both legally and informally tothe descendants of “former owners, former slaves, and indi-viduals who continued to migrate to the area” (p. 40). TheEast End thus became a diverse community of small farm-ers. By 1848 (the year slavery was abolished), 90 percent ofthe community were recognized as “Free Colored.” As pro-visioning became less profitable with the abolition of slav-ery, the economy of the East End became increasingly fo-cused on maritime trade. A severe hurricane in 1916 provedso destructive that it led to the abandonment of the EastEnd.

Theoretically, Douglas Armstrong employs a “transfor-mational model” to examine social change in the East End.According to Armstrong, a transformational model is dis-tinct from more traditional approaches based on the con-cepts of “transculturation,” “ethnogenesis,” and “accultur-ation,” and it is particularly useful in examining Caribbeansocieties. It is best to imagine Creole societies, he argues, as

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being in a constant and nondirectional state of change andtransformation. Unlike other approaches, the transforma-tional approach does not assume “whole culture” changebut, instead, change through accommodation, resistance,and interrelation from forces both within and without thecommunity.

Armstrong uses a creative methodology to documenthow the process of transformation unfolded in this now-abandoned community. He directed an extensive archae-ological survey of the East End of St. John during whichhouse sites were georeferenced using GPS technology. Sur-face collections and an extensive regimen of archaeologicaltesting were conducted at a number of sites. Preliminaryresults allowed Armstrong to identify three separate houseareas associated with the various historic periods he estab-lished for the East End community: “Windy Hill,” datingfrom 1781–1835, is associated with the early provisioningperiod of the East End; “Pleasant Lookout” dates from 1793–1856 and is associated with the period of transition betweenprovisioning and maritime trade; “Rebecca’s Fancy” datesfrom 1835–86 and is associated with the period in whichmaritime trade dominated. After discussing the results ofthe macrolevel spatial changes that saw households clustertoward the western coast of the East End as maritime tradebecame dominant, Armstrong analyzes social and spatialchange at the three households.

In doing so, he uses a modified functional analysis of ar-tifacts to establish the nature of the activities that occurredwithin the three house lots. This approach, he argues, pro-vides a richer understanding than analyses based on theformal characteristics of artifacts. For example, Armstrongestablishes several functional categories, including “Food-related,” “Personal,” “Activities,” “Tobacco,” and “Toolsand Trades.” Each of these broader categories is brokendown further. The “Food-related” category, for example,is subdivided into “Consumption, non-bottle,” “Beverageconsumption/storage,” “Preparation,” and “Storage.” Usinga functional category such as “Food-related—Preparation”allows one to examine, say, earthenware cooking pots andiron cooking pots together. This gives the analyst a greaterunderstanding of the kinds of activities that occurred ata certain location than could be established using artifactcategories based on formal attributes, such as clay pot oriron cauldron. Using a variety of spatial-plotting software(including ArcView and Surfer), Armstrong correlates thedistribution of artifacts assigned within his functional cate-gories with specific activities. He thus illustrates how certainspaces were used based on the concept of activity areas, andhow the use of these spaces changed over time.

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Applying this methodology to the East End resultsin a robust analysis of change in this fascinating, small,autonomous, and free community. The transformationalmodel Armstrong employs is flexible, allowing him to ex-amine both short-term and long-term social and spatialtrends within the community. Historical archaeologists willfind his functional analysis of interest, while scholars of theCaribbean in general will find the case study of the EastEnd community very appealing, as it underscores the diver-sity of Caribbean experience beyond the plantation. CreoleTransformation from Slavery to Freedom is a well-written andtimely book that addresses current methodological, topical,and theoretical advances in both historical archaeology andhistorical anthropology more generally. All anthropologistswith an interest in the past will find this book a valuable ad-dition to their library.

Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and thePolitics of Inequality. Richard Bauman and Charles L.Briggs. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2003.356 pp.

JOSEPH ERRINGTONYale University

Voices of Modernity is an ambitious historical account oflanguage ideologies that shaped major intellectual devel-opments between the 17th and 20th centuries, in Europeand the United States, and across received boundaries be-tween philosophy, philology, folklore, and anthropology.The book also presents language-centered critiques of shift-ing categories of “modernity,” which makes for a strong,doubly themed critique of the foundations of folklore, cul-tural anthropology, and linguistics.

Those familiar with Bauman and Briggs’s other influ-ential writings will recognize their continuing concern forintertextuality as an important ground for constructing au-thority in folklore and anthropological traditions. In thisbook, though, they considerably expand that perspectiveto encompass a wide range of what they call metadiscur-sive regimes: authoritative and authorizing constructions of“language” that are not only described but also realized indiscourses that turn language on itself. They track shiftingrelations between language as object and means of discourseover a wide swath of intellectual history, reading key texts inways that are substantive and sophisticated enough to ben-efit readers, not just in anthropology but also in philosophyof language, intellectual history, comparative literature, andother fields.

The book’s transdisciplinary ambitions have two majorsources. First, it is framed to answer Dipesh Chakrabarty’scall to “reprovincialize” Europe—that is, to recover and re-localize ideas and practices that, from the 18th century on,European elites projected as universal conditions for know-ing and being in the world at large. They take up this chal-lenge in three long chapters on philosophical and philologi-cal developments in England and Scotland, followed by two

shorter chapters on German philology, tracing dominantcategories of language use and performance (the “voice”of their title). Two dominant intellectual traditions are atissue here: John Locke’s referentialist and instrumentalistlanguage philosophy, and the expressivist and Romanticisttradition of which Johann Herder is a foundational figure.The impressive intellectual breadth and expository detailin this part of Voices will reward the several sorts of read-ers noted above. Those with an interest in philology willbe especially rewarded if they have no prior knowledge ofthe lines of influence, traced in Chapter 4, between par-ties to the 18th century controversy centered on Scottish“antiquity” and Herder’s much-better-known philosophy ofpoetry and history. The last two expository chapters bringthe authors closer to disciplinary home as they trace theconflicted ideological grounds for Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’sfolklore and for Boas’s approach to primitive language andculture.

It is no small thing for specialists in any field to developclose critical readings within and between texts runningfrom Bacon to Boas. In Voices, the second inspiration forsuch a project is Bruno Latour, whose influential reflectionson “modernity” are also indirectly invoked in the book’stitle. Recourse to Latour’s notions of “purification,” “hy-bridity,” and so forth are frequent and crucial enough thatsome prior familiarity with (at least) his influential essayWe Have Never Been Modern (1993) is needed to follow thebook’s overarching argument. But it is not an extended dis-ciplinary footnote to that work or a specification of its ar-gument (something like “we have never been linguists”). Infact it is not hard to infer, on the contrary, that Bauman andBriggs demonstrate how much more integral “the languagequestion” is to “the modernity question” than Latour’s owncursory remarks on the former issue suggest.

The construction of difference, linguistic and human,recurs as a theme for critiquing texts, informatively and of-ten provocatively, by reading them back into authorial lives,interests, and social projects. Key categories and notions—discourse and reason, performance and expression, textsand tradition—are shown to help figure the conditionsof modernity, which authors presuppose and inhabit overand against their (primitive, lower-class, female, etc.) Oth-ers. But beyond the diagnostic explication of such iden-tity categories, each chapter gives close, revealing atten-tion to the ways texts meet the discursive requirement thatthey embody the conditions of difference they purport todemonstrate.

Bauman and Briggs are measured in their concludingobservations about enduring shaping effects and recenttransformations of these language ideologies, noting howtheir major themes resonate and converge with a range ofother work in the field. A few examples drawn from contem-porary language politics in the United States help them toclose with a half dozen suitably reflexive, qualified sugges-tions for future directions. Although these may be addressedto readers in anthropology and cultural studies more than inother fields, that should not disguise the broader synthesis

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they have achieved in Voices of Modernity or the profit manycan gain from this important, ambitious work.

REFERENCES CITEDChakrabarty, Dipesh

2000 Deprovincializing Europe. Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress.

Latour, Bruno1993 We Have Never Been Modern. Catherine Porter, trans.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Linguistic Diversity in the South: Changing Codes,Practices, and Ideology. Margaret Bender, ed. Athens:University of Georgia Press, 2004. 141 pp.

SARA L. SANDERSCoastal Carolina University

This collection of papers, originally presented in a panelorganized by Margaret Bender at the 2002 meeting ofthe Southern Anthropological Society, points to the com-plex language variety found in the geographic region ofthe southern United States and analyzes some of theways in which language variety impacts identity. This vol-ume is about language in the South, including, but notlimited to, English. Language use and variation are ex-plored in connection with the identity and culture of thespeakers.

Southern Appalachian and Cajun varieties of Englishare explored (Kirk Hazen and Ellen Fluharty, ChristineMallinson, Shana Walton), and there are pieces about Na-tive American languages—the Creek spoken by Seminoles inFlorida (Susan Stans and Louise Gopher) and the Mvskoke,which insures the potency and effectiveness of Muskogeemedicine in the Stomping Ground tradition (Pamela Innes).African American Vernacular English (AAVE) is discussed,but only in connection with language contact in settlementhistory (Blair Rudes) and in comparison with features of Ap-palachian English in the community of Beech Bottom inAvery County, North Carolina (Christine Mallinson). Em-blematic features of Southern English like y’all are men-tioned only in connection with the way language relatesto identity for Appalachian speakers.

The first (Walt Wolfram) and last (Anita Puckett) chap-ters frame the collection with large questions. Wolframrefers to the principle of linguistic gratuity and explores themoral responsibility of researchers to take into account howtheir work affects the people and communities they study.Wolfram exhorts researchers to find empowering applica-tions for their theoretical studies and gives examples fromhis work with the Ocracoke and Lumbee dialects. At theend of the volume, Puckett explores the significance of eth-nonyms, the names by which groups are known. She usesMelungeon and Scotch Irish as examples to show how thenames of groups reflect and shape issues of race, history,and cultural identity. The relationship of language and cul-tural identity is the focus of five of the chapters. Hazen andFluharty and Mallinson write about the role of language va-

riety in constructing an identity as a speaker of AppalachianEnglish. Stans and Gopher and Innes write about the con-nection of Native American languages (Creek and Mvskoke)with the cultural identity of the Florida Seminoles and theOklahoma Muskogee. Walton writes about the connectionbetween Cajun English and the construction of a Cajun eth-nic identity.

Hazen and Fluharty use the stereotype of AppalachianDrawl in cartoons like Snuffy Smith as a starting point for dis-cussing language variation in the huge geographical areafrom midstate New York to Mississippi, which is knownas Appalachia. They claim that there are AppalachianEnglishes that vary as a result of both geographical andsociolinguistic factors. These Appalachian Englishes sharea number of features with other varieties of southernEnglish and share only five phonological variables acrossmost of the speakers in the study (Hazen and Fluharty,p. 57). Mallinson adds a racial dimension to the investi-gation of Appalachian speech by looking at speech changeacross generations of African American speakers in BeechBottom, North Carolina. The speech of her younger infor-mants shows a movement away from features traditionallyassociated with AAVE and toward features associated withAppalachian speech in the area.

Walton’s study of Cajuns telling stories about who theyare shows that educated speakers of a language variety havea range of options in their “performance” repertoire. Theirchoices about which variety of English to use, and the ex-tent to which they use the most marked form of that va-riety, might be shaped by the context in which they arespeaking and their own view of the ethnic variety they arerepresenting.

The relationship of language loss to cultural identityis explored by Stans and Gopher in their description of alanguage maintenance program designed by the Seminolesin Florida in an effort to preserve the Seminole heritage andculture. It is also noted by Innes in connection with thepractice of medicine making at the stomping grounds inOklahoma—a central part of the Muskogee group identity.In medicine making, language has power to make medicinessafe, healing, and effective. In the absence of medicine menwho know the language, what will become of the medicinethat maintains the health of the community?

This is a useful text for courses about the intersectionof language and identity, and, in courses about languagevariety, a good companion to books like Language Variety inthe South Revisited (1997) and English in the Southern UnitedStates (2003). The interrelationship of language, culture,context, and identity is the theme at the heart of this di-verse, engaging collection.

REFERENCES CITEDBernstein, Cynthia, Thomas Nunnally, and Robin Sabino, eds.

1997 Language Variety in the South Revisited. Tuscaloosa: Uni-versity of Alabama Press.

Nagle, Stephen J., and Sara L. Sanders, eds.2003 English in the Southern United States. New York:

Cambridge University Press.

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Why America’s Top Pundits Are Wrong: AnthropologistsTalk Back. Catherine Besteman and Hugh Gusterson,eds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.282 pp.

ROBERTO J. GONZALEZSan Jose State University

Anthropologists have increasingly redirected their work to-ward the general public by addressing urgent contemporaryissues, including corporate globalization, racial and sexualinequality, ethnic violence, and the effects of U.S. foreignpolicy. This edited book examines such topics by critiquingwell-known pundits—America’s “modern-day mythmak-ers” (p. 3), whose writings and televised commentaries in-fluence presidents, policymakers, and others in powerfulpositions.

Most chapters expose the outrageous errors of threepundits: Samuel Huntington (Harvard political scientist),Robert Kaplan (Atlantic Monthly writer), and ThomasFriedman (New York Times columnist). The final chapterscritique books by Dinesh D’Souza (The Virtue of Prosper-ity), Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer (A Natural History ofRape), and Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray (The BellCurve). Although these are not the most reactionary pun-dits, they are among the most influential and have some-times inspired reactionary politics.

Collectively, the contributing anthropologists devas-tate the mythmakers’ facile arguments. Various punditsgrossly misuse anthropological concepts such as culture,kinship, and civilization. For example, Hugh Gusterson(Chapter 2) focuses on Huntington’s sloppy definitionof “Western civilization,” which, oddly enough, ex-cludes Greece (defined as part of “Orthodox civilization”).Huntington commits graver errors such as the “assertionthat Africa is only ‘possibly’ a civilization . . . he considers itpossible that Africans are a people without culture” (p. 29).Gusterson takes Huntington to task for ignoring how cul-tures change, for demonizing Islam, and for using pseudo-scientific data.

Pundits often overlook historical context. CatherineBesteman (Chapter 5) notes that Kaplan’s obsession withAfrican violence and criminality ignores how Europeancolonialism helped create divisions that have fostered post-colonial violence. She notes that in Rwanda the colonialproject entailed “the construction of a rigid social order ofmutually exclusive, hierarchical racial groups [Tutsi, Hutu,colonist] to one of which every Rwandan was assigned”(p. 94). After the Belgians departed the distinctions per-sisted, and when economic crises hit in the 1990s, theHutu-dominated government (supported by internationalaid agencies) responded with racist anti-Tutsi propaganda.This eventually led to the 1994 slaughter of a million Tutsisand moderate Hutus.

Some of the contributors dissect the pundits’ persua-sive techniques. Ellen Hertz and Laura Nader (Chapter 7)

parody Friedman’s language: “breezy, sarcastic, anecdotal,accessible, and optimistic—the kind of not-too-serious writ-ing that people might choose to read at the end of anall-too-serious workday . . . [he] draws on the techniques ofadvertisers . . . his contempt for alien cultures is blatant”(p. 123). They also point to his use of partial evidence,repetition, false claims of authority, buzzwords, and falseanalogies. For anthropologists, Friedman’s book The Lexusand the Olive Tree is particularly galling because it portrayscultures that resist “globalization” (he means global corpo-rate capitalism) as primitive and those that embrace it ascivilized.

The articles reveal that many pundits view the worldexclusively from elite vantage points: “Kaplan positions hisreaders as passengers in a comfortable limousine cruisingthrough [Third World] streets filled with the violent, thediseased, the hungry” (p. 84). One senses that Kaplan doesnot spend much time outside of limos, luxury hotels, andembassies. Similarly, Friedman’s words imply that he “hasnot talked to very many different kinds of people on hisjaunts across the four-star-hotel-dotted globe. He’s talkedto the global representatives of Madison Avenue” (p. 124).

Some contributors provide refreshing insights intoroot causes of contemporary conflicts. Tone Bringa’s arti-cle (Chapter 4) on violence in the Balkans offers an ex-planation that is much more intellectually satisfying thanKaplan’s flawed analysis (which attributed recent warsin Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina to “centuries-old ha-treds”). According to Bringa, it was not age-old tensionsthat led to war but, instead, a series of contingent histori-cal facts: anticommunist revolt and counterrevolt, totalitar-ian nationalist leaders who resorted to fear mongering, andthe destruction of Yugoslavia. Bringa’s analysis is based onparticipant-observation, historical knowledge, and recogni-tion of cultural complexity.

The book raises important questions about the role ofU.S. anthropologists in public discourse today. If pundits“reduce controversial issues to sound bites . . . [and] harnessthe full power of the media” (p. 2), how might anthropolo-gists more effectively enter public debates? When five me-dia corporations dominate U.S. television news, how mightperspectives critical of big business ideology and practicebe introduced to the general public? How might more U.S.anthropologists engage in public debates, when such workis seldom valued as highly as academic publications?

This provocative and passionately written collectionclearly demonstrates that anthropologists have much tocontribute to contemporary public debates. It may also sig-nal a new direction in anthropology, which has the poten-tial to revitalize the discipline through reengagement withthe public sphere.

Asian American Religions: The Making and Remakingof Borders and Boundaries. Tony Carnes and FenggangYang, eds. New York: New York University Press, 2004.399 pp.

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KAORU OGURICalifornia State University at Long Beach

Until recently, studies on Asian Americans focused primar-ily on issues of immigration, racism, economic adjustment,acculturation, and assimilation. Religion was often ignoredor viewed mainly as a source of social services to aid theseimmigrants and refugees from Asia in their struggle to adaptto a new social and cultural environment. Currently, how-ever, there is a growing awareness of the importance ofreligion in the lives of contemporary Asian American com-munities. Asian American Religions: The Making and Remak-ing of Borders and Boundaries helps to pull together someof the most recent research on the various and significantroles religion is playing in the formation of group and per-sonal identity vis-a-vis the mainstream society and the eth-nic community, as well as coalitions and cleavages withincongregations along gender, generation, and class lines.

The category “Asian American” is one more of politicalexpediency than of homogeneity of cultural background,so this edited volume is useful for showing, to some ex-tent, its diversity and complexity. Articles focus on recentimmigrants (legal and illegal) from China, Korea, India,Pakistan, Thailand, and the Philippines, as well as on theirsecond- and third-generation U.S.-born children, all cop-ing with how to be an Asian American of Hindu, Muslim,Christian, or Buddhist faith in the urban United States inthe 21st century. As comprehensive as it seems, it does notinclude any articles that specifically focus on an importantsegment of Asian America—the Southeast Asian communi-ties and the long-established Japanese Americans. However,it is still very useful for providing alternative insights intowhat seems to be a growing trend of religiosity in U.S. soci-ety in general.

The editors, Tony Carnes and Fenggang Yang, havewritten an informative introduction and beginning chap-ter, which gives an overview of various aspects of AsianAmerican communities, especially in regards to their reli-gious beliefs, practices, and institutions. This includes eth-nic groups that are not included in the articles. Carnes andYang attempt to integrate the diversity of articles by pro-viding a theoretical framework of ethnic religious boundaryformation, adaptation, and maintenance. It makes sense forsome of the articles, although it seems to be a bit of a reachor irrelevant for others.

