BOOK REVIEWS 451

labor and delivery routines have been aban- doned in many hospitals (wheelchairs, shav- ing and enemas, separation of the father from the laboring mother, etc.), a trend noted by Davis-Floyd, the practical and symbolic uses of technology are increasing in newer reproductive medical specialities, particularly infertility treatment and prena- tal monitoring (and treatment) of fetuses.

The neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) is a relatively recent subject of anthropolog- ical inquiry. Lucile Newman summarizes her research into the social and sensory environments of low-birthweight babies in the section devoted to cultural dimensions of the hospital treatment .of critically ill new- borns. Jeanne Harley Guillemin, using the case study method, examines how NICU staff evaluate and treat parents of the infants in their charge. She also comments on disjunctions in neonatologists’ and par- ents’ concerns. Neonatologists judge suc- cess on short-term outcomes and restrict what they say to parents about the longer- term risks their sick infants face, partly

because too little is known about how well NICU survivors do in later life to make such statements with confidence and partly be- cause neonatologists’ values and rewards emphasize saving critically ill infants from immediate crises.

Collectively, the chapters in Childbirth in America lay out a representative sketch of research, problems of interest to sociocultu- ral anthropologists and other social scien- tists working in the area of reproductive health. A distinct accomplishment is the acknowledgement in some of the chapters that not all American women want the same kind of childbirth care or have the same values and attitudes about pregnancy, birth, and parenting, and that this variation needs addressing in both childbirth policy and practice.

CAROL SHEPHERD MCCLAIN Medical Anthropology Program University o f California, San Francisco San Francisco, California

BIOLOGY OFTHE PEOPLES OF INDIAN REGION. BANGLADESH, BHUTAN, INDIA, MALDIVES, NEPAL, PAKISTAN, SRI LANKA. A CLASSI- FIED AND COMPREHENSIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY. By M.K. Bhasin. Delhi: Kamla-Raj Enter- prises. 1988. vii + 496 pp., tables, index. Rs. 400/-(cloth).

Anthropological studies in India and their publication are more than 100 years old. The research papers are widely scattered in world journals, reports, and the proceedings volumes of various conferences, national as well as international in origin. To locate these has always been a nightmare; one had to adopt a “hit in the dark” approach to stumble on a lead reference and proceed from there if luck favoured.

The present 496-page volume is a compre- hensive bibliography of the published liter- ature on biological anthropology relating to peoples of the Indian region. It covers the countries south of the Himalayas, including Maldives and Sri Lanka but excluding Burma. The bibliography covers 371 pages; the two appendices of 72 pages include some tables and maps and a n exclusive ethno- graphic bibliography on tribes and castes of India. It has four sections: Introduction;

Journals and Abbreviations used; Bibli- ography; and the Appendix.

The brief introduction basically elaborates the organization of the main text “catego- rized under the following heads” (p. 1): Primates-Behaviour and Biology; Demog- raphy, Inbreeding, Marriage Distance; An- thropometry, Physiology and Nutrition; Dental Anthropology; Dermatoglyphics; Morphological and Behavioral Charac- ters; Taste Sensitivity and Colour Blindness; Genetic Markers in Human Blood; and Hu- man Population Cytogenetics. Further sub- headings under most of these are helpful for more specific references.

Section 2 on journals and their abbrevia- tions, has 366 listings, a large number indeed. This includes the proceedings of var- ious societies and academies, reports, and memoirs. It reflects the scattered nature of the biological anthropology publications for the region, and the potential difficulty in locating them.

