Reviews
Anderson, E. N. 2005. Political ecology in a
Yucatec Maya community. Tucson:
University of Arizona Press. xx + 274 pp.
Hb.: $55.00. ISBN: 0816523932.
In the 16th century, in his Relación de
Yucatán (ed. by Miguel Rivera, Madrid:
Historia 16, p. 161), Friar Diego de Landa
described the Peninsula of Yucatán in the
southeast of Mexico as ‘the country with the
least earth I have ever seen, since all of it is
one living rock’. Soil cover in the northwest
of the area is indeed sparse and the surface
extremely rocky. While this description does
not apply to the entire Peninsula, almost
nowhere do conditions for agriculture seem
particularly inviting, at least at first glance.
Landa was surprised to find that local Yucatec
Maya planted their crops between the stones
and that even trees grew there, some of them
‘so big and beautiful that it is a marvel to look
at them’ (ibid., p. 162). He also recognised one
of the reasons behind this indigenous practice,
suggesting that in areas lacking surface water,
humidity could be preserved more
satisfactorily among the stones than in the
soil. The basic features of indigenous milpa
(swidden) agriculture, which consisted of
cutting the underbrush, felling trees and
burning the remains a couple of months later
before planting in the soil now fertilised by
ashes, are still practised by many peasants
today.
The Spanish-speaking elites of the
colonial era and of the period after
independence from Spain in the 19th century
considered milpa cultivation to be an archaic
technique that destroyed the forests. This
opinion is shared by most government
officials, agricultural technicians and
development planners of more recent times.
Although many of the intensive techniques
employed by the ancient Maya had been lost
to the Maya-speaking campesinos (peasants)
Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale (2008) 16, 2 237–265. 
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doi:10.1111/j.1469-8676.2008.00026.x
since the post-Classic, milpa agriculture was
still able to support a fairly large population
in colonial and post-colonial times.
In his Political ecology in a Yucatec Maya
community, E. N. Anderson raises the
question of whether milpa agriculture is
sustainable. The community referred to in the
title is Chunhuhub in the west of the state of
Quintana Roo, a town with a current
population of 6000 people. Anderson
provides an ethnographic overview of the
town, focusing primarily on the environment
and land use, such as agriculture and logging,
as well as on the rituals and world view
associated with these practices, and the effects
of what he calls ‘modernization’ – including
government development projects and the
more general influences of ‘Western culture’,
such as the spread of radio, television and
computers.
Anderson is highly sympathetic to the
‘traditional’ agricultural land-use practices of
the Maya-speaking campesinos in the area.
However, he is not an uncritical romantic
who idealises the milpa nor a conservationist
radical who condemns all change to the
environment: ‘Maya agriculture is
“sustainable” in the sense that it will support a
fairly large population indefinitely, without
totally ravaging the environment. It will not
support an infinite population; indeed, it will
not support the current population in many
(if not most) parts of the peninsula’ (p. 7).
‘Maya agriculture and forest management . . .
are well adapted to the needs of the people
who practice it. It is not a thoughtless and
mindless waste of the environment, but
neither is it a modern conservation biologist’s
utopia . . . Its purpose is to keep people alive,
not to maximize biodiversity’ (p. 6). As
Anderson rightly stresses, the forests found
on the peninsula today are anything but
primary. They are the result of at least
5000 years of cultivation and logging.
237
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While Anderson highlights the
effectiveness and sustainability of the milpa
system that is supported by an extensive
knowledge of the environment and a world
view that does not consider the latter as a
mere aggregate of resources to be exploited or
wasted, he is fully aware that change is
inevitable if the challenges of a growing
population and the anonymous and
heterogeneous forces of what is frequently
called ‘globalization’ are to be met.
The author is rightly critical of past
development programmes for the rural areas,
most of which failed as a result of
mismanagement and corruption, as well as of
false conceptions of reality and lack of
farsightedness. Hence, for example, Mexican
bureaucrats attempted to promote the
small-scale production of rabbits in tropical
regions where these animals succumb to
countless diseases and where the local
inhabitants were unaccustomed to eating
them. The latter preferred chickens and
turkeys, both of which were more suited to
the local environment and produced eggs as
well as meat.
Nevertheless, Anderson is also aware of
positive measures, such as those introduced
by the government to lower infant mortality.
‘Certainly, a person of humble means seeking
medical care in Chunhuhub is better served
than she would be in most parts of modern
United States’ (p. 195). While the author
portrays the people of Chunhuhub as
pragmatic and open to change, he also
emphasises what ‘traditional’ agricultural
practices and knowledge have to offer to
mankind, threatened as it is by a worldwide
rural environmental crisis and a precarious
world food situation, where approximately a
fifth of the world population suffers from
malnutrition.
What Anderson suggests as a realistic and
sustainable economic development for the
people of Chunhuhub is a specific type of
‘multi-tasking’: ‘There is every reason to
expect that a family could combine (for
example) software development [possible due
to the introduction of computer training in
the town, W.G.], milpa agriculture,
specialized fruit production, technical
services, and beekeeping’ (p. 200).
WOLFGANG GABBERT
Leibniz Universität Hannover (Germany)
Animal Studies Group. 2006. Killing
animals. Urbana and Chicago: University of
Illinois Press. 224 pp. Hb.: £32.95. ISBN: 0
252 03050 8.
In April 2000 Belgian artist Jan Fabre
wrapped the pillars of one of the university
halls in Ghent with slices of ham. These
skinned legs of reason made it to the headlines
of the evening news, if only for the fierce
reactions of neighbours (the smell!) and of
animal activists, who criticised the artist and
the university authorities for wasting animal
lives. This controversy illustrated the growing
social and political concern for animals. Even
if the interest in the ethical treatment of
animals originated with the rise of
industrialisation and urbanisation in the West,
in the last few years it has gained special
salience due to the increasing anxiety and
uncertainty related to trans-species diseases
(such as BSE and avian flu) and other threats
to ‘food security’. These concerns are also
reflected in the rise of animal studies as a new
domain in the humanities and social sciences.
Coming from a wide variety of
disciplines (among others, anthropology,
literary studies and philosophy), the eight
contributors to Killing animals start from the
observation that animal death is a structural
feature of animal–human relationships. Their
joint introduction illustrates this with
staggering figures on the number of cows,
pigs and chickens killed each year by the
animal industry. This main idea is further
elaborated in the conclusion, which consists
of the transcript of a roundtable discussion
the authors had somewhere between writing
and publishing the book’s manuscript.
From this point of departure, the authors
place a first emphasis on hunting (in the sense
of leisure or sport). Garry Marvin’s piece, for
instance, analyses hunting (‘wild killing’) as a
cultural activity aimed at creating and

C 2008 European Association of Social Anthropologists.

maintaining social order. Diana Donald then
analyses how hunting was represented during
the Victorian era, and how works of art
reflected the ambiguous attitude of the public
towards trophy hunting and towards the
spectacle of the wild (in, for instance, zoos). A
similar ambiguity pops up in Steve Baker’s
discussion of the use and role of
(representations of) dead animals in
contemporary art.
A second emphasis is laid on the role of
animals in the intellectual history of the West.
Though an essential part of all chapters, this
theme is elaborated especially by Erica Fudge.
Going back to, among others, Thomas
Aquinas, she deals with the orthodox ethics of
Western thought (the ethics, in the author’s
terms, of the good self) that she opposes to
notable challengers such as Michel de
Montaigne and Jacques Derrida, who
advocate a philosophy of the good life. These
two ethics differ on the question whether or
not they also include the treatment of animals.
Thirdly, the volume explores the
relationship between slaughter and modernity.
Jonathan Burt emphasises that social practices
are also a product of a particular configuration
of technology, the animal, and discourses of
efficiency, breeding, health and ethics. Robert
McKay, in his turn, analyses the BSE crisis in
the UK, underlining the parallels between
representations of animal death and hysteria.
A final theme I discern in this volume is
the inherent ambivalence of the West’s
attitudes towards (the death of) animals.
Chris Wilbert, for instance, asks the questions
why we are so horrified by the thought of
creatures feeding on human flesh (be them
bugs, worms, aliens or giant spiders), and in
what terms animal agency is discussed. Clare
Palmer, finally, discusses the attitude of
Western society towards pets and the practice
of abandoning them in animal shelters – a
practice that usually brings about the death of
the animal. Like most of the contributions,
this one also places the killing of animals in an
ethical framework.
Killing animals raises interesting
analytical issues regarding concepts central to
contemporary social thought (such as agency