In regards to Asian American religion, particularlyintriguing are the articles by Soyoung Park (“KoreanAmerican Evangelical: A Resolution of Sociological Am-bivalence among Korean American College Students”), Re-becca Kim (“Negotiation of Ethnic and Religious Bound-aries by Asian American Campus Evangelicals”), and Rus-sell Jeung (“Creating an Asian American Christian Sub-culture: Grace Community Covenant Church”). All dealin various ways with second and later generations ofChristian Asian Americans as they struggle to integrate(or at least rationalize) their universal religious faith withtheir worship in an ethnically separate organization—

that is, if they are to serve God, why are they do-ing it as a group separate from other Christians? WhilePark and Kim focus on Korean American college stu-dents, Jeung examines the thus far successful efforts tocreate a truly Asian American Christian identity andpanethnic church among later generations of AsianAmerican Silicon Valley professionals. All three authors ei-ther allude to, or deliberately address, cultural factors suchas common communication and behavioral patterns lead-ing to a belief of common understanding, even thoughthe congregants may come from different Asian ethnicgroups. The worship style of these newer generations ofAmericans is different from that of the traditional ethnicchurches—more personal, more informal, more individ-ual, yet more group oriented and geared toward spiritualgrowth. It is more that of the U.S. evangelical mainstream,which sets them apart from their traditional parents, butit feels more comfortable to do it with people who are likethemselves.

Prema Kurien (“Christian by Birth or Rebirth? Gen-eration and Difference in an Indian American ChristianChurch”) wonders if these ethnic churches will disappear asthe second and later generations follow a more individual-istic, evangelical model of Christianity. Jeung, on the otherhand, sees a possible continuation of an Asian Americanchurch with a distinct Asian American theology and faithpractice.

If Jeung is correct, this is good news for researchers. Itmeans they will still have work.

Fraternal Capital: Peasant Workers, Self-Made Menand Globalization in Provincial India. Sharad Chari.Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. 379 pp.

KAMALA VISWESWARANUniversity of Texas-Austin

Fraternal Capital is a carefully researched, richly detailed,and highly informative book about the Gounder commu-nity’s dominance in the knitwear industry in Tiruppur, amedium-sized city in the Coimbatoire District, Tamil Nadu.It is notable for its attention to the gendered articulations ofwhat Sharad Chari calls “Fraternal Capital,” the imbricationof a masculinized work ethic within the horizontally situ-ated caste and familial networks used to organize local capi-tal. The book traces the uneven insertion of small provincialknitwear firms into the global clothing market and insight-fully documents paradoxical aspects of trade union mobi-lization and the struggle around piece rates in the Coimbat-ore garment industry.

Based on more than 200 interviews and historicalanalysis of the growth of the knit garments industry inCoimbatore, Fraternal Capital is a work of impressive in-terdisciplinarity, one that engages several competing ana-lytic frameworks: agrarian studies, development economics,cultural geography, and local ethnography. Although Charilived for a period of his research in one of the workplaces

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he studied and sought to make sense of the caste andgender-specific notions of “work” or “toil” informingGounder identity, anthropologists should not expect work-place ethnography but, rather, an “ethnographic approachto intersectoral linkages” (p. 43). As an ethnography of castemobility, the book succeeds fairly well, although the book’sdetailed empirical arguments sometimes detract from theauthor’s central question: “How peasant workers have be-come owners and transformed the knitwear industry into apowerhouse of small firm networks” (p. 29).

In part, Chari—who was trained as a cultural geogra-pher but is influenced by subaltern studies historiography—knows that the book’s central question is a rhetorical one.This he acknowledges in a provocative chapter titled “Canthe Subaltern Accumulate Capital? Toil in Transition, 1950–1984” (p. 184). And, yet, because of Chari’s engagementwith the notion of “subalternity,” he cannot help but treatthe question as if it were a transparent one, and this hasserious consequences for his understanding of the relation-ship between caste and class, a subject that has exercised agreat deal of Indian sociology. Even M. N. Srinivas’s classicethnography, The Remembered Village, can be read as chart-ing the emergence into business and industry of anotherlandowning South Indian peasant caste—the Gowdas ofKarnataka—enabled by its dominant caste status.

While there may be generational differences in ex-tended families between fathers and sons, or between olderand younger brothers with respect to the ability to use landor other resources as sources of business collateral (a topicChari does touch on), there is no doubt that membershipin a dominant caste eases the way into business owner-ship. Thus, Chari’s central question, “How do Gounder ex-workers manage to accumulate capital?,” loses its chargeonce the fact of Gounder dominant caste status is centered.

Part of the confusion stems from Chari’s use of theterm backward caste to refer to the Kongu Vellala Gounders.Although the term is not incorrect—the Vellala Goundersthemselves have lobbied to increase the percentage of reser-vations awarded the community—Chari’s usage of the termis equivocal. The mobilization of “backward castes” inNorth India, which are located toward the bottom of lo-cal caste hierarchies, approximates the Varnic system ofcaste ranking but is substantially different from South In-dia where so-called Sudra castes are actually dominant (andsome argue, actually “forward castes” despite their self-proclaimed “backward caste” status).

Chari does at points acknowledge that the Gounders area dominant caste: The book contains a sharp analysis of dalitindebtedness to Gounder landlords in traditional agrar-ian relations, and he notes that even the communist-ledunion movement in Coimbatoire was headed by landown-ing Gounders. Yet, by decentering the Gounder’s dominantcaste status, Chari is unable to analyze how cultural id-ioms work to preserve caste dominance, not just class hege-mony. Thus, when Chari notes that one of his non-Gounderfriends is “cognizant of casteism” (p. 239), recognizing thatthe possibility of becoming an (ex-worker) owner is remote

because of Gounder favoritism toward fellow caste mem-bers, Chari does not call this discrimination. He concludesthat “Gounders of modest origins open a route for contin-ued class mobility through toil while challenging an ascrip-tive notion of caste as determinative of occupation and so-cial location” (p. 239). “Modest origins” may legitimatelydescribe Gounders of limited means, but the phrase alsoworks to obscure the ways in which most Gounders candraw on caste privilege regardless of actual wealth. Thus,Fraternal Capital ably shows the genesis of a caste-based ide-ology of mobility but fails to confront how caste networksare deployed as instruments of exclusion and violence. Asa dominant caste in Coimbatoire and Salem districts, theVellala Gounders have been implicated in incidents of anti-dalit violence, which escalated in the late 1990s and con-tinue into the present. Publicity surrounding the Gounderrole in intercaste conflict may be one reason some of Chari’sinformants were angry or defensive about questions con-cerning caste.

Fraternal Capital is at its best when detailing the modesof masculinity of the “self-made men” in Tiruppur’s gar-ment industry. The penultimate chapter of the book,“Gender Fetishisms and Shifting Hegemonies” locates theshift in the knitwear industry toward hiring women laborersfor unskilled work, a process that left the masculine skilledwork domains of cutting, stitching, and other sectors ofknitwear unchallenged. At the same time, Chari shows thatwomen workers from Kerala were subjected to more virulentforms of social stereotyping.

Although Chari’s work earns distinction for movinggender to the center of his analysis of caste mobility, his in-sights sometimes generated more questions than answers.One wanted to know more about women’s role in labor or-ganizing, how Gounder women accrued the savings thatsometimes funded their son’s enterprises, and how they be-came shop owners. Surprisingly, Chari also does not explorethe relationship of the family wage to women’s wages. Fi-nally, Chari’s observations on bride price and dowry in theGounder community might have been productively pur-sued, given the reluctance of Chari’s informants to discussdowry. In the early 1990s the Kongu Vellala Gounders ofnearby Salem District received much negative publicity forcommitting female infanticide, a recent practice attributedin part to the shift from bride price to dowry. In conclusion,although Chari productively raises more questions than hecan answer with a single book, one hopes that in future workhe will extend the analysis of Fraternal Capital, enabling himto write more about a subject he clearly knows so well.

The Culture of Migration in Southern Mexico. Jeffrey H.Cohen. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004. 195 pp.

LEIGH BINFORDBenemerita Universidad Autonoma de Puebla

Cohen investigates migratory and nonmigratory outcomesamong a dozen rural and periurban, indigenous, and

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mestizo communities in the Valley of Oaxaca, one ofMexico’s most intensively studied ethnographic zones.Based on the results of survey information—supplementedby an undetermined number of open-ended interviews andlimited participant observation, Cohen argues for a house-hold model that treats national or international migrationas the result of rational decisions made by the prospec-tive migrant in consultation with those with whom he orshe shares economic and other resources. He notes that inthe Oaxaca valley, “The decision to migrate takes accountof that household’s resources, the ability of its members(both migrant and nonmigrant), the traditions of the com-munity (including the history of migration), and the op-portunities that the migrant’s planned destination holds”(p. 31).

Successive chapters treat migration first historically andthen contemporarily. This is followed by examinations ofmigration, remittances, development, and, finally, nonmi-grant households. The inclusion of a dozen communities—varying in terms of economic orientation, distance from thecapital, and ethnic identity—makes it possible for Cohen todiscuss both central tendencies and departures from them.Although most information is derived from the one-timeapplication of a broad survey instrument, Cohen and histeam conducted enough supplementary interviews to makeit possible for him to enrich the statistical materials withshort but appropriate case studies.

The portrait that arises of the Oaxaca Valley is of a seriesof populations with long and complex migration histories—from adjacent market centers and the nearby state capital, toother sites in Mexico and the United States. In Cohen’s view,local economic opportunities (generally hard hit by neolib-eral policy), household demographics, wealth, social net-works, and the state of development of the regional trans-portation system have all played roles in shaping migrationdecisions with respect to who (if anyone) migrates, wherethey go, and how long they remain. Although Cohen gener-ally adopts a social process approach to migration that offersan alternative to the functional–dysfunctional dichotomythat plagues much migration research, the claim that migra-tion has been internalized as a constituent part of rural andperiurban Oaxaca Valley culture—that is, that it has becomeanother rational alternative available to those householdsthat possess the necessary social and material assets—hewsdangerously close to a functionalist vision.

Cohen argues that international migration tends to beof short duration and that most migrants remit portions oftheir U.S. income in benefit of resident household mem-bers. Moreover, he finds no difference between migrantsand nonmigrants in their propensities to participate in com-munity projects (financially or otherwise) when called onto do so. However, the interview schedule solicited infor-mation on resident and nonresident members of sampledhouseholds that indicates that the survey failed to obtain in-formation on many independent households: For example,many married sons, daughters, and others had relocated,more or less permanently, to the United States. This would

result in a general tendency to underestimate some behav-iors, such as the incidence of migration, and to overestimateothers: participation in community cooperacion or the inci-dence of households that remit goods and money home,among them.

Cohen confirms that in the context of the neoliberalpolicy and several decades of economic crisis, migrationto the United States is displacing national migration. Aswell, he sides with a growing body of literature when henotes that only a small proportion of Oaxaca Valley house-holds are in a position to productively invest remittancesearned in Mexico or the United States—although he alsorecords significant levels of intercommunity diversity inthe propensity to invest. In the final chapter, Cohen pro-vides a welcome counter to claims of migrant invasionsby discussing some of the reasons why most valley resi-dents do not view migration to the United States as a viablealternative.

The book represents the most systematic effort to dateto examine migration in the Oaxaca Valley. Researchers inthat area will want to study the methodology and learn fromthe results. The Culture of Migration in Southern Mexico is writ-ten in a direct prose style, and the positions and supportingmaterials are set out in a clear and logical order, makingit eminently useful for both undergraduate and graduatecourses on contemporary Mexico, international migration,and introductory anthropology, among others.

Around the Tuscan Table: Food, Family and Gender inTwentieth-Century Florence. Carole M. Counihan. NewYork: Routledge, 2004. 248 pp.

SUSAN CAROL ROGERSNew York University

An intriguing romance has long drawn cultivated Anglo-phones (among others) to Florence and its Tuscan hinter-lands: The importance of the Florentine stop on the GrandTour is but one link in a long chain (e.g., Forster 1908; Ivory1985). A more current one is the remarkable attention thatcontemporary foodies and other mavens of cosmopolitanlifestyles have recently devoted to Tuscany as a center ofgraciously sophisticated style. Even if the social distinctionconveyed by things Tuscan has been dulled by less-than-exclusive distribution—for example, via Frances Mayes’sbest-selling memoirs of postdivorce rebirth in the Tuscanhills and its aggressively marketed film version (Mayes1996, 1999; Wells 2003), as well as by countless cookbooks,home decor magazines, and furniture lines promoting a Tus-can style, not to mention tourist agencies offering Tuscanvilla holidays—Florence and its surrounding countrysidenonetheless continue to stimulate many U.S. imaginationswith powerful connotations of old world charm.

Carole Counihan’s study of food practices within an or-dinary Florentine extended family draws part of its interestfrom this context, precisely because neither the MerchantIvory nor the glossy-magazine version of Tuscany figures

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significantly in her analysis. Both are presumably equallyirrelevant to the subjects whose lives she has shared as ananthropologist and as an in-law. Counihan offers us a ver-sion of the evolution of daily life in Florence, using foodas a lens to capture changes in family and gender relationsover the course of the 20th century. Her analysis is basedprimarily on her own observations and on several dozen“food-centered life histories.” Most of her data were col-lected in 1982–84, but this material is informed by her reg-ular extended stays in Florence between 1970 and 1984,and supplemented by a lengthy return trip in 2003. Herown experience thus spans several decades, while that ofher subjects covers most of the century. They are a soci-ologically diverse lot, including men and women of sev-eral generations who occupy a range of class positions:blue- and white-collar workers, artisans, students, retirees,and housewives. They nonetheless form a relatively co-herent group: Linked by kin ties, they also share the ex-perience of urban life (although some come from ruralbackgrounds) under relatively comfortable material circum-stances, and although none belongs to Florence’s social,economic, or political elite, they all have long roots in thearea.

Several points emerge especially forcefully from thiswork. First, food is such a central preoccupation within thisFlorentine family—and presumably for many others likeit—that it provides its members a strikingly powerful ve-hicle for recalling their pasts and imagining their futures,as these may be played out in the intimate circles of familylife as well as in the increasingly prosperous and globaliz-ing world they also occupy. The picture of change presentedhere is, in many ways, a familiar one, similar to accounts of20th-century modernization described many times in manydifferent settings. The significance of this study does not liethere but, rather, in its compelling display of foodways asa remarkably effective tool for drawing out people’s livedexperience of such change processes and for demonstrat-ing the inextricable links among its domestic and broadlypublic dimensions. In settings where people care less aboutfood and eating, this tool may not be such a powerful de-vice. But Florentines are certainly far from cross-culturallyunique in their strong commitment to the pleasures of thetable, and Counihan’s case study constitutes another of herfascinating and important contributions to the burgeoningfield of Food Studies.

Equally striking to me is the unremarkable nature of theingredients comprising the Florentine cuisine, as describedin the text, offered in an appendix of recipes, and discussedlovingly by Counihan’s subjects. Dried beans, onion, gar-lic, olive oil, pasta, and tomatoes are ubiquitous, with amodest assortment of vegetables and some meat or driedfish appearing in certain dishes. On the face of it, none ofthese are at all unique to Tuscany, and together they re-semble the monotonous fare once eaten by poor peasantsthroughout much of Europe (although the dominant cook-ing fat and starch have been geographically variable). Thisobservation begs a series of questions that promise useful in-

sights into processes of place-making in the contemporaryworld. For example, how and under what conditions doesa cuisine rooted in poverty capture the devotion of pros-perous descendants or cosmopolitan sophisticates? How dowidely familiar foods come to be associated with specificplaces? Counihan does not directly address such questionsin her book but provides remarkably fertile ground for pos-ing them.

Around the Tuscan Table might usefully be paired withA Room with a View, Under the Tuscan Sun, or any magazineversion of Tuscan style to explore the distant relations be-tween commodity consumption and “authentic” life expe-rience. But a much more interesting question posed by sucha juxtaposition, it seems to me, concerns the variety of re-lationships and fantasies that can be forged with a givenplace. Forster, Mayes, Counihan, and her friend Leonardo’srelatives all undoubtedly understand Florence and Tuscanyon their own terms. Carole Counihan’s book offers the ba-sis for fruitful food for thought about how those versionscome to be constituted and remembered, and what inclinesus to consider any one of them to be more the “real deal”than any other.

REFERENCES CITEDIvory, James, dir.

1985 A Room with a View. 117 min. Merchant Ivory Produc-tions. United Kingdom.

Forster, E. M.1908 A Room with a View. London: E. Arnold.

Mayes, Frances1996 Under the Tuscan Sun: At Home in Italy. New York: Chron-

icle Books.1999 Bella Tuscany: The Sweet Life in Italy. New York: Broadway

Books.Wells, Audrey, dir.

2003 Under the Tuscan Sun. 113 min. Touchstone Pictures.

From Mukogodo to Maasai: Ethnicity and CulturalChange in Kenya. Lee Cronk. Cambridge, MA: WestviewPress, 2004. 172 pp.

DOUG JONESUniversity of Utah

This well-written ethnography of the Mukogodo of Kenyaworks on a number of levels. It is an engaging introduc-tion to the field of cultural anthropology and to the basicsof fieldwork. It touches on a number of important anthro-pological topics, including the nature of hunter-gatherersocieties, definitions of ethnicity, and modernization andinequality in colonial and postcolonial societies. While giv-ing due weight to rival views, it also advances a particularconception of the relationship between culture and biolog-ical evolution, which was set forth in a more general andprogrammatic way in Lee Cronk’s earlier book, That Com-plex Whole.

The name “Mukogodo” perhaps originally meant “peo-ple who live in rocks.” Until the 1920s and 1930s, the de-scription fit the people who resided in rock shelters andsubsisted as hunter-gatherers in forested uplands north of

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Mount Kenya. In some ways during this period they fitclassic stereotypes of hunter-gatherers, living in small, rel-atively egalitarian, mobile bands. In other ways, they de-parted from the fluid bilateral social structure of more fa-miliar African foragers like the !Kung, being organized inexogamous patrilineal territorial clans. Cronk plausibly re-lates this to their subsistence, which included a heavy in-volvement in keeping bees and storing honey, turning theminto “delayed return” foragers.

By the time Cronk and his wife began studying theMukogodo in the 1985, things had changed quite a bit.Earlier in the century, the Mukogodo moved out of theirrock shelters into houses, a change necessitated by a switchto cattle herding. This brought their subsistence practicesin line with those of their Maasai and Maasai-speakingneighbors. Other cultural shifts followed the switch to pas-toralism, as the Mukogodo copied their neighbors’ initia-tion rites, age sets, clothing, and hairstyles. Eventually theyadopted a dialect of Maasai. By the time of the Cronk’sfieldwork, their earlier language, Yaaku, was virtually ex-tinct. The Mukogodo’s present status is complicated: Theyretain memories of a separate identity but are also heavilyintermarried with surrounding peoples and sometimes nowclaim to be Maasai. Yet a number of factors—their imperfectassimilation of Maasai customs, their poverty, and memo-ries of their earlier condition as hunters—lead neighboringpeoples to classify them as il-torobo, a derogatory term forlow-status non-Maasai.

