Book Reviews

Pretty Modern: Beauty, Sex, and Plastic Surgery in Brazil. Alexander Edmonds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. x + 297 pp. DONNA GOLDSTEIN University of Colorado Pretty Modern is a provocative ethnographic excursion through the labyrinth of context necessary for understanding the rise in popularity of cosmetic plastic surgery in contemporary Brazil. Edmonds captures a rich and diverse range of voices that mostly celebrate this rise and congratulate Brazil on its very own exible (read: neoliberal) and sex-positive (Goldstein 2003) approach to modernity. He gracefully captures the national sentiment while offering gentle critiques of what seems to be madness at times by listening closely to his Brazilian informants as they constitute beauty as a social domain that has its own internal logic and cannot be reduced to an operation of other forms of power (p. 20). Willkommen, Bienvenue, Welcome (remember the opening to Cabaret ?) to the ubersexy and surreal modernity of Brazil! Brazil boasts a newly booming economy that is characterized in a recent award-winning commercial as a giant awakening from a deep sleepa veritable economic engine of rising wealth and prosperity. Still a sticking point, however, if, of course, ignored by the marketing geniuses, is the obstinate and obscene Gini coefcient pointing to the persistent problems associated with socioeconomic, racial, and gendered inequalities. In the shadows of this sleeping giant, we nd emerging debates about the value of afrmative action in the ambiguously constructed Brazilian hierarchical racecolor scheme, as well as elements of a seemingly ancient class system that is superciallyand, yet, compellinglyleveled at the beach. Women are in control of their sexual desire and are anything but pushovers, but in the context of this book, the feminist intelligentsia is somewhat absent or perhaps has nothing critical to say about the issue. Instead, the majority of characters produce narratives that support the giventhat attractiveness is a new form of capitaland why should anyone be prevented from seeking out their own true best form of it? In this celebrity-peppered ethnography, we meet the King of Plastic Surgery, Dr. Ivo Pitanguy, who has achieved celebrity status for his skill with a scalpel, his charitable contributions, and, above all, his zealous advocacy of the idea that his patients have a right to beauty (p. 51) because, he asserts, beauty literally makes you healthier. For their part Brazilians treat the charming and cosmopolitan Dr. Pitanguy as a heroic exemplar of his profession, immortalizing him in the 1999 Rio de Janeiro Carnival with the samba theme song The Universe of Beauty: Master Pitanguy. Brazilians believe in Pitanguy and his fellow practitioners. A popular saying told as a joke by plastic surgeons captures this sentiment: whereas a traditional psychoanalyst knows everything and changes nothing, the plastic surgeon knows nothing and solves everything (p. 76). Surgeries considered cosmetic in other countries are viewed by a broad swath of Braziliansas reparative of the mind and self-esteem. So it is that inside the walls of the ailing public hospitals, impoverished women wait long hours to obtain nancially supported liposuctions, breast surgeries, face-lifts, and nose corrections. The female patients and their surgeons feel that plastic surgery resolves the tensions between motherhood and sexualitywho needs Viagra in this environment?and repairs the damage to the body done by breast-feeding and vaginal birth. Edmonds acknowledges that the medical gaze is at times aligned with a certain (if taken-for-granted) misogyny, in an atmosphere where everyone wants to see women meet their beauty potential. One surgeon tells his patient who is concerned about her belly after childbirth, You are really young . . . no way. You have to have a surgery. If your husband cant pay for your breast [surgery], Ill do it for free, because its absurd, a young woman of your age having to look like that (p. 185). Now, thats a cool guy! The pesky informed consent system established in post-Nuremburg Europe and strengthened in post-Tuskegee United States is admittedly and sheepishly dodged a bit so as not to produce fear in the patient. But we should not underestimate the importance of the skills that plastic surgeons gain in Brazil, carrying out surgeries in public-health hospital settings early in their careers before opening up their own private spalike clinics in wealthier neighborhoods. The feeling expressed by Edmondss surgeon informants is that this circularity approaches a game where everyone wins (p. 93).

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 39, No. 3, pp. 627659, ISSN 0094-0496, online ISSN 1548-1425. C 2012 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2012.01385.x

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There are, too, in this public hospital setting, the endless reections on Brazils complicated color hierarchy that in the context of plastic surgery translates into corrections of the Negroid nose and attention to the higher potential for keloid scarring on Afro-Brazilian bodies. The old clich e that held in Brazil since the colonial era was that money lightens. Now, the meaning and interpretation of a good appearance for those descended from African ancestors is not only contoured by the economic and cultural capital that in Brazil has always been tied to a certain habitus, it can also be altered by acquiring sexual capital, a form of capital that Edmonds claims that Pierre Bourdieu neglected (p. 248). If the black movement failed at some level to capture the imagination of the povo (the people) then in this new instantiation, they can remake themselves as aesthetic citizens, using new medical technologies to negotiate markets and elusive notions of health (p. 114). In this brave new Brazil, appearance is a form of value and plastic surgery enables the aged, the abandoned, the unemployed, the nonwhite, the unloved, to name their condition an aesthetic defect and objectify it in their bodies (p. 114). Pl astica has become thoroughly banalized in this context. Edmonds sees all of this and shares it with the reader, but it is the voices of individual Brazilians that dominate. Indeed, a compelling feature of the book is that the reader encounters a diverse range of interlocutors who, in their musings about the social architecture of pl astica in Brazil, can approximate just about any possible subjectivity. Yet the voices tend to celebrate rather than critique. Thus, the popular (i.e., impoverished) women crammed in the waiting rooms at the public hospitals who make black-humored fun of their own bravery and guinea pig status also insist on their desire for pl astica and claim that it is to please themselves and not some mans gaze. Because they sound so convincing in their convictions, they come across as agents of their own desire, in spite of quite obvious differential opportunities for social mobility, gender equity, and racial equality. The multiple and complex arguments about plastic surgery laid out in Edmondss book demonstrate that beauty under late capitalism and under the spell of imaginative neoliberal marketing engenders new forms of identity that entail a progressive commodication of the selfa self that can garner increased valuation and social mobility, perhaps here even breaking through stubborn and entrenched economic, social, and cultural forms of capital. The patients romantic embrace of this new aesthetic medicine can potentially negotiate color hierarchies and tensions between the maternal and erotic body; it might propel the individual to improved forms of self-esteem and success. Just as with the much acclaimed social mobility of Afro-Brazilian men available through the route of professional athleticismfor example, soccer in Brazil Afro-Brazilian women now, too, can access some form of

social mobility through the route of professional beauty trades. In Brazil, so it seems, nine out of ten Brazilian girls want to be a model (Veja 1999, in Edmonds, p. 208). As Edmonds notes in the conclusion, For some workers and consumers on the margins of the market economy, physical allure can be an asset that actually seems to disrupt the class hierarchies that pervade many other aspects of their lives. . . . Beauty then can be seen as a kind of double negative: an unfair hierarchy that can disturb other unfair hierarchies (p. 250). Edmondss Pretty Modern clearly captures an overwhelming national feeling and presents it in a respectful and tempered poststructural arrangement that is likely not to offend his Brazilian interlocutors. I found his ethnography to be important and compelling, yet I occasionally longed for more critical engagement from Brazilians other voices?on racialcolor inequalities, aesthetic commodication, thoroughly banalized surgery, and the sly promises of neoliberalism. Where are the Brazilian feminists? What about members of the increasingly visible black-pride movement? Because I am deeply skeptical about the economic utopian potential of this new form of aestheticized capital, I hope that, if they are not out there already, there will be more critical perspectives audible in Brazil in the coming years.

References cited
Goldstein, Donna M. 2003 Laughter Out of Place: Race, Class, Violence, and Sexuality in a Rio Shantytown. Berkeley: University of California Press. Veja 1999 Ursinho e salto alto, July 14. http://veja.abril.com.br/ 140799/p110.html, accessed January 14, 2012.

Unveiling Secrets of War in the Peruvian Andes. Olga M. Gonz alez. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. 307 pp. LINDA J. SELIGMANN George Mason University Perus civil war between the Shining Path movement (Sendero Luminoso) and the Peruvian state (198092) generated a battalion of Senderologists seeking to make sense of the extreme violence that characterized the conict. The publication of Orin Starns Missing the Revolution: Anthropologists and the War in Peru (1991) also catalyzed critique and self-reection on the part of anthropologists who were taken by surprise by the war and its virulence. Yet much of what was written had a journalistic feel to it and too often tended toward sensationalism, depicting violence rather than analyzing its causes. Even seasoned anthropologists found it difcult to

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do eldwork in unpredictable conditions that sometimes threatened their lives and, more so, the lives of their informants. When the war ofcially ended with the capture and imprisonment of Senderos leader, Abimael Guzman, at least 69,000 had died or disappeared and hundreds of thousands of Peruvians, particularly indigenous inhabitants of the central and southern highlands, had become internal refugees. How the war was experienced through an anthropological lens is only now unfolding, providing texture, subtlety, and insight into the times of fear and danger, as the Sarhuinos of the Central Andean highlands of Ayacucho referred to it. Olga Gonz alez probes how the villagers of Sarhua processed and remembered the war and its repercussions. In her ethnography of making memory (p. 83), she asks, given the simultaneous desire to forget and to reveal the brutality and trauma of the conict, what is silence? Under what conditions does forgetting transpire and what are its consequences? In what ways have the Sarhuinos dynamically used their cultural toolsthe mythical death and afterlife creatures of their oral traditions, such as condenados and qarqachus, the powerful protective mountain spirits of the wamani and apukuna, and their dreamsto lter, interpret, and sculpt the war and its ongoing traces that permeate their lives? Gonz alez began her research in 1996 in her hometown, Lima, where approximately 1,000 Sarhuino migrants were living. Her work ended in 1997, and more than ten years passed before she began writing her book. In Lima, Sarhuino artists who organized into the Association of Popular Artists of Sarhua (ADAPS) had created a series of 24 paintings on wooden tablets or tablas, depicting events of political violence in Sarhua, including looting, execution by ring squad, apologies by the military, dismemberment, punishment of stool pigeons, mandatory schooling, recruitment, re, rape, and ight. Peter Gaupp, a Swiss benefactor interested in folk art with political themes had commissioned the collection, entitled Piraq Causa (Who Is Still to Blame?). Gonz alez nally tracked it down in Costa Rica. A long recognized aesthetic tradition among Sarhuinos, tablas are exchanged at ritual occasions and passed from one generation to the next, activating and reinforcing important social ties and extending reciprocal social networks. Artists take great care to accurately personalize and depict events, scenes, and individuals but avoid negative character dimensions. The tablas have also entered the tourist circuit as decorative commodities. The amount of writing accompanying scenes in traditional tablas explains the scenes but also serves as a reection of the size of the recipients social networks. Gonz alez used color photocopies of the Piraq Causa series to elicit response from villagers about their experiences of war. She is aware the tablas themselves inuence and structure the creation and selectivity of memories and nar-

ratives conveyed to her. Hence, triangulating between visual anthropology, linguistic anthropology, and oral history, she therefore also relies on archival documents, the reams of testimony gathered by the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and participant-observation. At the crux of the story punctuated by the Piraq Causa tablas are the actions of a wealthy villager, Narciso, who, in 1971 sought to expand his landholdings to which he was convinced he had the right. Deciding to pursue his individual self-interest, he behaved as a gamonal, or landed estate owner, but was in fact part of the community. When Sarhuinos fought back against his efforts to persuade legal authorities of his right to Sarhua resources, Narciso retaliated. He claimed to the military that his fellow villagers were being incited by terucos (terrorists), thus bringing the war directly to Sarhua. As a result of Narcisos accusations many Sarhuinos were imprisoned and subsequently members of Sendero took over, establishing popular trials and schools and killing those they suspected of spying or of being twofaced. Narciso was banished but reappeared and then disappeared, inciting gossip, and what Gonz alez calls public secrets. Pieces show up eventuallya severed hand, Narcisos horse. Senderos extreme actions, in turn, led to the bloody murder of the local Sarhua leader, Justiniano; a pitched battle between guerrillas and the military, after which an uneasy peace nally returned to the community. The traditional political hierarchy crumbled; women were shamed, abused, and raped; the communal artists workshop was burned and destroyed. Virtually all villagers were enmeshed in the conict. Gonz alez argues that in the context of the polarization and vacuum of power created by the civil war, Sarhuinos could no longer contain or deal with preexisting land conicts as they had once done. They also faced notorious problems with cattle rustlers but encountered the abject failure of the national justice system. These conicts and lack of justice became the raison d etre, at least initially, for encouraging the entrance of Sendero (who expediently dealt with cattle rustlers by killing them) and of the military. Gonz alez demonstrates brilliantly how the conicts became strategic tools in the war itself and points out key fallacies of David Stolls assumptions and the conclusions She also he reached in his debate with Rigoberta Menchu. critiques the culturalist analyses that claimed that hangings and dismemberment were actually returns to customary law under these conditions. Gonz alez shows how this history is both revealed and concealed in the visual grammar of the tablasnotions of Andean space, society, and ideology. As such the tablas relieved viewers from the burden of remembering or worse, impairing their memory to the point of conditioning them to oblivion (p. 83). The ability to create all memories, she argues, stimulates forgetfulness, and the tablas made for multiple memories. Her interactions with villagers revealed

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gendered differences in how the tablas were interpreted and how public secrets, active forgetting, and politicized gossip became coping mechanisms. One heartrending example is that of Narcisos widow, Luisa, who experiences aburicuy depression and a sense of dispossession. Luisa has many clues that her husband was disappeared in some terrible way (that severed hand), but she holds onto the hope that he is still alive and that he did nothing wrong. Those who killed Narciso and the artists who made the tablas adhere to a collective silence. Gonz alez learns how the making of silence may serve as a safeguard even as it grants consent to what everyone assumes happened. She also encounters the dangers that lie in divulging such truths, especially since so frequently they involved close kin pitted against one another. Such constraints in remembering do not make for a tidy narrative. And there is an obsessive quality to Gonz alezs efforts to nd out what really happened, mirroring the tension of knowingnot knowing out of which memories emerge among those who live through and in civil war. At the same time, Gonz alezs sensitivity to the emotional toll of war on ordinary people is, in part, a consequence of her work in clinical psychology prior to becoming an anthropologist. I found most signicant and compelling Gonz alezs in-depth exegesis of key Andean concepts that held clues to the Sarhuinos experiences of the war and to their lives today. Her command of Quechua; her respect and empathy for the Sarhuinos, some of whom were allied with Sendero, some not; and her deep reluctance to impose her own views and demands are among the many strengths of this outstanding and incisive ethnography on memory and truth telling.

Reference cited
Starn, Orin 1991 Missing the Revolution: Anthropologists and the War in Peru. Cultural Anthropology 6:6391.

The Tour Guide: Walking and Talking New York. Jonathan R. Wynn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. 226 pp., index. NATALIE ALVAREZ Brock University If space is a practiced place, as Michel de Certeau asserts in The Practice of Everyday Life, then the stories of the walking tour guide bring to the fore the practices that produce civic spaces, exposing the illusory xity of the map: What the map cuts up, as de Certeau says, the story cuts across (1984:129). Wynns The Tour Guide responds to the dearth of scholarship in tourism studies on the tour guide

as subject, offering rare insight into the diegetic practices of tour guides who generate an urban alchemyan alternative culture at street level that resists the macrostructural forces of a city (pp. 175176). With lively analysis punctuated by illustrative eld notes from Wynns own experiences on walking tourssuch as Mark Levys theatrical tour of New Yorks Five Points District, Jeffrey Trasks Before Stonewall tour that geographically follows the chronology of gay culture as it evolved in Greenwich Village, Jennifer Froncs Immigrant Labor and Lower East Side Tour that immerses tourists in the world of the worker (p. 113), and Bruce Kaytons radical history tour of Central Park, to name a fewthe book itself has a suitably peripatetic structure, which takes the reader on a tour of its own. Much as a walking tour guide unveils the city to disclose what Walter Benjamin referred to as its porosity (Benjamin 1986)the hidden layers of history, culture, and political action that accumulate over time to create everevolving structuresWynns study is a multifaceted reveal. The reader sees the working conditions of walking tour guides who operate at the edge of a leisure and tourism supersector of the labor market (p. 12). And the study reveals how walking tour guides, as public historians, produce public culture. But for readers interested in the intersections between ethnographic research, tourism, and performance studies, what may be of most interest is the books elucidation of how, as an embodied practice, the walking tour can be interventionist in affective, kinesthetic, and explicitly political ways. The book opens with eld notes from a city council hearing at New York City Hall in June 2003, scheduled in response to widespread protests generated by the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs new Sightseeing Guide Licensing Exam. The rationale behind the notoriously difcult new examwith a pass rate of 36 percent (p. 4)was to professionalize, according to Wynn, what was otherwise a rather informal labor market (p. 8). The exam, written by noted New York City walking tour guide Justin Ferate, essentially served as a mechanism to regulate and codify relevant urban history and culture (p. 8) and as such was perceived to be directly at odds with an industry that is, as the books abundant and colorful case studies illustrate, generative precisely because of its idiosyncrasies and irregularities as an informal sector. The controversy over the exam allows Wynn to introduce the tensions that exist between the informal culture shaping of walking tour guides and the corporate culturalism of city planners that often leads to urban ossication (p. 21). In contradistinction to the increasing pervasiveness of corporate culturalism, walking tour guides see themselves at the top of the intellectual food chain, as one guide puts it (p. 28), resisting the avoidance culture of tourist traps by compelling visitors and local New Yorkers to slow