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REVIEWS 239
or subjectivity). These issues, however, are
touched upon but not elaborated in this
volume. Even though it does justice to the
complexity of thinking about animal–human
relationships in the West, its analyses are
distanced and distancing, looking at animals
as a category of thought, as, paradoxically,
disembodied objects. It is perhaps more
important to note that the ethical stance the
authors advocate is not unproblematic. First
of all, it starkly opposes the human condition
to the animal condition, since humans have
been able to ‘culturise’ death. Secondly, such
an ethic is inherently evolutionist (animal
rights as the epitome of civilisation) and
ethnocentric (since animals are approached
from what is basically an urban, Western
perspective). Unfortunately, these issues are
not addressed by this book.
STEVEN VAN WOLPUTTE
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium)
de Jong, Willemijn, Claudia Roth,
Fatoumata Badini-Kinda and Seema
Bhagyanath. 2005. Ageing in insecurity.
Case studies on social security and gender
in India and Burkina Faso/Vieillir dans
l’insecurité. Sécurité sociale et genre en
Inde et au Burkina Faso. Etudes de cas.
Münster: Lit Verlag. 394 pp. Pb.: €29.90.
ISBN: 3 8258 7846 5.
How do the poor in some of the world’s
poorest countries secure their survival and
well-being in old age? To what extent are they
able to mobilise support from family, wider
kin, community and the state? Is old-age
security gendered? Ageing in insecurity
addresses these questions by comparing the
support networks of poor older people in
urban and rural Kerala, India and Burkina
Faso. The book, based on ethnographic
fieldwork, represents the first comparison of
the logic and reliability of diverse sources of
old-age support in contexts of economic and
social insecurity. Understanding vulnerability,
the authors argue, requires consideration both
of local notions of entitlement, obligation and
belonging, and of people’s capacity to
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negotiate the limited social and material
resources at their disposal.
Not surprisingly, the authors uncover
important differences between the countries
and urban and rural settings. Burkina Faso is
poorer and more elders find themselves in
critical insecurity. More so than in Kerala,
support is contingent on a person’s capacity
to maintain at least basic autonomy. Given
high levels of unemployment, parents may
find themselves continuing to provide for
children, rather than relying on them. In
Kerala, formal welfare arrangements and civil
society support are better developed. In both
countries, elders are more likely to find basic
security in rural settings. In Kerala this is
because living costs are lower, in Burkina Faso
because elders’ continued control over family
land provides them with a degree of power
over the younger generation. In urban
settings family and kin networks are more
dispersed and neighbourhoods more
economically segregated, but elders find
access to a greater range of informal and
semi-formal community support.
Despite these differences, it is the
similarities in poor people’s situations in the
four settings that are most striking. Across the
communities, old-age support arrangements
are heavily negotiated: they require careful
investment over the life course, and their
reliability is uncertain. Once elders are no
longer able to maintain independence, their
security depends on their acquiescence: unless
they are modest, uncomplaining and helpful,
support is unlikely to be forthcoming; in
Burkina Faso elderly women face the
additional risk of being accused of sorcery if
considered too demanding. Children remain
the most important source of support in old
age, and the basic intergenerational ‘contract’
is rarely questioned. However, as a result of
poverty, children are often incapable of
providing much support, and of course they
may sometimes simply be lacking. This means
that despite the dominant rhetoric of sons’
obligation to provide support, in reality sons
and daughters, as well as wider kin and
community links become instrumental for
elders’ survival. The authors draw attention to
a much-neglected source of old-age support,
namely older people’s spouses. Across the
four settings, elderly men rely heavily on their
wives, and the same is true for the minority of
women who are still married.
The findings on the role of kin and
neighbours are fascinating. Much as kin
solidarity is emphasised in public discourse,
in fact only very limited expectations for
support are attached to relations with wider
kin. Both in India and Burkina Faso, kin are
important for assisting with ceremonies and
small-scale needs, but they do not compensate
for a lack of children or spouses. Neighbours
are similarly important for immediate
assistance, but not far-reaching support.
Moreover, kin and neighbourhood support is
based on a logic of reciprocity, with any
receipt of assistance tied to an expectation of
return. This means the poorest, most
vulnerable elders have least access to these
wider networks. Especially in urban settings,
wealthy kin are able to distance themselves
from poorer relatives, making them
unavailable for assistance. In short, the logic
of kin and community support is such that its
‘redistributive strength’ is low, with material
disparities reinforced rather than alleviated.
The material on the gendered nature of
old-age support defies any easy
generalisations. Women’s structural position
in both societies certainly makes them more
vulnerable to insecurity in later life: for
example, they are much less likely than men
to own a house or land or have access to
income. In Kerala, women’s freedom of
movement is constrained, and their networks
therefore limited to the immediate family and
neighbourhood. That said, women are better
placed to continue contributing to their
families in later life, and this provides them
with some degree of bargaining power and
status. Men, once no longer working, are
vulnerable to neglect and marginalisation.
Especially in Burkina Faso, where polygyny
is common, mothers tend to have closer
bonds with their children than fathers and
may therefore receive more filial support.
I would have liked to see greater
interpretation of the fascinating case studies:

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at times these are passed over without much
comment. And while the different potential
sources of old-age support are captured very
well, it is not always clear who has access to
what kinds of support, and why, and how a
division of labour between different network
members is negotiated. Finally, the use of the
term ‘middle class’ to refer to non-poor
families in rural Burkina Faso strikes me as
inappropriate. But these are minor quibbles
with what is an excellent contribution to a
field of growing academic and policy
concern.
ELISABETH SCHRÖDER-BUTTERFILL
University of Southampton (UK)
Knighton, Ben. 2005. The vitality of
Karamojong religion. Dying tradition or living
faith? Aldershot: Ashgate. xvi + 349 pp.
Hb.: £55.00. ISBN 0 7546 0383 0.
The pastoral societies inhabiting Karamoja
area in the northeastern corner of Uganda
have been the subject of several significant
monographs. Knighton continues this
tradition by presenting an outstanding study
of the three tribes (Karimojong, Jie and
Dodoso), which he collectively refers to as
Karamojong. Taking religion as the central
theme, he presents a vivid and enticing
description of a society that operates in a very
harsh and uncertain environment. The initial
chapters deal with history and basic
ethnography. Subsequent chapters deal with
the warrior culture, the impact of the
introduction of guns, and the complexity of
social relationships with territorial sections,
matrimonial ties, clan membership, initiation
and the intricate generation-set and age-set
system. The final chapters deal with sacrifice
and mediation, ‘women’s affairs’ and the
vitality of Karamojong society.
Pastoral societies of Karamoja and
adjacent areas are often depicted as resisting
innovation and refusing modernisation. In
1973, John G. Wilson observed that Karamoja
District ‘could in many ways be construed as
a living museum resembling Africa of the past
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Colonial rule was indeed minimalist in its
governance in Karamoja, but this changed
significantly in 1971 when Idi Amin decided
to impose a formal dress code on all Ugandan
citizens alike, which the Karamojong initially
resisted. Amin reacted violently, sending in
his troops to break Karamojong resistance.
Nine years of incessant persecution followed.
Unfortunately, immediately after Amin’s
forced retreat in 1979, Karamoja area was
struck by two consecutive periods of drought
and famine (1980–81 and 1984–85), the first
one being the most serious in the 20th century.
The hardship of over 15 years of continuous
suffering took its toll and the dress code of
the Karamojong did slowly change until it
became much the same as that of their
neighbours. But appearances are deceptive
because, in spite of the immense pressure on
Karamojong society – or was it because of it?
– the change in dress was not emblematic of
any significant change of Karamojong society
itself. This can be explained by the relentless
search of the Karamojong to keep their
autonomy. Knighton effectively argues how
traditional religion has played a crucial part in
Karamojong resistance, which did not develop
into a violent struggle, but rather in the steady
refusal to let their religion atrophy in favour
of an alien one. Karamojong religious life has
been maintained ‘through chance and change’
(p. 76) and indeed persists as ‘a living faith’.
According to Knighton, the Karamojong
have ‘no intention of enculturating the
priorities of modernity or renouncing their
traditional pastoral values’ (p. 75) and adopt
only what is perceived as useful, that is
‘Europe’s technology, more than its ideology’
(ibid.). Guns undoubtedly figure among the
most coveted trade goods and have been
introduced on a large scale. Knighton states
that the gun is being determinedly used by the
Karamojong ‘to preserve their autonomy,
their traditional politics and religion’ (p. 131).
The proliferation of guns has allowed inner
tensions to be resolved by projecting them
onto raiding neighbouring peoples. The
increased raiding in the 1980s and 1990s must,
of course, be understood as a necessity for the
Karamojong, to halt the economic losses of
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decades and to restock their herds. Yet,
although ‘the morality of valuing ngimoe
(strangers, enemies) as expendable to
Karamojong ambitions is not one calculated
to be acceptable to others’ (p. 132), it cannot
be denied that raids take a heavy toll on the
population of both sides, especially when
guns are involved. Knighton argues that the
increased raiding is not undermining the
legitimate power of the elders, since ‘the
age-system has considerable power to control
miscreant individuals and even groups’
(p. 110). Yet the recent efforts by the
Karamojong to amass huge herds have paved
the way for the erosion of tribal unity: today
the three major territorial sections (Bokora,
Maseniko and Pian) have become distinct
political entities as relations among the three
units oscillate between aloofness and overt
hostility.
Knighton’s book is based on intensive
fieldwork; it includes a wealth of first-hand
field data and is filled with detail. The number
of indigenous terms incorporated in the
book’s index reflects the importance of
linguistic analysis in the derivation of
meanings. Knighton also has a thorough
knowledge of the literature on the
Karamojong, as is shown by the impressive
bibliography, which includes many
unpublished local sources. The exhaustive
index is a very handy tool for researchers.
Knighton’s monograph undoubtedly presents
a major contribution to our knowledge on the
Karamojong and an absolute must for anyone
working with the Karamojong and their
neighbours.
GUSTAAF VERSWIJVER
Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren
(Belgium)
Leservoisier, Olivier (dir.). 2005. Terrains
ethnographiques et hiérarchies sociales:
Retour réflexif sur la situation d’enquête.
Paris: Karthala. 327 pp. Pb.: €26.00. ISBN:
2 84586 598 8.
Selon l’idée que ‘si l’ethnologue construit son
“terrain”, ce dernier le “fabrique” à son tour’
(p. 24), cet ouvrage a pour objectif de décrire
le contexte de production du savoir en
définissant la place de l’ethnologue dans les
hiérarchies sociales. Au contraire des pays
anglo-saxons, la démarche réflexive sur la
situation d’enquête en France a davantage
mené à des récits de voyage qu’à des travaux
méthodologiques. Dans son excellente
introduction théorique et historique, Olivier
Leservoisier remarque que les monographies,
qui consacrent le travail de terrain, demeurent
silencieuses sur l’expérience du chercheur. La
pratique d’enquête, allant au départ de soi, n’a
donné lieu à un questionnement qu’il y a
vingt-cinq ans, même si, comme le rappelle
Laurent Bazin dans son article, l’analyse des
hiérarchies commence avec celle du rapport
colonial par Balandier dans les années 1950.
Loin d’être évidente, l’observation
participante passe parfois pour un ‘art de
terrain’ (p. 9), voire ‘une simple “évocation
esthétique”, comparable à une œuvre
“poétique”’ (p. 18). Une implication trop
grande empêchant d’adopter le recul
nécessaire, les notes de terrain, qui consignent
le ‘hors-texte’, se révèlent précieuses et
peuvent être appréhendées comme des
données. Citant la recherche de Favret-Saada,
Leservoisier pose l’analyse de l’implication du
chercheur sur le terrain comme condition à la
production du savoir, en plus d’ajouter de la
rigueur et des possibilités de recoupement.
Conscient du risque du travers inverse,
Leservoisier critique les post-modernes chez
qui l’obsession du texte, sous prétexte de
restituer la dimension dialogique, limite les
conclusions au travail d’exégèse et tend à
éluder l’essentiel, l’objet de la recherche, à
force de se focaliser sur les chercheurs. Les
post-modernes omettent en outre de rappeler
que les résultats de l’enquête demeurent une
interprétation de l’ethnologue, ou comme
l’exprime Deliège d’une autre manière: ‘même
les prophètes les plus radicaux du relativisme
culturel ne reviennent jamais de leur
expérience de terrain en disant que les valeurs
de la population étudiée sont si différentes
qu’il est impossible de les comprendre’ (p. 65).
Avant la rédaction du texte, Leservoisier
s’intéresse à la production du savoir sur le