Understanding this shift from Mukogodo to(semi)Maasai is at the heart of this ethnography. Thecentral thesis, supported by a number of lines of evidence,is that the transition was not just a process of passiveacculturation or modernization but also the working out ofadaptive individual choice in a particular historical context.The historical context is one in which a traditional patternof coexistence, with a large measure of independence forthe Mukogodo, was undermined by contradictory colonialpolicies. Although British officials were committed tomaintaining (or even artificially reinforcing) a separatestatus and territory for the Mukogodo and other marginalgroups, colonial policy in other parts of Kenya, especiallyland alienation, led to intensified contact between theMukogodo and others. Mukogodo men, who traditionallygave beehives as bridewealth, found themselves competingin the marriage market with cattle-owning Maasai. Thisuneven contest resulted in high rates of outmarriagefor Mukogodo women, with the remaining Mukogodobeing assimilated as a cattle owning—but relatively poor—segment of a wider social order. A final twist in the story isthe effect of this transition on Mukogodo family life. Withtheir women standing a better chance of marrying andreproducing than their men, the Mukogodo have come tolavish more care on daughters than on sons. This is notsomething they acknowledge: Following Maasai norms,they claim to value sons more. Yet daughter favoritismshows up in statistics on health care, child mortality, andgrowth and development.

From Mukogodo to Maasai is accessibly written and jar-gon free, and it would make an excellent introductory textfor undergraduates. It is of broader interest as well: Cronktakes the opportunity here to develop, in an unpolemicalway, some important arguments about the relationship be-tween culture and human behavior. He shows that sociallytransmitted information—for example, the Mukogodo as-similation of Maasai norms of son preference—can be anunreliable guide to behavior; therefore, it stresses the im-portance of collecting quantitative behavioral data. Further-more, while accepting the proximate importance of culture,he argues that we need to look beyond culture for the ulti-mate causes of human behavior. In particular, he summa-rizes theories and evidence from evolutionary biology aboutthe circumstances in which organisms will favor one sex orthe other among their offspring and argues that these the-ories provide a neat fit for the Mukogodo data. Thus, whileMukogodo daughter favoritism is very unlikely to be un-der direct genetic control, a flexible set of evolved motivesmay override cultural instructions in influencing parentalbehavior here.

Many readers will have questions about how generallythese arguments apply. Are ideologies favoring one sex ofoffspring always as weak in the face of individual strategiz-ing, as they seem to be in the Mukogodo case? What aboutethnic identity in societies that are more successful thanthe Mukogodo at pressuring individuals to conform to in-group norms? Although it does not settle these questions,From Mukogodo to Maasai is an excellent demonstration ofthe value of bringing rigorous methods and original think-ing to bear on some of the perennial concerns of culturalanthropology. It deserves a wide readership.

The Price of Poverty: Money, Work, and Culture inthe Mexican American Barrio. Daniel Dohan. Berkeley:University of California Press, 2003. 314 pp.

ROBERT R. ALVAREZUniversity of California, San Diego

Mexican Americans and the barrio are the subject of nu-merous publications, but the comparison of the barrio withneighborhoods of incoming Mexican immigrants is a rar-ity. In The Price of Poverty, Daniel Dohan explores poverty intwo urban neighborhoods in California. Unlike most workon immigration and settlement, Dohan compares the livesof undocumented immigrants in San Jose who work pri-marily in the Silicon Valley with urban Chicanos in LosAngeles. Economic life is the focus here, and Dohan skill-fully interweaves individual strategy through the ethno-graphic with structural analysis. The book is divided intothree primary themes: work, crime, and welfare, which, heargues, are definitive factors in the production and main-tenance of poverty among people of Mexican descent. Do-han provides an understanding of the similarities and dif-ferences of immigrant poverty in the neighborhood he la-bels “Guadalupe,” and what he calls the persistent poverty

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of Chavez, an urban Chicano barrio in Los Angeles. This isa classic in the tradition of urban ethnography but also anovel and important contribution investigating contrastingsocial realities.

The economic realities of both communities are, inpart, the result of what Dohan calls the “institutions ofpoverty”: informal social networks, indigenous institutions,and subcultures. Social networks are composed of kin andfriends, both local and transnational, that provide not onlymutual aid but also “cultural orientation” that defines howpeople, in Guadalupe for example, adjust to and value low-wage jobs, whereas the people in Chavez see the same typesof jobs as economic and social dead ends. Transnationalnetworks help Guadalupanos envision jobs as part of up-ward mobility, in which home regions are a central part.For Guadalupanos, the value of the dollar in transnationalterms has made low wages economically sensible. A princi-ple economic strategy here is that of “overwork,” in whichGuadalupanos work as many hours as possible. People inChavez, on the other hand, are caught in a severe cycle ofpoverty in which low-wage jobs maintain social structureand are dead ends that force residents into the illicit econ-omy. In Chavez, “hustling” is the strategy of taking advan-tage of opportunities in which crime and welfare are a part.The outcome of this comparison illustrates the profoundpersistence of poverty in Chavez, whereas immigrants inGuadalupe find a progressive escape. Dohan argues and il-lustrates how local job opportunities not only shape dailywork life but also people’s engagement in crime, welfare,and social life generally.

Indigenous organizations relate specifically to the par-ticipation of both Mexican and Chicano in illegal activities.For immigrants, illegality is a part of their social condition—simply being in the United States as undocumented is break-ing the law. However, the stark reality of continued eco-nomic deprivation in Chavez makes working in the illiciteconomy a regular part of daily life. Street gangs (Chavez)and street-corner, day-labor markets (Guadalupe) are thetypes of indigenous organizations discussed. Subcultures af-fect how residents in both areas participate in public aidprograms and provide strategies of coping with the in-consistency of welfare stigma and the necessity of receiv-ing welfare. Importantly, subcultures are (like culture it-self) the practices and strategies of how people get thingsdone. Welfare-coping strategies in this sense are subcultures.Interestingly, Dohan argues that immigrants and Chicanosshare the same perceptions and questions with policy mak-ers concerning welfare. Welfare and public aid are seen inboth communities as illegitimate sources of income.

The book questions the availability and longevity ofjobs but also the quality of work experience. In both com-munities, jobs were undifferentiated, dull, and did not re-quire specific skills. Underlying this is the necessity, chal-lenge, and struggle of the need to take these jobs.

A crucial question raised by the book is the following:How does Chavez compare to other Mexican–Chicano bar-rios. Is this really a bottom-tier social rung? What does this

tell us about the eventual societal accommodation of im-migrants faced with continued economic and social segre-gation as illustrated by Chavez? The centrality of crime inthis scenario also begs for further investigation.

The Price of Poverty is, however, an exemplary ethno-graphic work that illustrates the strength of comparativeresearch and analysis. Dohan not only describes and delvesinto the lives of these communities but also challenges pub-lic policy. He includes an appendix on methodology, whichalso provides quantitative information on each community.The book is a valuable and timely portrait of the variationof Latino life in the United States.

The Anthropology of Development and Globalization:From Classical Political Economy to ContemporaryNeoliberalism. Marc Edelman and Angelique Haugerud,eds. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2005. 406 pp.

TED LEWELLENUniversity of Richmond

In the 1990s several anthropologists sounded the deathknell for “development” in general and “development an-thropology” in particular (Escobar 1995; Esteva 1993). Theobituaries tended to be premature. Buttressed by its associa-tion with that latest of intellectual vogues—globalization—development remains deeply embedded in the theories andpractices of anthropology. After a period in which, underthe influence of postmodernism, many anthropologists dis-avowed all “metanarratives” (grand theories), the pendu-lum seems to have swung back. Within a global systemdominated by the market-driven economy of neoliberalism,insight seems to begin at the level of general analysis.

Many anthropologists, along with economists and po-litical scientists, are represented in the 31 readings in thisanthology, but there are no true ethnographies. This meansthat the global–local nexus is handled at a fairly high levelof abstraction. The aim seems to be to provide the readerwith the broad context from which to understand more fo-cused studies.

Part 1 offers readings from classical theorists AdamSmith, Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Karl Polanyi, all of whomviewed economic change, for better or worse, as the workingout of the organic logic of capitalism. In Part 2, the subjectshifts to 20th-century debates over modernization, devel-opment, and globalization. A key point is that nothing canbe taken for granted; every aspect of “development” and“globalization” (and their myriad intercombinations) is indispute, including the definitions of the terms themselves.The conception of development as reduction of povertyin the newly decolonized countries of the “Third World”emerged with modernization theory in the 1950s and re-mained for decades closely conjoined with Cold War ide-ologies. The failure of the optimistic predictions of the dayled to a multiplicity of contradictory models, many basedon the idea—in one form or another—of delinking from thecapitalist system, which was considered the root cause of

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underdevelopment. With the collapse of the Soviet Union,neoliberalism (the “Washington Consensus”) emerged vir-tually unchallenged; IMF “structural adjustments” em-braced an end to protectionism and the weakening of thenational state, rendering any significant delinking unfeasi-ble. New analyses and new models have proliferated.

Early on, anthropologists adapted by absorbing mod-ernization theory and attempting directed culture change.The backlash from within the discipline was virulent andis represented in the readings by James Ferguson’s “Anthro-pology and Its Evil Twin”—the Evil Twin of academic an-thropology being “development anthropology.” Some the-orists began to conceive a postdevelopment era, in whichalternatives to development (not always clearly spelled out)would be localized and based on group participation, appro-priate technologies, and redistributive strategies.

The book’s approach throughout is top-down, that is,the editors’ introductions and the readings deal with broadsubject areas—development theory, neoliberalism, biotech-nology, development institutions, and so forth. Despite thebook’s title, globalization gets short shrift, with only onesection and a few articles specifically devoted to this sub-ject. The true subject of the book is “development.”

The 74-page (including notes and bibliography) “intro-duction” is at once exhaustive and exhausting. Althoughthe target audience seems to be the classroom, this reviewof the literature on development since the 1950s is intimi-datingly dense. It is less appropriate as a survey for the stu-dent than as a refresher for the already knowledgeable oras a reference for the scholar. However, the editors’ “intro-ductions” to the eight sections are focused and accessible;each provides, clearly and succinctly, the historical, theo-retical, and analytical context necessary to understand thereadings.

It would be difficult to find a more varied or more com-prehensive anthology of essays on the subject of develop-ment. The selections—which run the gamut from classicaleconomics to gender to biotechnology to the internal work-ings of aid institutions—provide an invaluable overview ofdecades of development theory for the anthropologist.

REFERENCES CITEDEscobar, Arturo

1995 Encountering Development: The Making and Unmakingof the Third World. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Esteva, Gustavo1992 Development. In The Development Dictionary: A Guide to

Knowledge as Power. W. Sachs, ed. London: Zed.

The Ethnographic I: A Methodological Novel about Au-toethnography. Carolyn Ellis. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMiraPress, 2004. 448 pp.

KIRIN NARAYANUniversity of Wisconsin, Madison

As a methodology and a prose genre, ethnography is nowused, written, and written about in a range of venues be-

yond anthropology: communications, cultural studies, edu-cation, marketing, religious studies, and sociology, to namebut a few. As an emergent subgenre, autoethnography alsotraverses disciplinary boundaries. Karl Heider is creditedwith having first coined the term autoethnography in 1975 tocharacterize Dani school children’s accounts of what Danido. As Deborah Reed-Danahay observes (1997:4–9), in someworks the “auto” side of autoethnography is highlightedto reference autobiographical narratives with a cultural di-mension, while in others, the “ethno” side is stressed torefer to cultural accounts with a reflexive dimension.

For sociologist and communications scholar CarolynEllis, autoethnography is a transformative tool for knowingoneself and the world through close attention to one’s ownlife. She characterizes autoethnography as “research, writ-ing, story, and method that connect the autobiographicaland personal to the cultural, social and political” (p. xix). El-lis is passionate about autoethnography’s potential in mak-ing sense of experience, particularly moments of painfuldislocation or epiphany. As she states, “It’s about giving in-sight into who you are and others are and finding a way tobe in the world that works for you” (p. 296).

To share and spread autoethnography, Ellis has cre-ated a unique genre of narrative textbook that follows acourse titled “Communicating Autoethnography” througha semester, interspersed with four “ethnographic inter-ludes.” This book is published in the “Ethnographic Alter-natives” series edited by Carolyn Ellis and Art Bochner forAltaMira Press.

Carolyn Ellis, the novel’s narrator, is unabashedly aversion of Carolyn Ellis, the author and series editor: Sheteaches at the same university, is married to the same fel-low academic, and is responsible for the same publications.Why, then, is this book cast as a novel rather than a perfor-mance of its subject matter? Well, Ellis the author, it turnsout, is not depicting an actual course she has taught. In-stead, she is inventing a class by drawing on other classesthat have covered similar materials. She is also assemblinga group of eight graduate students who were never actu-ally enrolled at one time: Six of the students worked withher at different times and their reactions to being depictedwith their real names in the manuscript are included in ac-counts of interviews. Two other students in the seminar areinvented composites.

Ellis recounts ten class sessions in which she introducesher mostly ecstatically enthusiastic students to various as-pects of autoethnography, speaking at articulate length andsometimes writing on chalkboards (provided as illustra-tion). The students respond, discuss, and finally presenttheir work. After class, she might warmly welcome a studentin her office and then reflect further on the seminar’s issueswhile driving home. Greeting her supportive academic hus-band Art and their four amiable dogs, she and Art then chatabout the issues further over an invariably delicious dinnerhe has usually cooked or ordered in.

With such goodwill on all sides, where, you may ask,are the stakes of a plot? Not in the immediate safe circle of

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campus or home, it appears, but in the responses of thewider world to the autoethnographic mission. The bookdetails the various dilemmas of students undertaking au-toethnographic projects, but some of the most grippingmoments in the book follow Ellis’s candid struggles withhaving exposed herself too much through her writing.

Readers seeking to learn more about autoethnographywill find sound background scholarship and provocative in-sights in the disquisitions that Ellis shares with her class,colleagues, and self. They will, however, have to make theirway through a ponderous welter of detail. As captive read-ers, we learn everything from Ellis’s taste in earrings andcars, to what the students were wearing, to the kinds offood that Art cooks. Readers seeking the imaginative es-cape of a novel will likely wish they were not trapped inan unfolding semester and will long for the sleek economyof telling detail that might quicken the pace. As a novel,a textbook, an autoethnography of Carolyn Ellis, and anethnography of a graduate seminar, this brave experimentcan seem crowded and cluttered. It raises an important ques-tion: As ethnography morphs into new hybrid forms, howmight we refrain from enthusiastically stuffing too muchinto stretchable new texts?

REFERENCE CITEDReed-Danahay, Deborah E., ed.

1997 Auto/Ethnography: Rewriting the Self and the Social. Ox-ford: Berg.

Medieval Archaeology: Understanding Traditions andContemporary Approaches. Christopher Gerrard. NewYork: Routledge, 2003. 302 pp.

THOMAS H. MCGOVERNHunter College, City University of New York

The title of this book would suggest a broad overview ofan increasingly active area for world archaeology—the in-vestigation of the period broadly between the end of lateantiquity circa C.E. 600 and the European discovery andcolonization of the Americas and much of Asia and Oceaniain the late 15th and early 16th centuries. The 13th centurypeak in medieval population and associated environmen-tal impacts, prior to the impacts of climate cooling in theearly 14th century and the Black Death in the mid–14thcentury, has provided a set of dramatic stories of the inter-action of human demography, landscape formation, andclimate change that continues to inspire cross-disciplinaryinvestigations with clear relevance to modern situations inthe developing world (failed states and warlords compound-ing climate change and epidemic disease are not only 20th-century phenomena). The medieval period thus presents arange of problems of interest to anthropologists and envi-ronmental scientists as well as to historians.

However, this book is not actually about any of theseissues. It focuses on a narrow temporal definition of theMiddle Ages (approximately C.E. 1066–1492), and there isno discussion of medieval archaeology outside of Britain.

In fact, nearly all the examples presented are actually fromEngland. This is not a book that seeks a broad interdisci-plinary synthesis or overview of the state of the art through-out Europe, and the author very clearly states this early on.This book is a history of the development of the subfield ofmedieval archaeology in Britain and essentially reflects theprofessional interests and concerns of most of the contribu-tors and editors of the journal Medieval Archaeology (Christo-pher Gerrard is the monographs editor for Medieval Archae-ology). This book is also not an overview of new findingsbut is, rather, about the development and improvement offieldwork and the evolution of a subfield: from the workof a few ham-handed romantics into the large, well coordi-nated, fully professional archaeology units that dominatethe modern scene.

Within these limitations, this is an excellent one-volume history. It takes the reader through six chronologi-cal phases (beginnings to 1800, 1800–82, 1882–1945, 1945–70, 1970–89, and 1990–present). The book is very well writ-ten, clearly organized, and presents a series of engaging sto-ries that place the development of medieval archaeology inEngland in its social and temporal contexts. It combinesaccounts of some of the colorful scholars and enthusiastswhose careers advanced the field with solid and thoughtfuldiscussion of the impact of external economic forces (esp.rescue–contract archaeology of the 1970s), and of some ofthe theoretical debates leaking over from prehistoric archae-ology. Both the impact of urban development (which in-creased urban excavations by 300 percent between 1970 and1990 [p. 167]) and the profound impacts of the processual–postprocessual split (which had an even more seriously po-larizing effect in the United Kingdom than in the UnitedStates) are discussed clearly and authoritatively. They aresupported by many solid statistics presented to buttress ar-guments and illustrate trends. This is an excellent case studyof the interaction of economics with the development ofmethod and theory in archaeology. Pressed for time, facedwith daunting technical and logistic problems, and buf-feted by shifting theoretical winds, the British urban unitsbetween 1970 and 1990 created some of the most effec-tive approaches to some of the most complex stratigraphicarchaeological problems in the world—approaches whichhave since widely disseminated into other geographical re-gions and into other time periods. The Harris Matrix, open-area excavation, single-context recording, integrated digitalrecording, and integrated environmental field archaeologywere all originally the products of practical solutions to theproblems posed by largely medieval deposits, which con-fronted British excavators in the last quarter of the 20thcentury. This book is, thus, not primarily about the MiddleAges but, instead, about the development of archaeologicalmethod.

Gerrard may have rather closely restricted his area andperiod of investigation, but within the limits he has set, hedoes a superb job of carrying out his primary task of showingwhere modern medieval archaeology in Britain has comefrom, why it became so influential, and how this tradition

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continues to shape contemporary practice. As one of themany U.S. anthropologists who got some of their forma-tive early field training on British urban digs of the 1970s,and one who has largely adopted excavation and record-ing methods based those used by United Kingdom urbanarchaeology units, I found this volume fascinating and il-luminating and have already lost my review copy to mygraduate students. This is a work well worth having for itsdisciplinary insights, even if you are not terribly interestedin British castles or abbeys.