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down, observe, and take notice of the details of local history inscribed in the cityscape, which surround them unseen. Indeed, for walking tours, the experience is not about getting from point A to point B, as a bus tour might be organized but, rather, about the inhabited experience along the way, the chance encounters with locals and street activity that introduce elements of unpredictability and improvisation. The walking tour is, according to Ferate, all about the interaction that, Wynn emphasizes, could be said about the city itself: walking is a part of the quotidian New York life, and this kind of engagement is an integral part of the daily lives of New Yorkers (p. 107). By following specic tour guides such as Ferate, the book captures the visceral experience of the walking tour, which foregrounds how our urban environment shapes us just as we shape it. In his Grand Central Terminal Tour, Ferate draws tourists attention to the physiological effects on the onlooker who gazes up to see a sculpture that has been placed high above by the architect: when you raise your chin up your chest opens, and your lungs get more oxygen, so the body feels good (p. 84). Entering the terminal, he relays that the building used to feature a set of double doors as a kind of experiential pacing: visitors would be distracted by having to wrestle with two sets of doors only to be struck by the beauty of the room once they made it through. Ferate then demonstrates how the ramp, which takes visitors down into the space, forces the walker to arch her back, taking the sightlines up to the Zodiac mural on the ceiling (p. 91). Ferate then runs off into the crowd to the amusement of his tour group, hopping between couples and commuters and circling back, according to Wynn, to demonstrate the careful mass-ballet that occurs every minute (p. 91). Through these lively, rsthand accounts, Wynn effectively captures how tourists are affected by the kinesthetic rather than merely by seeing the sights (p. 107). Slowing down and taking notice of the details in an experiential way can also be a highly subversive activity, as Wynns analysis of the Surveillance Cameras in Chelsea Tour, offered by performance artist and activist Bill Brown, demonstrates. In his walking tour Brown stresses that walking slowly and stopping periodically can trigger warnings on the latest counterterrorism surveillance software (p. 146). Browns tour concludes with an explicitly political enjoinment to reclaim public space and actively explore neighborhoods (p. 147). What Wynns book effectively captures is how these explorations of specic neighborhoods and urban enclaves can be tactical, in de Certeaus sense, in multiple ways. Just as the tour guides themselves become stewards for their neighborhoods, as tour guide Eric Washington puts it, participants are tasked with the responsibility of taking ownership of insidiously privatized public spaces. In this respect, the walking tour is oriented toward locals as much as it is

visitors to New York City. Wynn persuasively and vibrantly demonstrates how walking tour guides shift the ground beneath the feet of participants by defamiliarizing and debanalizing the local, as Wynn says, in turn re-enchanting the city (p. 168). As such, The Tour Guide will be of keen interest to ethnographers interested in microsocial urban practices (p. 175) as acts of intervention, capable of shaping local culture and mobilizing participants to become more invested citizens of the cities they inhabit.

References cited
Benjamin, Walter 1986 Reections. New York: Schocken. de Certeau, Michel 1984 The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Ismaili Modern: Globalization and Identity in a Muslim Community. Jonah Steinberg. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. 256 pp. DAROMIR RUDNYCKYJ University of Victoria The contemporary world is increasingly characterized by the integration of production systems, nancial activities, and labor markets across national borders. In addition, NGOs, religious communities, multilateral organizations, and other institutions operate transnationally with escalating frequency. Given the disciplines earlier focus on discrete, bounded cultural units, contemporary anthropology has increasingly had to address the new congurations of individual subjectivity and the discursive practices of identity attendant in these processes of globalization. Ismaili Modern makes a distinctive intervention in this arena of research by documenting the emergence of a range of networks that link together the global Ismaili community. Jonah Steinberg deploys several analytical strategies to document what he calls global Ismailism. The Ismaili community, a branch of Islam, was formed in the eighth century after a disagreement over the rightful succession to the Islamic caliphate. Consisting of somewhere between 2.5 and 12 million members, Ismailis comprise a much smaller group in comparison to the better known Sunni and Shia communities to which they are often contrasted. The current leader of the Ismaili community is the fourth Aga Khan to whom members of the Ismaili community pay an annual tithe of 12.5 percent of their income. A distinctive feature of the Ismaili community is that it consists of a broad diaspora with concentrations in various parts of South and Central Asia, the Middle East, East Africa, Western Europe, the United States, and Canada. Unlike both Sunni and

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Shia Muslims, Ismailis do not constitute a majority of the population in any of the nation-states in which they reside and have faced hostility from other Muslim groups in the past. Thus, identity presents a distinct political problem for members of the Ismaili community, and Steinberg directs his analysis toward the formation of a transnational Ismaili identity through a range of institutions and technological efforts. Steinberg argues that global Ismailism demonstrates a new conguration of identity that extends beyond the nation-state. This collective identity is the product of, on the one hand, the fact that Ismaili communities are increasingly subject to the intervention of various development initiatives supported by the centralized Ismaili authority, and, on the other hand, that these communities cling to the margins of the nation-states in which they are found. Steinberg shows how the Aga Khan oversees a highly centralized network with specic institutions dedicated toward various development and education initiatives. In many cases these Ismaili institutions provide services that are more often associated with state provision, such as health care, educational curricula, and water distribution and purication. Steinberg argues that these institutions are becoming increasingly important in the constitution of Ismaili subjectivity and are instrumental in creating a uniform, transnational community out of what until recently was a highly dispersed and only loosely knit collection of Ismaili practitioners. These arguments are supported by a methodological approach that focuses on two main areas. First, Steinberg documents the range of institutions that Ismailis have created, primarily through a discursive analysis of a range of reports and other documents that these institutions have produced. Second, he supplements this primarily discursive approach through interviews and observations drawn primarily from eldwork conducted in both Pakistan and Tajikistan. In so doing, Steinberg demonstrates a strikingly thorough knowledge of Ismailism. He made an (unspecied) number of trips to Pakistan between 1993 to 2001 and also conducted eldwork in Tajikistan, London, Paris, and Geneva in 2003 and 2004. (Most key Ismaili development institutions are located in Europe.) Ismaili Modern contains ve body chapters in addition to an introduction and a conclusion. The rst chapter documents the history of Ismailism. The next two focus on key institutions aiming to develop Ismaili communities and to standardize the practice of the religion. The subsequent two chapters examine the politics of Ismaili identity and the shape of transnational community from the perspective of the village. The chapters on Ismaili institutions focus on textual representations and analysis of the discourses that are found in the publications of institutions like the Aga Khan Development Network and the Institute for Ismaili Studies.

Steinberg does a ne job documenting how liberal modernist values (p. 75) and a commitment to progress and development undergird ofcial, centralized discourses about the Ismaili community. The arguments might have been more compelling if the author had used ethnography, rather than textual analysis, to make more of the fundamental theoretical points. It would have been interesting to know whether any of the participants in Steinbergs research, either the residents of the villages in which he studied or the employees of the various development agencies he documented, paraethnographically posed the problem of identity on which the book is focused. For example, did villagers consider themselves less Pakistani or Tajik and more Ismaili? Did they ever pose their membership in the nation-state as a problem? Like any solid anthropological work, the book raises a number of questions. Steinberg emphasizes the novelty of Ismailism as a transnational entity that is not territorially bounded, but such units are not that unusual, either historically or in the contemporary moment. At various points in the text I found myself wondering how Ismailism compared to other congurations of global identity, such as antiglobalization activists, Catholicism, or (from a perhaps slightly earlier historical moment, but nonetheless relevant given that a portion of the research was carried out in the former Soviet Union) international communism. Furthermore, given the increasing prevalence of institutional ethnography, it would have been illuminating to see how visions of development were actually produced institutionally on an everyday basis. The author might have explicitly documented what the development ofcials thought that they were doing in designing, funding, and executing development initiatives in explicit comparison to what the people in the villages where Steinberg was working thought that they were doing. Furthermore, is the commitment to liberalism and modernity that Steinberg argues are constitutive of global Ismailism at all debated contested in the highlands of Tajikistan and Pakistan? The book also might have made more of an explicit intervention into the literature on the anthropology of development. Of course one cannot do everything in an anthropological work and on balance the book makes a substantial contribution to documenting the reconguration of identity through new global networks. Steinberg makes a key intervention in discussions of how the reconguration of the nation-state and the increasing proliferation of powerful institutions not conned by the territorial boundaries of states enable the formation and the standardization of new senses of self. Thus, the work makes an important contribution to anthropological work that no longer takes bounded cultures or the nation-state for granted as units of analysis.

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Cultured States: Youth, Gender, and Modern Style in 1960s Dar es Salaam. Andrew Ivaska. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. 288 pp. DANIEL MAINS University of Oklahoma Andrew Ivaskas Cultured States explores the complex intersections among gender; perceptions of the modern; national and transnational culture; wealth; and generation in the rapidly changing context of 1960s Dar es Salaam. Ivaska skillfully uses case studies of conicts over music, fashion, university educational policies, and marriage law to concretize these potentially abstract issues. Ivaska draws a great deal of the evidence for his analysis from letters from readers that were published in Tanzanian newspapers. As he explains in his introductory chapter, historians of Africa have underutilized the popular press, and Ivaska puts forth a convincing argument for its value. Letters from readers were a rich source of discussion and debate in 1960s Tanzania. Ivaska uses these letters to examine opposing positions concerning policy and national culture. He explores how letter writers position themselves discursively, and this analytical methodology is highly effective in demonstrating how multiple issues, including gender and notions of the modern, are interrelated with arguments concerning cultural policy. The letters also reveal that state policies were not simply accepted. Instead they generated lively debate in which individuals sought to broadcast their arguments to large audiences. Government bans on soul music and miniskirts are two of Ivaskas most interesting case studies. Ivaska argues that in both cases cultural policy reects gendered concerns about the decadence and immorality of urban youth culture that is specically associated with feminized consumption. Ivaska describes the state-led Operation Vijana (Operation Youth), which was a campaign launched in 1968 against various forms of indecent dress and adornment, like miniskirts for women and tight trousers for men. Youth league ofcials argued that wearing miniskirts inhibited the expression of womens Africanness and associated these fashions with a Europe that was marked by crime and immorality. Interestingly, Operation Vijana occurred at the same time as Operation Dress-Up, an attempt to encourage Maasai to abandon traditional forms of dress in favor of trousers for men and long dresses for women. In both cases the state was promoting a vision of the modern, but it was a modern that was constructed as decent and appropriate for Tanzania. This was primarily a rural rather than an urban modern. Opponents of Operation Vijana focused their critiques of the policy precisely on what it means to be modern, arguing that banned fashions are associated with a desirable future. The modern, therefore, was taken up as a symbol that could be used to legitimate arguments on both sides of the

debate concerning banned clothing. Similarly, in banning soul music the state sought to discourage one aspect of international urban culture, at the same time that it embraced radical, black internationalism and hosted guests of honor like Angela Davis. The actual enforcement of Operation Vijana focused on young women and the ban on miniskirts was accompanied by vigilantism in which groups of young men attacked and publicly stripped young women who were wearing miniskirts. Ivaska does well to place concerns about womens clothing and morality within a context of fears about womens increased economic power in the city. Signicantly, women were often attacked on or around buses that women depended on to get to and from work. Ivaska provides evidence that, in practice, male migrants were much likelier to nd work than women. However, urban men perceived female migrants as dominating desirable urban jobs and using their sexuality to gain market. Young men perceived banned fashions, like miniskirts, as both symbols of womens economic success and tools that women used to obtain desirable employment. For many, the miniskirt represented the slippery slope between secretarial work and prostitution. On the one hand, womens secretarial work symbolized the modern nation in the sense that it represented economic development and independence. On the other hand, men often assumed that women exchanged sex for employment, leading to resentment that was directed at the miniskirt. Together with chapter 4 on marriage policy, Ivaskas analysis of miniskirts and gaining market is a useful contribution to a growing literature in African studies that examines love, exchange, and power within the context of the city. Importantly, Cultured States demonstrates that such tensions are not unique to the current generation and provides a case to compare with recent ethnographies. Chapter 3, Of Students, Nizers, and Comrades examines controversies concerning state-mandated national service for university graduates and the inuence of international leftist faculty members on university curriculum. This chapter is certainly interesting, and I was excited to learn about the activities of academics, like Walter Rodney and Giovanni Arrighi, who taught at the University of Dar es Salaam in the 1960s. However, many of the books primary themes are absent in this chapter. It is not clear how the issues of modernity and gender that are so important for the rest of the book relate to the material discussed here. Ivaska does offer an insightful discussion of the conict over national service in terms of generational tensions, but I found that this chapter distracts from the analysis developed elsewhere in the book. Ivaska articulates his theoretical arguments most clearly in the introductory and concluding chapters. One of his primary arguments is that positions concerning the ban on clothing are based in a singular notion of the

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modern rather than multiple or alternative modernities. Ivaska argues that the attraction of being modern was based precisely in its singularity, yet the vision of this singular modernity varied between groups based on gender, generation, wealth, and access to state power. In this sense, Cultured States makes an important contribution to discussions of modernity. Ivaska also engages with Achille Mbembes notion of conviviality to argue that although rulers and ruled may share categories and discourses, in Dar es Salaam this did not necessarily prevent critiques that in some cases even resulted in shifts in policy. On the whole, Andrew Ivaskas Cultured States is a wellwritten book that documents a fascinating historical period and offers signicant theoretical insights. Cultured States would work well in graduate and upper-level undergraduate courses.

Ethnographic Sorcery. Harry G. West. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. 132 pp. NAOMI HAYNES University of California, San Diego In this wonderful book, Harry G. West presents a compelling account of the ethnographers magic (Malinowski 1984:6). Through an examination of sorcery on the Muedan Plateau in northern Mozambique, West demonstrates how worlds are created and re-created, worlds that include his own. The result for the reader is a share in the authors uncanny realization that the ethnographer, like those he dreams, is himself susceptible to being dreamt (p. xi). While this book draws on sophisticated anthropological theory, it is useful not only for those in the discipline interested in reecting on the nature of their craft but also for newcomers and students curious about the practice of anthropology. West begins Ethnographic Sorcery by describing a talk he gave to a group of Mozambican researchers early in his eldwork. In it he argued that Muedan sorcery lionsthat is, lions created by sorcerers to devour the esh of their victimswere symbols that expressed ambivalence about power. After his lecture, the audience was visibly uncomfortable. Finally, someone gently explained to West that he had misunderstood what his Muedan informants were telling him; the lions they spoke of were not symbols but real things. In this moment one of the central questions of the book emerges: How do anthropologists respond to reports of phenomena, such as sorcery, that they typically nd hard to accept as true? More to the point, do anthropologists consider their world to be any more contestable than their informants do theirs? When confronted with stories of witches, zombies, or sorcerers, few today would reproduce Evans-Pritchards statement that such things clearly

cannot exist (1976:18). But, even more palatable appeals to symbols or metaphors may fail to satisfy on this point. For, as West notes, quoting Louise White, metaphor is often read as a polite academic term for false (p. 35). Alongside this discussion of anthropological analyses of the supernatural, West recounts some of his experiences in the eld, including a serious bout of dysentery and the subsequent treatment he received from a Muedan humu, or healer. Fearing that the illness had been the result of sorcery, the healer worked countersorcery on Wests behalf. Efforts of healers and other leaders to undo sorcerys effects represent instances of kupilikula, the Shimakonde word that serves as the title of Wests rst book (2005). In that monograph, West uses the notion of kupilikula to discuss power in postcolonial Mozambique. He argues that power is an unending series of transcendent and transformative maneuvers, each one moving beyond, countering, inverting, overturning, and/or reversing the one preceding it (West 2005:7). By undergoing treatment at the hands of a Muedan healer, West was brought into this process, and in the shared world of kupilikula came to an understanding of what sorcery means and does on the Muedan Plateau. West argues that sorcery is a powerful mode of world making for Muedans. If this is true, then the question is not whether sorcery lions are symbols or real things but, rather, what kind of reality they create. On the Muedan Plateau, the shared language of sorcery produces a world divided into two interdependent realms, one visible and one invisible. At the same time that sorcerers work in the invisible world to bring destruction to the visible, healers work countersorcery to thwart those efforts and to create the world anew. As with sorcery, this undoing of harm is actualized through language, paradigmatically expressed in the nighttime patrols of countersorcerers who expose the work of their enemies by crying out, I see you! for everyone to hear. This is the world of kupilikula, a world in which everyone is (or at least might be) a sorcerer and a countersorcerer, in which things are constantly made and unmade. Wests ultimate argument about ethnography emerges after he relates a conversation he had with the successors of a late Muedan healer who had been an important informant. During their visit, West was surprised to learn that this man had considered him a fellow worker in the sorcery trade. Given what we know by this point about Muedan sorcery, it is not difcult to see why this was the case. Ethnographers, like Muedan countersorcerers, walk about saying, I see you!, rendering things like sorcery made things and, in so doing, unmaking them. This is what West means by ethnographic sorcery: the simple fact that interpretative visions of the world necessarily constitute means of leverage on the world (p. 81). And, of course, these visions are never the nal word but are challenged as quickly as they are produced. Nor does anyone operate outside this process of world construction, a thought that returns our attention

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to the initial problem of whether sorcery, or ethnography, or any other social discourse stands above contestation. While Wests argument is convincing by itself, it is made more so by the way he has structured his chapter. This is a short book divided into short sections that move back and forth between key ethnographic moments and efforts to bring those moments into dialogue with anthropological understandings of sorcery and metaphor. In the hands of a less skilled writer this method would have been difcult to follow, but West pulls it off beautifully. By the end of the book the reader has been caught up with him in the ongoing process of kupilikula, the back and forth of world making and unmaking, clarity and complexity. Rarely are we given such a clear view of the ethnographic process as we have here in the slow advancement of ideas and counterideas working together to make sense of a particular community. By walking us through in this way, West succeeds in making sorcerers of us all.