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terrain de façon complémentaire mais
visiblement plus ciblée que ses prédécesseurs,
comme dans De l’ethnographie à
l’anthropologie réflexive de Christian
Ghasarian, publié en 2002.
L’ouvrage se poursuit par deux articles
intelligents et bien écrits. Jean-Pierre Warnier,
dont l’intéressante démonstration répond
exactement à la problématique, approfondit
ses interrogations d’une belle plume. Ensuite,
dans un article systématique et structuré,
Robert Deliège critique ceux qui qualifient la
moindre expérience personnelle d’expérience
de terrain et constate que les critiques les plus
virulentes vis-à-vis de l’ethnographie sont
formulées par ceux qui la connaissent le
moins. Il souligne l’exercice de l’intuition et
l’importance des qualités personnelles dans
l’aboutissement de l’enquête de terrain, traits
souvent omis, même dans les ouvrages
d’anthropologie réflexive. Dans un article
subtil et fouillé, Valéria A. Hernandez montre
que les anthropologues ne s’intègrent jamais
que partiellement aux niveaux de pouvoir
auxquels ils sont associés et souligne le rôle de
la frontière entre vie publique et vie privée
dans les logiques de communication. Le livre
s’achève par un article brillant, qui aurait tout
aussi pu être proposé comme préambule:
Tcherkézoff nous expose son raisonnement
sur la construction occidentale des hiérarchies
appliquée au terrain. L’idée même d’inégalité
est à remettre en question, car l’anthropologue
en juge en transposant à la société observée ses
propres réflexes politiques. L’auteur distingue
la hiérarchie de statuts, basée sur une
gradation d’interdits, de la stratification, basée
sur un accès autonome aux avoirs. La première
se construit sur une interdépendance, absente
de la seconde. Il montre enfin comment la
confusion entre les deux a parfois justifié, de
la part des Occidentaux, un interventionnisme
mal à propos face à une situation de ‘chefs’ ou
de ‘régime aristocratique’ absents en tant que
tels des classifications indigènes.
Dans ces articles et dans d’autres,
l’insertion malgré lui de l’ethnologue dans des
hiérarchies locales se révèle capitale,
notamment quand il sert de faire-valoir, voire
que les observés se réapproprient ses

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découvertes comme le montre Elisabeth
Cunin. L’échelle sociale qu’elle met en
évidence construit des nuances de couleur de
peau, au sujet desquelles il n’existe pas de
consensus collectif, ce qui rend l’investigation
anthropologique malaisée sans offenser
quelqu’un. À l’inverse, Leservoisier note
l’erreur fréquente d’appréhender des sociétés
à travers la vision qu’en ont leurs dirigeants. Il
s’attarde aussi aux conséquences pour les
populations observées d’adresser la parole à
l’ethnologue, et décortique son contact avec
ceux qui cherchent à échapper aux
classifications.
Indépendamment de la démarche
méthodologique et de l’indéniable qualité de
la plupart des contributions, certaines sont
inégales, voire peu étoffées. L’utilisation du
‘nous, ethnologue’ et d’une troisième
personne de convenance, dénoncée dans
l’introduction, se retrouve dans certains
apports, jusqu’à nuire à la lisibilité du texte
comme dans l’article de Gilles Holder et
d’Emmanuelle Olivier. Enfin, suivant
l’objectif général de déconstruction des
circonstances de production du savoir, la place
de l’ethnologue dans les hiérarchies sociales
n’est pas l’argument principal de tous les
auteurs, qui gagneraient sans doute à pousser
leur enquête de terrain plus loin tout en
gardant la problématique de l’ouvrage à
l’esprit.
ASTRID DE HONTHEIM
Université Libre de Bruxelles (Belgique)
Low, Setha, Dana Taplin and Suzanne
Scheld. 2006. Rethinking urban parks.
Public space and cultural diversity. Austin:
University of Texas Press. 248 pp. Pb.:
£14.95. ISBN: 0 292 71254 5.
The book under review was written with a
mission: to encourage designers, planners and
managers of urban parks to engage with issues
of cultural diversity. In times when urban
public space has become almost synonymous
with privatisation, social exclusion,
surveillance and anti-terrorism measures, the
authors of this volume remind us of the
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crucial role of public places for preserving the
democratic ideal of the city. ‘How can we
continue to integrate our diverse communities
and promote social tolerance in this new
political climate?’ they ask (p. 3). One way,
they suggest, is to make sure that urban public
spaces remain public, i.e. inclusive and
culturally diverse, settings where city dwellers
of all races, ethnicities and classes come
together to perform and share urban public
life. With this book the authors, thus, seek to
extend the dialogue about public space
beyond the issues of comfort and vitality
propounded by previous research. Their
endeavour starts at an obvious point of
departure: William H. Whyte’s classic 1980
study of New York’s plazas. They revisit
themes emerging from Whyte’s seminal work
from a post-9/11 perspective, reflecting the
present political and historical climate where
fear of terrorism has made urban public places
inhospitable to diverse cultural practices and
identities of gender, class, religion, culture,
ethnicity and nationality. Noting the
changing, increasingly homogenised and
segregated, character of urban public space
during their 15 years of research at the Public
Space Research Group within the Center for
Human Environments at CUNY, the authors
initiated a series of research projects to
ascertain what activities and management
techniques would encourage, support and
maintain cultural diversity, a requirement
(and here the authors amend Whyte’s study)
for promoting sociability in small urban
spaces. Their aim is to encourage designers,
planners and other specialists and
non-specialists involved in urban park design
and management to rethink – as the title of
the book suggests – towards a more inclusive
and culturally diverse urban public space.
The book is divided into nine chapters.
The first two chapters set the theoretical
framework and historical background,
respectively, of urban parks in North
America. Interestingly, at the beginning of the
book the authors attempt to standardise the
terminology for ethnic, racial and class groups
of urban park users. The next five chapters
comprise case studies of major urban parks in
New York City, New Jersey and Philadelphia,
describing their historical and socio-cultural
context, the landscape design approach, site
management and maintenance, and users’
profiles, activities and landscape values. Most
chapters include a table of the methods used,
types of data collected, duration of research,
kinds of information produced and what was
learned by each case study. Chapter 8 explores
qualitative anthropological methodology for
assessing cultural life and values in large urban
spaces. The authors utilise ‘park ethno-
graphy’, a methodology introduced by Setha
Low, in the tradition of Whyte’s public space
ethnography. Park ethnography focuses on
the role of perceptions of, and attitudes
towards, the use of urban parks among
culturally diverse groups. This adaptation of
anthropological ethnographic methods for the
purposes of landscape architectural research
is, arguably, one of the strengths of this book.
Of particular interest is the use of rapid
ethnographic assessment procedures (REAPs)
for the collection of multi-source data which
can be used to promote empowerment of local
communities. It is unfortunate, however, that
the (linear) reader has to reach the end of the
book to find this valuable information on the
methodology utilised in the case studies. This
misplacement of the methodological chapter
weakens the preceding presentation of
research findings. The final chapter discusses
lessons for promoting and sustaining cultural
diversity in urban parks learned throughout
the research. This reflects the authors’ explicit
concern ‘with truly public spaces’ (p. 195) of
inclusive, culturally diverse, and therefore
assertively democratic, character.
This book is certainly a valuable addition
to the literature of urban social sciences as
well as that of landscape architecture,
complementing (the very few) previous
studies on cultural diversity within urban
open space. With its emphasis on diversity, the
city as the stage where we meet and interact
with the ‘other’, this book is especially topical
in our times of mass migration, global
mobility of people and pervasive anxiety
about the multiform ‘dangers’ lurking within
public space. Although the book’s focus is on

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urban parks and heritage sites in the United
States, its findings are relevant to many other
places around the world, rendering it a –
potentially – very influential work.
PENNY S. TRAVLOU
Edinburgh College of Art (UK)
Massicard, Élise. 2005. L’autre Turquie. Le
mouvement aléviste et ses territoires. Paris:
Presses universitaires de France. 361 pp.
Pb.: €28.00. ISBN: 9 782130 549475.
This book builds up an eloquent picture of
the strategic uses of Alevi identity in today’s
Turkey, where the number of Alevis oscillates
between 12 and 20 million, according to a
report made in 2004 by the European
Commission (p. 3), and Germany, where the
Alevi population was estimated to be between
500,000 and 700,000 in 2003 (p. 286). The
book explains in a clear way how Alevi
identity blurs the boundaries between
religion, ethnicity, cultural and folklorist
options. This identity is particularly due to its
religious elements (like the cult of trees,
shamanist rituals, the influence of the Bektashi
orders and belief in metempsychosis), which
differentiate it from Sunni Islam, as well as
cultural traits (like the tradition of
troubadours and the alleged equality between
men and women). One of the central ideas
developed in the book is precisely this
polysemic ‘fluctuation of sense’, which
depends on ‘the fluidity of these symbolic
games’ around ‘the definition of symbols of
mobilisation or legitimization’ (p. 144). The
fragmentation of Alevi identity has, first of all,
a territorial aspect, defined by an ‘important
spatial variability’ (p. 278): mention is made of
the division between (internal or external)
immigrants and permanent inhabitants, who
are scattered demographically and who do not
constitute the majority in any Turkish
constituency, except Tunceli (p. 193). The
analysis shows equally how Alevi associations
and foundations develop a different character
according to their political stances (ranging
from the Islamist tendency to the Kemalist
secularised ideology and other left-wing