The bibliography, the main part, is ar- ranged alphabetically by author and for each author chronologically under each heading. It lists about 5,000 entries, a rough estimate based on average entries per page. Anthropometry, Physiology, and Nutrition is spread over 104 pages; Dermatoglyphics

452 BOOK REVIEWS

is covered in 47 pages, and Genetic Markers in Human Blood takes 30 pages. Others are less expensive. The least-represented areas of study are Dental Anthropology and Human Population Cytogenetics; between these two, the cytogenetics portion is the weakest. A closer scrutiny and comparison of these reflects the influence of historical- cum-financial factors influencing the devel- opment of biological anthropology in the region. The appendices are aimed to acquaint the reader with “geographic, social, political and cultural aspects of’ India because the major emphasis of investiga- tion is on that country and “the representa- tion of references from other countries is almost negligible” (p. 391). The book pro- vides brief information on India’s popula- tion demography, principal languages, nat- ural regions, administrative divisions, some specific ethnographic bibliography on castes and tribes, and a list of institutions relating to anthropological studies and the journals published. The relationship between anthro- pology and the Indian Science Congress since 1914 is presented in a tabular form; its relevance is incomprehensible. The 34-page Author Index marks the end of the book.

The author has done a n incredible job in searching and compiling the published titles in a meaningful sequence. This is a positive contribution and the volume would certainly prove to be immensely helpful to all inter- ested researchers of the Indian region. It is a commendable effort.

The title of the book is rather ambitious; it raises many hopes that were not realized completely. Under the title, one also won- ders if the author considers primates (their behaviour and biology) as “peoples” and studies on Gigantopithecus and suture closure as part of behaviour and biology? This section is totally out of place, though useful as a separate entity. However, it then omits completely F.E. Poirier’s work on Indian monkeys.

The organization of the book, at places, is rather repetitious for various sections (p. 2), and it is cumbersome in the appendices, where the main aim is not achieved. The expectations are belied, as it provides a cock- tail of facts and figures extracted from gazet- teers, census volumes, and earlier ethno- graphic accounts. It neglects a discussion on social and cultural aspects altogether. To the reviewer, the purpose of an appendix is to provide additional relevant information to supplement the text, which cannot be incor-

porated lest it distract from the central theme. The information on India’s bound- aries, zones and provinces, rural urban classification, and ethnic and linguistic groupings, loosely explained, make it very uneasy reading. The author has missed an opportunity to emphasize their relevance to the benefit of the reader. At places, either the information on anthropological institu- tions in different provinces is missed, or places are mentioned where nothing exists (pp. 448-450). A separate list of anthropo- logical journals originating in India is an exercise in futility because these have been mentioned in pages 5-19. Furthermore, one wonders if some of the abbreviations, e.g., for Current Anthropology, Eastern Anthro- pologist, and the Indian Journal O f Physical Anthropology and Human Genetics, are the ones recognized by these publications-or has the author created them on his own? The latest issues of these journals do not use the suggested abbreviations. A clarification would have been helpful.

The difficulties in publishing such material are obvious in some printing errors like Bahadhur (p. 115) for Bahadur and epiphysi- cal (p. 112) for epiphyseal. In spite of his best efforts the author has missed some old and some fairly recent publications of various authors, e.g., P.C. Mahalanobis (1928) on standardization of measurements and his revision of Risley’s data (Mahalanobis, 1933); H.K. Rakshit, (1965; 1988), on inter- and intra- observer errors; D.N. Majumdar (1955, 1958, 1959) on Rupkund; R.D. Singh (1972,19811 on Rupkund and on caste dermatoglyphics (Singh, 19821, to name a few. However, the reviewer does not claim to know all sources.

These few obvious shortcomings, however, do not diminish the utility of this publication. The major journals and other titles are avail- able in the National Library, Calcutta.

RIPUDAMAN SINGH Sociology and Anthropology University of Windsor Windsor, Ontario, Canada

LITERATURE CITED

Mahalanobis PC (1928) On the need for standardization in measurements on the living. Biometrika 20A:1-31

Mahalanobis PC (1933) A revision of Risley’s anthropo- metric data relating to the tribes and castes of Bengal. Sankhya 1(1):76-105.

Majumdar DN (1955) A preliminary report on the human skeleton remains from Rupkund. The National Herald (October 9).

BOOK REVIEWS 453

Majumdar DN (1958) Rupkund rahasya. Prachya Man- ava Vaigyanik 3:94-106.