The Predicament of Chukotka’s Indigenous Movement:Post-Soviet Activism in the Russian Far North. PattyA. Gray. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.276 pp.

PATRICK PLATTETUniversity of Alaska, Fairbanks

Why did the wave of activism that appeared in Moscowand spread throughout the country during the period ofglasnost (“openness”) not help the rise of independent in-digenous movements in the far reaches of the former So-viet Union? To answer this paradoxical question, Patty Grayfollows the process of decentralization and documents forthe first time post-Soviet activism in the Chukotka Au-tonomous Region (North–East Russia). Like several oth-ers recent anthropological studies devoted to indigenousresidents in the Arctic, The Predicament of Chukotka’s In-digenous Movement is based on urban-centered fieldwork.This choice was initially heuristic because, in 1990, the re-gional capital city of Anadyr hosted an association whoseleaders belonged to the local “national (ethnic) intelli-gentsia” (p. 87)—that is, the indigenous elite on whomthe book focuses. Socially created out of the long develop-ment of Leninist national policies among the “small peo-ples” of Chukotka (Chukchee, Eskimos, Evens, Chuvans,Koriaks, etc.), this elite was surprisingly unable to defend in-digenous rights against increasingly chauvinistic incomers(Russians, Ukrainians, etc.) during the 1990s.

To understand the dynamics that brought about thistragic situation, Gray describes the predicament of indige-nous activism in relation to “the process by which nation-alities policy was dismantled in that region” (p. 71). Thisanalytical perspective proves important for understandingthe Anadyr Association “as properly belonging to this verygenre of Soviet citizen activism” (p. 41), rather than as anew phenomenon. Marked by the productive use of Scott’sconcepts of “hidden/public transcript” (1990), Gray’s richethnography not only contributes to the study of socialmovements; it also fills a gap in post-Soviet studies by de-tailing how the scripted roles of the Soviet civil society werebeing rewritten (and by whom). In this regard, the “thick”description of three events epitomizing the nature of protestin Anadyr is particularly eloquent: During the 1990s, indige-nous activists were “trying to redefine social space” (p. 26)and to express a latent criticism. Against what? They were

protesting the new “democratic” administration, which wasscripting the marginalization of indigenous Chukotkanswithin a “Russian” space.

A great strength of the book is the way in which theauthor narrates this process. To remind us how significantthe transformations attempted by indigenous Chukotkansalready were before the collapse of Soviet Union, Gray jux-taposes the factual material of her ethnography with the lifestory of Malina Ivanovna Kevyngevyt, a fictional Chukchiwoman born in the 1940s. Through an evocative seriesof short vignettes preceding each chapter and picturingMalina’s experience within the “Soviet story,” a contrastedperception of collectivization emerges: Although “nationalidentity was so rigidly state-controlled that it was extremelydifficult for ‘bottom-up’ conceptualizations of identity toprevail” (p. 57), Gray shows in a very convincing way thatindigenous peoples at least had their own status in the colo-nial script of Russian dominance. The abrupt demise of thisscenario and the return to political and professional repres-sion during the 1990s nonetheless made it necessary to pro-tect the identity of her consultees and “to concentrate theminto a few representative dramatis personae” (p. xv). In a sub-tle way, this choice furthermore evokes the performative di-mension of socialist “successes” among indigenous reindeerherders and sea mammal hunters. The long-lasting effectsof Soviet-masked colonization—ambiguously supported byethnographers and national intelligentsia itself—partly ex-plain the incapacity of the Anadyr association to becomea full-blown movement in the 1990s. Gray argues that be-cause of the paternalist perception of indigenous culturesthat resulted from “the thoroughness of their colonizationby Soviet ideology” (p. 64), “there was simply no precedentupon which to imagine a truly independent and defiantsocial organization” (p. 43).

The Predicament however avoids a univocal criticismof collectivization by taking into account both negativeand positive aspects of indigenous encounters with the So-viet system. Following Richard Fox and Orin Starn (1997),it does not portray social protest “as an already achievedstate” but, rather, develops a new approach, which captures“these in-between phenomena that are most importantfor understanding the nature of domination and dissent”(pp. 68–69). It is this significant effort to consider in-digenous activism not only as a means of accommoda-tion but also as a “process of becoming more” that makesit possible to fully answer the initial question. Thanksto an illuminating analysis of the transformation of lo-cal politics in Chapter six, Patty Gray details the restruc-turing of the Soviet “ethnic balancing act” (p. 165) inChukotka’s government (which traditionally ensured theaccommodating repartition of control between indigenousand nonindigenous leaders) and clarifies the paradox of thepredicament. At the other end of the democratic reformslaunched by president Yeltsin in the early 1990s, indigenousChukotkans lost their political and economic influence dur-ing a “dark decade.” They became structurally unable to facea “new-Russian” style of domination that would deny their

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autochthony to monopolize the limited resources of theregion.

REFERENCES CITEDFox, Richard G., and Orin Starn

1997 Between Resistance and Revolution: Cultural Politics andSocial Protest. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Scott, James1990 Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Tran-

scripts. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Man the Hunted: Primates, Predators, and Human Evo-lution. Donna L. Hart and Robert W. Sussman. Cambridge,MA: Westview Press, 2005.

ANNE INNIS DAGGUniversity of Waterloo

In the 1960s, I used to teach about Man the Hunter. Itwas the only theory of human evolution I knew, and it fitwell into the concept of the human domination of nature,which then seemed so natural. One of my students com-plained to me about Man the Hunter, emphasizing that itwas only a theory. He was right, but also wrong—as a de-vout Christian, his historical human framework featuredAdam.

Then came the discovery in 1974 of small-brained Lucy,our australopithecine forebear who, 3.2 million years ago,was only three-and-a-half feet tall. Her little bones laid outin skeletal order on a table did not resonate with “hunter”at all, unless roots, clams, and fruit were her prey; her malepeers would have been larger than she, but still very smallcompared to us.

In Man the Hunted, Donna Hart (professor of wildlifeconservation at the University of Missouri, St. Louis) andRobert Sussman (professor of physical anthropology atWashington University, St. Louis) discuss the life of our an-cestors in detail, focusing mainly on the time period of Lucy,who lived about halfway through our evolution from ape-like ancestors about seven million years ago to ourselves.Lucy and her peers would have been preyed on by the an-cestors of lions, tigers, leopards, wild dogs, hyenas, snakes,crocodiles, sharks, and even eagles—animals whose present-day descendants still kill a number of people each year.There were more than 100 extinct species related to hye-nas alone.

The authors report that stone tools, but not weapons,have been found with fossil bones of human ancestors 2.3million years old. Evidence for large scale [sic], systematichuman hunting only appears about 60,000–80,000 yearsago, after 99 per cent [sic] of the time over which humansevolved had elapsed. Humans began to eat meat regularlyonly with the advent of farming 10,000 to 15,000 years ago.Lucy’s fossilized remains do not have sharp, shearing teeththat reflect a meat diet, but incisors and canines that aresmall in relation to her large, blunt molars. The microwearon these molars indicates that she ate foods such as leaves,fruits, seeds, and tubers. Like other primates, she would

seldom have access to animal protein. Her alimentary canalwas undoubtedly suited for an omnivorous diet such asthat enjoyed today by people and chimpanzees, feeding onwhatever foods came to hand, neither specialized for eatingleaves nor for consuming meat.

Hart and Sussman consider why there has been a biastoward the idea of protohominids being hunters morethan forager–gatherers. Most academics come from a Judeo–Christian background, which valorizes the dominance ofman [sic] over nature. Most have been men, and male schol-ars chose to write books and articles about the prehistoricalprominence of their sex as represented by their huntingability; they resisted the thought of women being impor-tant in society because they gathered edible vegetation, al-though we have known for four decades that some 60 to90 percent of food used and collected by most modern hu-man foragers in the tropics is still provided by women. Theearlier significance of Piltdown Man (proven a fraud only in1953) had predisposed scientists to think of our ancestors ashaving a large brain, which would enable them to becomeskilled hunters, long before one actually developed.

Where meat is concerned, we can think of our hominidancestors at best not as hunters but as scavengers. LouisLeakey (Leakey and Ardrey 1971) recounts how he and hisson, Richard, reenacted the possibility of scavenging on theplains of Africa. They took off their clothes, grabbed giraffeleg bones to protect themselves, and approached hyenasfeasting on a zebra kill that lions had made. They were ableto scare away and hold at bay the hyenas for about tenminutes while they hacked meat from the zebra. The hyenaswere “furious,” Leakey reports.

Hart and Sussman have written a highly readable book,with jazzy subtitles such as “Will the First Hominid PleaseStand Up?,” “Before the Age of Ulcers,” and “My, What BigTeeth You Have!” Their argument that human beings andtheir predecessors, during almost the entire period of theirevolution, have been preyed on rather than predators is en-tirely persuasive.

REFERENCE CITEDLeakey, Louis, and Robert Ardrey

1971 Aggression and Violence in Man. Munger Africana LibraryNotes #9. Pasadena: California Institute of Technology.

The End of the Soul: Scientific Modernity, Atheism, andAnthropology in France. Jennifer Michael Hecht. NewYork: Columbia University Press, 2003. 402 pp.

NICOLAS LANGLITZUniversity of California, Berkeley

In The End of the Soul, Jennifer Michael Hecht examinesatheism in late-19th-century France through the lives andworks of a number of eminent physical anthropologists.

Hecht investigates the problems of early republican sec-ularism through an examination of the Society of MutualAutopsy, founded in 1876. The members of this societydecreed that, after death, their brains would be dissected

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by surviving members of their group. The goal of thesefreethinking anthropologists was to prove the nonexistenceof the soul and to demonstrate correlations between phys-ical features of the deceased individual’s brain and suppos-edly corresponding mental characteristics of that same indi-vidual. During more than 30 years of existence, the societyproduced hardly any scientifically valuable findings whileat the same time never giving up its initial grandiose ambi-tions. Hecht explains this seemingly irrational persistencethrough the religious function attributed to science in thisgroup, interpreting the dissections as a secularized burialrite. The French anthropologists described in this book,who had discarded the idea of possessing an immortal soul,sought consolation in the hope that their otherwise mean-ingless death might at least contribute to the progress of sci-ence. In Hecht’s work, as is frequently the case, the conceptof “secularization” implies a deficiency: The ersatz eschatol-ogy of scientific progress cannot fully replace the prospectof spiritual eternity because the dead individual eventuallyhas not lived to see the earthly paradise that Enlightenmentscience has promised. The corresponding affect is one of bit-tersweet, brave resignation.

Most of the freethinking anthropologists described hadoriginally been drawn to anthropology, not for love of an-thropological knowledge as such but because anthropol-ogy seemed to provide them with a powerful conceptualarmament for their struggle against religion. Many of themwere politically engaged advocates of feminism and social-ism. Paradoxically, these egalitarians meticulously studiedand established biological differences between human be-ings. This anthropological knowledge came to be employedin the service of a laicized pastoral state engaged in whatMichel Foucault has called “the bio-politics of the popula-tion.” In this context, Hecht provides a detailed and knowl-edgeable discussion of the emergence of demography andcriminal anthropology, as well as race theory and eugen-ics, in which Georges Vacher de Lapouge played a key role.Lapouge had a strong impact on the eugenics movement inthe United States as well as in Germany. Thus, the originallyleftist and egalitarian project of the freethinking anthropol-ogists eventually transmuted into a radically antiegalitarianrightist body politic.

In France, however, Lapouge remained a fringe figure.In Hecht’s account, racism is depicted as a marginal phe-nomenon in 19th-century French mainstream anthropol-ogy. Her narrative ends in an upbeat tone. Its secret hero isLeonce Manouvrier, who criticized the biological determin-ism predominant among his colleagues while maintaininga secular position. The sociologist Emile Durkheim and thephilosopher Henri Bergson are presented as advocating re-lated forms of “scientific indeterminism” as a response tothe radical materialism of the freethinkers. After all, withBergson’s life force and Durkheim’s notion of society, Godand the soul return in a worldly guise. A post-materialistleftism comes to acknowledge and to speak in a secular vo-cabulary about the variety of once-religious needs allowingfor indeterminacy, mystical experience, and social “spirit.”

Hecht’s discussion of this interesting subject matter isrich and thought provoking. However, her analysis mighthave profited from a more critical engagement with the no-tion of secularization. She provides ample evidence to backup her claim that certain aspects of the freethinking anthro-pologists’ activities and conceptions served as responses toquestions that, in the eyes of the freethinkers, religion couldno longer answer. Secularization has undoubtedly served asa necessary precondition of 19th-century anthropology. Butthese modern phenomena cannot be reduced to varying ac-cidental forms of a transhistorically immutable substance.The idea of scientific progress, for example, cannot be sat-isfactorily explained as a secularized eschatology. It differsin its internal logic (the anticipated future is envisioned asthe outcome of an immanent process of development ratherthan as a transcendent intervention) as well as in its origin—the overcoming of the unalterable, authoritative status ofAristotelian science (Blumenberg 1983). Furthermore, notonly the responses but also the problems often undergosignificant transformations. It seems arguable whether es-chatology or soteriology are really universal and ahistorical“human needs,” as Hecht’s functionalist analysis suggests.This book would have profited from a more self-consciousexploration of its inherent tension between functionalismand historicism. Nevertheless, Hecht’s book is challengingand valuable. It is a must for those who are interested inthe history of French anthropology. It would also be usefuland engaging to those interested in the ethical and politicaldimensions of modernity.

REFERENCE CITEDBlumenberg, Hans

1983 The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. Robert Wallace, trans.Cambridge: MIT Press.

Archaeology beyond Dialogue. Ian Hodder. Salt LakeCity: University of Utah Press, 2003. 208 pp.

STEPHEN A. KOWALEWSKIUniversity of Georgia

This is a collection of short chapters by Ian Hodder, a Selb-stschrift or self-writing, as it were, of pieces published invarious journals and edited volumes, or given at meetings,since 1998. He supplies brief introductions to the whole andto the four sections into which the 15 pieces are grouped.

The first section is about globalization and archaeology.Hodder says that transnationalism has fragmented archae-ology and that this is generally a good thing. In his view ar-chaeology does not speak with the authority that it used tohave. This could be true in some ways. But, for example, mypredecessors here at the University of Georgia—I am think-ing of Robert Wauchope in the 1930s to 1960s and thenJoseph Caldwell into the 1970s—represented a disciplineunified mainly in the sense that there were so few practi-tioners (when Wauchope began the program at the univer-sity, he was the only professional archaeologist in the state).

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They were distinguished scholars, but whether they wieldedpower from positions of authority is open to serious ques-tion. So to me Hodder’s history seems iconic and stereotyp-ical rather than thorough and empirical. Those who wishto write the history of a discipline should refer to original,not secondary, sources.

Similarly, Hodder says that under globalization, archae-ologists must now pay attention to their various publics. Itwould be difficult to think of a major Americanist projectin the last 15 years, CRM or otherwise, that did not spendconsiderable time and effort on public obligations. Quite afew have done much more than the case discussed in thisvolume, and for that matter, Kent Flannery’s Oaxaca projectof the late 1960s was at least as reflexive, socially conscious,and locally involved.

Several chapters loosely and briefly deal with exca-vation method—that is, how the postmodern, globalized,polyvocal world affects the author’s field methods. Here,Hodder responds to criticisms of the methods he is us-ing at Catalhoyuk. Many archaeological colleagues wouldagree with the author that excavation and survey shouldbe intellectual activities, that concepts are formed andretested through practice, and that this process of testingalternatives (my words) occurs in the field as well as thelab.

It can be shown that all of us commit silly interpre-tations from time to time. But because excavation is de-struction, and because we produce for future use and notonly current fashion, archaeologists are held to a more rig-orous standard—that a systematic record be published todocument the information previously in the ground. If wereport what we found and where we found it, consistentwith current standards or better, so that comparison andreanalysis are possible, then we are permitted our interpreta-tions, subject to future scrutiny, applause, or derision. Mostof us would say that if Hodder wants to promote idealist,structuralist interpretations, fine—as long as the originalcollections and information are available for others, whowill surely have different approaches.

Three of the pieces offer interpretations of archaeologi-cal data. One claims that in prehistoric Britain, wetness, dry-ness, and their margins had social meaning. Another con-siders house and household in Neolithic Europe and arguesthat it was a nexus of cultural, economic, and social signif-icance. The chapter coauthored with Craig Cessford offersthe most detail, this from the Catalhoyuk excavations. Thepremise here is that the house itself, and the patterned activ-ities that people regularly carried out in it, acted to embody(to put into the body, as habit) the social rules necessary forpeople to live together in a densely packed, Neolithic vil-lage, and that the house thus helped create social memories,or traditions.

Lengthier publications from the projects cited in thesethree chapters contain more information and richer analy-ses, but his purpose here is to offer something theoretical.Hodder’s proposition in all three is that patterned mate-rial culture, and the regular actions that created it, must

have had meaning for individuals and that such meaningswere socially created, shared, or contested. This premise isutterly vacuous, with or without its dressing of cultural the-ory. Why or when would social, culture-bearing, linguisti-cally capable Homo sapiens not create meanings out of whatthey did and the things in their world? If they made floors,over and over again, they had words describing it and theyacted together or got snippy with each other as people do insocial life. This is an empty generalization, not an advancein anthropological archaeology.

Yet there are interesting observations worth salvagingfrom Hodder’s interpretations, for example, the settlementlocations in the wet-dry paper, the big houses of the Ne-olithic in Europe and the Near East, and the artifacts andmicro-artifacts at long-occupied, dense villages in Anato-lia. These are good initial ideas. Still, the patterns need tobe clearly and explicitly specified. Attention needs to bepaid to the size and representativeness of samples (e.g., areall early Neolithic houses in southeastern Europe large andelaborate?). What are the alternative models? Can com-parison of variations inform us of underlying processes?These basic methodological guidelines might be called oldhat or even social memory, but they have been shownto work. For those interested in Hodder’s Haddenham orCatalhoyuk studies, I recommend the lengthier projectpublications.

Now I Know Only So Far: Essays in Ethnopoetics. DellHymes. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003. 512 pp.

DENNIS TEDLOCKState University of New York, Buffalo

In part, the chapters in this book continue a line of workfor which Dell Hymes is already well known—namely, thedisclosure of verse patterns in texts of Native American nar-ratives that had been previously been presented as prose.But here, too, are explorations of gender relations and char-acterization in stories, together with critical discussions ofthe work of such theorists as Claude Levi-Strauss, WalterOng, and Michael Riffaterre.

Nearly all of the stories presented and interpreted inthis book were collected by handwritten dictation. Such isthe case with stories told by John Rush Buffalo to HarryHoijer in Tonkawa, by William Hartless to L. J. Frachtenbergin Kalapuya, by John B. Hudson to Melville Jacobs in Kala-puya, by Stevens Savage to Melville Jacobs in Molale, by Vic-toria Howard to Melville Jacobs in Clackamas Chinook, byLouis Simpson to Edward Sapir in Wishram Chinook, andby Hiram Smith to Dell Hymes in Wasco Chinook. Hymeskeeps the identities of the narrators and their differencesas artists up front, thus going against the more commonpractice of treating “traditional” verbal arts as anonymousproductions whose primary value lies in their being typicalof a given culture.

