BOOK REVIEWS / Sociocultural Anthropology 457

mostly from the archives of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Sheconcludes, based on these sources, that the OIA failed in its as-similationist objectives, in part because Ute women continuedto assert themselves, in accordance with "traditional" Ute defi-nitions of appropriate gendered behavior, as autonomous actorsin their public and private lives.

Theda Purdue reaches much the same conclusion in herdetailed Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700-1835. Purdue, a historian, seeks in this volume to view Nativewomen as "major players in the great historical drama that is theAmerican past" (p. 11), in that their role within their own socie-ties "became part of the larger debate over Indians and Indianpolicy" (p. 11). Both Osborn and Purdue refer to contemporaryfeminist scholarship concerning the role that Native Americanwomen played in colonization, which ranges from Eleanor Lea-cock's claim that Native women's status declined as a result ofcolonization, to Nancy Shoemaker's contention that such amodel does not apply to the many Native societies wherewomen's status appears to have risen or remained significant inthe century following European colonization.

Purdue also eschews a strictly chronological approach, in fa-vor of chapters that review the construction of gender in Chero-kee society, the nature of the Cherokee community, and the spe-cific effects of trade and war on Cherokee women during thecontact period of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Inparticular, she takes issue with historians who suggest thatCherokee women became, like women in neighboring Nativesocieties, part of the "laboring class of the deerskin trade" (p.71).

It was not until the early days of the Republic that Purdue seesa major threat to the status and authority of Cherokee women,due in part to the waning of the town councils and to the increas-ing adoption of white gender conventions by the wealthy minor-ity of Cherokee men who dominated the Cherokee constitu-tional convention and the Cherokee national government (p.145). Purdue argues that it was the traditional culture of Chero-kee women that sustained the opposition to removal amongCherokee people (p. 194) after the constitutional conventionhad eliminated women from public action. Her narrative endswith the removal of the majority of the Cherokees in the winterof 1838-39 but concludes that the patterns of leadership andcommunity-minded values typical of eighteenth-centuryCherokee women is also typical of contemporary Cherokeewomen leaders today (p. 195).

In contrast to these document-based historical narratives, inboth theory and substance, is Ruth Landes's classic volume TheOjibwa Woman, originally published in 1938 and here reprintedwith a new introduction by Sally Cole. This composite portrait isdrawn almost exclusively from Landes's work with Mrs. Mag-gie Wilson, "a woman of Scots-Cree descent who had beenraised and married in an Ojibwa cultural world," a woman whowas a storyteller and a powerful visionary (p. ix). As Cole pointsout, Landes's work is "an important early contribution to the an-thropology of gender" (p. x), in its methodology (the collection,presentation, and analysis of lifehistories), analysis (giving cen-trality to the domains of marriage and work), and theory (gendertheorized as a sociological and cultural phenomenon) (p. x).

The tension between cultural norms and expectations, and thenegotiated struggle for survival and expression, interested Lan-des, and this concern found expression in her analysis of Ojibwa

women's lives, which she saw as exemplary of that tension.Within the constraints placed on Ojibwa women, in the gen-dered division of labor, and the proscription against the tellingof stories by women, Mrs. Wilson spoke to the young Ruth Lan-des about survival, individuality, resourcefulness, and the skillslearned from other women. Ojibwa women, while succeedingthrough individual strength and autonomy, were neverthelessstrong by virtue of the sense of community created by the retell-ing of women's lives and experiences.

Landes chose to frame much of her discussion in terms of thecontrasts between men's and women's lives and has been criti-cized for seeming to establish male Ojibwa behavior as the normfrom which women's behavior deviated. In this Landes believedthat she was most closely approximating the Ojibwa woman'spoint of view, at the time she conducted her interviews, and thatthis provided her with the most persuasive platform on which tobuild her arguments for experience as a negotiation betweencultural norms and individual idiosyncracy. Although she didnot deal explicitly with change in Ojibwa society, the theory ofculture that underlies her analysis is in many ways compatiblewith contemporary models of cultural identity.

Whatever its flaws, this compelling book also evokes sympa-thy and allows both insight and appreciation for the complexityof the lives of American Indian women. Landes's theoretical in-terests and the immediate quality of the narratives she repro-duces, in whole and in part, seem to provide us now with a moreessential historical truth about Ojibwa women than any adum-bration of documentary sources might do.

As the authors of all of these volumes point out, there is an ex-plosion of scholarship on American Indian women today, muchof it initiated and directed by Native women themselves. Al-though the vexed questions concerning the role and status ofwomen remain, these books make clear that, as Theda Purdueremarks, Native women were and continue to be "major play-ers," in their own societies and in the larger context of Americanhistory, and to study them is to learn more about the human con-dition. •>

Oyster Wars and the Public Trust: Property, Law, andEcology in New Jersey History. Bonnie J. McCay. Tucson:University of Arizona Press, 1998. 246 pp.

DAVID GRIFFITHEast Carolina University

Until recently, much of the work on the anthropology and so-ciology of fishing communities suffered from too narrow a fo-cus, examining the lives of fishers, fishing practices, and fishingtechnology without considering how fishing communities fitinto wider social and cultural contexts. While new work on fish-ing communities has benefited from the attention of anthropolo-gists who, earlier in their careers, studied peasant farmers, low-wage workers, and other nonfishing peoples among whompolitical economic circumstances and ethnic affiliations cannotbe ignored, Bonnie McCay was one of the first to bring widerfields of social inquiry and analysis to her interest in fishing andfishers. In the process, she has demonstrated the different waysthat fishers' lives and communities have been constricted or

458 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST • VOL. 101, No. 2 • JUNE 1999

influenced by people who spend little or no time at sea. OysterWars is, perhaps, her most ambitious work along these lines todate, modest in title yet wide and deep in scope. The book stemsfrom her disappointment with the tragedy of the commonsmodel that she and James Acheson have so tirelessly and suc-cessfully critiqued. At the heart of Oyster Wars lie several courtcases fought in New Jersey over the question of under whatterms individuals, residents of states, corporations, and identifi-able groups (such as a specific community of baymen) have ac-cess to submerged bottom lands that produce oysters. Thesecases move the chapters forward through postrevolutionaryNew Jersey into the early part of the twentieth century, finallyassessing their relevance to current debates over new manage-ment regimes and recent trends in the privatization of marine re-sources.