References cited
Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 1976[1937] Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the Azande. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Malinowski, Bronisaw 1984[1922] Argonauts of the Western Pacic. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press. West, Harry G. 2005 Kupilikula: Governance and the Invisible Realm in Mozambique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

uck Recreating Japanese Men. Sabine Fruhst and Anne Walthall, eds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. 347 pp. CYNTHIA DICKEL DUNN University of Northern Iowa This book is a collection of case studies of Japanese men in various contexts over a span of four centuries from the 17th to the 21st century. Rather than focusing on the construction of hegemonic masculinities in Japan, the chapters delineate a variety of masculinities at the margins. An introduction by the editors elucidates four themes that run through the collection: explorations of noniconic masculinities, masculinity in crisis, the achievement of male maturity, and how specic masculine identities are dened in contrast to other socially situated groups of men. The 13 chapters are grouped loosely into three thematic sections. The rst, titled Legacies of the Samurai, consists of four chapters delineating denitions of Japanese manhood in relationship to violence and the image of the warrior. Anne Walthall examines the construction of guns in relationship to masculinity and social status in texts from the early 1600s, focusing in particular on the use and owner-

ship of guns by high-ranking nobility. Luke Roberts demonstrates that martial bravery and honor violence were also central to the autobiographical self-construction of a successful merchant of the same time period, suggesting that distinctions between the masculine ideals of samurai and merchants were not as clear-cut in this era as they later became. Jumping forward in time, the next two chapters consider images of the warrior in 20th-century Japan. Michele M. Mason deconstructs three texts published over the span of the 20th century that respond to a perceived emasculation of Japanese men and subordination to Western power by attempting to reconstruct a national masculine identity uck anabased on an idealized samurai past. Sabine Fruhst lyzes the subjective experiences of members of the Japanese Self-Defense Forces who strive to articulate alternative definitions of military heroism as members of a military force that is constitutionally prohibited from engaging in warfare. The second section examines Marginal Men. Yuki Sakurai details the progression of young male employees to adult status within an 18th- and 19th-century dry goods store, suggesting that the lengthy apprenticeship system denied most employees the opportunity to achieve the contemporary masculine ideal of independent family life. The remaining three chapters examine marginality and changing constructions of masculinity in the 20th century. Christopher Gerteis examines how the family breadwinner orientation of the postwar Japanese labor movement systematically disadvantaged both women workers and younger male workers and explores how this image failed to appeal to younger generations of men in the 1960s and 1970s who aspired to middle-class consumer identities. Susan Napier provides a literary analysis of the novel, movie, and television series Densha Otaku, exploring how the computer and anime-obsessed hero geek emerges through the romantic narrative as a sympathetic alternative to the traditional salaryman model of Japanese masculinity. Tom Gill analyzes how Japanese homeless men enact identities centered around the trope of self-reliance in ways that contrast and often conict with the promotion of that ideal by government agencies and policies. The nal section, Bodies and Boundaries, again combines historical and contemporary case studies. Hiroko Nagano examines the construction of masculine power and identity in village mens associations in the 19th century. Wolfram Manzenreiter examines how the potentially androgynous sport of rock climbing becomes implicitly gendered through recruitment and interactional patterns, even while offering an alternative form of masculinity. Teresa A. Algoso analyzes how hermaphrodites and others with ambiguous sexuality became problematic for the biomedical construction of discrete sexual categories as part of the governmental apparatus of the early modern Japanese state. Ian Condry explores the phenomenon of moe, love for imaginary online characters, as involving gender

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performativity through new forms of postmodern consumption. Finally, Jennifer Robertson demonstrates how the growing industry of humanoid robots in Japan produces creations gendered in ways that reproduce heteronormative gender roles. The juxtaposition of these disparate case studies amply deconstructs any concept of an essentialized masculine or national identity during any period of Japanese history. While some of the chapters examine masculinity in relationship to femininity, others focus on how groups of men dene themselves in relation to other men, whether on the basis of age grades, generation, or social status. A number of the studies analyze emerging forms of masculinity during periods of social change or the experiences of men who fail to achieve hegemonic forms of masculine identity. The contributors vary in the extent to which they engage with the existing literature on masculinity; some of the case studies are somewhat myopic and would benet from more explicit placement within a broader theoretical framework or comparative context. Although many of the individual chapters are well worth reading, the selection of the case studies and their division into thematic sections appear opportunistic. The heterogeneity of time periods, disciplinary perspectives, and analytical foci means that there are few general themes or theoretical questions that link the chapters together. The reader is left primarily with a clear sense of the diversity of male experiences and identities both within and across different moments of Japanese history.

Venceremos?: The Erotics of Black Self-Making in Cuba.

Jafari S. Allen. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. 241 pp. KRISTINA WIRTZ Western Michigan University Jafari Allens new ethnography of gendered, raced, and sexed self-making in Cuba (p. 2) provides a timely consideration of desires for freedom and possibilities for social equality under the Cuban Revolution. Cubas Special Period, declared by Fidel Castro in the 1990s crisis following the end of the Soviet era, seems nally to have shifted into a more hopeful era of reforms, where issues of sexism, racism, and sexuality, of individual autonomy (esp. in economic activities) and civil society are gaining visibility, as the Socialist state undergoes a carefully managed contraction, pulling back from its saturation of every facet of life. These trends are accelerating the opening of new spaces for critical debate and new possibilities for long-silenced voices to be heard more widely and perhaps to impact political processes of reform. Allens period of research, from the late 1990s through the early 2000s, captured what we now recognize to be a moment of transition, when tactics of ev-

eryday survival that contradicted Revolutionary tenets and grumblings of discontent shared only among intimates began to coalesce into a willingness to engage in more visibly political dialogues and nonconformities, especially when seen through Allens feminist analysis in which the personal is political and his diasporic, black, queer analysis of radical becoming (pp. 1314). What makes this book such a fun and engaging read is Allens clear passion for issues of personal freedom and social equality and his refusal to assume the position of neutral observer. Instead, he follows iconoclastic schol ars such as bell hooks, Audre Lorde, and Gloria Anzaldua, writing himself into the text, making his allegiances clear. Like many Cubanists, Allen shares the idealism that represents the very best impulses of the Cuban Revolution but bears witness to Cubans everyday struggles in that system. No apologist for the Revolutions failings, he is not willing to condemn it either; nor does this book presume the late hour of its twilight (e.g., Weinreb 2009). Allen is, like many of his Cuban respondents, a loyal (if embattled) critic, rooting for Cuba to reach its somewhat tarnished radical potential and allow its citizensall of its citizensto live out theirs. One sees him pointing to small successes and reaching for answers, for governmental policy implications and practical calls to civic action. In this he seems to have internalized (or converged with) what strikes me as a very Cuban approach to social science in seeking the practical implications of ones research. Allen does not shy away from combining theoretical exposition with a desire for political engagement in this critical ethnography. His incorporation of radical, feminist, black diaspora and queer theory is sophisticated, even as it advocates action for liberation. To give the tenor of his political commitments, consider one example: I want to support the claim by Audre Lorde, Chela Sandoval, and others that the practice of loving friendship is a powerful tool (that we have now) that can be used to heal from the multiple and compounded traumas of race/sex terror (p. 131). He also engages approaches emphasizing the role of individual desire in motivating community-building and in practices of disidentication as steps toward what Paolo Freire called conscientization through small, grassroots communities (pp. 9394). Allen also engages major Cuban intellectual gures. His is the freshest discussion of early folklorist Fernando Ortizs inuential book, Cuban Counterpoint (1970) that I have read in some time (given a much-needed queer reading in ch. 2). He uses important Revolution-era lms by Sara G omez and the better-known Tom as Guti errez Alea as commentaries about the structural exclusions of women, non-gender-normative, and same-sex-loving people under what he deems the Revolutions heteropatriarchal policies promoting militant New Men (p. 67) while identifying women with families and domestic life (see ch. 4). He

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explains why lesbians are effectively disappeared (p. 68) for violating the conation of femininity with particular familial and sexual roles. He also shows how disparaging discourses linking effeminacy and cowardice have denied gay men both masculinity and Revolutionary commitment, leading to persecution of what was seen as a contagion of counterrevolutionary homosexuality (pp. 6972). Surprisingly, he does not connect this with rhetorics of contagion long applied to Cubas black population. He does argue that the Cuban Revolutions policies unquestioningly adopted longstanding heteronormative and racist ideologies, for example in explaining continuing black marginalization as the fault of this populations backwardness. Such analyses invite comparisons with, for example, the Moynihan report and culture of poverty thesis it advanced in the United States (as Allen discusses). Given recent attention to racialization processes and the bitter legislative and legal ghts over gay rights in the United States and elsewhere, the timeliness of Allens project is conrmed. Myths of Cubas isolation from international cultural and political trends are likewise dispelled. Interspersed with these discussions, Allen offers nuanced ethnographic accounts of his Cuban interlocutors, mostly young, urban residents, and mostly black. In short vignettes, he emphasizes that their views are not always consistent, nor are their struggles always clearly for or resistant to particular political stances. These are intriguing portraits of what James Scott calls infrapolitics: there is Octavio, who also goes by Lili, who decides to aunt her drag performances before neighbors who publicly malign what they privately desire. There is Cole, a card-carrying Young Communist member whose views on racism Allen catches in a moment of youthful ux. Sex workers, too, explain their choices and reveal something of their lives, as do lesbians who have formed quiet support groups and highly visible rap groups alike. One is left craving more ethnographic grounding of these individuals and the communities they represent. Nor does Allen use his material to reexamine the hegemonic Lockean notion of personhood promoted by nation-states of all political stripes, despite the fact that the religious activities and drag performances of his research subjects often challenge the forensic basis of personhood in individual accountability and biographical continuity. Ignoring these implications, he measures social progress based on notions of individual sexual citizenship and erotic autonomy (e.g., p. 130). And, yet, Allen effectively demonstrates that the question is . . . much more complex than whether Cuba is or is not oppressive to homosexuals and gender nonconforming individuals (p. 129). In the course of the book he describes improving conditions, because of political openings and changed ofcial policies and practices but argues that the hegemonies on which [oppressive policies and practices of the past] were based have proven to be sturdier

and remain largely unchanged, even within some queer critiques (p. 129). His is an important intervention for Cubanists, Caribbeanists, and all those interested in understanding the nexus of desire and liberation in processes of racialization, gendering, and sexuality.

References cited
Ortiz, Fernando 1970[1947] Cuban Counterpoint: Sugar and Tobacco. Harriet de On s, trans. New York: Vintage. Weinreb, Amy 2009 Cuba in the Shadow of Change. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.

Reservation Reelism: Redfacing, Visual Sovereignty, and Representations of Native Americans in Film. Michelle H. Raheja. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010. 338 pp. LEIGHTON C. PETERSON Miami University Drawing from numerous theoretical and analytical frames, detailed archival research, and close readings of a variety of visual representations, Michelle Rahejas work Reservation Reelism: Redfacing, Visual Sovereignty, and Representations of Native Americans in Film seeks to question interpretations of Native cultural producers as innocent dupes of capitalism (p. 6) and to provide an Indigenous lm theory unique to North American cinema (p. 7). The book is neither a comprehensive history of Native American representations in lm nor a catalogue of recent indigenous lmmakers or productions. Rather, it is an in-depth exploration of visual sovereignty and how it has developed from Hollywoods silent era to performance art to contemporary low-scale video productions accessible online. This discussion is augmented at the books conclusion by a personal vignette of real-world redfacing. It is refreshing to have a scholarly work on Native lm that transcends analyses of negative stereotypes in Hollywood Westerns, or canonical lmic turning points such as Kevin Costners Dances with Wolves (1990) or Chris Eyres Smoke Signals (1996). Of specic interest to anthropologists is the books engagement with recent anthropological work on indigenous media, as well as the framing of some indigenous visual culture as ethnographic interventions. The books most promising theoretical frame is the articulation of visual sovereignty, specic acts of selfrepresentation by indigenous media producers in a variety of political, economic, and cultural contexts, in which contemporary media practices are in dialogue with the past, leading to indigenous cultural healing. As noted, such acts are not limited to lm, an enlightened approach considering the shifting boundaries of mediated forms, yet

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lms necessarily provide the bulk of the exposition. For example in chapter 6, Zacharias Kunuks award-winning Atanarjuat (2001), based on an Inuit legend, is framed as a response of visual sovereignty to ethnography, and specifically to Robert Flahertys classic Nanook of the North. Sidestepping myriad debates of Nanook as ethnography, the author deftly explores how the production team countered Nanooks lingering ethnographic present to create an epic lm representing the past. Atanarjuat has itself become canonical in indigenous media studies, but Rahejas reading is productive despite a narrow understanding of anthropology, which unfortunately recurs. Other contemporary First NationsNative American lms are analyzed as texts or as cultural productions made on and for the virtual reservation through the lens of Native conceptions of prophesy, spirituality, or ghosts. The analysis of Shelly Niros It Starts with a Whisper (1993) suggests that it is designed to counter colonial prophesies and indigenized Christian narratives to imagine a different, more positive future for Native peoples. The analysis of Michael Linns Imprint (2007), for which Chris Eyre (Smoke Signals) was a producer, relies on the idea of previous lmic representations as ghosts of the past that current Native producers must confront, as well as the actual lmic engagement with ghosts that are discursively linked to the lms present-day characters. With Imprint , the author rightly acknowledges the interventions of Eyre, who suggested the scripts Native protagonists, and the Native cast, but the choice to frame Imprint as Eyres lm despite having been written, directed, and edited by nonNativesis puzzling, exhibiting a lack of understanding of narrative lm production and negating Linns role as the primary creative voice. The book is at its best with detailed, archival accounts of the workings of the early lm industry and specic personalities from the silent lm era, and with numerous narrative summaries and close readings of such classics as Minnie Ha Has role in Mickey (1918) or Molly Spotted Elks role in The Silent Enemy (1930), in the latter case linking it to a more contemporary performance dance piece, Evening in Paris. Here we nd the underpinnings of visual sovereignty, with early actors laughing at the camera, redfacing themselves, or challenging the tropes of miscegenation and gender ideologiesand with contemporary producers engaging this past. Rather than focusing exclusively on stereotypes, the author examines the meanings such representations have for indigenous media makers. Stereotypes are, however, addressed head-on with a scathing critique of Iron Eyes Cody, his contested Native identity, and his portrayal of the crying Indian in the 1970s antipollution media campaign, an image and act of passing of particular concern to Raheja. It is puzzling that in this discussion of Cody, the author critiques othersincluding recording artist Shania Twains

familial and personal connections to indigenous identity while claiming an understanding of indigenous identity and community as uid. This rhetorical tension between authenticity and a critical approach is never comfortably addressed. In the nal chapter, Raheja presents a rsthand account of the politics and perils of challenging contemporary redfacing in U.S. elementary school Thanksgiving pageants, specically at her own daughters school. Raheja and other parents launched what came to be a very public campaign to end the practice but were thwarted by local ideologies and politics. At times venting and indignant, the anecdote clearly illustrates the relationships among media practice, meaning, and broader sociocultural contexts. The melding of seemingly disparate frameworks and examples can leave the reader confused at times, an unfortunate distraction that could be circumvented by a more structured narrative. Likewise, the recurring metaphor of virtual reservation as a vexed social and imaginary geography where Native media occurs (p. 3) is unfortunate and serves to unintentionally delegitimize indigenous involvements far beyond any real reservation. Interestingly, Cree lmmaker Neil Diamonds 2010 documentary Reel Injun (Lorber Films) addresses the same issues with many of the same examples, including an intensely personal interview with Codys son Robert, interviews with indigenous lmmakers and actors, and poignant scenes of redfacing and playing Indian. As an act of visual sovereignty itself, Diamonds lm should be considered as either supplement or replacement for the book for some classroom uses. However, Reservation Reelism is a welcomed addition to the literature, and Rahejas archival research and extensive references to relatively unknown lms will prove useful to scholars of indigenous media and representational practices, as will the exposition of visual sovereignty, the works strongest contribution that will be discussed and utilized for years to come.

Reference cited
Diamond, Neil 2010 Reel Injun. 86 min. National Film Board of Canada, Rezolution Pictures. Montreal.