With one exception, Hymes deals with stories that werecollected by researchers other than him. The important

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point here is not that Hymes should have done more ofhis own fieldwork but, rather, that past collectors of native-language texts, dating back to the time of Franz Boas, haveleft an enormously rich legacy that is open to retranslationand reinterpretation. This fact is all the more striking inan era when “text” has become a metaphor for culture and“translation” has become a metaphor for interpretations ofcultures that are cast in the discursive prose of observers.These metaphorical usages divert attention from the factthat the publication of texts and translations in the literalsense are no longer standard practice, and that the weightof “thick description” has compressed the discourse of theOther to the point in which it consists of brief extracts thatsupport an interpreter’s argument.

Although Hymes says a good deal about the textshanded down by his predecessors, he scarcely even men-tions the process of text-making itself. Many fieldworkersof the past—among them Washington Matthews, AlfredKroeber, Dorothy Demetracapoulou, and Gladys Reichard—complained that the tediousness of dictation affected per-formance. Recording equipment does not solve all the prob-lems of dictation, nor does it put an end to the need fortranscription and translation, but it does make a differ-ence. Above all, recording frees narrators to exercise theirfull skills, dramatizing their stories in real time.

What remains interesting about dictation is that theconversion of oral performance into oral literature beginswhile the story is being told. As each phrase is spoken, thenext phrase is held in check until the previous one has beenwritten down by the fieldworker, who may need to hear itmore than once. With the slowing of verbal production,speaker and transcriber become partners in a process thatmakes the formal features of discourse more evident andincreases the self-consciousness of the speaker. As GregoryNagy has shown, it was a combination of oral and writ-ten transmission that resulted in the crystallization of versestructure in the Homeric epics, and it is tempting to thinkthat an analogous process has contributed to the clarity ofthe patterns recognized by Hymes. To phrase the matterin the language of Pierre Bourdieu, what may have hap-pened in the transmission from Victoria Howard to MelvilleJacobs to Dell Hymes is that schemes immanent in prac-tice became a theory of practice, a theory that may havealready been emerging in the mind of the storytellerherself.

One of the stories in this book, told in Hopi by HelenSekaquaptewa, was videotaped by Larry Evers. It was tran-scribed and translated twice, first by Emory Sekaquaptewaand Allison Lewis, who treated it as prose, and then by An-drew Wiget, who treated it as poetry. Hymes replaces Wiget’slines, which reflect the original alternations of sound andsilence, with lines he arrived at by scanning the transcrip-tions for syntactic patterns.

Hymes describes his version of the Hopi story as “an-alytic” rather than “a model of vocal performance” andsees it as revealing “ingredients of narrative competence”(p. 251). By “competence” he means linguistic skills that

exist prior to “performance.” As a formalist in the traditionof Roman Jakobson, he constructs his poetics on the modelof linguistics. What qualifies a text as poetic is the extent towhich a performer has utilized the phonetic and syntacticunits of conventional linguistic analysis in measured ways.This is a conservative poetics, one that suspends a wholerange of vocal skills in a zone somewhere outside of “com-petence” and marginalizes a vast range of modern poetry.Hymes ends the book with an chapter in which he singlesout Robinson Jeffers from the crowd of poets who write in“free verse,” demonstrating that the variability of lengthin Jeffers’s lines follows a pattern that can be described innumerical terms.

Chronicling Cultures: Long-Term Field Researchin Anthropology. Robert V. Kemper and Anya PetersonRoyce, eds. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2002. 353 pp.

ANGELIQUE HAUGERUDRutgers University

Eric Wolf, in his 1989 Distinguished Lecture at the AmericanAnthropological Association’s annual meeting, lamentedanthropology’s “intellectual deforestation,” its repeatedslaying of paradigms that later re-emerge in new guises “asif discovered for the first time.” Chronicling Cultures offersa welcome alternative to these tendencies as it confrontsdirectly the challenges of building cumulative knowledge,while at the same time raising new questions. Longitudi-nal ethnographic projects (the focus of this volume) allowa sympathetic yet questioning archaeology of disciplinaryparadigms, methods, ethics, and controversies. Anthropol-ogists who revisit one field site for decades “live the after-math of empire, live the effects of shifting political insti-tutions, live the dismantling and creation of nation-states”(p. xxi). Many have become active partners with and ad-vocates for the people they study ethnographically. Moreso than neophyte or short-term fieldworkers, those who re-turn many times to their field sites have a chance to facetheir limitations of understanding; as the editors note, suchresearchers cannot avoid confronting the provisional na-ture of knowledge or the unpredictability and rapid pace ofchange in ethnographic situations. Contributors to Chron-icling Cultures offer fresh, candid commentary on suchmatters.

Chronicling Cultures is a valuable resource for bothteaching and research. The prose is clear and engaging,and the editors’ volume and section introductions cogentlyframe unifying themes and review a wider disciplinary his-tory of long-term studies. The studies included here begandecades ago, and at least two are intentionally multigen-erational: Elizabeth Colson and Thayer Scudder’s researchin Zambia’s Gwembe Valley, which started in 1956, andGeorge Foster’s study in Tzintzuntan, Mexico, which beganin 1945. Thus Lisa Cliggett, a 1997 Ph.D., writes about “in-heriting fifty years of Gwembe Tonga research,” and RobertV. Kemper and Peter S. Cahn discuss their second- and

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third-generation studies of Tzintzuntan. The volume in-cludes other well-known projects such as those of T. ScarlettEpstein in India, and the large-scale studies of Ju/’hoansi!Kung (Richard B. Lee and Megan Biesele), Navajo of theAmerican Southwest (Louise Lamphere), and the HarvardChiapas Project (Evon Z. Vogt).

Topics emphasized include methods, rethinking earlierknowledge claims, social change, research ethics, chang-ing relationships with study communities, and the chal-lenges of collaborative projects or team fieldwork. Widerdisciplinary changes register in these studies, as Lampheretraces shifts in portrayals of Navajo as “objects,” “subjects,”or collaborators; Lee and Biesele reflect on acerbic debatesin hunter-gatherer studies; and Wade Pendleton notes thathis first field research in a township in Southwest Africa(as it was known during the apartheid era) was deeply in-fluenced by Manchester School approaches at a time whenurban anthropology was an anomalous specialty. Some au-thors offer glimpses of how ethnographic change over timecan reduce the fit of analytical models (e.g., Foster’s dis-cussion of his Limited Good model). Epstein sorts her cor-rect and incorrect predictions about change in two villagesin Mysore, India. Ulla C. Johansen and Douglas R. Whitecoauthor a chapter in the form of a dialogue about newunderstandings gained from converting Johansen’s Turkishgenealogies and ethnographic narratives into a quantitativeform suited to the formal network analysis that is White’sspecialty. In a graceful chapter that includes excerpts of let-ters she exchanged decades ago as a graduate student withher advisor (Elizabeth Colson), Anya Peterson Royce dis-cusses the incompleteness of her first book’s findings aboutZapotec identity, and her deepening understanding aboutmatters that “require time and many field trips before youcan even ‘see’ them” (p. 29) or begin to glimpse the “poeticor striking side of things” (p. 11). While long-term studiesallow a growing trust and familiarity that opens or deepensaccess to sensitive topics, they also pose enormous chal-lenges, including, as Colson discusses, the onerous tasks ofcontinually updating village censuses, digitizing and man-aging a huge database, writing up data collected over manyyears, and arranging for a new generation to take over thesetasks.

Most poignant perhaps are contributors’ reflections ontheir long-term personal relationships with individuals intheir study communities, the effects of their own life-cyclechanges on those relationships, and painful realizationsabout the limits of what any ethnographer can do to as-sist study communities in an era of economic decline andgrowing hardship. In short, this volume illustrates remark-able ethnographic accomplishment, and at the same timehelps us to contemplate anew the place of anthropologyin a world where so many experience disconnection anddispossession.

Callaloo Nation: Metaphors of Race and Religious Iden-tities among South Asians in Trinidad. Aisha Khan.Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. 264 pp.

DEBORAH A. THOMASDuke University

Anthropological attention to processes of subject forma-tion has generated critical observations regarding how theseprocesses change over time and space, doing much toground and specify the loftier theoretical insights of otherfields. Within Latin America and the Caribbean, scholarshave demonstrated how groups of people make and re-make themselves through the prisms of race, class, andethnicity—categories that have been linked to “culture”in different ways at different historical moments. AishaKhan’s Callaloo Nation broadens this discussion by treat-ing religion as a primary domain through which culturalidentity is coconstructed in Trinidad. I write coconstructedhere to emphasize her primary argument that religion isnot a transcendent category in social life but articulateswith other Caribbean identity categories, most especiallyrace.

Khan’s complexly argued book—rooted in 15 years offieldwork and analyses of literary texts, historical archives,travel journals, and oral histories—explores this articula-tion in relation to ideologies of “mixing,” which she sees as“causal forces in social processes rather than being simplyconsequences of other putatively more significant dimen-sions of social organization” (p. 4). By positioning processesof racial and religious articulation in conversation with theways ideologies of “mixing” are worked out in practice,Khan demonstrates how struggles about identity can bothpromote equality and solidify hierarchies.

The bulk of Callaloo Nation is spent ethnographicallygrappling with these processes, illustrating how, despite thepervasiveness of a nationalist ideology that emphasizes dis-courses of “mixing” to promote unity, the effects of mixinghave increasingly been mobilized to distinguish Afro- fromIndo-, Hindu from Muslim, rural from urban, and formallyfrom traditionally educated. But, as Khan brilliantly showsus, it was not always thus. Through oral histories gleanedfrom older Indo-Trinidadians in “South,” the idealized re-gional bastion of Indianness in Trinidad, she reveals howthe kala pani (middle passage) and jahaji bhai (shipmate) re-lationships were central to an early Indo-Trinidadian dias-poric identity that emphasized hard work, solidarity acrossreligious difference, and reciprocity. Complementing thesenarratives is her analysis of the mid-to-late-19th-century de-velopment of a middle-class Indian public sphere (news-papers, clubs, and other secular organizations) geared to-ward economic and sociopolitical “upliftment” rooted ina cultural, rather than religious, sense of Indianness. Thearrival of Presbyterian, Hindu, and Muslim missionaries inthe early 20th century complicated local notions about au-thority and prestige (in part, by encouraging “correct”—unmixed—practice), and splits between Hindus and Muslimstook on greater meaning as Muslim and Hindu religiousleaders became more vocal.

Khan’s discussion here of how social mobility acrossgenerations both generates and undermines group cohesion

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is one of the greatest contributions of the book. TheIndo-Trinidadians with whom she worked perceived aninverse relationship between social mobility and culturalheritage. As people moved “up,” heritage faded and pastpractices were perceived ambivalently. Nevertheless, be-cause religious traditions increasingly became the index ofcultural distinction, ritual practice became an important ve-hicle for debating knowledge and the kinds of knowledgethat were valuable.

By invoking the mid-20th-century emphasis on theself-consciousness (and politicization) of “heritage,” Khanis also obliquely introducing a sense of class conflict. At var-ious points in the book, Khan makes reference to sociopolit-ical and economic transformations that occurred in and be-yond “South” and that influenced how Indo-Trinidadiansperceived their own practices. Yet this is an aspect of thebook that could have been more ethnographically devel-oped, particularly in terms of how the mobilization ofracialized and religious differences within the national po-litical domain has affected the individuals and familiesamong whom she conducted research. This seems especiallypressing since one of Khan’s arguments is that globalizationhas encouraged a narrowing of identities, the establishmentof “orthodox knowledge from heterodox ways of knowing”(p. 155).

Ultimately, however, the book is about the danger ofrooting group membership in cultural categories of belong-ing, a danger that is mitigated neither by a celebrationof cultural heterogeneity or creolization nor by the real-ity of living comfortably with intricate intragroup diversity.As Khan points out, although metaphors of mixing wouldseem to embody cultural inclusivity, they also always invoketheir converse—authenticity and purity. Cultural authen-ticity, she argues, may be a “crucial element in resistance tocolonialism” (p. 11), but it also helps consolidate notionsof racial difference that engender other kinds of exclusions,hardenings, and reifications. It is this point that is so crucialto the analysis of contemporary nationalisms, and Khan’sattention to religion’s articulation with other categories ofdistinction is what makes Callaloo Nation such a significantaddition to this literature.

The Other Side of Middletown: Exploring Muncie’sAfrican American Community. Luke Eric Lassiter, HurleyGoodall, Elizabeth Campbell, and Michelle Natasya John-son, eds. Marburg an der Lahn: Basilisken Press, 2004. 307pp.

VALERIE GRIMIndiana University

KELLIE HOGUEIndiana University

In The Other Side of Middletown, Hurley Goodall and otherstell an engaging story of the lived experiences of AfricanAmericans who reside in Muncie, Indiana. Written in re-

sponse to previous works’ neglect of black life in this his-torical community, the editors and contributing writers takeissue with Robert and Helen Lynds’s 1920s and 1930s stud-ies. They see the Lynds’s Middletown primarily as a contin-uation of the racist traditions and approaches that ignoreblack life as an U.S. experience. Where this text exceedsits predecessors is in the way it conveys race as a lived ex-perience, rather than minimizing it as a by-product of the“American Dream.” The text is, like U.S. society, infusedwith a sense of race as an integral and central part of lifeitself.

Writers of this work have filled in gaps. Taking as littleas four months to collect data, which was compiled largelythrough participant observation approaches and interviewswith African Americans in Muncie, the researchers paral-leled black and white Muncie. Utilizing a theoretical ap-proach similar to the Lynds’s, chapters in this volume re-vealed that blacks in Middletown also earned a living, wereengaged in family life, went to church, and served the needsof black people. What blacks endured in Middletown wasdifferent but not unique. Blacks across the United Stateswere victims of Jim Crowism.

What is important about this volume is how so-cial anthropology utilizes interdisciplinary models and ap-proaches to ground a group’s experience in its voice, whichilluminated certain realities of the researcher and the re-searched. To some degree, the content of The Other Sideof Middletown suggests that the data collectors gained thegreatest education through their interaction and from ex-trapolating knowledge and understanding from the partici-pants. After a thorough reading, it is clear that any attemptto recreate the Lynds’s famous study utilizing an identi-cal methodology would have been inadequate and unsuit-able to effectively integrate the African American voice andexperience.

Race is tricky in this work. It is not clear that the samelevel of interrogation is happening with the interviewedparticipants. One wonders if they viewed this project andthe process simply as the telling of their story and not alsoas a critical assessment of how the Lynds’s study racializedand deracialized them. The complexity of race is hinted butnot thoroughly integrated. This is a story about black peoplelocating their experiences within themselves. Through aneffective transference of the dialogue from African Amer-icans as nonobjects to empowered subjects, these writers’collaborative ethnographic project exceeds the boundariesof traditional ethnography, in the sense that the readers ex-perienced the diverseness of blackness, as theoretical andmethodological approaches evolve into autoethnography,grounded theory, phenomenology, and case study meth-ods. What is being suggested is recognized by the reviewersas not being the book’s aim, but the work encourages us toconsider whether one can ever use majority-racial modelsand fit them onto the black experience and obtain a betterunderstanding of black people’s history and culture.

In this work, vibrant voices emerge from a prolongedand deeply unsettled silence that pushes us beyond the

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narrow confines of the statistically derived generalizationsthat were etched into public memory from the original 1929sociological study by the Lynds entitled Middletown: A Studyin Modern American Culture. The result is an anthropologi-cally rich series of narratives that provide the readers withan informal and intimate look at African American life ina town that still struggles with the nefarious legacy of race;a legacy that has historically rationalized the Lynds’s privi-leged luxury of ignoring a significant portion of the Munciepopulation.

The Other Side of Middletown has strengths and limita-tions. The experience students gained as researchers andevolving scholars is invaluable. The integration of black lifeinto the history of Muncie is certainly a worthwhile achieve-ment. However, there will be those who wonder how thesepeople’s experiences would have read if placed in more com-plex and critical contexts. Rather than seeking the safetyof quantitative data, the stated purpose of the authors was“to fully embrace the experiences of our consultants, theirmemories, and their stories” in a manner that “is indeed ahumanistic effort, not a scientific one” (p. 21). The OtherSide of Middletown does just that.

Early Inhabitants of the Amazonian Tropical Rain For-est: A Study of Humans and Environmental Dynamics.Santiago Mora. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press,2003. 211 pp.

A. C. ROOSEVELTUniversity of Illinois, Chicago

This bilingual monograph by Santiago Mora is billed as astudy of early humans’ interaction with the Amazon rainforest. Strangely, the title is different in the two versions. Inthe English title, only the environment is dynamic, but inthe Spanish, both humans and environment are dynamic.The text is about 90 pages with figures. Its raison d’etreis Penha Roja, an 8,000-year-old campsite on the Caquetain Colombia, but most of the book is a 50-plus page dis-course on human ecology. The brief site report seems anafterthought.

To archaeologists, new data on important sites is wel-come: I benefited from new details on the site, mentionedin print since the 1990s. It reveals an interesting earlyHolocene culture, apparently made up of specialized palmfruit collectors who had begun to cultivate local plants withedible roots or fruits. The book’s contributions, however,are limited. Contrary to the author’s claims, there’s no newtheory, just out-of-date compilations of others’ ideas, oftenwithout due credit or accurate citations. The research onthe culture was scant (two “telephone-booth” test pits, onlyfour dates); the methods, nonstandard (no topo maps, noartifact drawings, no plans, no piece plots, no excavationphotos, no statistical tests); errors abundant (wrong exca-vation size, wrong figure numbers, missing proveniences);and conclusions inappropriate.

Mora is inaccurate about earlier scholars. In his discus-sion of early theories, he leaves out researchers living inAmazonia (pp. 3–7). Wheras visitors such as Wallace andBates may have thought cultures primitive, Charles Hartt,Ladislav Netto, Domingos Soares Penna, Orville Derby, CurtNimuendaju, and others recognized the cultures’ sophisti-cation. Also contrary to Mora, Julian Steward did not basehis Handbook on conquest accounts but on ethnography.For recent research, Mora is unfair along academic–politicallines. Donald Lathrap, Mora’s mentor’s mentor, is praised,while contra-Lathrapians, like Betty Meggers, are chastised,despite their parallel ideas. Mora even reverses stances onissues. For example, he criticizes me, an opponent of ethno-graphic projection, for being a proponent, yet he bases hisprehistoric models on ethnography.