Majumdar DN (1959) Rupkund in prospect and retrospect. Uttar Pradesh (March) 1-2.

Rakshit HK (1965) Anthropometry and personal error. J. SOC. Res. 8(2):54-62.

Rakshit HK, Singh RD, Ahmad SH, Sastry DB, Ali SGM, and Bhale RB (1988) All India Anthropometric Survey: South Zone. Calcutta: Anthropological Survey of India.

Singh RD (1972) Human skeletal remains from Rupkund. In KS Mathur and SC Verma (eds.): Man in Society. Lucknow: EFCS, pp. 153-173.

Singh RD (1981) Rupkund: Ek manava-vijnanik drish- tikon. Manava 9(2):65-76.

Singh RD (1982) Digital ridge-count variations in some castes of India. In CS Bartsocas (ed.): Progress in Der- matoglyphic Research. New York Alan R. Liss, Inc., pp. 303-3 15.

MURDEROUS SCIENCE. By Benno Miiller- Hill. New York: Oxford University Press. 1988. xvi + 208 pp., bibliography, index. $24.95 (cloth).

Miiller-Hill has written an outstanding book about values and integrity and closed minds. It is concerned only indirectly with the Nazi policy of mass murder of “inferior” peoples. Rather it examines the parallel aberration of anthropologists, geneticists, and psychiatrists as proponents of Nazi racism. This was a unique scientific-medi- cal-political “establishment”-as perverse as the world has ever seen.

The author, a professor of genetics in Cologne, was born in 1933, the year Hitler came to power. His book, first published in German in 1984, is an expose of the dishon- orable intimacy of science, academia, and barbarism in Nazi Germany; for unlike other past and present mass killings, so- called respectable science and scientists were the witting agents of Nazi genocide. This book has finally made these facts pub- lic to a broad audience in Germany, four decades after the end of World War 11. The reason why other Germans did not write this expose much earlier, or were ineffective in their attempts, becomes apparent upon reading Muller-Hill’s narrative. As Jorge Luis Borges said (Theroux, 1979, p. 144), “The Germans like to be pitied-isn’t that horrible? They showed me their ruins. . . . But why should I indulge them? I said, ‘I have seen London.’ ”

The historical roots of this scientific per- version were taxonomic rigidity, racial ste- reotyping, the typological mindset. The cul- tural roots in Germany were xenophobia, bigotry, belated democratization, military defeat in WWI, economic disasters in the 1920s, and the peculiar authoritarian struc-

ture of German universities. Such historical and cultural factors still fester in many areas of the world. Racial stereotyping and xenophobia are not unknown in the United States and Japan. Elitism, grant greed, and political footsieism are not uncommon in academia.

The author sets out to show that a state in which science, or at least some scientists, flourish while justice is absent is con- demned. To do this he studied numerous archives (and noted that many documents had been deliberately destroyed). But more importantly, he interviewed the leading sci- entists’ co-workers and descendents as well as some aged participants themselves. A notable number of interviewees refused to allow publication of their statements. Never- theless, the author has assembled the essen- tial facts about the formation and function of a broad scientific-political axis. It is a his- tory not just of a few evil men but of wanton closed-mindedness in science itself. While it is universally accepted that justice was ab- sent in Nazi Germany, the question remains as to whether science indeed flourished under the Nazis, as the author contends. Certainly such “leading scientists” as Eugen Fischer thought so. He and others had urged and “scientifically” justified the purification of the German Reich by means of murdering countless Jews, Slavs, gypsies, mental pa- tients, and the intellectually impaired. Thus in 1943 Fischer, the founding head of the leading institute for anthropology, human genetics, and eugenics, wrote of the “rare and special good fortune for a theoretical science to flourish at a time when the pre- vailing ideology welcomes it, and its find- ings can immediately serve the policy of the state” (p. 18).

But was this indeed science, let alone theoretical science? In my opinion, it was not. At the time, in human genetics and physical