New Organ within Us: Transplants and the Moral Economy. Aslihan Sanal. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. xx + 244 pp. MONIR MONIRUZZAMAN Michigan State University New Organ within Us: Transplants and the Moral Economy is a richly ethnographic and soulfully written book that plunges its audience into the world of transplant

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patients and physicians whose unfamiliar realm of being inhabits and contradicts the complex universe of the Turkish biopolis. The epistemic and ontological underpinning of biopolis, the focus of Sanals book, is a strange technological and tangible world in which the collective life of patients and physicians can be placed within the emerging biopolitical, cultural, and ethical practices being cultivated when imported medicines are made local. By grounding the text in ethnographic eldworkfrom dialysis clinics, transplant centers, patients wards, and physicians ofces to mental asylums, dissecting rooms, cemeteries, and shinesas well as drawing on local history, literature, art, and poetry, the volume argues that organ transplant and transfer alter our sense of physical and psychological being (p. 13), initiating a series of cultural, spiritual, and metaphorical transformations about the new life that has materialized from the bodies of both living and dead. Rather than offering concrete chapters, the book is divided into two parts. Part 1, The Desirable, explores how patients and physicians are seeking life-saving organ transplants yet are challenged to justify the expansion of the Turkish biopolis. Part 2, The Impossible, speaks to the concerns raised by this new medical technology, especially the manipulation of life and death in modern Turkey. The books conclusion captures the idea that organ transplant occupies our inner worlds and limits our akl-I selim, the common sense of cultural practices. Part 1 begins with a series of ethnographic vignettes, illustrating the lives of transplant patients whose self is being transformed by organ transfer. The author identies their invisible transformation using the Turkish word benimseme, a verb form of the pronoun I, or I-ing, which means the process of internalizing something new by making it ones own (pp. 34). Once patients benimseme the foreign objects for their medical utility, they change personally, emotionally, and psychologically. In a similar way, physicians also construct, invent, and internalize the desirable world of making the impossible possible, as well as justifying, legitimating, and normalizing the technological penetration inside the body. While physicians are borrowing modernity from the West and tting it into local culture, they face challenges over the cultural understanding of kadavra (brain-death donor), theological limits of the body, fragmentation of jaan (life force), and alienation of lifeless objects, not to mention political transformation, technological competition, cadaver sharing, and the so-called organ maa, all of which interconnect with the biopolis, polis, and market of organ transplant in Turkey. The author posits that both patients and physicians share a common space where existential benimseme and material invention have taken place through rites, rituals, and regulations of new biomedical technologies. In part 2, Sanal traces how dead bodies are being procured for transplant procedures, a process that is ra-

tionalized through the complex contradictions and media hype of semantic slippages of kadavra, resurrection of self, transformation of suicide, and diffusion of jaan into the Turkish population. Narrating the story of Mehmed, a schizophrenic man who ends up on the dissecting table, Sanal explores the violence being done against mental patients, prisoners, and the poor, whose dead bodies become products for scientic knowledge and social consumption. Because of the shortage of brain-dead donors, the bodies of suicide, homicide, and trafc-accident victims are also used for the service of humanity as organ transplant proceeds apace. Sanal nds out that these surplus bodies are dumped into a swimming pool and later turned into social goods to prolong the lives of ailing patients. Because the dead bodies become means for biopolitical ends, Turkish physicians invent them by restoring their personhood, purify them by remaking their identity, and diffuse them into the population through a rite de passage. On this passage, physicians are, however, struck by Muslim cosmological space, while the dead body speaks to the living. Because the Quran reinforces that the dead body will rise from its grave and God will recreate the same being with all of its parts intact, physicians become puzzled when adding scientic values onto cadavers, transforming them into biomedical objects, and violating their bodily integrity, holism, and emanet (the idea that the body is borrowed from God). Thus, on the one hand, physicians face challenges on how these cadavers can be invented as functional, while, on the other hand, they struggle to discover how the cadavers can be utilized humanely. Sanal argues that both physicians and patients benimseme these social mechanisms, acculturation processes, and psychological experiences that transform their inner life, fragment biopolitical agenda, and defy hegemonic biopolis. The volume is sensitive to multiple subjectivities and is enjoyable to read. One minor criticism that I offer is that it occasionally stands on uncritical adoption of thinly conceived theoretical frameworks, that is, Freud, Lacan, or L evi-Strauss, which never go much deeper than the epigraphs and quotations used to introduce them. Also, Foucaults major work, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (1964), is not included in the discussion on Turkish mental institutes. Moreover, Lesley Sharp, Margaret Lock, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, and Lawrence Cohens ethnographies are not critically explored in conversation with the moral economy of organ transplant in Turkey. The book could have addressed deeper issues, such as: How and when are the patients subjectivity gradually transformed, both existentially and ontologically? Do patients experience the transplant differently when they receive organs from family members versus brain-dead persons versus foreign donors? While patients and physicians are collectively placed under the rubric of biopolis, what

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are the differences between them, that is, in the transformation of their body and self? Do both parties comprehend organ transplant as only a temporary x? I am also curious to know about the experiences of organ donors, as well as the political, symbolic, and theological dimensions of organ donation in Turkey. These are, however, minor issues compared to the books analytical breadth, ethnographic depth, methodological challenges, and multisited contribution to the eld. In sum, Sanals book deserves a wide audience. It will be of interest to those working in medical anthropology, psychological anthropology, science and technology studies, globalization of health care, and medical ethics. The book is an important contribution to the burgeoning eld of organ transplant, which is one of the most challenging technological triumphs in our time, as it is literally importing life from one person into the body of another (p. 13).

Reference cited
Foucault, Michel 1964 Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. New York: Vintage.

Hip Hop Desis: South Asian Americans, Blackness, and a Global Race Consciousness. Nitasha Tamar Sharma. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. 351 pp. RAYMOND CODRINGTON The Aspen Institute Hip Hop Desis: South Asian Americans, Blackness, and a Global Race Consciousness by Nitasha Tamar Sharma addresses how South Asian hip hop artists use this form of cultural expression to challenge normative representations of racial and cultural identity. In the book, hip hop represents a transformative space where identity is contested through participation in hip hop while drawing parallels with the historical and political experience of blacks in the United States. In this instance, participation in hip hop presents a key space in which to develop racial, cultural, and political communities. The author puts forward heterogeneous notions of blackness and desiness that illuminate some of the complications involved in dening identity through popular culture in multicultural urban environments. As is common in many global locales, hip hop often serves as the primary point of cultural reference for young people in these urban settings. The book examines three central themes: how and why middle-class Asians identify with blacks as a group who are not seen as upwardly mobile; how hip hop is used by second-generation South Asians to create racialized identities; and how South Asian artists use black popular culture

to facilitate political alliances with blacks. In a wider context, the book notes how South Asians use hip hop to create racial identities in the United States and develop ties to black culture and the black community while at the same time addressing their experience as transnational ethnics. Hip Hop Desis places race in a wider theoretical and analytical context by discussing how the discourse around race in the United States is framed within a rather narrow black-and-white binary, which does not always allow for the examination of the racialization of other groups. In this instance, the author brings into the discussion processes of racialization that South Asians experience in the United States while addressing the role of hip hop in facilitating alternative identities in these communities. The book demonstrates that these artists are relatively unique in relation to the wider South Asian community, which does not share an afnity with the identity, culture, or experiences of blacks in the United States. In the authors view, parallels between blacks and South Asians are apparent in regard to the prevalence of racism that is experienced by South Asians that in many ways confounds the notion of South Asians as a model minority who does not experience identity-based marginalization. In a wider sense, the role and specicities of racism in the lives of desis (Hindi: indigenous to India) in comparison to that of blacks provides an opportunity to consider how racism can be seen as both a general and specic phenomena. The book views identity formation as an ongoing project that resists singular notions of identity and culture. The analysis relies on the concept of polyculturalism to describe the uid process and elements through which culture and group identity are created. In regard to polyculturalism, the author notes that it emphasizes the multiple ows of appropriation that minimizes essentialist interpretations of culture, a perspective equally applicable to hip hop and to diasporic South Asian recongurations of ethnicity (p. 24). In this instance cultural identity and cultural production are constantly made and remade in processes related to new social formations. The book will be of interest to scholars who are interested in racial and cultural formation within hip hop, which are at times seen as a racial utopia where racial distinctions dissolve in the context of creating art, building community, and contributing to a culture in various ways. As such, the book helps to problematize an ideal notion of racial politics in hip hop to address the potential to further examine issues related to racial and class politics at play in this form of expressive culture. The book might have beneted from a deeper discussion around the degree to which blacks and other groups identied with the struggles of South Asians, as the dynamics seemed to be somewhat unidirectional between desis and blacks while the converse is discussed relatively briey outside of hip hop. In addition, a wider examination of the ability of relationships between blacks and South

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Asians to address racism and disparate outcomes at the structural level through activism and organized political activity would have added a dimension to the book. The author opens a wider discussion in regard to what constitutes activism and political activity in the context of hip hop. The sustainability and impact of such relationships in hip hop might have provided an opportunity to discuss how new racial and cultural formations address racism over time as artists mature and move in and out of hip hoprelated spaces. In addition, the book discusses how artists use hip hop to address pressing political and cultural issues, but a wider multicultural strategic intervention in regard to race and racism at the systems level is not the primary focus of this book. As such, the ability of hip hop to address the structural nature of racial disparities in the United States remains an ongoing project. The book encourages strong points of dialogue around the politics of race and cultural formation among South Asians and in hip hop more generally. As such, Hip Hop Desis is a contribution to analyses that focus on race, political activity, and global practices of hip hop. The book presents an interesting case in regard to how racial consciousness is deliberately constructed through a historical understanding of the marginalization of people of African descent and a subsequent application of this legacy to frame the experiences of South Asians in hip hop. In addition, the book represents an entry point to further problematize racial and cultural identity for South Asians and understandings of racial formation in the United States more generally.

Sharia Politics: Islamic Law and Society in the Modern World. Robert W. Hefner, ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011. 329 pp. ERIN E. STILES University of Nevada, Reno This absorbing and timely volume, edited by Robert W. Hefner, examines the relationship between sharia and politics in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Nigeria, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Turkey. The book is the result of a collaborative research project; the case studies thus all consider sharia vis-` a-vis politics in the modern history of each country and all address questions of citizenship, gender, and public perceptions of sharia; readers will be intrigued by the diversity of approaches to sharia. The contributors are established scholars from a range of disciplines. Although none of the chapters is primarily ethnographic, many incorporate data from interviews or focus groups. Hefners comprehensive introduction sets the stage for the case studies by addressing issues most pertinent to understanding the interplay of sharia and politics today: the

relationship between sharia and democracy; debates about maqasidthe ultimate aims of sharia; and the status of women and minorities. Hefner briey reviews the historical development of sharia and its role in politics from the early centuries of Islam to modern states. The introduction also includes generous overviews of each subsequent chapter, making it a very useful chapter on its own. In chapter 1, Frank Vogel describes the unique status of sharia in Saudi Arabia, where it is the basis of the legal system: In Saudi Arabia sharia politics is not only one strand or subject in politics; sharia is implicated in all politics (p. 55). What many will nd most intriguing here is Vogels discussion on change and reform in Saudi Arabia, in particular regarding the status of women and minority communities. He observes that much change is stemming from civil society: while the Saudi public is committed to sharia, reform is under way in many quarters, and King Abdullah has also shown receptivity to calls for moderate reform. Nathan J. Browns chapter on Egypt rst examines the modern history of institutions associated with sharia, such as al-Azhar and personal status courts, which lost autonomy by the mid20th century. By the 1960s and 1970s, there were public calls for greater inuence of sharia. At present, Brown observes that there is a degree of public consensus on the role of sharia in Egyptian politics: namely, that sharia provides specic rules and general guidelines for social and political life, and should be open for debate (p. 95). Brown observes that while the Egyptian state has attempted to harness public discourse on sharia, this has resulted in multiple views on the subject even within the state. In chapter 3, Bahman Baktiari proposes that Iran illustrates the difculty of implementing laws based on sharia. Khomeinis vilayat-e faqihguardianship of the jurist makes Iran unique in that the state is run by senior clergy. The state has applied sharia in a exible manner often in service of itself, and Baktiari argues that by politicizing sharia in this way, the clergy has profoundly changed public views of sharia (p. 141). He describes increasing public opposition to clerical authority and to particular laws, such as those limiting womens rights, and an increasing interest among the highly literate public in reading and interpreting sacred texts. M. Hakun Yavuzs chapter on Turkey describes yet another approach to sharia. Turkey is of course well known for the secularizing reforms of Mustafa Kemal in the 1920s, in which matters Islamic were delegated to the private sphere. Interestingly, the religious resurgence in recent decades has not resulted in broad calls for a rule of law based on sharia. Yavuzs recent eld research shows that among the general public, there is a common emphasis on sharia as providing a general ethical model or moral core rather than a specic body of rules. T. Barelds chapter on Afghanistan examines the different ways in which sharia is understood in

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Afghan societythere has been and is no single Afghan sharia tradition. Scholarly understandings of a sharia based on scared texts contrast with the more common interpretations of sharia based on customary law and local practice; Bareld includes discussion of the Taliban in the latter. Interviews with women activists show that many feel that womens rights will be most effectively addressed through increasing education and local-level cultural reforms because legislation on womens rights could have little practical effect. Muhammad Qasim Zaman examines debates about sharia in Pakistan, illustrating divergent views on the role of sharia in recent history and today. Zaman traces the inuence of British colonial policy and the development of competing views among modernists, traditionalist scholars, and Islamists. In recent history, Zaman argues that successive weak governments in Pakistanboth military and civilianhave resulted in public calls for greater implementation of sharia as a means to remedy Pakistans troubles. However, no consensus has emerged. For example, modernist-based state-level reforms such as the family law ordinance of 1961 and the 2006 Protection of Women Act, have failed to garner the support of ulama (traditionally educated Islamic scholars). Paul Lubeck considers the recent adoption of Islamic criminal law in Nigerias northern states vis-` a-vis the inuence of neo-Sala reformers and in the regions historical context. He notes the long-standing inuence of the concept of tajdid, or restoration, and the inuence of modern politics, economics, and ChristianMuslim tensions on the call for implementation of greater sharia in the Muslimdominated north. Lubeck includes an analysis of competing Muslim organizations in northern Nigeria, such as Sus, Sala-inspired, and other reform movements, and observes that members of the Muslim public have diverse reasons for supporting increased application of sharia. The nal chapter considers Indonesia, where Hefner notes that sharia discourses complement a commitment to democracy, even in Muslim scholarship. Hefner traces the historical development of sharia in Indonesia and notes that many regions embraced a sharia that incorporated Indic traditions and local law. By the 20th century, increased travel and access to education spurred calls for greater application of sharia, but this period also saw the rise of powerful secular political movements. At the state level, recent decades have seen much back-and-forth in terms of state recognition of Islamic law. And although surveys show that Indonesian public support for state implementation of sharia, very few Indonesians act on this support in the voting booth. In sum, the book provides a rst-rate, readable overview of sharia politics in the world today. Undoubtedly, it will be widely read and referenced across academic disciplines and by policy experts. Readers of American Eth-

nologist should note, however, that the chapters are not based chiey on ethnographic research. In the future, a welcome companion volume to Sharia Politics might include ethnographic studies of local-level understandings and applications of sharia in each of the countries examined.

Fallen Elites: The Military Other in Post-Unication Germany. Andrew Bickford. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011. xviii + 268 pp. JASON JAMES University of Mary Washington The 1990 unication of Germanyor the reunication, as some preferwas hardly the happy reunion of estranged siblings that West German leaders portrayed at the time. Although unication found justication in the idea that East and West Germans had always belonged to the same national family, 40 years of division and mutual othering combined with stark inequalities in power and wealth to erect what some called a wall in the mind in place of the physical one removed from the heart of Berlin. As Andrew Bickford shows vividly in his study of former East German army ofcers, Fallen Elites, unication entailed not only an unequal union and the political dissolution of the socialist German Democratic Republic (GDR) but also a symbolic negation of everything associated with it. Unlike Wehrmacht ofcers who retained their status in West Germany as honorable German soldiers despite having served under the Nazis, ofcers of the NVA or National Peoples Army of the GDR were categorized by the unied state as members of a foreign army and vilied for having served a criminal, totalitarian regime. Bickford insightfully highlights the discursive and legal gymnastics this entails for the state: although the law of blood descent (jus sanguinis) meant that all East Germans, including NVA ofcers, were by denition citizens of the West German Federal Republic (FRG) and unied Germany, the ofcers service in the NVA prevented them from qualifying either legally or culturally as German soldiers. Part 2 is devoted to portraying in vivid detail how the former ofcers respond to the former ofcers stigmatization and loss of status. Their search for recognition, their attempts to justify their pasts, and their inclination to view themselves as innocent victims come across as comprehensible, if also tragic and at times disturbing. The vast majority of former ofcers remain deeply convinced, according to Bickford, that they served honorably in an antifascist army whose mission was to maintain peace. If many East Germans rejected state propaganda, most of these men seem to have embraced it wholeheartedly. Still more unsettling is their discourse of victimhood, which nds especially disturbing expression in some ofcers claim that they are

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the Jews of unied Germany. As Bickford portrays it, this is not simply a passing reference or rhetorical ourish. In at least one instance a group of former ofcers conversed at length about the parallels between their situation and that of the Jews during the Third Reich, including the idea that the government of unied Germany seeks a biological nal solution (biologische Endl osung) to getting rid of NVA ofcersthat is, waiting for them to die out. Those familiar with postWorld War II German history know that claiming victimhood and drawing comparisons to the Holocaust is not as uncommon as we might hope. To take a recent example, public discussion of civilian suffering caused by the Allied bombing of German cities has arguably cast the majority of Germans as victims. Although this discussion has lacked explicit comparisons to the Holocaust, it has included references to the Allies program of annihilation and execution chambers and crematoria to describe the underground shelters in which many died. This makes clear that NVA ofcers discourse is not simply a product of East German indoctrination or a culture of memory that emphasized communist victims of Nazi repression more than other groups, including Jews. Indeed, claims of victimhood have been a quite common way for Germans to manage the burdens of Germanness since the end of World War II. To the degree that this suggests a relative failure to fully come to terms with the past, the punishment and othering of NVA ofcersalong with the general negation of the GDRcan be seen as a performance of decisive condemnation of a socialist criminal regime that has now displaced the fascist one as the primary object of historical reckoning. NVA ofcers thus rightly see themselves as caught up in a much broader politics of national memory and forgetting. In addition to portraying the competing and equally troubling constructions of the past adopted by the unied German state and NVA ofcers, the book also provides in part 1 a compelling portrait of militarization and the cultural production of soldiers in the GDR. In this regard the book contributes to a relatively small but important and growing body of anthropological literature on the military and militarization. Drawing mainly on archival data, Bickford documents the ways the East German regime sought to glamorize the NVA, prepare boys and young men for service (as well as girls and young women to be supportive military spouses), and entice or pressure young men to choose what for most became a lifelong military career. In addition to actually training to defend the GDR, these soldiers also servedas all soldiers do, Bickford is careful to point outas the primary embodiment of state power and its monopoly on violence, as well as its ideal of a devoted, upstanding citizen. In this respect the unied states unwillingness to recognize NVA ofcers makes symbolic sense: they stand in its view as a primary embodiment of an illegitimate state that was in, but not of, the German nation.