C 2008 European Association of Social Anthropologists.
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supporters) and to their geographical
position. For example, when an association is
situated in an urban Turkish suburb with a
high level of unemployed population, who
vote for the left, it is very often keen on
creating a conservative, and even religious,
image (p. 276). The Turkish public sphere is
basically defined by a strict separation
between the good patriots and the bölücü, the
separatists, who can be Kurds, capitalists,
left-wing partisans or religious people,
according to the person who formulates the
accusation (p. 138).
In Turkey, the political system
discourages the federation of local Alevi
mobilisations. On the contrary, in Germany,
there is only one ‘actor of reference’ whose
legitimacy German authorities recognise, the
AABF (Almanya Alevi Birlikleri
Federasyonu), created in 1993. The AABF
considers Alevi identity to be a transnational
one and lets each association decide whether
to use the Turkish flag or the portraits of
Atatürk or not (p. 306). However, the
movement in Germany is more hierarchical
(with the progressively institutionalised
predominance of dede, the spiritual guides of
the community) and less polarised, which is
explained by the absence of electoral
competition (p. 288). Interestingly enough,
the first Alevi textbook (Alevilik Desleri) was
written in Germany in 2000, as part of a
regional pilot programme for Islamic
education (p. 292). In fact, in Germany, Alevi
identity has been invested with a religious
meaning since the 1990s (p. 296) and Alevis
are often presented as the ‘Protestants of
Islam’ (p. 299). This evolution leads the
author to question, on the one hand, whether
the recognition of Alevi identity in Germany
led to its progressive criminalisation in
Turkey after 2000 (p. 309); and on the other
hand, whether Europe, with its respect for
minorities and its insistence on the free
exercise of religion, reinforces identity
divisions (p. 321).
Both the different manipulations of Alevi
identity and its negotiation by multiple agents
are presented to the readers, who do not need
to be a specialist of Turkish or German
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societies to understand what is at stake each
time. Anyone who is interested in how
minority-based associations and foundations
work in order to claim equal rights, offer
social services and enhance political
representation and visibility can appreciate
the value of this book. The patron–client
relations are also examined, as well as the
tribal affiliations which sometimes persist in a
changing and global world: for example, an
Alevi cultural manifestation in Cologne,
organised in 2001, was defined by the
presence of African dancers and of a French
singer (married to an Alevi), who sang in
Turkish, in Kurdish and in French (p. 203). As
an anthropologist, I cannot but regret that
there is no description of individual life
stories of Alevi commitment: this could allow
the study of the intersection between
individual and collective experiences, as well
as between the private and the public
domains. The reflection on the falsely
‘angelic’ idea of the development of civil
society that is socially dominant nowadays is
interesting, but, unfortunately, not developed
enough (pp. 319–20). Apart from this
criticism, Élise Massicard provides a useful
discussion of how a movement, step by step
but also in contradictory manners, constructs
the identity that it claims.
KATERINA SERAÏDARI
Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire Sociétés
Solidarités Territoires, Toulouse (France)
Nutini, Hugo G. 2005. Social stratification
and mobility in central Veracruz. Austin:
University of Texas Press. xi + 178 pp. Hb.:
$45.00. ISBN: 0292706952.
Some notable exceptions notwithstanding,
social stratification and mobility in
contemporary societies have not been among
the preferred topics studied by
anthropologists but frequently left to the
sociologists. The efforts of Hugo Nutini to
understand these phenomena in Mexico from
an anthropological and historical perspective
are therefore a valuable contribution to a field
that has received little research attention.
Social stratification and mobility in central
Veracruz is the third in a series of related
volumes. In The wages of conquest: the
Mexican aristocracy in the context of western
aristocracies (1995) and The Mexican
aristocracy: an expressive ethnography,
1910–2000 (2004), Nutini discusses the
development of Mexico’s elite since the
Spanish Conquest in the 16th century. In
Social stratification and mobility in central
Veracruz, in contrast, he endeavours to create
a broader picture by including the middle and
lower classes, about which far less is known.
Although stratification and mobility in
Mexico in general are discussed in the
introduction, the first chapter and again in the
conclusion, the book concentrates on
developments in the Córdoba region in the
state of Veracruz after the Mexican
Revolution in 1910. The passage from Indian
to Mestizo status in the context of class
formation and social mobility is a major
focus. The ethnographic and quantitative data
forming the empirical basis of the work was
gathered through participant observation,
hundreds of individual and group interviews,
key informants and several questionnaires.
Patterns of inequality have changed
significantly in Mexico since the Revolution.
According to Nutini, the landed aristocracy
was disempowered and in the 1950s almost
entirely concentrated in Mexico City. A new
elite of plutocrats and politicians emerged,
with high political office an important source
of enrichment. In addition, under the
‘benevolent dictatorship’ of the revolutionary
party PRI that ruled until 2000, education,
social security, health, transportation and
communication experienced great change,
creating the basic infrastructure for the
development of modern industry and
commerce. Thus, a new middle class of white
collar professionals could emerge and many
formerly disenfranchised Indians became
urban working-class Mestizos. The share of
Indians in the population declined from
approximately 40% in 1910 to currently
under 10% (at least according to official

C 2008 European Association of Social Anthropologists.

census data). The upward mobility of the
lower classes was essentially fostered by the
spread of secondary education and by
constant migration to the urban centres.
Nutini summarises post-revolutionary
development as that from an estate to a class
system: ‘[T]he tendency toward a more open
society fostered by the Revolution resulted in
the second part of the century in a class
system approaching that of modern nations’
(p. 11).
He differentiates between objective and
subjective approaches to stratification. While
the former concentrate on the differential
distribution of criteria such as power, wealth,
education, residence and occupation, the
latter underline ‘the behavioral and expressive
attributes of class, where lineage, heredity,
local prominence, and appropriate breeding
play significant roles’ (p. 15). Nutini
convincingly argues that structural variables
alone, such as wealth or occupation, lead to an
incomplete account of social stratification and
need to be complemented by expressive
variables. Thus, the two approaches should be
combined.
Although Nutini’s book provides
interesting data and interpretations on social
stratification in Veracruz, and his regional
approach is to be lauded, several problems
remain. Somewhat surprisingly the author
argues that ‘[s]ince the reprint of Bendix and
Lipset’s (1966) volume on class, status, and
power, stratification studies have received
little attention, and no theoretical
innovations, let alone theories, have been
postulated’ (p. 17). Consequently important
more recent theoretical contributions that
likewise take objective and subjective
dimensions of inequality into account, such as
those by Pierre Bourdieu, Giddens or
Runciman, and the literature on social closure
(e.g. by Frank Parkin or Raymond Murphy),
are not even mentioned. Beyond this, Nutini
takes the meaning of one of his central
concepts, i.e. ‘class’, for granted, leaving key
questions unanswered. What is the reality
status of the suggested classes? To what extent
are they mere aggregates of individuals

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sharing similar life chances and to what extent
can they be considered social communities?
While Nutini expresses sympathy for
Max Weber’s approach to ethnicity, he does
not develop his thoughts on the topic to any
measurable degree. As a result, the content of
and relationship between the categories of
Indian and Mestizo and their correlation to
real people remain somewhat vague. It is not
clear who considers whom to be Indian or
Mestizo and under what conditions. Neither
is it clear whether self-definition of ethnic
status or its ascription by others tends to
coincide or to diverge, as several studies of
ethnicity in Mexico suggest. Mobility of
status from Indian to Mestizo appears to be a
highly uncontroversial process of
acculturation, implying among other things a
change of dress and of language, and a new
secular worldview fostered by modernisation
– albeit the meaning of this term remains
obscure – and industrialisation (see pp. 122–
31, 145). Nutini considers the ‘cultural
whitening syndrome’ a key trait in Mexican
society. In other words, ‘the more European
an individual looks at the top, and
concomitantly, the less Indian an individual
looks in the middle and lower rungs of
society, the more it helps one to succeed and
achieve social, economic, and perhaps even
political goals’ (p. 37). However, power
relations, exploitation, and strategies of social
closure and discrimination are largely absent
from his portrayal of interethnic relations and
ethnic mobility in Mexico. In his view,
Indians are traditional as a result of their
isolation and become Mestizos ‘by the
process of modernization and secularization
brought about by the construction of roads,
transportation, communication, and other
agents of change’ (p. 126). Bearing in mind the
colonial past and cultural imperialism that has
influenced the life of the Mexican nation so
radically, as Nutini himself acknowledges
(p. 37), the image he conjures up seems too
idyllic to buy into.
WOLFGANG GABBERT
Leibniz Universität Hannover (Germany)
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Papailias, Penelope. 2005. Genres of
recollection. Archival poetics and modern
Greece. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
xii + 301 pp. Hb: £52.00. ISBN: 1 4039
6105 0.
The anthropological subfield of memory,
focusing as it does on the voiceless people that
history is suspected of obliterating from its
authoritative treatises, is often counterposed
to historical writing. Where historians would
favour the authority of archival sources,
anthropologists celebrate the subjective
experiences of individual witnesses, valuing
heterogeneity and competing interpretations
over monolithically coherent discourses. For
this reason, anthropologists have tended to
renounce the authority of the archive in
favour of the alternative authenticity of living
informants; confronting historical discourses
of national progress and unity with the
people’s countermemories of displacement,
loss, violence and marginalisation.
By conducting an anthropological
investigation of historiography in Greece over
the past 90 years, Penelope Papailias’
ingenious work transcends this dichotomy
between memory and history. As Papailias
outlines in Chapter 2 following an excellent
introduction to the field of collective memory,
modern Greece has suffered – perhaps
uniquely in Europe – from an historical failure
to archive properly. But throughout the 20th
century amateur historians have stepped into
the gulf left by the state, filling in the silences
of a country that has systematically effaced its
past at the official level. Tracing the
‘graphomania’ by means of which amateurs
perpetually confront professional historians
with their omissions, Papailias highlights the
role of family archives and other informal
projects of recollection as ‘a potential
storehouse for counterhistories’ (p. 40). In a
country that was visited not only by the two
World Wars, but also rent asunder by the Asia
Minor Catastrophe of 1922, the civil war of
1946–49, and the ensuing right-wing
dictatorship 1967–74, amateur historiography
operates as oral memories might be expected
to, as an oppositional force counterposed to
state-sponsored historiography.
The book’s third chapter looks at a
specific example of Greek amateur historical
research: the archive of the Centre for Asia
Minor Studies. As its name suggests, this
research centre came into being as a result of
the ‘exchange of populations’ between the
nascent modern states of Greece and Turkey
that followed the ‘Catastrophe’ of 1922; the
sacking of Smyrna and the routing of the
ethnic Greek community from Asia Minor.
Papailias reveals how the newly invented
system of creating nation-states by means of
mass expulsions – which would revisit the
Balkans at the end of the century under its
proper name of ethnic cleansing – paved the
way for the Greek middle classes to become
nostalgic about their lost territories and folk
identities as the new state became more
industrialised, less culturally diverse, and
peasants were rapidly transformed into
refugees, industrial labourers and emigrants.
Within this political context, the Centre’s
research stands as one of the first examples –
pre-dating the work that was to follow the
Holocaust – of gathering testimonies from
individuals identified as victims of genocidal
conflict and as refugees. Papailias also sees
clearly, however, the contradiction involved in
the taken-for-granted premise of Centre
researchers that they were interviewing Greek
refugees, effectively begging the question
regarding the complex identities of refugees
and the resentment they felt at the Greek state
as they found themselves ghettoised and
shunned in their new ‘homeland’.
The book’s fourth chapter looks at
another form of historiography, that of the
novel, focusing on Orthokosta – an historical
work by the prominent novelist Thanassis
Valtinos. As with the work of the Centre, the
novel is steeped in the genre of testimony, and
like the amateur historians whom Papailias
discusses in Chapter 2, Valtinos is presented
as ‘troubling hegemonic representations of
the modern Greek past’ (p. 140). But Valtinos
does so in an unexpected and controversial
way: by recounting a massacre perpetrated

C 2008 European Association of Social Anthropologists.