Mora’s cursory literature review does not give sufficientarchaeological background, and he does not discuss howhis site relates to other early tropical lowland sites. He treatsthem cavalierly or not at all, leaving out Boquete, Cavernado Gaviao, Taperinha, and Paituna in Brazil, which are com-parable in age to his, but with different ecological adapta-tions and human impacts. He does not compare his artifactsor food remains with those of late Pleistocene sites suchas Caverna da Pedra Pintada and does not mention CarlosLopez’s (1999) published monograph on the only Pleis-tocene site in lowland Colombia. Mora also erroneouslycites J. Stephen Athens’s and Jerome V. Ward’s 1999 off-siteEcuadorian pollen cores as an archaeological site (1999:77,183) and leaves out Ward as coauthor in the bibliography.

Mora’s environmental definitions are contradictoryand do not reflect current knowledge. He says rain forestshave more than 1,500 millimeters of rain per year but classesLathrap’s and Clark Ericson’s sites as rain forests, althougheach has 1,500 millimeters of rain or less. Conversely, Moraclasses Lopez’s and one of my sites as savannas, althougheach has substantially more than 1,500 millimeters of rain.His characterization of his site’s paleoenvironment is alsoquestionable. The pollen core he relies on is not dated con-temporary to the site, and his supposed rain forest indicator,Moriche, is a common palm in savannas, too (Henderson1995). Mora also says rock for stone tools is scarce in Ama-zonia, but such rocks are widely abundant (Putzer 1984).

Finally, this monograph fails to deliver on Mora’s claimsof theoretical relevance. Mora says the site is the first to dis-prove the theory that hunter–gatherers could not live inAmazon forests without agriculture. However, other earlysites already disproved the theory, because they have onlywild foods. Penha Roja does not disprove this theory be-cause cultigens were present there from the beginning, afact that Mora acknowledges in other publications (Gneccoand Mora 1997; Mora and Gnecco 2003) but not in themonograph. His other claim—that his is the first early siteto show human impacts on habitat—does not acknowledgethat for decades researchers have been unearthing evidenceof early human impacts on tropical South American envi-ronments (Lentz 2000).

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REFERENCES CITEDGnecco, Cristobal, and Santiago Mora

1997 Early Occupations of the Tropical Forest of Northern SouthAmerica by Hunter-Gatherers. Antiquity 71(273):683–690.

Henderson, Andrew1995 The Palms of the Amazon. New York: Oxford University

Press.Lentz, David L., ed.

2000 Imperfect Balance: Landscape Transformations in the Pre-columbian Americas. New York: Columbia University Press.

Lopez, Carlos1999 Occupaciones tempranas en las tierras bajas tropicales

del valle medio del rıo Magdalena sitio 05-YON-002, Yondo-Antioquia. Fundacion de Investigaciones Arqueologicas Na-cionales Banco de la Republica 67.

Mora, Santiago, and Cristobal Gnecco2003 Archaeological Hunter-Gatherers in Tropical Forests. A

View from Colombia. In Under the Canopy: The Archaeol-ogy of Tropical Rainforests. Julio Mercador, ed. Pp. 31–45. NewBrunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Putzer, H.1984 The Geological Evolution of the Amazon Basin and Its

Mineral Resources. In The Amazon: Limnology and LandscapeEcology of a Mighty Tropical River and Its Basin. Harold Sioli,ed. Pp. 15–46. Dordrecht: Dr. W. Junk Publishers.

Social Movements: An Anthropological Reader. June C.Nash, ed. Williston, VT: Blackwell Publishers, 2005. 344 pp.

MICHAL OSTERWEILUniversity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

It is not easy to assess Social Movements in its entirety. The17 chapters, each on a movement that the book’s editor de-scribes as a result of “globalization processes related to theexpansion and integration of capitalist investments, pro-duction, and markets in new areas” (p. 1), span a broad arrayof topics and areas. However, considering that this readeris the only collection on social movements to come out inrecent years that is explicitly identified as anthropological,a discussion of its merits as an entire volume is particularlysignificant.1

In putting this book together, Nash quite explicitlyseeks to contribute to the following: (1) the literatureon social movements, emphasizing anthropology’s uniquecapacity to study movements holistically—managing topresent an analysis privy to both the messy specificities ofgrounded and close study, as well as their macropoliticaland macroeconomic contexts; and (2) to anthropologicalstudies of globalization processes and their effects. I wouldargue that overall, while the book is a welcome and academ-ically rigorous anthology, as a single volume it falls short ofits potential for truly pushing forward or adequately delin-eating and teasing out the importance of the unique theo-retical, epistemological, and methodological contributionsthat an anthropological and ethnographic approach lendsto the study of social movements.

This weakness has a great deal to do with the organiza-tion of the book into four sections with titles such as “Frag-mentation and the Recomposition of Civil Society” and“Secularization and Fundamentalist Reactions.” Althoughdeliberately picking up on key debates within the literature

on globalization, the choice of these sections misses the op-portunity to highlight similarities and differences amongand within the various social movements that could alsochallenge assumptions about the appropriate conceptualand geographical terrains of anthropology.

The overwhelming emphasis on certain geographi-cal regions—Latin America, Africa, and Asia—and the ab-sence or paucity of others—Europe and North America—reinstantiates the vision of anthropology as a disciplinesuited to studying “marginal” political and social processes,mainly in the Third World. The section on secularizationand fundamentalism is particularly troubling in its inclu-sion of movements in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa,with no mention of the growing fundamentalisms in the“West.” Organized differently, the book could have demon-strated anthropology’s theoretical and methodological ca-pacity to study a variety of political processes, in a varietyof places, including the West, more holistically than othersocial sciences.

Furthermore, rather than assume social movements arereactions to, or “generated” by, macroeconomic and dom-inant political processes (as Nash herself seems to acceptin the introduction), ethnographic studies make visible theways in which movements are the products of historicallyand geographically specific processes that, while certainlyconstituted by economic and global processes, are also theresult of explicit efforts at building particular political, so-cial, and religious projects with various orientations towardthe state—a reality that is not limited to the contemporarycontext(s) of globalization.

Despite these organizational weaknesses, many of theindividual pieces do an excellent job of showing the manyfactors and forms of deliberate practice (intellectual, affec-tive, contingent) that must go into producing what the so-cial sciences call “social movements.” Unlike most studiesof social movements in sociology and political science thatignore particularity, specificity, and agency, and which as-sume movements emerge mechanically or naturally whencertain conditions are present, these case studies show howmacroeconomic and political systems are significant to so-cial movements only insofar as they are actively engagedand interpreted on the ground.

Collectively, the various pieces challenge simplisticclassifications such as “new social movements,” showinghow class-consciousness has not disappeared (Kasmir), butthat at the same time, reductive or simple notions ofidentity are not sufficient to understanding a movement’seffectiveness or lack thereof (Stephen, Albro). In others,ethnographic engagement pushes the authors to focus onthe failures, shortcomings, and even the surprising use ofsocial movement tactics by conservative institutions, chal-lenging the romanticism and simplifications often asso-ciated with social movements (Edelman, Bowie). Partic-ularly notable is Edelman’s piece that questions popularterms such as “networks” and “civil society,” used (oftencrudely) by academics and social movement–civil society

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actors alike. In doing so, pieces like his raise questions thatare of relevance not only to academics but also to socialmovements and other political actors who are themselvesstruggling to understand appropriate strategies for socialchange in the contemporary context. Overall, the repeateddescriptions of the intellectual, theoretical, and investiga-tive work at the heart of what most social movements dopoint to a potentially exciting intersection between aca-demic and activist work, one that other less-embedded ap-proaches miss.

NOTE

1. The works by Alvarez et al. (1998) and Fox and Starn (1997)are perhaps the last two such collections. And, notably, the firstis more explicitly situated within Latin American studies thananthropology.

REFERENCES CITEDAlvarez, S., A. Escobar, and E. Dagnino, eds.

1998 Cultures of Politics and Politics of Culture: Re-VisioningLatin American Social Movements, Boulder, CO: WestviewPress.

Fox, R., and O. Starn, eds.1997 Between Resistance and Revolution: Cultural Politics and

Social Protest, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Ethnoecology: Situated Knowledge/Located Lives. Vir-ginia D. Nazarea, ed. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.2003. 299 pp.

WILLIAM BALEETulane University

This is a paper reprint of the 1999 cloth edition, and eventhough the pace of change in ethnoecology and allied fieldssince then has been rapid, Situated Knowledge/Located Livesremains opportune reading for ecological anthropologists.Editor Virginia Nazarea emphasizes the contingency of eth-noecological knowledge through time. She distances herapproach to ethnoecology from that of ethnolinguistic,classificatory approaches to the examination instead of in-trasocietal and intersocietal variability in perception of theenvironment, and in valuation of its resources. Not all re-sources in all cultures are valued because of their export po-tential. Some accrue indigenous folk value because of theirperceived aesthetic properties. Some are valued differentlyby distinct strata of society, based on age, gender, ethnic,and class affiliations. Nazarea and her collaborators’ eth-noecology has an applied aspect that deals with how local,cultural constructs of environment, landscape, and biotacan be incorporated into plans for commons managementand conservation of crop genetic resources (fv’s or folk va-rieties). This approach reflects a concern with intellectualproperty (or traditional resource) rights that refer to folkknowledge and use of biotic resources.

Eugene Hunn argues that Traditional EnvironmentalKnowledge (TEK) harbors a valuable critique of Western sci-ence that could lead in new directions; TEK proffers mod-els of sustainable living apart from market-driven factors.

Lillie Lane shows how Navajo formulaic construction of thehouse (hogan) carries mnemonic codes that help in preserv-ing other aspects of traditional knowledge. Michael Doveexamines how the current use of plants and the recount-ing of mythologies pertaining to their origins in South-east Asian contexts reveal the history of their incorporationinto crop repertoires. Two normative accounts of indige-nous land and water management are chapters by RichardFord (on the Zuni) and Devon Pena (on Chicanos of theUpper Rio Grande).

Nazarea demonstrates the utility of Thematic Appercep-tion Tests in defining the essence of plant resources as theseare perceived by different groups stratified by age, sex, andethnicity in Lantapan, the Philippines. Daniela Soleri andSteven Smith give an enlightening account of crop varieties,both new and old, and how these are maintained or notin traditional ethnographic settings. They evaluate cross-pollinating species like maize and how factors of heritability(high or low) of specific traits (such as color of ear) may in-fluence selection practices by farmers. They pose questionsfor future research on how traditional farmers impact in situcrop genetic variability over time.

Timothy Johns looks at how food production and foodpreparation practices in mostly African milieus impact nu-trition and health. Marta Lagrotteria and James Affolter givean overview of “wildcrafting”—that is, gathering of nondo-mesticated plants for sale on the market, based on the real orimagined medicinal and aromatic properties of these plants,in northern Argentina. Commons issues are evident in thediscussion, because one of the postulated reasons for thedecline of native species and environmental degradation inthe area is “indiscriminate collection” (p. 179). They assessarguments in favor of ex situ conservation of these resourcesvia domestication. Scott Atran’s study of perceptions of thecharacteristics of resources by three different ethnic com-munities in the Maya area is based on Consensus Analysis.These perceptions are correlated with behaviors that affectthe commons.

The late Darrell Posey wrote his chapter on traditionalresource rights (his term), suggesting that intellectual prop-erty rights, as configured in Western civilization, are some-what alien to most indigenous societies. David Stephensonagrees with Posey that intellectual property rights in thebroad sense (including patent and copyright restrictions)are probably inappropriate in most indigenous (folk, non-Western) contexts; rather, protections afforded by trade li-censes and trade secrets do bespeak a legal arena in whichmany traditional societies and the specific cultural and tech-nological knowledge held by their constituents can be rep-resented best. That is because many groups do have secretsocieties and the like with culturally recondite knowledge.Katy Moran’s chapter adumbrates well-known observationsof the correlation between biotic diversity and cultural di-versity and extant means for compensating native peoplesfor development of drugs based on their knowledge. Thischapter—and the book itself—was written before govern-ments began to draft laws specifically protecting indigenous

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knowledge and restricting access to it—specifically, in theLatin America context, in Colombia and Brazil. Initiativesby governments are now also a factor in traditional resourcerights, including those dealing with new drugs and the like,but obviously these initiatives are not covered herein.

Christine Kabuye’s chapter reprints the famous 1988Declaration of Belem, a benchmark for later work in intellec-tual property rights regarding traditional resources and folksocieties. The epilogue by Robert Rhoades and the late JackHarlan reinforces the distancing of Nazarea’s ethnoecologyfrom that of an intellectualist, ethnolinguistic ethnobiol-ogy, although perhaps it goes too far in downplaying thecritical importance of basic research. They regard highly theapplied potential of this ethnoecology—its capacity to grap-ple with real world problems, such as intellectual propertyrights, and the loss of biodiversity and traditional knowl-edge. They note that the preceding chapters in the book takeethnoecology out of the “straightjacked approaches of staticlinguistic analysis” (p. 278) to the “political ecology of cog-nition” (pp. 278–279). Although it may be true that ethnoe-cology contains sufficient knowledge to be useful in helpingresolve problems related to modern human and environ-mental interactions, basic research on the history and con-temporary dynamics of indigenous knowledge of environ-ments and biota nevertheless informs much of this volume.In sum, the book is effective in delineating the history oftheory in ethnoecology; approaches to perception of the en-vironment and biota by various interested parties; access toand utilization of the commons in traditional settings; andintellectual property rights in non-Western legal contexts.

Archaeology as a Process: Processualism and Its Progeny.Michael J. O’Brien, R. Lee Lyman, and Michael BrianSchiffer. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2005. 350pp.

STEPHEN A. KOWALEWSKIUniversity of Georgia

This is a history of archaeology since 1960, limited to theUnited States and, to a lesser extent, Britain. What the au-thors mean by a “history of archaeology” I will explainbelow.

The virtue of this book is its lightness. It has many pho-tographs of archaeologists. It has cartoons. There are tables,such as a list of all the archaeology books published by Aca-demic Press. The writing tries to be informal, which is notan easy thing to accomplish well, but when the attemptworks, the words flow along quickly and even amusingly.This book would appeal to undergraduates.

The authors discuss leaders, followers, schools, camps,personalities, citation-circles, most of the schisms, and allthe -isms. The treatment may be “Enlitenment,” but it is abroad reconnaissance—as evidence, the index has 700 en-tries. There are over 1,600 bibliographic references, of whichonly 46 are to works of Lewis Binford and only 42 to thepublications of Michael Schiffer.

The title, Archaeology as a Process, refers to the authors’approach to the history of the discipline. For them, scienceis a marketplace of ideas in which not the ideas but their hu-man proponents contend with the objective of prevailingin material ways over their opponents and everyone else. Itwould not be an excessive exaggeration to title the bookArchaeology as a Process: An Explicitly Capitalist Approach.Ideas are products and the field consists of consumers whoselect among products. In the authors’ view, the theoriesand methods do not have inherent value; archaeologicalresults are incidental by-products of the struggle to gainmarket recognition. In this approach, advertising may notbe all, but it is crucial.

If science worked as a marketplace, would economicprinciples apply? For example, is Gresham’s law operatingin archaeology? Gresham’s law is “bad money drives outgood”; more precisely, when two forms of currency are incirculation, the one perceived as more valuable will be heldwhile the one perceived as debased will remain in circula-tion. Could it be that this happens to method and theory,where what is advertised and passed as theory is debasedwhile most archaeologists go quietly about their work us-ing the valuable method and theory?

As told in this history, natural selection rules in science-as-marketplace. What are the units on which selection op-erates? Here is where the sociology comes in—the schools(Michigan, Arizona), the schisms, and the -isms (culture-history, postprocessualism, ethnoarchaeology, etc.). Indi-viduals better their positions by joining and leading fac-tions; -isms are given names or trademarks to distinguishthem in the competitive marketplace. Thus “selection”would operate on two different things: Individuals’ careersand their “products” (ideas or -isms), which, I suppose,would be considered phenotypic, like behavior or artifacts.On the first level, “selection” of individuals is easy to un-derstand (if not entirely apt). It is like a college dean’spoint of view—the dean does not read what professors pub-lish or care what they are cited for, as long as they pub-lish and are cited frequently, or, better, bring in externalfunding.

The other kind of unit on which selection is said towork—the “product”—is more problematic. The authorsuse the ready-at-hand labels or trademarks (what peoplesay) instead of the more difficult history of behavior—whatarchaeologists actually produce. In an evolutionary perspec-tive such as the authors’, is it not poor systematic taxon-omy to reify advertised identities as the fundamental unitsof a discipline? I would think that an evolutionary, behav-ioral approach would be less gullible and more discerningof those practices that work and those that do not—unless,of course, “what works” is defined as that which advancesyour career.

My criticism is that the book chooses not to concernitself with the findings of archaeology—that is, the what,why, and how of the past. A student would learn little aboutthe results of archaeology over the last 50 years, or, moreimportantly (because this a history of the discipline and

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not a prehistory text), little about which theories, meth-ods, or techniques helped and which did not help us reachthose understandings. What have we learned about the pastand how have we learned it? Unlike the disciplinary histo-ries by such respected figures as Ernst Mayr or Marvin Har-ris, this one does not critically identify the field’s successesand failures. Its emphasis on the succession of academicfashions does not connect well with the research designsand practice of most archaeologists in CRM or academicinstitutions.

And, yet, Archaeology as a Process is a noncontentious,affably told story. Certainly the authors deserve credit fortheir distinctive, accessible, and wide-ranging endeavor.Perhaps there is room for such a history.

Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethicsas Anthropological Problems. Aihwa Ong and StephenJ. Collier, eds. Williston, VT: Blackwell Publishers, 2005.494 pp.

ULF HANNERZStockholm University

Some books are rewarding to read, but difficult to review.Here is one of them. It is an edited volume, with 24 chap-ters; and as some of these are coauthored, it has a slightlylarger number of contributors. Moreover, as the editors notein one of the three introductory chapters, the compositeconcept of “global assemblage” suggests some inherent ten-sions: “global implies broadly encompassing, seamless, andmobile; assemblage implies heterogeneous, contingent, un-stable, partial, and situated.” Under the circumstances, a re-viewer can perhaps at best convey a sense of what kind ofbook it is.

The volume is the result of a workshop in Prague,mostly of U.S.-based scholars (with a certain Berkeley dom-inance) and with a few Europeans; despite the choice ofsite, apparently no Czech colleague was among the par-ticipants. The contributors range from well-known seniorscholars (George Marcus, Aihwa Ong, Paul Rabinow, NikolasRose, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Marilyn Strathern, and oth-ers) to members of the first new professional cohorts of the21st century. With an anthropological center of gravity buta degree of interdisciplinarity, Global Assemblages suggestssome of the current areas of intellectual exchange or con-vergence in social science. It can also be seen as document-ing another move in the continued reinvention of anthro-pology. There are few references to even the most promi-nent of late-20th-century anthropologists (other than thecontributors). Those by now routinely assuming that any-thing “global” in anthropology deals centrally with popularculture, consumption, migration, and the media are in fora surprise. The Internet figures rather marginally, and it isnot a book about September 11 or jihad either. (I am notcomplaining.)