Fallen Elites offers a fascinating and highly readable case study, especially for those interested in the politics of national identity and memory, not to mention the production of military subjects and the militarization of society. The books aim and primary strength lies less in the realm of theoretical novelty and more in ethnographic detail and analytical clarity. It is also quite successful in striking a balance between a fair, empathetic account of these natives perceptions and sentiments and an uninching portrayal of their most unsettling inclinations.

Cultures of Migration: The Global Nature of Contemporary Mobility. Jeffrey H. Cohen and Ibrahim Sirkeci. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011. 165 pp. LOURDES GUTIERREZ NAJERA Dartmouth College Cultures of Migration is the result of a long-standing collaboration between anthropologist Jeffrey Cohen, whose research has focused on migration in southern Mexico, and geographer Ibrahim Sirkeci, whose research has focused on Kurdish migration. While it clearly builds on Cohens previously articulated model of a culture of migration (2004), Sirkecis collaboration expands the cultural model through a comparative global framework emphasizing mobility, security, and conict. Cohen and Sirkecis expanded cultures of migration framework sheds insights into sociocultural dynamics undergirding human mobility at various scales including micro (individual), mezzo (household, community), and macro (regional, national, global). The authors argue that mobility is not merely an economic response but, rather, is shaped by cultural traditions and practices [that] frame, reframe, and nally form responses and outcomes that allow people to make sense of what is going on around them (p. xi). In developing their framework, the authors emphasize interdependent themes of cultures of migration, mobility, and security throughout the books chapters. Important to the books cultural approach is an emphasis on the household model for understanding migration. As argued by the authors, decisions to migrate almost always occur in and are shaped by the household. While households may vary in composition, status, power, and size, they invariably shape the needs, desires, and possibilities of their members (p. 32). And these variables shape migration outcomes. For example, those with more access to resources can more easily pay for costs associated with migration whereas those households with limited resources may not be able to afford sending a migrant elsewhere. Whether in the sending or receiving community, households play a major role in sustaining migrant dreams and realities. Ultimately, the household reaps both the benets and costs

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associated with migration. It is not surprising then to learn that households will seek to maximize benets while minimizing costs to the individual migrant and the collective. Mobility is also critical to a cultures of migration framework. In contrast to migration, mobility is envisioned as more uid and dynamic and able to capture irregular ows of people not usually considered in discussions of migration. Mobility appears particularly useful for thinking critically about movement at different scales including the local, the regional, and the international, as well as a continuum in mobility, from nonmobile to highly mobile populations. A chapter on internal mobility within the connes of nation-states considers the ows of labor commuters and internal migrants. While much has been written about internal migration, the most prevalent form of population movement, a consideration of labor commutes as a form of mobility exposes the limitations of the dominant category of migration. Like migration, commuting is shown to be a household strategy for maximizing resources, status, and wealth while minimizing risks to the individual and household. A consideration of international labor commutes or long-distance commutes further draws attention to the gray area between where commuting ends and migration begins (p. 57). Last, a focus on mobility also shifts our attention from the mover toward a fuller consideration of nonmovers and nonmobility. We stand to learn much about the relationship between movers and nonmovers, the role of nonmovers in household decision-making processes, and the effects of migration on those who stay put. Finally, Cultures of Migration focuses attention on the role of security, insecurity, and conict, in migration. The scope of conict Cohen and Sirkeci embrace is broad ranging from familial strife to labor competition to overt political conict and violence often associated with large-scale population displacements. At all levels, conict shapes migration decision-making and behavior. Security thus becomes critical to understanding mobility, since humans continually make decisions based on the desire to minimize risk and improve their longevity. Human mobility is thus envisioned as a strategy used to overcome insecurities caused by natural disasters, wars, ethnic cleansing, discrimination, and disease. Remittances also gure prominently into a consideration of (in)security and migration. Economic and social remittances provide a means for maximizing resources to improve the overall well-being of those who remain in their natal homes. Remittances pay for individual and family-related educational and medical expenses as well as community development projects. During times of crisis, whether because of natural disasters (like that in Haiti) or political conict, economic and political resources are critical to ensuring stability. Cultures of Migration makes an important contribution to the current scholarship on migration. A particular strength of the book lies in its broader discussion of mobil-

ity to capture a more complex vision of human migration and movement: from labor commutes to international migration. Certainly, the books consideration of mobility will engender further discussions, as will the authors notion of security, which takes on the human perspective rather than a geopolitical approach popular these days in light of discussions of national security. A focus on conict, at multiple scales, is also unique and often overlooked in studies of migration. I highly recommend this book for both undergraduate and graduate course. The books consideration of major scholarly debates, clear prose, and comparative perspective make it a valuable introduction to immigration studies and broader issues of human mobility. The books accessibility and clarity will also appeal more broadly to nonacademic audiences.

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

Money and Violence: Financial Self-Help Groups in a South African Township. Erik B ahre. Leiden: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2007. 192 pp. EMILY MARGARETTEN Ripon College Erik B ahres study of nancial mutuals in South Africa offers an ethnographic lens into the economic world of Xhosa women migrants. It provides a closely observed analysis of their monetary exchanges, which primarily take on the form of nancial self-help groups, such as burial societies and grocery clubs as well as other neighborhood organizations, like rotating savings and credit associations. B ahre conducted most of his research in a Xhosa township, Indawo Yoxolo, which is located on the outskirts of Cape Town. As a eld site, Indawo Yoxolo presents itself as an opportune location for B ahre to investigate the creation of nancial mutuals from scratch (p. 52) for Indawo Yoxolo is a relatively new township, transformed in the mid-1990s from an informal settlement to one with government-sanctioned housing and infrastructural services. Yet while a formally recognized township, Indawo Yoxolo is not a secure place to live, as crime, violence, and the misallocation of public resources make it difcult for residents to establish a sense of civic connection and communality. Thus, the politics of development informs much of B ahres research, too, as he traces the struggles and contentions of local residents to make claims to the limited and, at times, diverted resources of the postapartheid state.

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Early in his ethnography, B ahre delineates the historical trends of labor migration in South Africa. With a particular focus on migration from the Eastern Cape, B ahre describes the kin and home-people (abakhaya) networks that during the apartheid era sustained Xhosa men in their search for jobs in the mining sector and more urbanized settings, like Cape Town (p. 35). Essentially the abakhaya, with their home identications, created a sense of connection for newly arrived migrants, which often translated into the cooperative assistance of nancial mutuals (p. 36). Migrant women meanwhile depended on the municence of men for their subsistence and lodging. Because of the repressive inux control laws of the apartheid state, their presence in urbanized areas was illegal and difcult to sustain on their own (p. 43). They too relied on the cooperative assistance of abakhaya, not through their female networks but, rather, through their ties to men. In the mid-1980s, as it became increasingly untenable for the apartheid state to control the movement of Africans, inux control laws relaxed and urban areas became a site for women to nd employment and reside independently from men (p. 44). By the mid-1990s with the end of apartheid rule, the presence of femaleheaded households, once an anomaly in Cape Town, became a common feature of the urban landscape (p. 28). The centrality of the abakhaya meanwhile diminished. For in the face of a weak labor market, even established migrants had difculty securing jobs and safe residences (p. 40). As a result, Xhosa women today nd themselves in settings, like Indawo Yoxolo, where neighborsand not abakhaya structure the social dependencies of daily life (p. 44). For B ahre, this increasing reliance on neighbors sets up the main question of his anthropological investigation. Namely, given the extreme destitution and violence of living in Indawo Yoxolo, what makes it possible for Xhosa women to trust their neighbors, to the extent that they hand over half their monthly salaries to nancial mutuals (pp. 5, 115)? Here B ahres attention to the social category of neighbor is particularly insightful, for it offers the chance to identify the values of trustand its corollary, distrustas based on proximity and everyday interactions. B ahre also makes the valid point that compared to community, the social unit of neighborhood has been relatively under-theorized by scholars of South Africa (p. 44). Yet while B ahre calls for a sustained analysis of neighborhoods, more could be done to distinguish the analytical category of neighborpeople with whom one interacted on a daily basis (p. 44)from friend. For friendship too is a voluntary association, based on some of the same membership qualities that B ahre uses to explain nancial mutuals: those of trust, cooperation, and respect (p. 90). Throughout his work B ahre rightfully draws attention to the ambivalence, conicts, and reluctant solidarity of nancial mutuals (p. 98). Yet perhaps B ahres objective to not romanticize nancial mutuals as warm, cosy, and sweet womens groups goes too far in the

opposite direction (p. 22), where shared experiences and interests, based on friendship, are minimized as well as the positive materializations of female companionship, recognition, and reciprocity. In part, this framing of nancial mutuals may relate to B ahres upfront admission about the limits of his data collection (pp. 1620, 173176). To conduct eldwork in Indawo Yoxolo, even in the best of circumstances, is not an easy feat. The pervasiveness of violence makes it difcult for B ahre to move freely or spend extended periods of time living in the township. To help mitigate these difculties, B ahre relies on the help of a research assistant, Edith Moyikwa, a longtime resident of Indawo Yoxolo. With Moyikwas guidance, B ahre gains entr ee into various womens groups where he can observe, participate, and conduct interviews. Here too Moyikwa proves invaluable to B ahres research, as she translates meeting events and conversations. In these cases, it would be helpful for B ahre to present narratives in isiXhosa, at least in connection to how Xhosa women use the term neighbor in their identication of social relations, as it is central to his framing of nancial mutuals. Nonetheless, despite these methodological constraints, B ahres ethnographic accounts are compelling and vivid, as they situate the monetary exchanges of migrant women within a broader constellation of social relations: those of abakhaya, neighbors, and kin. ahres book a valuable addition to the eld of This makes B economic anthropology as well as to a South African scholarship that addresses the politics of daily survival in highly destitute and hostile settings.

The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and Chinas Collective Past. Gail Hershatter. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. 455 pp. SHANSHAN DU Tulane University Among the explosive proliferation of literature concerning women in China, The Gender of Memory stands out for its momentous contribution to and unique insight into the localized effects of the state on rural women in the 1950s, the rst decade of the socialist era. By meticulously and brilliantly unraveling the sociocultural meanings and historical contexts intricately embedded in the life histories of 72 elderly women from Shaanxi Province, this book offers a compelling read for scholars and students of history, anthropology, sociology, and political science, particularly for those interested in gender studies and Asian studies. Hershatter organizes the book around thematic emphasis on memories of womens roles and follows rough chronological order. Following an introductory chapter on the development of this research project and its

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theoretical methodological framework, chapter 2 (No One Is Home) interweaves many heartrending memories of the women as girls and young women who were refugees, child brides, and farmers during the Republic era, a war-torn and famine-stricken period prior to 1949. Respectively titled Widow, Activist, and Farmer, chapters 3, 4, and 5 delve into the womens memories of their experiencesin which enthusiasm and frustration, opportunity and danger, courage and fear, joy and agony intermingledduring rapid social changes that began in the 1950s in new China. Set in the social milieu of the national land reform campaign and the formation of mutual aid groups, chapter 3 vividly demonstrates the embodiment of the local presence of the state through such neighbors as the heroine of that chapter, a widow who simultaneously embodied state-sponsored community leadership and traditional notions concerning womens virtue. Set against the backdrop of the campaigns to implement the 1950 Marriage Law and to mobilize women to become literate and politically active, chapter 4 explores the unprecedented liberties, choices, and struggles of some young female activists in that newly created social space where state objectives confronted and negotiated with existing gender norms and kinship ties. Chapter 5 examines the processes by which party-state policies mobilized rural women into full-time collective farming and the impact of those policies on individual women, families, and local communities. While retaining its overall emphasis on the 1950s, chapters 69 analyze womens memoriesin which ambition, disillusionment, achievement, and failure were intertwined with exhaustion and sufferingall against the broader historical background of the socialist era that extended into the 1970s. Addressing Midwife and Mother respectively, chapters 6 and 7 offer complementary and insightful perceptions regarding the transformation and continuation of reproductive beliefs and practices in rural Shaanxi. Chapter 6 (Midwife) demonstrates the persistence and modication of traditional childbirth beliefs and practices amidst the large-scale implementation of party-state policies aimed at modernizing the practice of midwifery. Chapter 7 (Mother) deals with the unexpected impact of the decreased rate of infant mortality on women, who were overburdened by the new expectation for full-time participation in collective farming that was added to the old norms of gender division of labor concerning childrearing and domestic work. The next two chapters jointly explore the socialist construction of the new role of women in pubic domains, especially in agricultural work. Chapter 9 (Model) investigates how a handful of women not only excelled in cotton production but also actively participated and succeeded in the dynamic processes by which the state apparatus construed them as labor models, renowned both regionally and nationally. Chapter 10 (Laborer) fo-

cuses on the extremely intense collision between state campaign time and domestic time during the Great Leap Forward Movement and the consequent disillusionment, hardship, hunger, and famine experienced in some places. Hershatter also makes a convincing argument that the prolonged mobilization of women laborers during this period consolidated a trend toward a long-term feminization of agriculture in Shaanxi (p. 237). The nal chapter (Narrators) captures the melding of disappointment, grievance, and nostalgia with a sense of pride as these elderly women reconnect the memories of their lives before 1949 and then during different stages of the socialist era with their present, ongoing lives in this current, postsocialist age. Highlighting their life histories as epitomes of womens virtue, these women poignantly and touchingly make a compelling claim on the attention of the present, a new era when histories, memories, and institutions of the collective era are disappearing and devalued (p. 12). As two major turning points in Chinese history, the 1911 Revolution overthrew two thousand years of dynastic rule and the New Culture Movement (191521) systematically challenged the deeply rooted sociocultural traditions of dynastic China. Nevertheless, the fundamental transformation of sociopolitical institutions and cultural norms did not take place throughout the whole of China at the levels of family and local community until the 1950s, the rst decade after the victory of the Chinese Communist Revolution in 1949. Unfortunately, little is published concerning this period beyond diverse accounts of the intense political campaigns of the party-state, and biographies of some political leaders and urban intellectuals, who were primarily males. By systematically presenting and incisively analyzing the reective voices of rural women concerning their lives during this period, the contribution of this groundbreaking book is invaluable, and, perhaps, irreplaceable. While acknowledging her eldwork limitations and the plasticity and subjectivity of memory, the author brings a humanistic touch to the chaotic and catastrophic history of modern China with moving and powerful life stories. The reective positioning of the author herself during 15 years of the project, as a researcher and a mother of four, further enhances her sensitivity and relatedness to the elderly Chinese women. The memories of these women strongly resonate with the reviewer not only as an academic in an American university but also as a half-starved little waif in a small rural village in Shangdong Province during the Cultural Revolution. As a distinguished historian, Gail Hershatter creatively navigates the methodological frontiers where history borders anthropology, primarily by skillfully knitting archival research into intensive interviews. The sample of interviewees covers a broad spectrum, although some

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readers might wish to also see women whose class backgrounds place them in the position of political outcasts. The detailed descriptions and original analyses of the memories of these elderly women enrich, expand, and challenge some conventional understanding concerning mainstream gender norms in rural China, such as the womens prerevolutionary connement to the home (ch. 1), the relationship between the child bride and mother-in-law (pp. 121125), and local reproductive beliefs about women and pollution (pp. 179181). In reading this book, we have to keep in mind that, in addition to the differences between regions and urban versus rural contrasts that the author herself has already emphasized, the elderly women described are all Han, and the socialist state had diverse impact on members of ethnic minority groups with their own, often distinctive, gender norms prior to 1949.