not by the Nazis, nor by the dictatorial
regime, but by the resistance fighters in World
War II. If the decision to revisit this event
seems odd given the author’s left-wing
credentials, it is particularly mysterious given
the fact that the Greek resistance fighters, far
from being celebrated as heroes after the war
as they were in the rest of Europe, were sold
out by the Allies as communist sympathisers.
Where one might expect Valtinos to have used
a novel about the civil war to represent the
silenced history of the communist resistance
to the Nazis, then, Orthokosta obdurately
fails to appease its expectant reader.
Finally, Papailias’ fifth chapter traces the
personal memories of an Arcadian migrant to
the United States – a largely tragic story
which, Papailias points out, happily fits
neither the American nor the Greek myth of
national identity.
With a short epilogue rather than a
conclusion and little in the way of a central
subject or topic unifying the diverse chapters,
this book represents a series of essays on the
theme of memory rather than a monograph,
but its diverse chapters boldly introduce a
new field of anthropological enquiry: the
ethnography of historiographical production.
NICOLAS ARGENTI
Brunel University (UK)
Pelkmans, Mathijs. 2006. Defending the
border. Identity, religion and modernity in
the Republic of Georgia. Ithaca and London:
Cornell University Press. xvi + 240 pp. Pb.:
£12.95. ISBN: 978 0 8014 7330 2. Hb.:
£34.50. ISBN: 978 0 8014 444 0 1.
It is no secret that one of the fastest ‘growth
industries’ in anthropology recently has been
that known, in one fashion or another, as
‘border studies’. Following on the early work
of Barth (1969) and Cole and Wolf (1974), this
current interest in boundaries and frontiers
has multiple origins, amongst which the
collapse of the Soviet Union and the former
Yugoslavia, German reunification, the
enlargement of the European Union, the
announced ‘withering away of the state’ and

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that most famously contested category
known as ‘globalisation’ have all been cited.
Pelkmans’s book, based on extensive
ethnographic research in the Ajarian
Autonomous Republic on the southwestern
border of Georgia with Turkey, is a most
interesting contribution to this ongoing
anthropological discussion on borders and
borderlands. Structured in three parts, the
book focuses firstly on the divided border
village of Sarpi on the Black Sea, then moves
to the frontier between Islam and Christianity
in the mountainous hinterland of Ajaria, to
finally explore the links between postsocialist
urban space and the politics of belonging in
the provincial capital Batumi.
Since it was divided in 1921, the village of
Sarpi (Sarp in Turkey) has gone from having
an open border (the period from 1921 to
1937), to having a virtually impermeable
‘border of fear and control’ for the 50 years
from 1937 to 1988, to today’s reopened
border. While the opening of the border with
Turkey brought new possibilities of economic
gain, it also brought some unpleasant
surprises. Despite 50 years of longing for
contact with ethnic kin across the border,
when the villagers of Sarpi finally met their
relatives on the other side they encountered
unexpected differences between themselves
and those living in Turkey. Not only did they
dress and act differently, Pelkmans tell us, but
their moral worlds had reference points that
were no longer shared. Relations between the
two sides became strained. Cross border
relatives were strangers and, Pelkmans says,
villagers thought they needed to remain
strangers.
Although the inhabitants of Ajaria have
been predominantly Sunni Muslim since the
Ottoman empire, the province is believed to
be the site where Christianity first took hold
in Georgia and the linking of Christianity
with Georgian nationalism and, in the eyes of
many people (though not of the Orthodox
clergy) with ideas of ‘modernity’, has meant
that Ajarians are increasingly converting to
Orthodox Christianity. Yet these conversions
– almost exclusively amongst members of the
educated ‘middle class’ – are not perceived as
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ruptures with the past, but as a regaining of
the religion of one’s forefathers, as a return to
Christianity from the inauthentic influences
of Islam. And those who strive to maintain
their Muslim identities have a hard time of it,
since by demonstrating their ability to
consume large amounts of alcohol, men in
Ajaria prove that they are truly Georgian.
Muslim men in Ajaria are often forced to
choose between their religious and their
national identity, or at least to create a
tenuous reconciliation between the two.
The initial enthusiasm for the positive
economic effects of the opening of the border
between Georgia and Turkey – access to
Western consumer goods and hard currency –
rather quickly soured. For most ordinary
citizens the initial opportunities of
transnational trade lasted only a brief few
years until local power holders took control
of cross-border trade with new regulations,
new taxes and prohibitions to trade in certain
goods. Diminished trading opportunities,
combined with the general deterioration of
the economy – standards of living in Ajaria
have dropped significantly since Soviet times
– explain why feelings about the border
opening grew increasingly negative. Yet
Pelkmans claims that blaming ‘the Mafia’ and
‘the Turks’ for present problems has enabled
people to maintain their dream of modernity,
their fantasies of a bright future. Impressive
modern buildings are left (almost) empty,
states Pelkmans, in order to keep the future
bright and open and not reveal that this new
‘modernity’ only serves the goals of the elite.
The book challenges both the ‘cold
storage’ view that pre-Soviet identities were
repressed by Communist rule only to return
with renewed force after the collapse of the
Soviet Union, as well as the theory of an
‘ideological vacuum’ which arose after
Communism to be filled by invented or
reinvented histories. Pelkmans claims that
neither explanation is able to analyse how
these identities were modified to fit changing
social and political contexts.
Not least of the virtues of this elegant,
subtle and multilayered book is that Pelkmans
always keeps in mind the point made by
Donnan and Wilson (1999) that ‘borders are
simultaneously structures and processes,
things and relationships, histories and events’
(p. 6).
Reference
Donnan, H. and Wilson, T. M. 1999. Bor-
ders: frontiers of identity nation and state.
Oxford: Berg.
WILLIAM KAVANAGH
Universidad CEU San Pablo, Madrid (Spain)
Ribeiro, Gustavo Lins et Arturo Escobar
(eds.). 2006. World anthropologies:
disciplinary transformations within systems
of power. Wenner-Gren International
Symposium Series. Oxford: Berg. x + 341
pp. Pb.: £17.99. ISBN: 978 1 84520 1906.
Hb.: £55.00. ISBN: 978 1 84520 191 3.
Depuis une demi-douzaine d’années certains
anthropologues ont posé les bases d’une sorte
de nouveau paradigme expérimental qui vise à
interpeller, de manière réaliste, au premier ou
au second degré, la perspective centripète
dominante qui fait la part belle aux traditions
occidentales, tout en accordant un poids égal
aux autres points de vue possibles, ceux des
pays du sud, des traditions autochtones ainsi
que des conceptions tout à fait
transnationales. Cette déconstruction propose
une vision éminemment politique de la
discipline, en termes d’inégalité de pouvoir,
d’hégémonies institutionnelles et de traditions
scientifiques et idéologiques nationales; et, en
ce qui concerne les auteurs réunis dans cet
ouvrage, elle dessine un mode d’action et
d’organisation pour changer l’état des choses.
Comme le dit si bien Eduardo Archetti dans
son chapitre consacré à l’anthropologie
française: ‘Combien y-a-t-il de centres et de
périphéries en anthropologie?’ Johannes
Fabian suggère de son côté, dans son texte
‘Anthropologies du monde. Questions’, de
considérer les anthropologies du monde
comme un concept flottant ou mobile, qui ne
s’enracine dans aucun système en particulier,
et qui signale que les relations entre

C 2008 European Association of Social Anthropologists.

anthropologies ne doivent être ni
hégémoniques ni hiérarchiques.
Fruit d’un colloque tenu en 2003, cet
ouvrage relate les activités d’un réseau, (qui
est également un réseau de réseaux) animé par
A. Escobar, qui vise à dépasser aussi bien le
provincialisme que le cosmopolitisme gratuit.
L’essentiel de l’ouvrage est constitué d’une
douzaine de monographies nationales qui
examinent les dynamiques internes et externes
de quatre traditions du Nord et de six du Sud;
le Japon constituant un cas tout à fait à part
selon nous. L’ouvrage malheureusement, du
point de vue de son économie générale, n’est
pas à la hauteur de ses ambitions. En effet la
dominance du Sud est ambiguë car parmi ces
auteurs certains enseignent dans un
établissement universitaire du nord. Les
remarques les plus intéressantes toutefois se
trouvent dans les textes ‘transnationaux’,
rédigés par des chercheurs, a priori étrangers
en partie à la tradition nationale qu’ils
analysent (cela dit, je ne connais pas la vie
professionnelle et universitaire des auteurs). Si
un chercheur indien de l’Inde (et pour une fois
pas des Etats-Unis!) parle de l’anthropologie
indienne il n’est peut-être pas surprenant que
ce soit une canadienne, J. Smart, qui évoque
les problèmes de l’anthropologie chinoise.
Néanmoins l’article le plus original est
certainement celui d’une finlandaise, E.
Berglund, travaillant pour partie en
Grande-Bretagne, qui examine la glorieuse
tradition britannique. E. Archetti, chercheur
argentin décédé et à qui les éditeurs dédient
leur recueil, présente le cas français. L’auteur
décrit la discipline des années 1930–1950 et
visiblement c’est un élève spirituel de L.
Dumont qui limite l’anthropologie à ses
traditions les plus ‘idéalistes’. La tradition
africaniste est longuement analysée à travers
M. Griaule. Mais paradoxalement il ne nous
dit rien de G. Balandier, M. Augé ou encore de
l’anthropologie marxiste de Cl. Meillassoux et
M. Godelier. Le portrait proposé a fort peu de
rapports avec l’histoire sociale et
institutionnelle passée et encore moins avec la
conjoncture actuelle de la discipline qui reste,
malgré son prestige symbolique, une
discipline de seconde zone en France par