As the world is depicted here, in large part throughnew and often hybrid vocabulary (emic or analytical,

to the extent that the distinction is still there to bemade), the scenery may appear more unfamiliar: techno-zones, the postsocial, the garrison–entrepot as site of themilitary–commercial nexus, therapeutic as well as techno-preneurial citizenship, antiretroviral globalism, nested hi-erarchies of biotechnical norms, information architects,real-time protocols for imagined consultations (and viceversa), paraethnographic practices. Yet, clearly, the sceneryis shaped in large part by the management of humanbiology, by new interrelations between technologies andmarkets, by the refiguration of the state under neoliberal-ism, and by the transnational operations of new forms ofexpertise.

Where in the world is this world? It may be a conse-quence of the actual current distribution of the phenomenaexplored that the materials are often from Europe and NorthAmerica, but certainly the coverage is wider, ranging fromWall Street speculators to West African bush bandits. Thus,Susan Greenhalgh discusses attempts of the Chinese stateto govern demography; Kris Olds and Nigel Thrift, as well asAihwa Ong, describe the efforts of certain Southeast Asianstates to climb upward in the global knowledge economy;Gısli Palsson and Paul Rabinow rather playfully claim thatbiotech/bioethics may have become a gatekeeper conceptfor Icelandic studies (much as caste has been for India, andhonor and shame for the Mediterranean); and Janet Roit-man dwells on the relative order of business and crime thatactually exists in the Chad Basin, the kind of African regionin which other commentators have recently been inclinedto see only disorder, “anarchy,” and so forth.

Twenty-first-century anthropology evidently need not,should not, give up its ambition of global reach, even whenattending to the phenomena of high modernity in tech-nology, science, business, or statecraft. If anthropology isto some extent being reinvented here, however, what ischanging? Perhaps, to a degree, Global Assemblages exem-plifies an anthropology without ethnography—in many ofthe chapters, there is little of the close-up observation ofthe everyday that has been central to the discipline. Possi-bly this is only to be expected in the compact contributionsto an edited volume, so that in a monographic format theethnography will again appear. Yet it could be that we seein them instances of another style of anthropology, dealingwith matters on another scale, in other kinds of sites (andwith different kinds of interlocutors, as not least GeorgeMarcus and Douglas Holmes argue). Reinventing anthro-pology here may be in significant part a matter of retoolingfor an increasingly sophisticated handling of combinationsof texts, documents, media materials, and other sources.Those who have seen parallels between anthropologicalwork and investigative reporting may find some supportfor that view in this volume. And those who wonder howthis should affect anthropological training may get morestuff to think about. With its consistent emphasis on prob-lematizing, on close analytical scrutiny of global public life,its assumptions, and their implications, however, the bookclearly goes beyond reporting. I would expect we will refer to

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it often in coming arguments about the varieties of criticalanthropology.

The Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism from Lewisand Clark to Wounded Knee. Jeffery Ostler. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2004. 400 pp.

THOMAS BIOLSIUniversity of California, Berkeley

Jeffery Ostler, a historian at the University of Oregon, haswritten an ambitious book. I say ambitious because of itsformidable historical sweep (from the 1803 Louisiana Pur-chase to the aftermath of the Wounded Knee massacre in1890), because of Ostler’s goal to examine in detail both theLakota and U.S. standpoints in the colonial encounter, andbecause of his scholarly control over a wide range of histor-ical sources. For specialists in the “ethnohistory” of NativeAmericans, most impressive may be Ostler’s mining of the“Letters Received by the Office of Indian Affairs,” from theCheyenne River, Spotted Tail (Rosebud), Standing Rock, andRed Cloud (Pine Ridge) agencies. Although these records inthe National Archives are available on microfilm, they arenot organized by topic or in an order that makes them easilyaccessible, and scholarship on late-19th-century reservationlife has been limited by the difficulty of working with them.Ostler has patiently expended the scholarly time and energyto examine these documents, as well as many other sources.

Ostler has gone beyond all of the existing books on19th-century Lakota history—and there are many of them,including George Hyde’s classics A Sioux Chronicle, RedCloud’s Folk, and Spotted Tail’s Folk—to take Lakota cultureseriously in writing the history of these people. In this re-gard, Ostler is probably strongest in his analyses of the his-tory of Lakota religious beliefs and practices. He considers,for example, both Lakota political and religious thinkingbehind the acceptance, even encouragement, of Christianmissionaries on the reservations in the 1870s and 1880s.Some Lakota leaders such as Red Cloud (Oglala Lakota) andSpotted Tail (Sicangu Lakota) recognized that missionariesoffered potential allies in certain political engagements withthe U.S. government and in education in the English lan-guage for the next generation. But Ostler also argues per-suasively that Lakota people “often understood Christianritual primarily in terms of its power to heal” (p. 190) and,thus, took it seriously, even if they cannot be said to havebeen full-fledged “converts” to Christianity.

Ostler also examines Lakota reception of the GhostDance, which originated with the Paiute prophet Wovokaand is widely recognized in anthropology as a paradigmatic“revitalization movement” or “syncretic” religion. He ar-gues that the Ghost Dance did not necessarily representanything “particularly unprecedented” (p. 253) in Lakotaspiritual thinking. Although it was clearly an “anticolo-nial movement” (p. 262), even Ghost Dance’s referencesto the (Christian) “messiah” were a matter of the Lakotaturning the contradictions of Christianity against the col-

onizers in a typically Lakota spiritual apprehension ofpower.

Anthropologists will have their quibbles with this book,which are more a function of disciplinary priorities than anydeficiency in Ostler’s work. For example, in his attempt todemonstrate that the Ghost Dance was fully consistent withLakota religion, Ostler argues that bulletproof Ghost Danceshirts and dresses made sense in terms of a long traditionof Lakota “spiritual experimentation” (p. 270), in whichthe physical and the spiritual were interwoven in a singlelifeworld. Thus, we are told, Lakota men understood therawhide shield that could on occasion deflect a bullet to beeffectively continuous with leather shield covers, which hadno such physical capacities but spiritually protected the car-rier. The problem here is that we are asked to accept that thesame empirical Lakota mind that could effectively engagethe U.S. Army in a long-term guerrilla action, and developsophisticated political tactics and strategies against the col-onizers on the reservation, made no significant distinctionbetween the power of guns and the power of muslin GhostShirts. If this was the case, it requires additional cultural andhistorical analysis. To assume this equation ahistorically—as something in the longue duree of Lakota culture ratherthan something related to the complexity, and emergentquality, of critical native thought in the desperation of thecolonial encounter—strikes this reviewer as verging on atroubling Orientalizing assertion. The Lakota are in dangerhere of being denied a history or of being allowed only astructuralist history in which the more things change themore they remain the same.

My quibbles aside, however, this is an important con-tribution to the history of American Indians. It would be avery appropriate text in an upper-division course on Amer-ican Indian policy or the history of the reservation system.

Foundations of Social Archaeology: Selected Writingsof V. Gordon Childe. Thomas C. Patterson and CharlesE. Orser Jr., eds. Lanham, MD: Rowman and LittlefieldPublishers, Inc. 2004. 211 pp.

ROBERT L. SCHUYLERUniversity of Pennsylvania

V. Gordon Childe (1892–1957) was the only archaeologistof the last century who successfully gained visibility as atheoretician across the social sciences and the humanitieswhile simultaneously achieving broad public recognition.Thomas C. Patterson and Charles E. Orser have now as-sembled in a single volume 14 of his important program-matic statements. These essays are arranged chronologically(1935–58) and, as such, present a condensed but informa-tive history of Childe’s research and evolving theoreticalinterpretations. Thirteen of the chapters are “stand-alone”items (journal articles, chapters from books edited by oth-ers, and inaugural addresses), with only one (Chapter 6, “So-ciety, Science and History”) extracted from his 1947 book,History.

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Chapters 1 through 4 reveal Childe as a culturalhistorian, a materialist, and an evolutionist, and they alsohighlight his standing as one of the leading archaeologicalsynthesizers of European prehistory. The subsequent threechapters (“Archaeology as Anthropology”; “Archaeology asa Social Science: Inaugural Address”; and “Society, Science,and History”) move the reader away from the specifics of ar-chaeological patterns, sequences, and technological stagesand into Childe’s continuing attempts to understand hisdiscipline’s relationship to the social sciences and to his-tory. The final chapters bring us back to cultural (social)evolution and include his classic statements on the primaryrevolutions in human history: Chapter 8 (“The Urban Rev-olution”), Chapter 9 (“Old World Prehistory: Neolithic”),and Chapter 13 (“The Bronze Age”).

The final chapter (Chapter 14, “Retrospect”), publishedin 1958, the year after Childe’s suicide in Australia, offers abluntly honest precis biohistory of his complex and neverstatic intellectual career.

Orser and Patterson open the book with a brief butwell argued introduction. Its title “V. Gordon Childe andthe Foundations of Social Anthropology,” and the reversedversion that serves as the lead title for the entire book andwhich delegates V. Gordon Childe to a subtitle, reveals anagenda. The editors are attempting to claim Childe as one ofthe founders—indeed, probably the first major, intellectualancestor—of “Social Archaeology.”

But what is “Social Archaeology?” Currently it is not atheoretical perspective in archaeology but, rather, a num-ber of programmatic statements combining disparate ele-ments that emphasize the social and historical nature ofthe archaeological record. Such statements also give atten-tion to the contemporary uses (and abuses) of archaeolog-ical knowledge and the immediate social position of thediscipline and its practitioners.

The editors try to clarify such a nebulous programby dividing it into two separate definitions: (1) “soci-etal archaeology,” an approach that emphasizes humansocial organization and interactions in history, and (2)“social archaeology,” the study of how and why thepresent uses archaeology and the knowledge of the past itgenerates.

Childe can be seen, as the editors’ introduction tries todemonstrate, as a possible advocate of an embryonic “soci-etal archaeology.” Oddly their discussion is primarily basedon his famous books—The Dawn of European History (1939),What Happened in History (1946), History (1947), Man MakesHimself (1951), and Social Evolution (1951)—with little refer-ence to the essays they collected in this volume. However,even in regard to “societal archaeology,” the reader mustlook closely and focus on the last period in his thinking.The case for “social archaeology” is even weaker and almostinvisible in the 14 chapters. Childe was a politically activeperson and very early (1922) undertook a “sentimental ex-cursion into Australian politics” (p. 191), but there is littleevidence of more than a passing scholarly interest in the so-cial positioning and purposes of archaeology between 1925

and 1957. Clearly, Childe was firmly committed to the pub-lic dissemination of archaeological knowledge (his “book-stall archaeology”) but this goal easily fits into standard,even bourgeois, archaeology.

If the reader concentrates on the essays presented byPatterson and Orser, Childe comes across much more pow-erfully as a traditional social scientist and cultural evo-lutionist. His partial acceptance of historical materialismmoves him beyond the means of production to the socialrelations of production, but he is never far from a mate-rialistic base. His “societal archaeology” has more to dowith the persistent problem of how to apply empirical butgeneral models of cultural evolution to the historical andethnographic specifics of individual case studies than itdoes with what some archaeologists today are calling “SocialArchaeology.”

Whiggish history always ends up where it wants to go.In the early 1970s, processual archaeology had arrived andwas also in search of intellectual ancestors. One candidatewas Walter W. Taylor. Unfortunately, Taylor was still alive,and when asked to comment on this new movement, he fo-cused on how it fundamentally differed from his own the-oretical views. If Childe were still with us, it is possible that“social archaeology” (or “societal archaeology” and “socialarchaeology”) would in part get a similar reaction.

Patterson and Orser have given us an excellent collec-tion of the key independent essays by the most famous ar-chaeologist of the last century. Just as Childe’s intellectualcareer was varied and multilineal, so can this compilationof his writings be put to many positive uses. It could evenbe used to understand Childe in his own terms and in hisown historic setting.

Race to the Finish: Identity and Governance in anAge of Genomics. Jenny Reardon. Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 2005. 312 pp.

HILARY CUNNINGHAMUniversity of Toronto

In 1991, almost one year after the United States announcedthe Human Genome Project (HGP), a small group of pop-ulation geneticists and evolutionary biologists critiquedthe endeavor, arguing that, because the HGP planned tomap the human genome on the basis of largely Cauca-soid samples, it was “Eurocentric.” They proposed a sec-ond project, the Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP),which would expand the sampling to reflect the greater ge-netic diversity of the human family. Some urgency was im-plied, given that HGDP participants felt that samples fromindigenous populations were of particular importance andthat these had to be acquired before some groups simplyvanished.

Less than two years after the inception of the HGDP,the project found itself on the brink of collapse. Many an-thropologists had resoundingly critiqued the project’s sci-entific basis, and in December 1993, with a broad coalition

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of indigenous, environmental, and human rights groupsbacking it, the World Council of Indigenous Peoples re-named the HGDP “the Vampire Project.” It was a label thatwould stick and today continues to haunt the project’s be-leaguered supporters.

What went wrong with the HGDP? Is this the story ofa group of well-meaning but overconfident scientists im-posing their own visions of scientific advancement on aworld that had grown less friendly to the “expert voice”? Is itthe story of a newly empowered but somewhat overzealoustransnational political network that stigmatized the projectirreparably? In Race to the Finish: Identity and Governance inan Age of Genomics, Jenny Reardon takes a measured andthoughtful look at the HGDP debacle, carefully steppingaside from comment on the egos, tempers, and the politicalgrandstanding that plague this story, to focus on the sub-stantial conceptual issues that divided the different groupsinvolved. Reardon’s project is to construct a much morecomplicated picture of the HGDP. She explores its brief buttumultuous presence as a story about science and powerin the context of globalization, emergent political tensionsbetween north and south, and fresh debates over the mean-ing of race. The author’s theoretical objective is to probe theHGDP as a power–knowledge nexus through which scien-tific and social practices are coproduced. Yet what is mostcaptivating about the book and perhaps also more useful,is Reardon’s detailed account of the debates within anthro-pology that the HGDP fostered.

Reardon situates the HGDP in a longer discussion abouthuman variation, evolution, and the classification of hu-man diversity, and, as the title suggests, she concentrateson race as a particularly problematic category. (The HGDPwas launched around the time The Bell Curve reignited dis-cussion about race and IQ.) Reardon documents the variouscritiques of anthropologists who felt that the project, de-spite its turn to new genetic technologies, was neverthelessembedded in 19th-century racist biology. She also demon-strates how HGDP organizers, to their detriment, concen-trated much more on the “science” of the project and failedto think carefully about collaboration and informed con-sent. The result of this oversight was a series of public rela-tions disasters, with HGDP scientists such as Luca Cavalli-Sforza and Mary Claire King left appalled by accusationsof biocolonialism and legal experts such as Henry Greeleyscrambling to produce ethical protocols to address the ob-jections raised.

Although the HGDP story is a complicated one, it doespoint rather directly to the importance of collaborating withresearch populations at the initial stages of a project. AsReardon notes, many of the HGDP’s proponents seemedto think that the science part could be kept separate fromthe collection and archiving of genetic data. When this be-came impossible, the project proposed a set of ethical proce-dures that were somehow supposed to counter what manyindigenous people and activists saw as a much deeper setof historically constructed inequalities. Clearly, one of thecentral issues that prevented the HGDP from going forward

was the failure among many of its proponents to recognizethe larger political economic context in which genetic re-search currently takes place.

The issues raised in Reardon’s study of the HGPDare far from resolved. In some respects, her book can beread as an informative account of some of the “best badpractices” of conducting genetic research with indigenouspopulations. In delineating this complicated history, Rear-don takes a look into an unpleasant chapter of anthro-pology, but, in doing so, she courageously provides uswith an important and useful book for present and futureresearch.

From Racism to Genocide: Anthropology in the ThirdReich. Gretchen E. Schafft. Urbana: University of IllinoisPress, 2004. 297 pp.

BERNHARD STRECKInstitut fur Ethnologie

This book under review attempts to contribute to the un-derstanding of the complicity of German scholarship withthe National Socialist Government and to reveal “Ger-man anthropology” as scientific stimulus for, companionin, and profiteer of Nazi mass murder. Gretchen Schaffthas searched a number of archives, in particular the doc-uments of the former “Institut fur Ostforschung,” locatedin occupied Cracow and stored today in Washington, D.C.(NAA-SI). She has also spoken to both eminent scholars onthe subject and to survivors. The material presented in thevolume is convincing, both interesting and explosive, andthrows a terrible light on the involvement of the scholarsthat she describes, many of whom were able to continuetheir careers almost unabated after 1945. The investigativeand accusative tenor of the volume gives it a particular cur-rency; it will certainly find its place in the contemporarydiscourse on scientific ethics, on anthropological account-ability, and on the encounter with the darkest chapters ofscholarship in the service of politics.

But the reviewer must protest decidedly against the par-allel drawn throughout the work between the German disci-plines of anthropologie and ethnologie. Schafft—either outof ignorance or intent—is victim of the cliche that whileU.S. anthropology was employed in service of the conceptsof cultural relativism and tolerance, German anthropologywas applied exclusively in the service of Nazi extermina-tion policy. The book, clearly written with a great deal ofengagement but little knowledge of German is, as a resultof this thoroughly simplified hypothesis, more confusingthan constructive. A text written with the fate of millionsof innocent victims in mind will be welcomed by all well-meaning readers. The central hypothesis must neverthelessbe challenged in the name of German ethnology, which,since Adolf Bastian (1826–1905), had seen its calling in thestudy of overseas tribal societies but is wrongly includedhere under the term anthropology and, thus, also indictedfor having committed mass murder.

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The author seems to be a victim of her own lack ofknowledge when it comes to European scholarly terminol-ogy. Josef Mengele, Eugen Fischer, Othmar Frh. von Ver-schuer, Adolf Wirth, Sophie Erhardt, or Eva Justin mayhave called themselves anthropologists; they representednevertheless a completely different discipline from that ofthe U.S. Boasians. These latter cultural anthropologists findtheir equivalent in the continental ethnologists, amongwhom individuals may have been, or had sympathies for,the National Socialists—in particular, as a result of their(futile) hopes of pushing through an international colo-nial policy revision (cf. Streck 2000)—but who in generalhad very little to do with the enumeration, measurement,racial evaluation, and scientific investigation of the victimsof the regime. Schafft is comparing apples with oranges,which, considering the incendiary nature of the topic, isinexcusable.

The more minor factual errors, a profusion of whichcan be found in this comprehensive volume, are, by com-parison, forgivable. For the potential U.S. reader for whomevents in contemporary central Europe will be quite dis-tant, I will only mention a few of the more obvious fac-tual errors: The German Democratic Republic did not existfor 50 years (p. 253); Czechoslovakia did not exist in 1882,and the state existing under this name in 1939 was not an-nexed completely (p. 89); principle in German is spelledPrinzip and not Princip (p. 224); the anthropologist teach-ing in Breslau was named von Eickstedt, not von Eichstedt(p. 53, 230, 240); Walter Scheidt’s definitions of ethnol-ogy and anthropology have been confused by the author(p. 52); she mistakenly understood “foreign Germans”—Auslandsdeutsche—to be a code name for Jews instead ofunderstanding the term literally as Germans living abroad(p. 51); Gobineau is stylized to a diplomat in the service ofthe German Kaiser (p. 39), who published his theses at theend of the 19th century (p. 39); Great Britain did not join inthe Second World War in 1941 (p. 118); the number of halfa million murdered Roma is taken from a dubious source,and so on.