a situation in which irreconcilable differences cannot but speak each others languagethus cutting antagonists off from the oppositional force of their own speech (p. 20). She goes on to say, For anthropologists, the paradox of relevance arose from the effectiveness of the tactic of discursive fracture that conservatives made integral to the new federal discourse by using the language of the old liberalism (identity, inequality) to spell its demise. In that situation, anthropologists efforts to counter the hegemony of the new discourse through the authority of ethnographic knowledge necessitated novel forms of creativity. [p. 20] The source of that creativity, as Greenhouse amply demonstrates in her analyses of the writing strategies of a number of exemplary ethnographers of that decade (e.g., she provides an extraordinary comparative reading of Liebows Talleys Corner [1967] and Bourgoiss In Search of Respect [1995] to show the contrast of signature ethnography of the liberal era to that of the emerging neoliberal one), is in the period of intensive, critical cultural theory and experiments with narrative inside academia and beyond that preceded and continued into the 1990s. Greenhouses study thus has the virtue of not falling for easy dismissals of the so-called postmodern moment but understands that period instead as providing anthropologists and others with effective tools of cultural critique: The critique of culture was the centerpiece of the hotly debated but misnamed postmodernismmisnamed since it emerged in anthropology not as an ism but as a broad array of critical, methodological, and literary experiments with and for ethnography (p. 6). Long a prominent proponent of the signicance of an anthropology of and for the United States, Greenhouse also understands that what urban ethnographies were attempting in the 1990s might have been lost on American anthropology in general because of a certain hyperopia, especially during that decade, in its focus on trends of globalization in which homegrown doctrines of neoliberalism were projected on a world screen. As she says, The most prominent effect of segregation of the ethnography of the United States within the discipline was a misreading of U.S. neoliberalism as the denition of globalization, and the particularities of U.S. identity politics as the template of global multiculturalism (p. 8). First-person narrative, among other techniques shared with genres of reexive writing, was a major modality for speaking back to the tactic of discursive fracture. Ethnography itself cultivated indirection, subtlety, and cunning, exhibiting a deep awareness of changes in the frame in which culture could be discussed or described in public and political discourses. Ethnographies of that period, quite

The Paradox of Relevance: Ethnography and Citizenship in the United States. Carol J. Greenhouse. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. 321 pp. GEORGE E. MARCUS University of California, Irvine In this brilliant, and brilliantly subtle, work of disciplinary history of the recent past, Carole Greenhouse explains the critical acuity and specicity of a particular body of anthropological scholarship on the United States that is likely to have been all too easily missed in the passing of academic fashions and in the dramatic and denitive changes that can shape political realities. Her concern is with the political changes in the United States during the decade of the 1990s and with a body of ethnographic researchurban ethnographies primarily within eastern citiesthat could be seen as a revival of the venerable genre of community studies in ethnographic writing, but that were far more critical, ambitious, and innovative in what they were attempting during that period. Greenhouse provides us with a kaleidoscopic lens to reenvision that body of work, and in so doing, to change the way anthropologists think about current trends of research more broadly. According to Greenhouse, it was during the 1990s that in legislative process the old liberal discourse was being denitively transformed by twistings and turnings of its own terms into a new federal discourse that substituted marketbased principles for rights-based ones on matters of citizenship and basic notions of civic fairness and responsibility in law. In effect, neoliberalism was denitively being established in doctrine, policy, and law in the United States. This was accomplished by discursive fracture, a term that Greenhouse coins to denote a political tactic aimed at creating

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different from either the descriptive modesty of classic community and urban studies or the uses to which they were put in earlier periods of documentary realism (during the Great Depression) and of liberal politics on race and poverty (e.g., the culture of poverty debates of the 1960s), were in this sense acts of citizenship. Greenhouse states that the address of ethnography was not just to the public; it was also through the public (p. 134). Greenhouse further notes that urban domestic ethnography of the 1990s was not congured around the problem of domination but, rather, contradiction: The community studies are not studies of actual community processes, but rather localized accounts of a general state of affairs (p. 16). Furthermore, In retrospect, the relevance of the United States in ethnographys theoretical terrain is not as some cultural geography to be lled in, but as conceptual ground where issues of subjectivity and power converge in a distinctive way (p. 44). By the end of the 1990s it was all over: With the denitive end of New Deal liberalism and the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001, the older more tender notions of security that had been the warrants of the community revival in the 1990s no longer had the same counter-hegemonic valance of just a few years before. The community study has once again receded from fashion, and ethnographers are more likely to declare alliances directly, out loud. [p. 21] Thus, we hear prominently in recent years among U.S. anthropologists the calls for public anthropology in the United States, and for explicit means to design ethnographic research that is activist. Yet any anthropology of the contemporaryof the present with orientations to what is emergentcrucially depends on understanding clearly, and in this case, provocatively, the specicities of its recent past, which, as Greenhouse demonstrates, are neither obvious nor clear in their implications. They must be excavated, as if they were buried deep in the past, but actually are crucial for dening debates about the present direction of an anthropology that is as rooted in conditions of U.S. society as it is cosmopolitan in orientation. Greenhouse demonstrates that discursive strategies matter in ethnographic communication (these days in forms beyond only the production of ethnographic texts) and have effects. For the 1990s, she shows that the worth of ethnography in and on the United States did indeed rest in a so-called reexive turn in ethnographic writing, but one that was not at all self-indulgent. Ethnographic representations of that period were indeed social facts. Their power as critique depended on their circulation. Of their success in this regard as a counterdiscursive maneuver in the 1990s, Greenhouse is uncertain (p. 53). But by her own example of multisituated analysis, her capacity to bring ethnogra-

phy of that period to bear on her expert analysis of the tactics of the new federal discourse, and further her achievement in excavating all of this for the sake of anthropologys present and near future, she demonstrates precisely the ways that ethnographic representations as critical social facts can have effect. Ethnography as counterdiscursive maneuvers mattered in the 1990s, and with the capacity to circulate, as Greenhouse performs in her own retrospective analysis, they still do. Anthropology awaits other such enabling histories of its recent past across its diverse domains of present engagement.

Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language, and Action. Michael Lambek, ed. New York: Fordham University Press, 2010. xvii + 458 pp., bibliography, index. RENA LEDERMAN Princeton University This major contribution should be appreciated in light of a wider cross-disciplinary ethical turn, heralded by two volumes (Davis and Womack 2001; Garber et al. 2000) that collected and commented on trends observed during the 1990s in popular culture and across the humanities. Contributors hailing from literary studies, philosophy, and political theory aimed to reinvent humanism as a site for critical ethical discourse in the wake of feminist, Marxist, and poststructural critiques associating reference to ethics with apolitical moralism and a universal, autonomous human subject. Anthropologists (as participants or even citations) were almost entirely absent in these conversations. Nevertheless, anthropological writing on ethics dates at least to the 1950s and, as Michael Lambek notes in his introduction (p. 5), disciplinary interest in the ethical has intensied of late. Several recent works attempt to delimit an anthropology of ethics or morality as a focus for ethnographic description and analysis (e.g., Faubion 2001; Howell 1997; Laidlaw 2002). These projects bring ethnographies of ethical judgment into the foreground to sharpen anthropological contributions. To that end, they also engage resources outside anthropology, especially philosophy and social theory (e.g., Aristotle, Kant, Foucault, Alisdair MacIntyre, and Bernard Williams). Advocacy for an anthropology of moralities or ethics recalls earlier advocacy for, say, an anthropology of colonialism or gender, which likewise foregrounded new ethnographic objects to advance understanding (however much we had been studying these things all along as dimensions of kinship, politics, and other already-marked topical domains), likewise seeking alliances and inspirations across disciplinary lines. Arguments for constructing new subeldlike foci are compelling but not universally joined by anthropologists

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similarly committed to promoting explicit and philosophically informed anthropological attention to ethics. Notably, the editor and several contributors to Ordinary Ethics argue persuasively that the ethicalpractices and culturally legible frames for assessing and indexing the goodness or rightness of human conduct vis-` a-vis other personsis so thoroughly implicated in the irreducibly sociable nature of human being as to resist delimitation as an ethnographic object in its own right. For example, Lambeks introduction construes ethics as a property of speech and action, specically not a discrete object; and his own chapter develops the point by elaborating a practice-centered social theory of performative acts (including utterances). Other contributorsnotably Alan Rumsey and Jack Sidnelllend convincing support by reference to evolutionarydevelopmental, sociolinguistic, and conversation analysis. While Laidlaw and others have blamed Durkheims inuence for the difculty anthropologists have had in delimiting morality or ethics and resisting its subsumption into the social (understood in terms of obligation and rule), Lambek and several contributors demonstrate that there are other ways of reading Durkheim. In a complementary argument, Webb Keane neatly articulates the historical conditions of possibility of a disembedded, objectied ethics that, together with religion, offers specialized reasons. In complex counterpoint to these positions, James Faubion works out a philosophically rigorous argument enabling him to demarcate ethics in a manner that appears to upend Lambeks construct of the ordinary. In addition to a substantial Introduction, Ordinary Ethics comprises 20 chapters grouped into seven sections. After Theoretical Frameworks (Lambek, Keane, Faubion) and The Ethics of Speaking (Rumsey, Sidnell), they are Responsibility and Agency (Laidlaw, Steven C. Caton), Punishment and Personal Dignity (Charles Stafford, Francesca Merlan, and a comment by philosopher Judith Baker), Ethics and Formality (Shirley Yeung, Justin B. Richland), Ethical Subjects: Character and Prac Sulkin, Sophie Day, Paul Antze, tice (Carlos David Londono Nireka Weeratunge), and Ethical Life: Encounters with History, Religion, and the Political (Donna Young, Naisargi N. Dave, Veena Das, Heonik Kwon). With the exception of the rst two, these groupings are somewhat arbitrary: the chapters rich arguments lend themselves neither to neat conceptual containers nor to individual commentary in a short review (thankfully, Lambek provides excellent synopses, pp. 2836). With qualications here and there, the contributors follow Lambek (e.g., pp. 89) and common anthropological practice in using ethical and moral interchangeably. At the same time, as the section headings also suggest, they trouble the constructs conventionally referenced by that dyad (respectively, choice: responsibility, freedom, inten-

tion, agency, and the like, and obligation: social order, constraint, structure, and the like). They also explore dimensions of the ethicomoral in situated ethnographic contexts, in a wide range of culturally specic idioms, and in light of sophisticated readings of both classical and more recent philosophical works. Ordinary Ethics derives from a graduate seminar cotaught by Lambek, Antze, and Sidnell (in which some other contributors also participated) and a subsequent workshop. As such, one might expect explicit cross-referencing among the chapters. While Lambeks introduction does an excellent job of articulating key themes and background assumptions, with a few exceptions (e.g., Keane, Merlan) the chapters are too often silent on their mutual relations (e.g., compare Dave and Faubion). This is unfortunate: as implied above, a key strength of the collection is its inclusion of diverse, divergent, and occasionally opposed arguments. Readers can look forward to working out the implications themselves. This philosophically thought-provoking, ethnographically rich set of papers deserves a wide reading, not simply among anthropologists but also among ethically turned scholars in neighboring elds. For disciplinary readers, one limitation should be noted: while they are sensitive to the importance of representing eldworkers as ethical actors in their scenes of research, contributors do not explicitly engage writings on the ethics of anthropology. That conversation was explicitly set aside (p. 3): aiming to go deeper than the usual association of ethics with law and regulation, contributors were meant to center attention on everyday comportment and understanding, considering disciplinary ethics, as relevant, from that vantage. It is true that writings on anthropological ethics are, as Lambek notes, typically concerned with special cases, . . . professional rationalizations, and the like. But it is also surely true that ordinary ethics inhere in our research, academic, professional, and even regulatory practices and talk. Construed ethnographically, all are eminently suitable to the perspectives this volume explores.

References cited
Davis, Todd F., and Kenneth Womack, eds. 2001 Mapping the Ethical Turn: A Reader in Ethics, Culture, and Literary Theory. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Faubion, James 2001 Toward an Anthropology of Ethics: Foucault and the Pedagogies of Autopoiesis. Representations 74:83104. Garber, Marjorie, Beatrice Hanssen, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, eds. 2000 The Turn to Ethics. New York: Routledge. Howell, Signe, ed. 1997 The Anthropology of Moralities. New York: Routledge. Laidlaw, James 2002 For an Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (n.s.) 8:311332.

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Insectopedia. Hugh Rafes. New York: Vintage, 2010. x + 465 pp. DAVID MCDERMOTT HUGHES Rutgers University Insectopedia has everything and nothing to do with ethnography. It is a genre-busting book, pushing the limits of anthropological persuasion. Hugh Rafes has written 26 vignettesranging from 2 to 42 pages, each of whose titles begins with a different letter of the alphabet. (The AZ -pedia format serves more as a pretense than as an organizational sequence.) The chapters advance a cunning argument: that the small, seemingly insignicanteven disgustinginsect world shapes our own in ways both profound and profoundly meaningful. The latter case is the easier one to makeand the one closer to ethnographic narrative. People invest bugs with meaning. Consider the Chinese practice of cricket ghting. As Rafes writes, cricket trainers, cricket traders, owners of winning crickets, and owners of losing crickets add drama to every aspect of the creature and its behavior. Cricket ghting represents all that is good and bad regarding modernity, urbanity (Shanghai), rurality, victory, and mercy (a defeated cricket must never be killed). Another spell-binding chapter concerns crush freaks, men for whom erotic fantasy centers on being squishedlike a bugby a womans foot. Rafes shares coffee with the leading pornographer of this fetish. A vegan, the cineaste does not enjoy attening insects; he wants to be the insect. These creaturesRafes writes with far greater lyricism are good to think with. Insects, though, exceed the good in this respect: they vary along so many different axes so few of which any of us understands. Much of Insectopedia concerns the history of entomology, both amateur and professional. In confronting insects, scientists face insurmountable problems of denition and measurement. What foolishness to judge insects, writes Rafes on the question of language among bees, so ancient, so diverse, so accomplished, so successful, so beautiful, so astonishing, so mysterious, so unknownby criteria they can never meet and about which they could not care! (p. 200). And this is the more searching theme of Insectopedia. Insects are agents, and, as they make their strange worlds, they pose an interpretive dilemma. The male balloon y wraps food in a cotton ball and gives it to his desired female. Sometimes he only gives wrapping, an empty present that, nonetheless, lacks no seductive power. How can we understand this behavior, simultaneously symbolic and instinctual or neither? We are again, Rafes concludes, caught between the unavoidability of comparison and the awareness of fundamental difference . . . between the reduction that makes things fathomable and the generosity that gives them fullness (p. 297). Insects space-time is small and of

short duration. But rather than economizing with their limited means, insects add complexity and intricacy. Caterpillars mature through seven instars while the pink bollworm ies at 3,000 feet full of calculation and action (p. 10). In the most direct appeal to anthropology, Rafes argues that insects . . . are not merely the opportunity for culture but its co-authors (p. 100). In this way, Insectopedia contributes slyly to arguments in favor of nonhuman agency. Those who enjoyed the uvial intimacies of In Amazonia (2002) will nd Rafess writing to have evolved even further in subtlety and nesse. This admiration opens again the question of genre. What is the discipline of Anthropology coming tosome will askwhen its practitioners write books such as Insectopedia and its leading journals dont tactfully ignore them? For decades of course, ethnographers have strayed into memoir, travelogue, and even ction. Tristes Tropiques sells better than La Pens ee Sauvage, and Insectopedia will sell better than In Amazonia. For professionals, however, Insectopedia may not appear usable. The chapters describe no (human) ethnographic group. Rafess prose perhaps deliberately miming his subjectsheaps detail on detail. Lucid writing carries one forward but builds toward no synthesis. From a narrowly instrumental point of view, the book lacks a purpose. But reckon what we gain from a work of literature that shows us our limits. We apply our method of ethnography and our notion of culture so very selectively, to the creatures with whom we communicate, have sex, and (now) consider human. Anthropology helped tear down the compartments of racism. Insects call for another great leap of tolerance. Rafes does not demand that oneJain-likestop crushing beetles. Insectopedia asks for a more far-reaching shift in sensibilities: that one acknowledge the co-creation of insect and human worlds.