C 2008 European Association of Social Anthropologists.
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rapport à la sociologie, la science politique
internationale ou encore la géographie.
Sans y voir malice un autre texte pose
encore plus problème, celui de Paul Nchoji
Nkwi du Cameroun, qui prétend parler pour
toute l’Afrique noire. Je ne comprends pas la
forte inégalité de traitement entre l’Asie et
l’Amérique latine et centrale qui sont
envisagées non de manière continentale mais à
travers quelques traditions nationales
significatives et bien connues des auteurs (la
Chine, l’Inde, le Japon d’une part, le Mexique,
le Brésil, le Pérou de l’autre) et l’Afrique noire
traitée comme un tout par un anthropologue
francophone qui ignore tout des traditions
anglophones ou lusophones. De plus les
particularités culturelles, linguistiques
ethniques et nationales sont oubliées ici au
profit d’un point de vue plutôt portée vers
l’anthropologie appliquée au développement.
Pour terminer ce panorama je ne puis que
conseiller la lecture du texte de Shinji
Yamashita sur le cas japonais, celui de Nikolai
Vakhtin sur la Sibérie ou encore l’article de
Sandy Toussaint sur l’Australie. Bref
l’ouvrage est passionnant et dans l’ensemble
on y apprend beaucoup: il complète selon moi
les monographies régionalistes que l’on peut
parfois lire dans Annual Review of
Anthropology.
Mais si j’émettais plus haut quelques
réserves c’est pour une raison très évidente,
qui mérite d’être rappelée. A. Escobar
enseigne en Caroline du Nord aux Etats-Unis
mais on peut se demander comment un auteur
réputé pour son point de vue anti-impérialiste
et altermondialiste peut publier un ouvrage
sur l’anthropologie mondiale ou du monde
sans y inclure au moins un chapitre sur un
aspect de la tradition américaine? Car une des
réponses à la question posée par ce recueil
(Comment transcender une conception
‘dominante’ de l’anthropologie (avec un ou
plusieurs centres)?), implique une analyse en
profondeur de cette tradition disciplinaire
suffisamment variée que l’on peut faire
l’impasse sur les apports d’autres traditions
nationales y compris celles d’autres pays du
Nord. Cette lacune reflète un des traits de
l’anthropologie américaine qui est capable de
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se remettre en cause de manière radicale (voir
les années 1960 ou encore 1985–1995) sans
que l’institution ne sanctionne ces déviations
car il y a toujours quelque part une université
prête à capitaliser sur cette sécession interne:
l’absence de tradition nationale globale et
contraignante dans cette discipline, qui règne
par départements universitaires interposés
(Chicago, Yale, Berkeley, Columbia, . . .), est
un modèle efficace.
La conception d’anthropologie du
monde est ambitieuse: mais pour réussir il
faut parfois commencer par balayer tout
simplement devant sa porte. Sur ce point nous
attendons le prochain ouvrage de ‘l’américain’
A. Escobar, à moins qu’il ne quitte les
Etats-Unis!
JEAN COPANS
Université Paris Descartes (France)
Sharma, Aradhana and Akhil Gupta (eds.).
2006. The anthropology of the state. A
reader. Malden and Oxford: Blackwell
Publishing. 424 pp. Pb.: £20.99. ISBN:
9781405114684.
In the past 20 years political anthropology has
passed through a remarkably productive
phase that is all the more dramatic if we
contrast this efflorescence with the decline of,
for example, economic anthropology. Who
would have thought in the wake of the Gifts
and Commodities debates and the opening up
of studies of markets in the real world in the
1980s that 25 years later the field would be in
such weak standing? Anthropologists have
responded more vigorously to the repeated
political horrors of this generation, as well as
some of its more hopeful moments, and this
volume well reflects some of that work. One
of the editors, Akhil Gupta, has established a
strong reputation for innovative thinking in
this competitive field, but I suspect he will not
look back on this book as amongst his best
work.
The introductory text, ‘Rethinking the
State in the age of globalisation’, offers two
‘big ideas’ for the students. First, while states
are traditionally seen as being ‘devoid of
culture’ (p. 7), anthropology shows that
‘states need to be seen as cultural artefacts and
effects’ (p. 20). Second, globalisation and the
emergence of a number of transnational
institutions are profoundly changing the way
many if not most states operate and
ethnography must, somehow, reflect this. In a
students’ reader, I suppose, these ideas are fair
enough, as far as they go. All modern states,
including the most authoritarian and vile, rest
their legitimacy on the claim that they
represent and serve the interests of ‘the
people’ who live within them – issues of
culture and issues of sovereignty are thus
likely to be lively concerns.
Even so, I remain a sceptic as to the value
of the approach presented. The claim that
states are culturally constructed (which I take
to mean both the institutions of rule and the
idea of the state in any particular part of the
world) is perfectly fair enough. Against a
certain straw man of political science the
point may even have some force. But is it
really true that anthropologists and historians
have ignored this point in the past? That the
abstract idea of ‘the state’, as an independent
political body or apparatus, separate from the
ruler/s, which the ruler has a duty to maintain
and preserve, is a thoroughly modern, and in
this form, a European construction is surely
only news to someone whose head has been
in the academic sand for a generation or more.
And was not Karl Wittfogel’s (admittedly
deeply problematic) work evidence of a
concern with the cultural forms autocracy
takes? Or, think of classics of the broad field
of political anthropology like Henri
Frankfort’s work on the rise of the Egyptian
and Mesopotamian states: impossible to
ignore culture there. It may be that Sharma
and Gupta’s point was aimed at work on the
modern state. But here there is also plenty of
work (there are several of Marc Abélès’
studies to give but one example) that
demonstrates a concern with the local
construction of political rule in a particular
historical context. Even within political
science, authors like Paul Brass or Karen
Dawisha offer intellectually seductive work
that neatly steps across disciplinary

C 2008 European Association of Social Anthropologists.

boundaries, outside tired old paradigms. But
this kind of innovative work is not properly
acknowledged in the introductory text.
Students will thus not acquire a sense of
different styles of work in the field.
This points to a broader disappointment
I find with this book as a reader for my
students: the overwhelming focus on the
modern state and the consequent lack of
interest in history or other disciplines. Now
of course, this is a reader on the anthropology
of the state – but why restrict ourselves and
narrow our vision thus? The legitimation of
the modern state’s political power, as Marc
Abélès’ work on President Mitterand’s
invented rituals demonstrated, is surprisingly
close to forms we find in the ‘pre-modern’
world – but, curiously, in this work a student
would get no sense of that at all. In fact, this
book may unintentionally promote a
Weberian conviction in the fundamental
difference between modern and ‘traditional’
societies.
The lack of a historical approach leads to
further problems. The claims as to the
transnationalisation of political power are
greatly exaggerated. Historically speaking, the
kinds of ‘transnational’ interference in state
sovereignty is hardly without precedent: the
Holy Roman Empire might provide
interesting parallels in several respects – local
rulers within this enormous structure had to
contend with multiple, nested sovereignties.
And today, too, the claim that there is ‘a
massive machinery of surveillance and
regulation’ monitoring and intervening over
human rights abuses (p. 23) would be met
with incredulity not just by those who run
fragile institutions like the International
Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia but
also the Bosnian women of Srebrenica who
have battled for 15 years to bring Ratko
Mladić and Radovan Karadžić to justice.
Most fundamentally, I wonder whether
the post foucaultian research paradigm
corresponds to the kinds of questions either
my students or my informants grapple with.
These are often closely connected to
understanding the perplexing continuities and
stabilities of political cultures and

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institutional forms, though they go beyond
that. The editors do sometimes address the
sort of issues that arise in the classroom, like
the rapid appearance of the language and
institutions of human rights observance, and
quite rightly point to the popular resistance
this discourse meets in many parts of the
world. But the foucaultian interest (obsession)
with power leads to anodyne and ultimately
unchallenging assertions like the following:
the use of human rights ‘instruments . . . both
rests on and reinforces geopolitical
inequalities between nation-states even as it
provides a powerful means of challenging
other inequalities’ (p. 23). With analysis of
extremely complex and particular ‘discourses’
at this level of reduction, the texts collected
here and the intellectual agenda presented will
not help my students answer the puzzles that
bring them into the university. They come in
part to study the struggles that take place
today and have taken place over the past half
millennium concerning the definition of that
locally peculiar but recognisably universal
institution, the state, and they need better
from their teachers.
MICHAEL STEWART
University College London (UK)
Smith, Daniel Jordan. 2007. A culture of
corruption. Everyday deception and popular
discontent in Nigeria. Princeton: Princeton
University Press. 296 pp. Pb.: $22.95.
ISBN: 978 0 691 13647 9. Hb.: $27.95.
ISBN: 978 0 691 127224.
Nigerian corruption is a topic of interest far
beyond the realm of those who routinely or
professionally engage with Africa. While
corruption continues to be hotly debated in
the Nigerian media, it has also been the
subject of comment, politics and policy
making at the national and international level.
Recently, anthropologists have begun to
explore corruption as part of the national
habitus and, like Andrew Apter’s The
pan-African nation (2005), focused on the
vexing relationship between corruption and
culture. However, while Apter explores the
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national malaise in terms of the great
narratives of the postcolonial condition,
Daniel Jordan Smith’s recent book A culture
of corruption takes the reader on a much
gentler journey through institutions and
communities known to him in south-eastern
Nigeria. With an understanding of culture
centred on contemporary everyday life, Smith
narrates and comments on peoples’
engagement in, reactions to and thoughts on
various forms of corrupt behaviour.
The first five chapters of the book
examine different forms of corruption,
including email scams, institutional and
personal favouritism, the NGO world, party
politics, and magical rituals to procure wealth.
The remaining two chapters explore vigilante
justice as well as the attempts by ethnic
nationalists and born-again Christians to fight
against corruption. The lively tone makes the
book potentially useful for undergraduate
teaching, and several of the chapters would
also make accessible background reading for
courses not directly concerned with
corruption but, for example, the social history
of higher education (Chapter 2), NGO work
(Chapter 3) and political ethnicity (Chapters 6
and 7) in Africa.
While not exhaustive, Smith’s choice of
topics reflects his groundedness in Nigerian
life. All his chapters explore topics that are
widely understood to belong together,
because it is widely accepted that ‘419’
practices – a shorthand expression for deceit
based on the paragraph in the penal code
outlawing advance fee fraud – pervade not
only the public sphere but potentially all
human relationships. As many people believe
that 419 practices have a part in explaining the
successes and failures of most institutions and
individuals, corruption is understood as a
force with both worldly and spiritual powers.
Thus, the Nigerian engagement with
corruption is not limited to the political and
economic sphere but located at the heart of
efforts of many social groups – from young
email fraudsters to university lecturers,
political aspirants and Christian reformers –
to create better lives for themselves and their
country.
However, while Smith faultlessly evokes
the topics that dominate contemporary
Nigerian concerns and debates on corruption,
he is reluctant to differentiate between
different kinds of behaviours and contexts.
Therefore, it is not clear whether he suggests
that the underhand practices of parents
attempting to secure a place at university for
their child represent the same kind of activity
as the conduct of organised advance-fee
fraudsters and powerful party politicians. As
a result of Smith’s implicit generalisation, his
analysis of the links between reliance on kin
and other networks, rumours about
supernatural wealth, political corruption and
vigilante activities remains vague. A more
detailed analysis of the different forms of
corruption discussed here might have made a
valuable contribution to the understanding of
the multifaceted relationship between
everyday life and social difference in Nigeria.
I would also have liked to better
understand the link between corruption and
national culture, or to what degree Smith’s
discussion of corruption is part of a southern
or even predominantly ethnic Igbo
experience. Thus, Chapter 4 looks at the role
of so-called ‘godfathers’, or political patrons,
in an extremely violent history of
patron–client politics in Anambra State.
Given that similar conflicts have mostly
occurred in southern Nigeria, do such
conflicts reflect particular cultural or
historical perceptions of and responses to
corruption? In Anambra State, the desire by
the central government to prevent an electoral
victory that might endorse the Igbo
ethno-national icon Chukwuemeka Ojukwu
in 2003 contributed substantially to the
establishment of corrupt patron–client
politics. Does this suggest that at least
political corruption reflects on the country’s
historical political economy?
Smith clearly likes Nigeria, and his focus
on everyday life allows him to draw on the
breadth of his personal experience of Nigeria
as, among others, a former NGO worker, a
tennis club member and an in-law (his wife is
Nigerian). Smith’s sympathetic depiction of
the struggles many Nigerians undergo on a