At issue, again and again and in several forms, is the publictrust, an anomaly in capitalist society because it frustrates theprivatization of property. Most of the court cases involving oys-ter beds, as with many of the armed and unarmed conflicts on thewater over oystering and other fishing practices, were orientedtoward "trying the right" of public trust: that is, challengingeither an individual's avowed right to privatize a strip of sub-merged lands (usually one adjoining his or her private land orone in which barren substrates were planted with oysters) or agroup's right to harvest oysters in common rivers, bays, andother areas. McCay's intricate analysis of these cases does notrestrict itself to the paper trails created at the trials, but considersthe class positions and motives of jurists, plaintiffs, defendants,and supporting organizations and coastal communities, reveal-ing how common is the blurring of fact and fiction in creatingmyth and inventing tradition in the U.S. judicial system. Flesh-ing out her analysis, McCay draws upon the ecological develop-ments that contributed to the court disputes, legal argumentsdating back to Roman law, reinterpretations of the MagnaCarta,the motives of monarchs, and the outcomes in terms of estab-lishing citizens' rights, legitimizing state management of fisher-ies, and influencing actual oystering and fishing practices. Shedoes not limit her attention to New Jersey but also considers im-portant property conflicts in other states and other fisheries anddiscusses the importance of a case most of us interested in inal-ienable wealth and common property know: Illinois CentralRailway Company v. The State of Illinois, the 1892 case in which"the principle of public trust for common rights such as fishingand navigation gained constitutional status" (p. 194).

The circumstances surrounding the cases reveal the centralimportance of civil disobedience in challenging laws that themany perceive as illegitimately rewarding the few. Living in astate where many of the marine police come from fishing fami-lies and view many fishing restrictions as ludicrous, the casesMcCay interprets also point to the problems that stem from en-forcement of marginally legitimate rulings meant to govern be-havior on the water. It has been civil disobedience and the diffi-culties of enforcement that, historically, have led to"remarkable" outcomes of public rights emerging triumphantover privatization, even in highly commoditized environments,and that have led to creative ways of managing commons.

Apart from the intrigue of the cases themselves, I was particu-larly drawn to McCay's critique of economic efficiency argu-ments and the tendency for economic theory to frame questionstoo narrowly to represent economic behavior. In her concluding

chapter, she writes: "Efficiency measures . . . assume certaindistributions of property rights or institutions. They cannot,therefore, be used to compare the performance of different re-gimes. . . . Consequently, arguments for privatization thajt useeconomic efficiency gains as the reason are defective, eventhough they are cloaked with the transparent objectivity of ana-lytic rigor. They do not recognize the critical social fact thatthrough collective processes—political, legal, social—peoplehave decided that some things and places should be public andothers private" (p. 193). Given such penetrating insights regard-ing the embeddedness of economic behavior and its implica-tions for theory, I was hoping she was poised to loop around andreconsider Weber's criteria for modern capitalism, which shediscusses early in the volume. Because of the otherwise impres-sive scope of this work, I cannot consider this a flaw on McCay' spart, yet I suspect that many of the characteristics of New Jerseyoystering that have made it difficult to consider capitalist—thelack of a fully proletarianized labor force, the Luddite-like fearof technical achievement, the failure of firms to separate pro-ductive sites and households, etc.—are in fact quite common inso-called modern capitalist economies, calling into question thevery theories of capital and capitalism that underlie the push to-ward something we call efficiency. Within the current practicesof flexible accumulation, even some of the most quintessentialcapitalist industries, such as automobile manufacturing, rou-tinely subcontract tasks into the homes of rural women whoscrew nuts on bolts or wrap wires around silicon while watching talkshows or soaps. Examining such behaviors, we may expandupon McCay's lessons and find that, like debates about whetherresources are fully and finally either public or private, debatesover what is capitalist practice and what is not will point us towardanalyses as narrow as the choice between oyster and pearl. •*•

Material Cultures: Why Some Things Matter. Daniel Miller,ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. 244 pp.

MARK LIECHTYUniversity of Illinois-Chicago

Material Cultures brings together nine ethnographic chaptersand a theoretical introduction (chapter 1) by editor DanielMiller. According to Miller, the volume steers a course betweenearlier anthropological studies that have demonstrated the cen-trality of material culture in social life and other more decontex-tualized object-oriented studies to offer a "second stage of mate-rial culture studies" (p. 3). Miller argues that by focusing on"material culture" this volume sustains a focus on cultural prac-tices within the "artefactual world" without falling into fetishis-tic object gazing (p. 5).

The first of three sections (chapters 2 to 4) is on "the domesticsphere." In chapter 2, Jo Tacchi considers the social implica-tions of radio sound in home environments. While Tacchi showshow listeners use radio to promote silence and intimacy, ormaintain social links, her argument that radio "soundscapes"constitute a kind of "material culture" is less well substantiated.Whether theorizing radio sound as "material culture" is an ad-vance over standard media reception models is open to debate.