References cited
L evi-Strauss, Claude 1955 Tristes tropiques. Paris: Plon. 1962 La pens ee sauvage. Paris: Plon. Rafes, Hugh 2002 In Amazonia: A Natural History. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Out of Place: Madness in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea. Michael Goddard. New York: Berghahn, 2011. xiv + 173 pp. RICHARD SCAGLION University of Pittsburgh This volume has been long in the making. Based on eldwork conducted in 198586 in the upper Kaugel Valley in the Western Highlands Province of Papua New

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Guinea (PNG), the book is a revised version of Goddards Ph.D. dissertation, whichdue to the nature of some of its content (p. x)has heretofore been placed on restricted access. The central theme is that, at the time of eldwork, the Kakoli people did not have a concept of mental illness as it is conceived by the Western world. Instead, madness was classied in social terms simply as behavior outside the range of responses appropriate to a particular social context. The Kakoli belief that madness is not mental but, rather, a kind of social estrangement, can be taken as an implicit criticism of the entire eld of psychiatry. Westerners, both medical practitioners and laypeople, typically address madness as a mental disorder arising from a deranged mind located in the brain. In contrast, the Kakoli did not even have a notion that Goddard could call ethnopsychiatry. Mad people were simply thought of as being socially out of place, and the array of behaviors that the Kakoli regarded as mad was wide, ranging from the contrariness of children, through inappropriate actions that were silly or funny, to actions that a Western psychiatrist would regard as evidence of major psychosis. The word used by the Kakoli to refer to madness was kekelepa, which Goddard has elsewhere glossed in English as crazy, used in the wide, loose, and lay sense; a separating of oneself behaviorally. We can conclude that psychiatric systems, just like religions or kinship systems, are culturally constructed. Although Goddards Ph.D. dissertation has not enjoyed wide circulation, this book contains revised versions of several previously published articles that derived from it. Unfortunately, the volumes overall coherence and continuity suffer somewhat from being so cobbled together. The rst chapter, based on an earlier paper, is a critical history of psychiatry posing the argument that psychiatry developed in PNG more as a response to social control issues than mental health concerns. Chapter 2, also previously published, builds on this notion. Drawing on clinical cases, Goddard delineates a contradiction between psychiatric theory and practice in PNG in which the social control function of psychiatry predominated over its self-characterization as a culturally sensitive mental health service (p. 11). He reviews literature that critiques psychiatry and transcultural psychiatry more generally and questions whether psychiatry can be operationally sensitive to cultural differences and practices at all. Chapter 3 provides an ethnographic sketch of the Kakoli focused on ideas of the person, how illness was understood, and how madness was not considered as part of illness. The next three chapters, sections of which have also appeared in print, can be taken as an ethnography of madness among the Kakoli at the time of eldwork, although Goddard is careful to point out that for the Kakoli, madness is not something that can be investigated as a eld in itself (pp. 1112). Instead, he employs a case study approach to discuss particular episodes of madness, illuminating the range of behaviors that were regarded

as mad and exploring Kakoli responses to these behaviors. Some of the extended cases examined include one in which a mans condition was attributed to an afiction caused by his dead mother; another where a womans madness was linked to an encounter with a spirit; the recurrent madness of a man reported to the ethnographer as a yearly pattern although Goddard discovered that it was not; and a man dened as dangerously estranged, an almost legendary mad giant who ran everywhere at great speed. Goddard uses these episodes of madness as an ethnographic reference point for a broader examination of Kakoli beliefs, attitudes, and sociality. Throughout the work, the author is careful not to employ the ethnographic present because, although he later lived and worked in Port Moresby, PNGs capital, he never returned to the upper Kaugel Valley after his Ph.D. eldwork, and anything [he] could say about the changes which have taken place there since the mid 1980s can only be generalized from [his] knowledge of other parts of PNG and from reading what others working more recently in the vicinity have written (p. 13). In a brief concluding chapter Goddard attempts to do just this, reviewing the books major themes, speculating on how recent events might have effected change, and guessing about what sort of developments could or would turn the former Kakoli view of madness into a kind of ethnopsychiatry. The book is welcome because, despite the plethora of ethnographic literature on New Guinea, there has been surprisingly little written about madness. Unexpectedly, the volume does not review or engage with much of the ethnography that does exist, including the well-known cases of what have been referred to as wild man behavior in the New Guinea highlands. However, the book adds to this literature substantially and provides yet another example of how a Melanesian society with an orientation very different from the West can inform and challenge our own social constructions. Its implicit critique of psychiatry is thought provoking and should be required reading for anyone in the eld.

Gangs, Politics and Dignity in Cape Town. Steffen Jensen. Oxford: James Currey, 2008. xi + 212 pp. DEBORAH DURHAM Sweet Briar College Heideveld is actually a nice place. This statement is made repeatedly to Steffen Jensen by residents of one of South Africas townships on the margins of Cape Town. The term actually is key: the township, a lowerincome Coloured location established through apartheid, is racked by poverty and violence. Residents struggle with the image of the skollie, a stereotyped Coloured gure, a

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male hooligan, unemployed, drunk, prone to violence and gangsterism, who haunts their attempts at what Jensen calls dignity. Perhaps because their populations were dened by cultures, black Africans have been the subject of extensive anthropological study since the early 20th century. Coloureds, a population constructed out of a mix of Khoisan, East Indian, and European ancestry, and who have been attracting increased anthropological attention since the 1990s, came to be dened in more sociological terms. Unstable families, dirty households, abused women, alcoholism, unemployment, high rates of criminal incarceration, gangsterism, and juvenile delinquency: government studies dened the Coloured population through these problems. And these problems persist in Heideveld, and are the terrain in which people nd their various forms of dignity. More difcult is the terrain of race, in which being Coloured means being not quite civilized, and in which agents of the state refer frequently to ones smell, to the lth of crowded housing, and to an inability to exert self-control. Jensen argues a Foucauldian perspective on how state commissions and social interventions produced a population that came to know itself through such terms. While in the 1980s, during the heyday of antiapartheid struggle, people often referred to themselves as so-called Coloureds, by the end of the 1990s, the so-called had disappeared, and people work around a Coloured identity in creating respectable lives. Many distance themselves from other Coloured people who are skollies. Some devise dignied lives through church, community work, and sports. And others nd dignity in gangsterism. Jensen explores each of these avenues in his book, drawing on eldwork that encompassed drug dealers and gang members, respectable church goers, community organizers, and even police patrols and stations. Gangs and the violence associated with them dominate the book. While many studies of gangs take the gang as a given, and the Cape Flats is known for its gangs, Jensen makes clear that what is and what isnt a gang, and who is and who isnt a member, are exible and situational. Women, for example, who must also build identities in the shadow of the skollie, often claim that their sons are not gangsters and that the real gangs are over there. Some of these women provide hangout space and food for groups of boys or men who take on names like the Cat Pounds and Junky Funky Kids. Some of these groups may just be soccer fans and friends who are compelled, eventually, to defend their turf; others, like the New Yorkers and Americans engage in petty theft and bullet-spraying feuds with rival groups that end in both gangs dyingliterallyout. In a way that should be familiar to anthropologists, it is in the practice of revenge and feud that a gang takes on the demarcated contours and violent phenomenology that is associated with the term. The Funkies and the Americans are local; then there are the gangs based in prisons, whose re-

gional membership facilitates drug peddling. And what are we to make of the police, many of whom have arrangements with certain dealers, protecting them and receiving goods and money? And, nally, of vigilante groups that organized in the later 1990s, prompted by the moral panic over crime and violence gripping the nation, and their practices of assassination and street-side beatings? As young men (and women) live as Coloured in South Africa, they contend with suspicious stares and the avoidance with which others treat possible skollies, and they are still reminded how Coloureds, who received labor preferences under apartheid, were seen as physically as well as morally weak. Gang membership, taunting police, raping women, revenging insult, and the time spent in prison to which much of this leads may reinforce ideas of the Coloured skollie yet also assert physical prowess and an alternative morality of defending ones community. While most drug dealers remain abjectly poorwith incomes less than formal employment might providesome few drug merchants attain glittering wealth, contravening the image of the skollie as poor. Churchgoers (or bybel ravers, gospel ravers, as some called them) found dignity in the dress, mannerisms, and time-consuming engagement with their churches. Others found it in such activities as neighborhood watch groups, whose activities included protecting territory and defending the communitylike gangs. And, yet, others have delved into new forms of community service, devised to rewrite antagonism to the state built up under apartheid. Jensens eldwork was admirably comprehensivehe worked with the gospel ravers, group and gang members, ex-gang members with employment, political organizers and community servers, and with police on patrol and in the station. And walking with him is the gure of the skollie, in relationship to whom every resident of Heideveld must position him or herself. Jensen uses the term dignity in provocative but perhaps slightly underdeveloped ways in the course of the study. In the ethnography itself, he often resorts to the more familiar terms respect to describe what young men might seek, and respectability for older womens goals. Dignity, in his usage, refers to that which is left to people when they are dominated and humiliated: it is what a woman retains after being humiliated, for example, by welfare ofcers. Jensen does not tell us whether dignity is a local term or how it might relate in local dialogics with respect (a term perhaps associated with civilized lives) or ubuntu, the African humanist philosophy much promoted in the new South Africa. Dignity remains an analytical term, and this is one reason it seems a bit distant from the ethnographic aspects of the book. While the term refers to a sense of core moral selfhood and humanity, Jensen describes it primarily as an effect of power (p. 10). In some ways, Jensens account slips into a description of how dignity is effected everywhere, in churches and gang ghts, organizing crime prevention committees and raping young women, much as the Foucauldian approach

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has been critiqued for an idea of power that is simply everywhere. There are multiple forms of power and humiliation at workthe case of the raped young woman, for example, must be different from that of the schoolboy who feels awkward in white shopping malls, or the middle-aged woman arranging for her imprisoned son to joinand be protected bya gang. But perhaps the forces producing the skollie and his mother, the commissions, social services and educational projects, crime prevention, housing and employment policies, are so powerful that they leave only bare life and a ubiquitous dignity. Heideveld is actually a nice place. We come to understand the actually all too well in this book, which admirably explores the collaboration of historical and present structures and actors that leaves low-income Coloureds with little other than dignity in the face of violence. What we dont understand is how Heideveld can be understood, or experienced, as a nice place. The ethnography sometimes takes us therethe pages on soccer (pp. 177180), describing the bodily joy of skilled play, are one such bright spot. Allegiance to European soccer teams is so deeply felt that one young man strips himself and runs naked through the streets when Manchester United defeated Bayern Munich in Europe. But apart from soccer, the ethnography doesnt tell us why Heideveld is a nice place. Is it because niceness isnt an effect of power, or at least, not of the power to humiliate and debase?

Learning to Speak, Learning to Listen: How Diversity Works on Campus. Susan E. Chase. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010. 291 pp. BONNIE URCIUOLI Hamilton College Learning to Speak, Learning to Listen examines undergraduate communication on a vexed contemporary topic. Susan Chase, a University of Tulsa sociologist, explores environments in which students learn to talk and listen (or not) to each other on race, gender, sexual orientation, and other subjects covered by the hypernym diversity, that ambiguous referring expression that so permeates contemporary U.S. higher education. After preliminary research in the mid-1990s, Chase undertook an extended on-campus case study in the mid-2000s, with a brief follow-up a few years later. Chases primary site is CU (City University), with under 3,000 undergraduates of whom fewer than 20 percent were students of color; she supplemented this with research at RU, a demographically comparable secondary site. She nds CU a viable site for her investigation because there, as she puts it, diversity is on the table as a subject of discussion and, to an extent, contention across the campus (as, by comparison, is not the case at RU). In her in-

troduction, she describes her focus as the complexity of voices (esp. those of students of color) talking about diversity, the complexity of listening to those voices (esp. by white allies), and the contexts in which all this takes place. She did 49 interviews with student groups and individuals as well as with faculty, staff, and administrators. She interviewed student journalists, student government members, informal residence hall groups, and organizations for GLBT students, women, Southeast Asian students, black students, white students against racism, conservative students, students concerned with disability rights, and students concerned with rearm safety. She attended discussions, award ceremonies, and other campus events and generally became familiar with student spaces. She also drew on narrative materials from the student newspaper, student government minutes, and various student group and website documents. Chase analyzes her materials using a type of narrative inquiry based on methods outlined by Jaber Gubrium and James Holstein in their studies of narrative reality, which they characterize as the socially situated practice of storytelling (2009:2). Chase organizes the discourses she elicited according to who talks to whom, where, about what, under what circumstances, to what end. She describes and contrasts CUs three major diversity discourses: social justice (highlighting structural distinctions and inequality, and the need for change), abstract inclusion (assuming fundamental sameness among all social actors, with race, ethnic, gender, sexuality, or political difference simply marking different varieties of structurally similar people) and political difference (the stance taken by conservative students who see themselves marginalized by liberal academe). She notes how the rst and third are consciously embraced by activist groups while the second provides resources for a general, unselfconscious student population who identify with neither liberal or conservative articulations. Although diversity and race are often conated in U.S. public discourses, Chase wanted her interlocutors to explain to her what diversity meant to them. Race emerged most often (on this campus at this time, p. 233) and most contentiously. Activist students of color occupy an especially vulnerable position in this regard. More than any other single category of diverse students, students of color have a lifetime of experiencing diversity as structural inequality; hence, for them and for their allies, a social justice perspective on diversity is particularly salient. At the same time, the experience of class inequality as such tends to fade from student narratives. Indeed, Chase notes that the voice of working class students is that least explicitly heard in CUs diversity dialogues. As the books title suggests, its central concern is the quality of communicative interaction among students, and their capacity to express, listen to, understand, and respond to perspectives unfamiliar and often troubling to them, especially where inequalities of race, gender, and sexuality

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are concerned. Especially important and effective are personal stories. The reader is struck by the amount of work that many students are willing to put into such communication, to try to grasp how the same campus might seem to those whose selves are shaped by very different life histories. At the same time, it is striking how much these perspectives and notions of diversity are institutionally contained and structured. It also becomes quite clear that the very organization of higher education puts the onus on those most marked as diverse to educate those least affected by structural inequalities. Chase sticks very closely to the sociological literature (although there is anthropological work on diversity in higher education that might have been germane). While she is to be applauded for working with techniques for narrative analysis drawn from Gubrium and Holstein, one might like to see Chase draw more directly on some of the discourse and social action work that informs the concept of narrative reality that they develop. That may have allowed her to dig more deeply into the conicting or incommensurable understandings of diversity, central to her book, that emerge from problematic and inconsistent institutional dynamics. For example, raceethnic and sexuality categories often emerge in discourse as parallel modes of diversity, although the former are federally mandated and provide numbers, while the latter categories are not and do not. How is that imposed parallelism institutionally generated? What does it mean to be a student spokesperson or activist in ways that make it their institutional job to educate? How and why do students internalize and discursively perform institutional assumptions about diversity? All this is part of the narrative environment. All that said, Chase offers a book rich in detail and thoughtful insight on how students experience, perceive, understand, or tune out that range of difference that institutions bundle under the rubric diversity . Of particular value is her demonstration of the power of the abstract inclusion discourse to tune out understanding of structural inequalitiesa power, I would add, as great in U.S. society generally as it is in college life.

Reference cited
Gubrium, Jaber, and James Holstein 2009 Analyzing Narrative Reality. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Social Anthropology and Human Origins. Alan Barnard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 182 pp., glossary, references, index. KIRK ENDICOTT Dartmouth College The origin and development of the human species is a topic that has long fascinated both scholars and the general

public. Many academic disciplines are contributing to our rapidly expanding knowledge of human evolution, but, according to Alan Barnard, social or cultural anthropology (he uses the terms interchangeably) is, regrettably, not among them. He argues that the theories and knowledge of human behavior and culture that social anthropologists have produced should be applied in discussions of human origins and evolution. This book consists of nine chapters followed by a glossary, references, and an index. The Introduction begins with a concise history of Western ideas about human nature and human origins, including recent debates about the concepts of society and culture. Then in If Chimps Could Talk, Barnard discusses what primatology can tell us about human evolution. He points out that there are major differences in the behavior of apes and humans, although orangutans, gorillas, and chimps display minor cultural differences between groups. In Fossils and What They Tell Us, he provides a thorough and up-to-date summary of the fossil record of our protohuman ancestors and discusses what we can know about the behaviors of these ancient species from the fossil evidence. In Group Size and Settlement, Barnard presents Leslie Aiello and Robin Dunbars theory that increasing group size caused by increasing neocortex size was what favored the development of early language (1993). They argue that mutual grooming cements together the small social groups of lower primates, but that more advanced hominins would not have had enough spare time to groom the number of people needed to hold together their larger social groups. This led to selection for language, which supposedly would tie together larger groups. Although Barnard adopts this theory, I think there are problems with it that need to be solved or at least better explained. If grooming is indeed what holds groups together, how could a group grow larger than grooming would allow? Was the value of early language really the promotion of group solidarity rather than the sharing of practical information, as most linguists believe? What is the nature of the natural group of each species? In the second part of the chapter, Barnard points out that individuals in modern nomadic hunting and gathering societies belong simultaneously to groups of varying sizes, ranging from families to bands to regional coalitions, and that residence groups uctuate in size during the year. Dunbars predicted group size for modern Homo sapiens, 150, is much larger than any enduring groups among modern nomadic hunter-gatherers. In Teaching, Sharing and Exchange, Barnard presents some concepts from social anthropology that he regards as applicable to human evolution, summarizing the history of the concepts and discussing some of their strengths and weaknesses. These concepts include society, culture, social system, sharing, ownership, and exchange.