C 2008 European Association of Social Anthropologists.

daily basis makes it easy for the reader to get a
sense of ‘what it is like to be there’. It is this
understanding that underlies Smith’s assertion
that everyday life in Nigeria is dominated by
people’s responses to corruption as much as,
or more than, by corruption itself. While
Smith himself is careful to warn of
exaggerated optimism, this does suggest that
present and future anti-corruption measures
might have a broad popular base in Nigeria.
INSA NOLTE
University of Birmingham (UK)
Stan, Sabina. 2005. L’agriculture roumaine
en mutation. La construction sociale du
marché. Paris: CNRS Éditions. 218 pp. Pb.:
€25.00. ISBN: 2 271 06304 3.
The changing of Romanian agriculture: a
social construction of the market explores the
way the Romanian market was constructed
and transformed after the collapse of the
socialist system. In order to grasp those
postsocialist economic metamorphoses, Stan
analyses the agricultural policies developed so
as to split up the collective farms and transfer
the land back to individual ownership.
Moreover, she looks at the legal changes (the
passing of privatisation legislation) and their
economic consequences, as embedded in
larger social and political frameworks. The
market, states the author following Polanyi
and Granovetter, ‘is not an autonomous and
distinct sphere of the society, but a correlated
part of a social “narrative”’ (p. 7).
Accordingly, the analysis of the economic
sphere cannot start from the ‘ideal type’ of
market of the neoclassical economics, but
from the ‘social relationships and cultural
representations underlying the economic
activities’ (ibid.).
The book is based on Stan’s extensive
fieldwork, which was carried out on several
levels: national (in Bucharest, within the
Ministry of Agriculture), regional
(Dâmboviţa county, in Southern Romania)
and local (a village in Dâmboviţa county). It
combines a macroanalysis rich in statistical
data concerning the agricultural policies, a

C 2008 European Association of Social Anthropologists.
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mesoanalysis (of the main actors involved in
the privatisation) and a subtle microanalysis
that gives depth to the statistical data.
The book consists of three sections. The
initial one makes a brief overview of different
agricultural policies in postsocialist Romania,
the analysis being based mainly on secondary
sources – such as the reports of the European
Commission or scientific literature, but also
on official documents of the Romanian
Government and on archival sources.
Following the theoretical background for the
analysis of these policies in Chapter 1, the
author discusses two ‘great transformations’
initiated by the socialist regime: the
collectivisation and the industrialisation in
Chapter 2.
After this extensive introduction, the
corpus of the book deals with the
reinstatement of private property rights after
1989. Thus, the second section scrutinises the
actors and the structures of the postsocialist
agricultural sector using a ‘top-down’
approach (approche par le haut), that is by
looking at the managers of the agricultural
associations established after the splitting up
of the socialist collective farms (Chapters 3–
5). The analysis shows that the (former
socialist) managers tend to reproduce their
power positions within the ‘new’ structures
(Chapter 3). However, the economic and
power relationships have been reconfigured at
the end of the 1990s, with the emergence of
new ‘agricultural entrepreneurs’ (Chapter 4).
In addition to the ‘internal’ metamorphoses
(changements du dedans, the trajectories of
the leaders) and ‘external’ factors
(changements du dehors, the emergence of
new actors), the agricultural associations have
their own dynamic, consisting in interactions
between managers and ordinary members
(Chapter 5).
The next section of the book investigates
the actors and the structures of the
postsocialist agricultural sector, but this time
using a ‘bottom-up’ approach (approche par le
bas), by looking at the owners of small
land-plots and at their relationship with the
agricultural managers. The dynamics of those
relationships are largely contingent on the
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development of the small-scale family-farms
(Chapter 6), on the creation of new
socio-economic hierarchies (Chapter 7), and
on the reconfiguration of the agricultural
market (Chapter 8).
Stan’s subtle micro-level analysis
succeeds in providing a detailed and
comprehensive picture of the postsocialist
agricultural reform and some valuable insights
into local situations; it captures, for instance,
the revision of the social, economic and
political hierarchies at the local level or the
dynamics of work values in the agricultural
sector. Thus, it is comparable with related
anthropological work on the changing
property systems in postsocialist Eurasia –
such as the works of the ‘Property Relations’
Group at the Max Planck Institute for Social
Anthropology, such as Cartwright 2001;
Hann 1998, 2003; Leonard and Kaneff 2002;
or Verdery’s ‘magnum opus’. The analysis
would have gained from including this recent
literature, not only because the
abovementioned authors present arguments
that resonate with Stan’s accounts, but also
because case studies from other areas of
Romania or other East European countries
could further explain the commonalities and
the differences in these postsocialist
transformations.
Stan’s book succeeds in conveying,
through the three-level analysis and especially
through the fine-grained study of the market
as a social construction, that the economic
sphere is interconnected with the political and
social spheres. The book will therefore be of
interest not only to economists, political
scientists (and, hopefully, policy makers), but
also to sociologists and anthropologists who
are looking into the transformation of
agriculture in postsocialist countries.
References
Cartwright, A. 2001. The return of the peasant:
land reform in post-communist Romania.
Aldershot: Ashgate.
Hann, C. 1998. Property relations: renewing the
anthropological tradition. Cambridge Cam-
bridge University Press.
Hann, C. 2003. The postsocialist agrarian ques-
tion: property relations and the rural condi-
tion. Münster: LIT Verlag.
Leonard, P. and Kaneff, D. (eds.) 2002. Post-
socialist peasant? Rural and urban construc-
tions of identity in Eastern Europe, East Asia
and the former Soviet Union. Basingstoke
and New York: Palgrave.
DAMIANA OŢOIU
Bucharest University (Romania) and
Université Libre de Bruxelles (Belgium)
Strathern, Marilyn. 2006. Kinship, law and
the unexpected. Relatives are always a
surprise. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press. 229 pp. Pb.: £14.99. ISBN:
0521625097. Hb.: £40.00. ISBN:
0521849926.
First lesson: offering to review a book by
Marilyn Strathern is foolhardy. At the very
least you are volunteering yourself for some
very hard work. Second lesson: that hard
work can be tremendously rewarding even if
you feel, like this reader, that you are only
catching a small portion of everything that is
there. Kinship, law and the unexpected is not
an easy book to read. Now this is not a
comment on style, but rather an
acknowledgement of how packed it is with
ideas and arguments. It shifts perspectives,
builds viewpoints only to demolish them a
sentence later; it brings together an incredibly
vast array of material from an equally
impressive range of areas and sources, all in a
way that can be hard to keep track of upon
first reading, but which makes longer
engagement all the more revealing and
satisfactory.
The book consists of six main chapters,
divided into two parts. The first part,
‘Divided origins’, draws mainly on
Euro-American material, while the second
part, ‘The arithmetic of ownership’, takes up
more ethnographic examples from Melanesia.
Throughout, material from one area is used to
illuminate material from the other, as has been
Strathern’s strategy. While reading from the
first to the last page is to be recommended,

C 2008 European Association of Social Anthropologists.

the chapters do stand by themselves and can
be read individually.
In Chapter 1, Strathern asks what
biotechnology does to ways of understanding
individuals, individuality and relationships.
She notes the frequent warnings of rampant
individualism, disembodied perchance as
choice, that many commentators warn
accompanies biotechnology. Only, what
biotechnology, genetics specifically, reveals,
articulates or constitutes, are relationships,
relationality. In ‘Embedded science’, Strathern
asks why anthropology is so focused on
relationships. The answer, if I understand it
correctly, is to be found in ways of making
knowledge that anthropology has inherited
from Enlightenment science: how any
particular phenomenon within the world is to
be understood through its relations, its
connections (of correlation, causation,
context even) with other phenomena, once
transcendental god has been rendered
irrelevant to these questions. Class status is
linked to bodily comportment, suicide to
religion, gift giving to everything. Some of
this ground may have been covered by the
Science Studies literature, but Strathern
suggests that this way of making knowledge
may itself be rooted in certain aspects of
English kinship, the basic fact of which is that
out of (procreative) relations emerges a new
and unique entity. Individuals and relations
go hand in hand. In ‘Emergent properties’,
Strathern asks how and why it was that the
terms ‘relative’ and ‘relation’ became to be
understood as ties through kinship in the 16th
and 17th centuries. She notes the frequent
overlap in English (relation being one
example, conception another) between terms
to do with knowledge practices and kinship
practices.
In the second half of the book, Strathern
begins by taking up the issue of technology
with a sideways glance to modernity.
Strathern’s strategy here is to draw parallels
between Western notions of intellectual
property and patents, on one hand, and the
New Irish Malanggan mortuary sculptures,
on the other. These are quite striking, but
Strathern’s purpose in doing so is to highlight