The author may pursue a noble cause in her cautionaryappeal to be watchful when it comes to the abuse of scien-tific research, and this may excuse factual inaccuracies suchas the branding of all forms of work in wartime Germany as“slave labor” (p. 137). But her theses and conclusions aboutthe “culpability of German anthropologists” are confusedand in their present form unacceptable.

REFERENCE CITEDStreck, Bernhard, ed.

2000 Ethnologie und Nationalsozialismus. Gehren: Escher-Verlag.

Creating the Creole Island: Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Mauritius. Megan Vaughan. Durham, NC: DukeUniversity Press, 2005. 341 pp.

CLARE ANDERSONUniversity of Leicester

Megan Vaughan’s interweaving of the economic and so-cial history of 18th-century French colonial Ile de France(now Mauritius) with an assessment of the lived experi-ence of slavery is historical anthropology of the very bestkind. Drawing on the magnificent legal records produced bythe culture of the ancien regime—detailed investigations,judges’ deliberations, and interrogations of suspects andwitnesses—Vaughan finds a textual residue rich in detailsof the quotidian. Using the many ambiguities and com-plexities of these records to examine the construction ofslave identities, neat thematic subdivisions give way to thereality of slave lives. The overarching themes of the book—relationships, ethnicity, race, language, labor, gender, sex,and sexuality—overlap to produce a powerful set of argu-ments about what it meant to be a slave. Also, Vaughaninterprets court records as part of an attempt to bring slav-ery into the public sphere and “civilize” it. In this con-text, a further concern of the book is the importance ofhonor and reputation to both owners and slaves: In manyways, each embodied the other in carrying and mediatingrespectability. More generally, Vaughan argues that courtrecords reveal a fundamental social contradiction, for theemphasis on intent and confession that underpin the legalrecords assume things about agency, knowledge, and sub-jectivity that are apparently contradictory with a state ofslavery.

The book begins with a discussion of the marginal-ized creole community in present-day Mauritius. Creoles,Vaughan argues, are defined both by a racial category (asthe descendents of Africans, although in reality creoles areof mixed descent) and by the idea that they have no au-thentic culture through which they can trace their origins.Exploding this notion of “authenticity,” she unpeels ac-counts of the island’s early settlement and “natural” worldto show their inherent instability. Moreover, the culturesfrom which slaves were drawn (from whom many creolesare descended) were themselves complex and dynamic. Thiswas a period of ethnic and political transformation in Mada-gascar, for instance. Other sources of slaves, such as SouthIndia, were already highly creolized. In this sense, the cul-tural “roots” of slaves may have been created by the slavetrade itself, a “package of practices” around questions ofsubordination, difference, assimilation, and accommoda-tion (p. 120). Both points are important, historically andpolitically, for according to Vaughan there was no historicalmoment prior to creolization. At the same time, there weremany cultural survivals and transformations under slavery.Performance was key to cultural survival—but each perfor-mance transformed the object and subject of the practice.“Herein,” she writes, “lie the multiple and ever-changingroots of a creolized culture” (p. 103).

The book is at its strongest in its discussions of raceand ethnicity, for Vaughan tells a compellingly detailedtale of the complexities that characterized cultural originand transformation. For example, a 1777 poisoning case isunraveled to explore questions of magic, divination, andherbalism for which Malagasies were known. For the later

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period, the discussion of the impact of French revolution-ary ideology on questions of color and citizenship is partic-ularly good, for it reveals a coalescence of racial categoriesat the expense of ethnic tags. Vaughan is similarly convinc-ing in showing how the massive expansion of the sugarindustry at the beginning of the 19th century resulted inbig changes in slave identities. A further strength is the rev-elation of the interrelationship between questions of raceand ethnicity (and creolization) and questions of gender.The case surrounding the apparent infanticide of a “white”baby in 1778 is used to reveal the fluidity of racial and eth-nic categories, as well as the nature of the relationship be-tween master and slave. Wheras slavery was built on anidealized patriarchal form, real relations included sexual re-lations between master and slave. In relation to this, theconcept of “masculinity”—too often missing from discus-sions of gender—is explored to enormous effect. Vaughanshows how the lynchpin of the (patriarchal) slave systemwas mimicked through the “hyper-masculinity” and sex-ual freedom–aggression maroon slave leaders sometimesdisplayed.

Rather weaker perhaps is the exploration of the culturalmarkers of the 18th-century Kreol language. As Vaughanherself acknowledges, her evidence is drawn from highlystructured court records. The significance accorded to Kreolin modern Mauritius is also perhaps misplaced. It is nottrue, for instance, that creoles speak “only” Kreol (p. 206).Like all communities, creoles have their own class struc-tures and ethnic aspirations that are sometimes played outthrough the language of the island’s white community,which is French. Moreover, Kreol itself has become an im-portant political issue in questions of education and cit-izenship. Nevertheless, these are minor quibbles. This isan important book of huge interest to Mauritian special-ists and historians of the slave trade and slavery elsewhere,as well as scholars interested in questions of gender andidentity.

Identity and Development: Tongan Culture, Agricul-ture, and the Perenniality of the Gift. Paul van der Grijp.Leiden: KITLV Press, 2004. 227 pp.

HAROLD ODDENEmory University

There has been great interest and increasing research overthe last few decades on the nature of the interactionbetween global social and economic processes and lo-cal contexts. Anthropology has demonstrated great poten-tial to contribute to this area, and Paul van der Grijp’smost recent book is an important addition to this bodyof literature. The author’s key research question couldnot be more central. “To what extent,” he asks, “are thesocio-economic changes in Tongan society propelled byWestern influences, and to what extent have they been gen-erated and orchestrated by the indigenous cultural and so-cial system” (p. 185)? The larger theoretical intention of

this work is to test and ultimately critique the well-knownMIRAB model as laid out by Geoffrey Bertram and Ray Wat-ters (1985, 1986), which argues that the local economiesof the Pacific are determined by external processes (mi-gration, remittances, foreign aid, and bureaucracy), as wellas the related world system theories that tend to portrayPacific economies as passively reactive to external forces.Based primarily on two stints of fieldwork (1993–94, 1995),van der Grijp’s research shows that the Tongan situation ispredictably more complex and nuanced than these modelsdescribe.

Rather than the traditional culture existing as an “im-pediment” to the transition to capitalism that is quicklyreplaced by meanings and practices more consistent withglobal capitalism—which is the way in which culture is of-ten portrayed by these models—van der Grijp’s case stud-ies documents a tremendous degree of cultural continuityin the face of widespread economic transformation. Specifi-cally, he notes the enduring relevance of Tongan “identity,”which he defines as a configuration of four features: (1) anideology of chieftainship in which social rank and privi-lege is predicated on possession of a direct line of descentfrom divinity; (2) the dominant role of kinship in the so-cial relations of production, distribution, and politics; (3)a form of land tenure structured by hierarchy and kinship;and (4) a subsistence and gift economy in which pigs, rootcrops, kava, mats, and tapa play a predominant part. Eco-nomic development in Tonga, according to van der Grijp,exists in a dialectical relationship with these different fac-tors and cannot be fully understood without reference tothem. Moreover, his case studies document the potent po-litical and economic agency of the growing body of middle-class entrepreneurs, which are the focus of much of vander Grijp’s text. Both of these factors point to the way inwhich the indigenous system of meanings and local actorsfunction as a potent force in orchestrating and influencingTonga’s ongoing economic development.

I personally found the discussion of Tonga’s recent“squash boom” to be the most interesting of the case stud-ies included in the text. Since the early 1990s, there hasbeen a remarkable growth in the export of squash, whichhas far outstripped all other cash crops including coconuts,bananas, and vanilla. Interestingly, squash is being sold ex-clusively to Japan, where it is a staple of low income house-holds. Van der Grijp documents the pervasive economic,social, and cultural changes that have resulted from this ex-port boom. The increased flow of disposable income intothe islands has greatly accelerated household consumptionand has shifted earning potentials such that some of thehighest paying jobs in the economy can now be found inagriculture. The opportunities available have reached thepoint in recent years that laborers are now returning fromoverseas communities in the United States, New Zealand,and Australia for seasonal employment in Tonga, and remit-tances are now being sent from the home islands to supportmigrant communities abroad. This is a remarkable reversalfrom the traditional unidirectional flow of migration and

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remittances, and it is the exact opposite of what is predictedby the MIRAB model. Additional changes can also be seen inthe increasing support for the democratization movementdriven largely by the growing middle class, and changinggender roles as women are increasingly participating in agri-cultural work previously confined to males. Whether or notsituations comparable to the Tongan squash boom (and theconcomitant social and cultural changes) can be found else-where in the Pacific, and whether or not this phenomenonis sustainable over the long term in Tonga, are importantquestions for future research. But the data presented herecertainly lead us to question many of the basic assumptionsunderlying more traditional perspectives on economic de-velopment in the Pacific.

This work will be of interest to anthropologists, histori-ans, and economists, as well as Pacific studies specialists. Itmay also serve as a profitable case study for undergraduateand graduate courses in economic anthropology, develop-ment, and globalism.

REFERENCES CITEDBetram, Geoffrey, and Ray Watters

1985 The MIRAB Economy in South Pacific Microstates. PacificViewpoint 26:497–519.

1986 The MIRAB Process: Earlier Analyses in Context. PacificViewpoint 27:47–59.

A Moral Critique of Development: In Search of GlobalResponsibilities. Philip van Ufford and Ananta Kumar Giri,eds. New York: Routledge, 2003. 309 pp.

R. L . STIRRATUniversity of Sussex

This is an important collection of chapters that seeks to re-store morality to the center of development thought andpractice. Denying orthodox positions that distinguish be-tween an anthropology of development and developmentanthropology, the authors, many of whom have worked asboth development consultants and academic observers ofthe development industry, argue that formal and universal-istic codes of ethics, which stress rules and procedures, arenot enough. Rather, what is required is an approach basedon “emergent ethics,” which recognizes the importance ofparticular situations and contexts and involves a continu-ous process of reflection by those involved in developmentinterventions.

The theoretical framework is laid in the chapters thatbegin and end the book. At times these are somewhatopaque and overwritten, and the call for a border cross-ing between anthropology and moral philosophy is notfully realized. The point made by the authors—that de-velopment should involve not just care for others but ashared concern of our global selves—is well made, butcouching this in terms of the contrast between ethics andaesthetics is perhaps not the best way of developing theirargument.

The great strength of this book lies not in the ratherpretentious and self-consciously theoretical chapters but,

rather, in the ethnographically based papers that form thebulk of the collection. Here there are some truly excellentpieces. David Mosse, for instance, presents a fascinatingdiscussion of a “participatory” project in South India withwhich he was involved as a consultant. He shows how par-ticipation functioned as a model for representation ratherthan implementation, and how, in practice, the project’sreputation and seeming success depended on a “network ofpatronage and welfare” (p. 68). Elizabeth Harrison’s chapteron aquaculture in Zambia is similarly based on her experi-ences of both being involved in the project and observingfrom the outside. She focuses on the detailed analysis of de-velopment practice involving actors at various levels, fromrural Zambia to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organiza-tion (FAO) offices in Rome, and presents a thoughtful anal-ysis of the dangers of moral detachment that an anthropol-ogy of development can involve. In a rather different way,Oscar Salemink’s discussion of the political and social con-text in which James Scott and Samuel Popkin developedtheir famous contributions to the debate on the nature ofthe peasantry raises similar issues. Salemink argues that an-thropological research in itself can form an interventionakin to and comparable with more directed forms of inter-vention, no matter what the intentions of the researcher.Thus, constant reflection, rather than a “fixation of rulesand procedures” (p.190), is essential.

Running through Harrison’s and Mosse’s analyses is acritique of an approach to development that sees it in termsof a monolithic development machine. The world of devel-opment is much more complex than that, and such argu-ments can only be maintained by relying on textual sourcesand a limited form of discourse analysis. Other authors,such Philip van Ufford and Dik Roth’s discussion of an In-donesian project come to similar conclusions. Their chapterfocuses on the “ritual” nature of evaluation and how the ad-ministrative discourse of the project cycle can be seen as amatter of “virtual reality,” existing apart from the chaos andconfusion of the real world.

One of the problems many of the authors identify is thesimplistic view of “resistance,” which often surfaces in dis-cussions of development. This theme emerges in Harrison’schapter but is also addressed in Peter Penz’s contribu-tion concerned with population displacement. Penz is con-cerned with the moral dilemmas involved in displacementand resettlement and argues strongly that foreign partici-pants have a much greater responsibility than simply ob-serving the laws and regulations of host states. Albert Alejotakes up a similar issue in an extremely interesting way.He presents a short but trenchant discussion of his ex-perience of working in, on, and with a social movementin the Philippines. Here, the moral dilemmas of engage-ment are presented in stark detail, and the limitations ofany formal code of rules and procedures are made clearlyvisible.

In a different field, Els Scholte faces comparable moraldilemmas. From her position as an information officerworking for a Dutch Protestant organization, Scholte is

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faced with the problem of interfacing between contrast-ing views of the nature of development: the demands ofthe Dutch public on the one hand, and the demandsof development agencies on the other hand. Given theever-changing nature of development and the technicalchanges in the communication industry, Scholte, like vanUfford and Roth, sees much of what is going on as amatter of “virtual reality.” Again, she argues for an ap-proach that recognizes the importance of the contingentand is aware of the moral nature of the developmentencounter.

Overall, this collection is well worth reading and is anexcellent corrective to those recent representations of de-velopment as a monolithic entity.

Modes of Religiosity: A Cognitive Theory of ReligiousTransmission. Harvey Whitehouse. Lanham, MD: Row-man and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2004. 208 pp.

MICHAEL WINKELMANArizona State University

This book examines major differences in religious ritualas reflecting modes of information processing that pro-duce “cognitively optimum concepts” and “attractor posi-tions” in the nature of ritual. Harvey Whitehouse’s theoryis based in different types of human memory systems thathe proposes produce two contrasting modes of religiosity—imagestic and doctrinal. The book does not test this theory,although future publications in the Cognitive Science ofReligion Series (Altamira Press) are intended to do that.

Whitehouse’s title indicates that he is examining modesof transmission rather than modes of religion in general, al-though he often makes broader claims. He suggests that un-derlying the many different dichotomies of religious formare two main differences: intensely emotional but rarelyperformed practices, and frequent highly repetitive androutinized practices. He attributes this dichotomy to twoforms of memory: (1) imagestic systems that produce low-frequency rituals that involve intense emotionality, a senseof revelation and bonding of small groups, and (2) doctri-nal systems that have routinized patterns of ritual perfor-mance, verbal transmission of a calm and sober but complextheology and doctrine for large religious communities. Hesuggests that rituals with certain kinds of mnemonic effectshave a selective advantage in transmission, leading him toexamine how memory systems are incorporated into differ-ent kinds of religious rituals.

But he also appears to make far more sweeping claims:“These variables, in turn, have far-reaching consequencesfor the social morphology of religious traditions, producingeither large-scale, inclusive, highly standardized, centrallyregulated, diffusely cohesive religious traditions (doctri-nal mode) or small-scale, exclusive, ideologically heteroge-neous, uncentralized, intensively cohesive religious tradi-tions (imagestic mode)” (p. 8). He continues, “At the rootof all this is a set of cognitive causes deriving from the ways

in which frequently repeated activities and beliefs are han-dled in human memory” (p. 70).

Whitehouse proposes that the imagestic mode of reli-giosity represents the most ancient forms of religious activ-ity, appearing in the Upper Paleolithic. Whitehouse’s refer-ences suggest that he is referring to shamanism, althoughhe never uses the term. He associates the emergence of thedoctrinal mode with Bronze Age civilizations. Whitehousealso characterizes the imagestic as closer to the natural andminimally counterintuitive aspects of categories of religion,while the doctrinal is more abstract and costly in terms ofsystems of transmission and support. But he notes that bothmodes of religiosity exist within some religious traditionsand suggests that these two modes differ from cognitiveoptimum concepts.

The basic accomplishment of this book is to provide aview of how different types of memory might elucidate par-ticular patterns in religious rituals. Whitehouse examines anumber of cases of actual and hypothetical religious activ-ities to illustrate how memory is differentially exploited inritual. But while a variety of cases are used as possible il-lustrations of these processes, there are no systematic datasubstantiating the theory proposed. In attempting to applymemory theory to ritual processes and outcomes, White-house is forced to speculate based on psychological stud-ies of memory in other contexts. Whitehouse sometimesrecognizes this in qualifying sentence after sentence with“might,” “may,” “may well,” “suggests,” “could be,” “ap-pear,” “seem,” and “presumably” (e.g., see pp. 89–90). Buton other occasions, Whitehouse takes free reign to spec-ulate, for example, on how initiation rituals reveal the dy-namics of religious terrorism, and he makes unsubstantiatedstatements about the underlying memory systems.

The problem with the lack of a systematic body of datais again evident is his defense of his theory against the op-posing theories of Robert McCauley and Thomas Lawson(2002) on the relationships among ritual transmission fre-quency, memory, and sensory pageantry. Lacking the datato test the theories we are left with defenses based on decon-textualized examples. However, it is possible to use cross-cultural data sets (e.g., Winkelman and White 1987) to testtheories about cross-cultural patterns of magicoreligiouspractice and their links to human biology (e.g., Winkelman1992, 2000).

The final chapter suggests the kinds of evidence thatwould be necessary to test Whitehouse’s theories. It is un-fortunate that his book was not such a test of his the-ory, although, as mentioned before, future publications dopromise to provide such tests.

If he does test his theory, Whitehouse will likely failto uphold these proposed modes of religiosity based onmemory systems. Whitehouse errs in presuming that thestructure of memory systems determines the basic formsfor modes of religiosity. Religion is not an adaptation tomemory systems but to higher-order human needs for un-derstanding, explanation, bonding, and other social andemotional processes. Certainly modes of religiosity, such as

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shamanism and priesthoods, exist (Winkelman 1992). Butthese reflect more general modes of consciousness (Winkel-man 2000) and their adaptations to ecological and socialconditions (Winkelman 1992).

REFERENCES CITEDMcCauley, Robert, and Thomas Lawson

2002 Bringing Ritual to Mind. New York: Cambridge UniversityPress.

Winkelman, Michael1992 Shamans, Priests and Witches: A Cross-Cultural Study of

Magico-religious Practitioners. Anthropological Research Pa-pers, no. 44. Tempe: Arizona State University.

2000 Shamanism: The Neural Ecology of Consciousness andHealing. Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey.

Winkelman, Michael, and Doug White1987 A Cross-Cultural Study of Magico-Religious Practitioners

and Trance States: Data Base. In HRAF Research Series inQuantitative Cross-Cultural Data: Vol. 3. David Levinson andRichard Wagner, eds. New Haven, CT: HRAF Press.