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In Origins of Language and Symbolism, Barnard attempts to explain when and how full language and symbolic thought developed. He adopts the model proposed by neurobiologist William Calvin and linguist Derek Bickerton (2000), which sees language as developing through three stages: protolanguage, rudimentary language, and language. Barnard believes that true language arose only within the last 200,000 years, in conjunction with the symbolic revolution, which is evidenced by red ochre found in southern African sites. In Elementary Structures of Kinship, Barnard explains and traces the history of descent theory, alliance theory, and the study of kinship classication. He argues that the most common features of kinship among modern hunting and gathering peoples, such as cognatic (bilateral) descent, are most likely to have been found among our ancient ancestors. In A New Synthesis, Barnard presents his scenario for the coevolution of human language and kinship. He organizes it in terms of three revolutions: the signifying revolution, the syntactic revolution, and the symbolic revolution (pp. 104, 132139). The signifying revolution, associated with Homo habilis or Homo erectus, was stimulated by a rise in group size to 75110 members. Protolanguage (words and phrases only), expressed verbally or by signs, superseded grooming for maintaining group solidarity. Sharing, especially of meat, became an important social practice. Protokinship, with a simple classication of kin, arose, and mating was by primitive promiscuity. The syntactic revolution, associated with Archaic Homo sapiens, took place when group size increased to 120130 members. Rudimentary language (words and simple syntax) developed as a medium of communication. Exchange, even between groups, became important. Rudimentary kinship, including incest avoidance and exogamy, developed. Finally, the symbolic revolution, associated with anatomically modern humans, took place when group size increased to about 150 members. True language (complex syntax and morphology), symbolic behavior, and explicit rules of sharing, exchange, and kin behavior came into existence together. True kinship in which all group members were classied as kin arose, and elementary structures, prescribing marriage to specic categories of cross-cousins, governed marriage. Although this scheme is plausible, evidence for some parts of it is weak. I nd the hypothetical development of kinship the most dubious. Instead of looking at the precultural mating behaviors of other primates for inspiration, Barnard follows the 19th-century cultural evolutionist Lewis Henry Morgan in attributing primitive promiscuity to early hominins, applies John F. McLellans 1865 theory of the advent of exogamy to Archaic Homo sapiens, and uses Claude L evi-Strausss concept of elementary kinship structures for early modern Homo sapiens (pp. 136137). Morgans and McLellans theories were pure

speculation, and L evi-Strausss was based on his claim that elementary structures are logically prior to complex structures (marriage systems that merely prohibit marriage with some categories of close kin). As Barnard notes elsewhere, most modern hunter-gatherers have complex structures together with cognatic descent. Although I believe there are some problems in Barnards theory of the evolution of language and kinship systems, I think he makes a convincing case that the study of human origins should become a specialization within social anthropology. This book would be a good starting point for graduate students and scholars interested in creating such a new subdiscipline.

References cited
Aiello, Leslie, and Robin Dunbar 1993 Neocortex Size, Group Size, and the Evolution of Language. Current Anthropology 34:184193. Calvin, William, and Derek Bickerton 2000 Lingua ex Machina: Reconciling Darwin and Chomsky with the Human Brain. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Picturing Islam: Art and Ethics in a Muslim Lifeworld. Kenneth M. George. Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2010. xviii + 164 pp. JESSICA WINEGAR Northwestern University For far too long, scholarship on contemporary Islam and Muslims has largely neglected to consider the rich forms of visual art practice produced in majority-Muslim societies. This neglect unwittingly conrms the erroneous view that art is antithetical to Islam; or worse, the stereotype that Muslims are inherently tradition bound and, thus, uncreative. Only recently have scholars begun to study the varied and voluminous forms of modern and contemporary art in such societies. Although most studies consider how artists, ideas, and objects cross geographical boundaries, the majority of the work is focused on the Middle East. Furthermore, this emerging body of scholarship does not yet adequately attend to how contemporary artists may engage Islamic visual or textual traditions in their work. Picturing Islam: Art and Ethics in a Muslim Lifeworld not only lls these gaps by focusing on contemporary Islamic art in Indonesia; it also presents a pathbreaking challenge for future research in the anthropologies of art, material culture, ethics and religion, subjectivity, Southeast Asia, and global art history. Finally, it is a model for honoring and exploring the encounter between the anthropologist and the interlocutor. Picturing Islam examines the life and work of one of Indonesias most well-known artists, Abdul Djalil Pirous, and

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is based on a 25-year friendship and ethnographic collaboration with the author. Georges moving rendering of the fruits of this deep encounter allows the reader to understand how an artist constructs an ethical lifeworld through a lifetime of engagement with images, objects, ideas, politics, and people. This ethical lifeworld, for Pirous, is simultaneously Islamic, modern, Acehnese, national, and global. Any tensions experienced between the embodiment of these categories are negotiated through the creation of art. The creation of art, then, is Pirouss ethical path, a means through which someone becomes a who and a what, nding relationships with oneself and others, with selfreections, and with the painted images that objectify and refract ones subjectivity (p. 38). George uniquely brings to view how ethics are made material and visual. We meet Pirous in his childhood, in a colonial Aceh lled with people from all over South and Southeast Asia, with Su mystics and reformist Islamic institutions. It is an Aceh where he loves watching cartoons, helping his mother make traditional embroidered fabrics, listening to her recite the Quran and tell stories, and writing both of these in Arabic script. We follow him to a provincial town for secondary school where he starts doing souvenir drawings, and then to the art academy in Bandung. There, he faces an arrogant colonial teacher and decides to embark on a path of making modern art Indonesian and to constitute himself as a postcolonial artistcitizen in the newly independent nation. We then accompany him on a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he had what might be called a spiritual awakening. He realizes that to make modern art Indonesian means to make it Islamic, and that modern art more generally could be made Islamic. George describes this moment as at once a revolt against Western-dominated modernism, and a submission to Islam (p. 46). Pirouss persistence to domesticate modernism by sidelining its secular-liberal presumptions and instead interpreting it as a path to submission reveals a different kind of artistic subjectivity than that with which most readers are familiar. In subsequent chapters, George closely analyzes the process by which Pirous constructs this Muslim artist subjectivity and meets the challenge of making art Islamic and Islamic art Indonesian. Pirous faces issues common to many artists in postcolonial societieshow to reconcile the socially constituted tensions between East and West, tradition and modernity, secularism and religionyet Georges is an especially careful study of just how these tensions are navigated materially and socially by one artist. George considers how Pirous makes, displays, and circulates specic art works in relationship to high and low points in Indonesias postcolonial history, including a very successful national Islamic arts festival and the atrocities in Pirouss home province of Aceh. Through George, readers are with Pirous as he corrects Quranic calligraphy in a previously

completed painting just before an exhibition, as he reects on paintings he habitually passes on the walls in his home, as he describes painting as a spiritual meditation, as he chooses modernist abstraction for its afnities with Islamic ethics, and as he gifts paintings to friends. In this way, readers gain an intimate understanding of how art works themselves can be vehicles for becoming a good Muslim and pathways for other Muslims to become closer to God. George describes his book as an ethnographic art history and, as such, draws on anthropological as well as art historical methodologies and theoretical models. This unique mixture challenges the insularity that has traditionally characterized the anthropology of art (in its focus on context and social patterns among artists) and art history (in its focus on form and individual artists). Taking the best from anthropologists of art who take seriously individual art works and artists, and from social art historians, George has created a text that blurs disciplines and genres to open up new ways for considering the relationships between subject and object, the individual and the social, the material and the immaterial, and the immanent and transcendent. Picturing Islam will produce rich discussions of theory and method in graduate anthropology and art history seminars. Its accessible language, short length, and focus on one compelling person also make it suitable for all levels of undergraduates. It could be used in introductory anthropology courses, as well as in specialized courses on art, modernism and modernity, ethics, religionIslam, and Southeast Asia. Pirous will join anthropologys other famous interlocutors, such as Nisa, Tuhami, and Catarina, who generously allow us to share in their lifeworlds.

Vodou Nation: Haitian Art Music and Cultural Nationalism. Michael Largey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. xi + 283 pp. WILLIAM HOPE Colby College Vodou Nation: Haitian Art Music and Cultural Nationalism offers a compelling account of the agencies and actions of Haitian elites in the period of the 1890s through the 1950s and the development of misik savant ayisyen (Haitian art music). Michael Largey presents a series of wellcrafted and nely detailed discussions that foreground the lives and works of selected Haitian intellectuals and art music composers as well as some of their African American counterparts in the United States. These biographies are interwoven within the shifting political fortunes and social alliances among Haitian elites, the foundation of a modern Haitian ethnological movement, and the materialization of cosmopolitan diasporic imaginings of an emergent black consciousness. Largey argues that Haitian elites

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increasingly employed Vodou-inspired cultural practices and aesthetics in their efforts to promote a vibrant and, importantly, authentic Haitian national culture, especially as these cultural nationalist expressions were informed by a fervent reaction to the U.S. military occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934. Largey draws out the generative tensions and paradoxes accompanying the historical development of misik savant ayisyen as Vodou was far from being accepted by Haitian elites. Heated debates ensued regarding the extent to which openly acknowledged African heritage should be asserted as a source of national pride or a shameful social atavism holding back modern national development. These debates made salient the increasing necessity for cross-class alliances in the formation of nationalist sentiment in a moment when national sovereignty and identity were threatened by the presence of a racist social order imposed under foreign military occupation. Largey skillfully articulates the material processes and ideological orientations constituting the selective tradition of mizik savant ayisyen as elite composers crafted compositions that drew inspiration from the Vodou religious practices of rural and working-class Haitians. The social contradictions of using lower-class performance genres in upper-class performance contexts, what Largey conceptualizes as vulgarization, entailed the incorporation of authentic Haitian cultural expressions but without risks of social contamination, such that the Haitian bourgeoisie could enjoy Carnivalesque exuberance without having to be present on the streets (p. 84). Vodou Nation successfully draws out the interconnections between the lives and works of art music composers Occide Jeanty, Justin Elie, Ludovic Lamothe, and Werner Jaegerhuber with that of Jean Price-Mars, the iconic Haitian intellectual and ethnographer. Price-Marss contributions to ethnology and his thoughts on the study of folklore as a basis for Haitian cultural nationalism have long been acknowledged. Largey demonstrates specic artistic linkages to Price-Marss seminal work Ainsi parla loncle (Thus Spoke the Uncle) providing a much better grasp of the social entanglements within which Price-Mars created this inuential piece. While laying the institutional foundation for Haitian cultural studies, Price-Mars berated his elite counterparts for denying their African heritage, calling on them to celebrate rural cultural practices and legitimate the use of the Haitian Kreyol language. Vodou Nation also provides a rich discussion of the symbolic value that Haiti held for African American intellectuals in the United States as a powerful yet ambivalent sign of black political agency and African-based cultural heritage. Specically, Largey examines the artistic works of Clarence Cameron White, John Frederick Matheus, and Langston Hughes and the ways they sought to evoke felt connections of the Black Atlantic experience through their

operas about Haiti (p. 148). Similar to those of their elite Haitian counterparts, these works embodied diasporic connections and imaginings. Drawing out the contested nature of modes of cultural memory, Largey also provides insight into the signicant cultural differences among these diasporic cosmopolitans, especially as these were informed by social distinctions of color, class, and nation. The ambivalent nature of these transnational articulations is particularly salient in discussion of Langston Hughess visit to Haiti and his conclusion that its social and political problems were based on historical and contemporary failures of the elite to manage internal class and color divisions (p. 185). While Vodou Nation largely achieves its goal of examining the complex sociohistorical process within which misik savant ayisyen emerges as a persuasive narrative of Haitian cultural nationalism (at least among its elite practitioners and supporters), the book is not without its limitations. First, although due attention is placed on prominent intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance, conspicuously absent is reference to contemporary Caribbean intellectuals and their attempts to formulate similar cultural nationalist expressions in the face of foreign political and cultural domination. The example of Fernando Ortiz in Cuba immediately comes to mind as an important counterpoint to Price-Marss attempts to promote the study of folklore as the basis of assertions of nationalist sentiment. Second, histories of cultural nationalisms of the early 20th century have to grapple not only with the rapidly shifting political and social organizations but must also examine how the attempt to promote the emotional legitimacy of the nation was a heavily mediated process. The Caribbean provides an important case study for the early deployment of communications technologies of sound recordings, radio, and lm as much for the populist aspirations of politicians as for an industrialized media codication and dissemination of local musical expressions that increasingly became indexed as national, while creating markets in the process. Although lm and radio are briey referenced in the North American context, discussion of the impact of these communications technologies in Haiti is virtually absent. Finally, an accompanying compact disc or hyperlink to the authors website would have contributed a much-needed sense of sound and style critical to better understanding Largeys discussion of vulgarization, thereby facilitating a broader engagement with a (musically) nonliterate audience. It is a bit ironic that the reliance on musical transcriptions represents precisely the same constraints of the music ideology employed by elite Haitian art music composers in their Vodou-inspired musical creations and the relative lack of popular appeal that they had. Still, Vodou Nation does well in its articulation of a broad range of disciplinary interests, including those of anthropology, African American studies, Caribbean studies,

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ethnomusicology, and history. Michael Largey models an effective research approach that provides rich contextualization of sociohistorical process while making more transparent the contested productions of specic historical narratives of Haitian cultural nationalism.

Being There: Learning to Live Cross-Culturally. Sarah H. Davis and Melvin Konner, eds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. 260 pp. JOYCE D. HAMMOND Western Washington University Storytelling is universal among humans, and people everywhere appreciate a well-told, compelling story. Being There: Learning to Live Cross-Culturally offers 16 such stories by authors who expand our understanding of humanity through reections about their interactions with diverse others. Most of the stories of intertwined lives and lessons are by anthropologists. Originating in the collaboration between contributing editors Melvin Konner and Sarah H. Davis, the anthology pays tribute to Marjorie Shostak, Konners wife and an inspirational gure in Daviss career. Two chapters specically refer to Shostaks work: Konners poignant tale of returning to South Africa several years after Shostaks death and an excerpt from Shostaks posthumous book, Return to Nisa (2000). Echoing Shostaks clear, effective style of communication, the anthologys stories offer broad appeal as vivid, well-crafted, and jargon-free writing. They also parallel Shostaks reexive approach of acknowledging her standpoint vis-` a-vis the !Kung San because the contributing authors provide rich details about their own positionalities. Nuggets of insight about themselves, as well as others and their lives, emanate from authors reections on their complex statuses and interactions with hosts. Chris Boehm even offers elucidation on the political aspects of insult and danger with chimpanzees, as well as humans. Many contributors write of the inuences and changes in their relationships with hosts over time, explaining their own positions as adopted kin, close friends, and recognized professionals. Some discuss being placed in statuses not of their own choosing. Others disclose the distances they felt between themselves and those among whom they lived. Balanced with accessibility produced through clear prose, each story draws on the complex knowledge of both researchers and hosts. Many kinds of information, beliefs, and behaviors are skillfully intermingled. Historical background, ethnographic details, and vivid descriptions of peoples actions provide contextual understandings for both hosts and researchers statements and behaviors. Readers learn, for example, how witchcraft is regarded among the Navajo and the Beng, of rural Montenegrin Serbs conver-

sations shouted across hillsides, of Mexican womens IUDs being removed to prevent extramarital relations in the absence of migratory husbands, and of a keen competition among some Costa Rican women who fashion elaborate miniature dresses for a small gurine of the Virgin. Authors embodied experiences provide rich details concerning others lives and authors insights. Lisa Dalbys understanding of Japanese geisha evolved largely from training as a geisha. Russell Leigh Sharman enjoyed a front-row seat to the rite of the Vesticion by participating as a member of an altar guild. Jessica Gregg moved into a Brazilian favela to better understand the conditions of life for women there. Coinciding with the authors use of time-honored participatory practices, some writers describe feelings and insights emanating from unexpected cultural attitudes, practices, and events. Louise Brown, for example, writes of an unanticipated Pakistani prostitute code of honor, and M. Cameron Hay anguishes over a theft she knows occurred but that could not be openly acknowledged. Authors unique experiences gave them some of their deepest insights into others lives. Several contributors discuss specic differences between themselves and others, some of which created unwanted barriers. In an early stint of eldwork, Ruth Behar learned that being childless put her at risk of being perceived as a threat to other womens babies. Alma Gotlieb and Philip Graham lament the probability of introducing conditions fueling a kind of material culture envy psychosis among Beng youth. Many of the stories in the anthology revolve around uncomfortable, sometimes dangerous, incidents occurring early in authors encounters with others, a time when both were trying to make sense of one another. Important, if sometimes painful, lessons often emerged from humbling gaffes. The authors uninchingly admit to their mistakes, and several point to hosts generosity in accepting them, despite their missteps, perceived shortcomings, and manifest differences. All of the stories are told in rst person. Although many revolve around experiences decades-old, the immediacy of rst-person voice allows readers to vicariously relive the incidents and be in the moment with the authors. The writers voices and frequent use of dialogue are especially well suited for conveying the emotional aspects of the stories. Shock, anguish, fear, grief, and remorse are expressed in relation to authors blunders and reactions to others actions and words. Readers also learn of authors feelings of affection, happiness, pride, and enlightenment. The honesty with which the writers describe their own and others feelings convey rich truths of lived experiences. A strong theme in many stories is that of the signicance of authors relationships with specic people and how those contributed to clearer understandings of others and, ultimately, of themselves. Lila Abu-Lughods

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decades-long tie with the Haj, Jessica Greggs bond with Grac a, Marjorie Shostaks friendship with Nisa, Jeanne Simonellis ties to members of Margarita Dawsons family, and John C. Woods friendship with Wario form the kernel of ve stories. A related subject is that of the deepening of relationships and insights as authors return two or more times to a group. Undoubtedly, the books predominant theme is that human connections can enable people to recognize each others common humanity, despite their differences. Regardless of whether authors bonds with others were concretized by practices such as surrogate kinship relations or mutual gift giving, the stories are overwhelmingly about how the writers and their hosts strove to connect with one another in meaningful ways. By sharing their stories, the authors send a clear message to readers that all

humans benet from efforts to realize our common humanity with others. Daviss reference to expanding worlds of connection and meaning (p. 7) in her eloquent introduction to the book and Greens two statements below summarize the books overarching theme well: We should not be distracted for too long by the surface glitter of difference . . . without connection on a deeper level with core truths of human intelligence and human sensibility (p. 136). They did with me as I did with them; they reached past my peculiar-seeming, exotic-looking actions to connect with what, in me, was most deeply human and really not so unusual at all (p. 138).

Reference cited
Shostak, Marjorie 2000 Return to Nisa. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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