C 2008 European Association of Social Anthropologists.
REVIEWS 257
the differences. So we learn that ‘moderns’ of
New Ireland do not think of Malanggan as
inventions (technology) or as ‘the original
inventive step (patents)’ (p. 108). Rather,
artefacts are seen as being ‘acquired not
created; therefore, the routes of acquisition
are a crucial source of their value’ (ibid.). At
issue here is the relative importance of
relationships. What people in New Ireland
seek then is ‘not the protection of new forms
[. . .] but the right to reproduce what others
have reproduced before them’ (ibid.). In the
background are the political and ethical
questions surrounding the export of Western
property regimes and their association with
resource exploitation and colonialism in its
many forms.
In ‘Losing (out on) intellectual
resources’, Strathern returns to the distinction
frequently drawn between modernity and
tradition. Evoking the case of head payments
in Papua New Guinea and questions of body
ownership, as expressed for example by the
Nuffield report on the issue, Strathern draws
out the curious idea of ‘part’ and how,
depending on the perspective, parts of and
whole persons can both appear as things. A
specific case of a young woman, seen to be
offered as part of head payments, is reviewed.
The case having revolved around her human
rights, Strathern concludes by asking how the
idea of human rights might sit with notions of
human beings owning each other. This
question of owning persons is at the centre of
the final chapter of the book, only here it is
played out in the context of the distinctions
between the mental and the material, and
along lines of knowledge and intellectual
property. Again Melanesian material serves to
throw Western worlds into relief. Looking
back to the beginning of the book Strathern
concludes that: ‘The arena of family and kin
relations is a prime place where the
Euro-American arithmetic that creates
distinct objects and singular originators is at
once formed and confounded [. . .] kin are
[. . .] bound up with one another in
dependencies that make counting difficult,
where belonging is a kind of ownership but
not quite, where persons both are and are
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not embodied in other persons, and where
notions of property can only introduce
complicating rather than simplifying factors’
(p. 161).
The book is to be recommended to
anyone with interest in kinship, law,
biotechnology and general anthropological
theory. At the heart of Kinship, law and the
unexpected is the enduring anthropological
topic of the relation. Indeed the second half of
the book frequently implies the importance of
relationality in by now well-established
anthropological fashion. Only, the first half
suggests that emphasis on relations may be a
consequence of certain knowledge practices.
There is perhaps a certain contradiction here,
tension at least. But then that is an extremely
fruitful tension as Strathern demonstrates
with wonderful effect.
ARNAR ÁRNASON
University of Aberdeen (UK)
Thiruchandran, Selvy. 2001. Feminine
speech transmissions. An exploration into
the lullabies and dirges of women. Women’s
education and research centre. New Delhi:
Vikas Publishing House. 88 pp. ISBN: 81
259 1057 3.
Thiruchandran, Selvy. 2006. Stories from
the diaspora. Tamil women, writing.
Colombo: Vijitha Yapa Publications. 96 pp.
Pb.: Rs. 450.00. ISBN 955 1266 24 2.
Selvy Thiruchandran’s two books deal with
public expressions of Tamil women, the first
looks at traditional songs: lullabies and dirges,
and the second at Sri Lankan Tamil women
writing about their experiences of the
diaspora.
Feminine speech transmissions. An
exploration into the lullabies and dirges of
women consists of only two chapters: one on
tallattu, the Tamil lullaby, and the other one
on oppari, the Tamil dirge. For
Thiruchandran, it is especially through these
two genres that the ‘mother/woman becomes
an agent of communication between her and
the society’ (p. 4). At the same time, these
songs reflect the position of the woman within
the society, in terms of gender, caste and class,
and they provide women with a means to
express their discontent with male dominance.
Among her manifold sources are informants
from whom she collected some dirges and
lullabies, and folklore collections, published
sources and stage plays. Whereas the primary
function of a lullaby is to put a baby to sleep,
it is also a medium for a woman to express her
love for the child. Moreover, as the texts of
lullabies shows, they help to establish the
mother’s role in the family and to secure her
position within the web of kinship (p. 17).
The translated songs provide the reader with a
good impression of the content and style of
the lullaby; however, no explanations of
melody or rhythm are provided.
The chapter on dirges aims to introduce
the reader to the different usages and forms of
songs of lament, although it is not
comprehensive. Dirges are sung by grieving
women on the occasion of death or of another
kind of loss, the singing being accompanied
by beating the breast in tune and wailing.
Unlike the personalised lullabies, oppari songs
are also performed by professional mourners,
mostly widows, who will be called upon in
the event of death. The author provides the
reader with a well-chosen selection of
different oppari verses, which give an idea of
the oral content and the various contexts of
usage. Most interesting here are the accounts
on how dirges were, and still are, used within
the Tamil Sinhalese conflict – for example,
when hundreds of Tamil women, who had
lost their husbands and sons in the conflict,
assembled in front of a court singing dirges
when Sinhalese soldiers, suspected of killings
and torture, were questioned – accounts like
these also appear in contemporary short
stories and stage plays (pp. 69–71).
Thiruchandran claims that she set out to
investigate the lullabies and the dirges from
four perspectives: (a) women as performers,
(b) how women use lullabies and dirges, (c)
the conditions of women’s creativity in these
songs and finally (d) women’s verbal arts
being part of the subjective consciousness of
the self (p. 3). The analysis, however, stays

C 2008 European Association of Social Anthropologists.

very much within a simplified feminist
framework, interpreting women’s oral
expression as rebellion within gender
hierarchies, but leaves out other possible
approaches, as for example given by Margaret
Trawick in ‘Spirits and voices in Tamil songs’
(American Ethnologist 15(2)) or Isabelle
Clarc-Deces in No one cries for the dead:
Tamil dirges, rowdy songs, and graveyard
petitions (2005), who deal extensively with
women’s oral expressions.
Despite this criticism I would
recommend this book to those interested in
Tamil folklore or anthropology, since it serves
as a useful introduction and offers interesting
accounts and sources.
Stories from the diaspora: Tamil women,
writing looks at short stories written by Tamil
Sri Lankan women in various countries of
exile between 1990 and 2000. It is a fairly new
phenomenon that Sri Lankan Tamil women
turn to writing short stories, and many of
these come from women living outside Sri
Lanka.
In the first chapter, called ‘Context’, the
author portrays Sri Lankan Tamil women’s
lives in the diaspora, and the reader gets the
image that the typical Sri Lankan Tamil
woman abroad is homeless, lacks the social
support of the natal family and suffers from
male dominance as well as from other forms
of oppression, which ‘can be even worse
under the pretensions of a “liberating”
Western ethos’ (p. 6). The second chapter
starts with a short introduction to the recent
history of Sri Lanka and explains the
circumstances under which the migration
took place, pointing out how women’s
personal experiences of war, death, violence
and forced migration are reflected in their
writings. The author achieves this by retelling
selected short stories and through a number of
quotations. These stories are about arranged
marriages, dominating husbands, ungrateful
and brutish children, exploitative work
conditions, sexism and racism, and most of all
women’s suffering. Chapter Three, written
along the same lines, examines short stories
which have been published in journals. For
this purpose the author has randomly selected

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short stories which seemed appropriate, but
unfortunately the reader doesn’t know
whether these stories are representative of all
women’s writing, or whether they have been
chosen because they fit the author’s
argument.
If we follow Thiruchandran’s analysis,
short stories are first and foremost a means
for oppressed women to express their misery
within different contexts and for different
causes. The stories are presented as a
testimony of Tamil women’s every day life,
not as a literary genre. The theoretical grid is
eclectic, arguments are redundant and
disappointingly one-dimensional, and leave
out the fact that there are other accounts on
the lives of Sri Lankan women in the form of
a considerable number of anthropological
studies on the Tamil Sri Lankan diaspora, a
consideration of which might have broadened
the picture.
Apart from the mentioned minor
criticisms, the two books make an interesting
contribution to the growing work on Sri
Lankan Tamils, and are important documents
about Sri Lankan Tamil women’s writing in
itself.
GABRIELE ALEX
University of Heidelberg (Germany)
Waldis, Barbara and Reginald Byron (eds.).
2006. Migration and marriage. Heterogamy
and homogamy in a changing world. Berlin:
Lit Verlag. x + 212 pp. Pb.: €24.90. ISBN:
3 8258 9873 3.
This most welcome collection of essays was
originally inspired by a homonymous
workshop held at the EASA Conference in
Vienna in 2004. It brings together the papers
of eight of the participants and an additional
chapter by Betty De Hart, rounding up the
volume with a socio-legal analysis of mixed
marriages in nationality law and immigration
law (p. 179). The book is predominantly
concerned with the institution of marriage in
contexts transformed by migration flows,
focusing on social reality at a micro level.
Most chapters offer ethnographic accounts of
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social exchange and subsequent construction
of ethnic distinctions in various social
settings, thus embracing a qualitative, bottom
up approach to the research of intermarriage
and related phenomena. The majority of the
contributors discuss material from their own
fieldwork, which makes the presented data
very valuable and offers a good starting point
for further research and analysis. This does
not mean to imply, however, that such an
analysis was not attempted in the selected
chapters but is simply meant to suggest that
the amount and relevance of presented
fieldwork material offers and demands further
consideration and elaboration. To a large
extent this further consideration is
accomplished by Barbara Waldis in the
introductory chapter, which provides a most
useful summary of the contributions while
placing them in context and illuminating
the central theme of the book with great
clarity.
Despite a common thread, the chapters
are nevertheless heterogeneous, coming from
various geographical and social settings and
exploring different types of heterogamous
relationships. With one exception, i.e. Byron’s
exploration of marriage strategies among Irish
migrants in 19th-century America (p. 161), all
the chapters address contemporary issues
from the viewpoint of individual actors,
building on their accounts to prove that
intermarriage is indeed much more than a
simple indicator of assimilation. The first
three chapters are primarily concerned with
the theme of intermarriage and its ability to
shift ethnic group boundaries. Bettina Beer
explores interethnic marriages of the Wampar
and their neighbours in New Guinea (p. 20),
while Gabriele Marranci researches interfaith
marriages in Northern Ireland (p. 40). While
both chapters are important, the latter goes
further in its analysis of ethnographic material
obtained in the field. It points to the relativity
of ethnic/religious divides in the context of
interfaith marriages in a country where a
dominant divide is the one between Catholics
and Protestants, and where interethnic
marriages are of secondary importance. Ewa
Nowicka is concerned with issues of identity
strategies among children of transnational
marriages in Poland (p. 61), opening an
important discussion of perception of
increased immigration to post-communist
and largely monocultural EU member states.
The next three chapters discuss changes of
family roles in new social settings, focusing
primarily on female agency in an immigration
context. Agency of Kosova-Albanian mothers
in Switzerland is presented in the context of
family relations and networks by Brigit
Allenbach (p. 85) and Jenny Ask discusses
gendered strategies among women in
cross-cultural marriages in Egypt (p. 114),
striving to go beyond stereotypes and
successfully using life stories to bring her
point across. Perhaps not entirely in concord
with the volume’s theme of migration and
marriage, van Ede presents dynamics of
post-divorce situations in contemporary
Dutch society (p. 135). This chapter is the
only one dealing with homogamy and indeed
offers a significant insight into the issue, yet it
deviates from the field of migration and will
undoubtedly prove more useful for scholars
of family sociology than those studying
migration and intercultural relations.
The volume ends with two chapters on
historical and socio-legal perspectives on
marriage and migration, which both focus on
the question of state boundaries, albeit each
from a different perspective. The editors’
choice to conclude the volume with de Hart’s
historical and socio-legal analysis is highly
commendable. The insights de Hart offers are
arguably one of the highlights of the book,
exploring how the legal position of nationally
mixed marriages in Dutch citizenship and
immigration law was and remains affected by
gender. The Dutch example is used to
demonstrate the developments of other
European countries in addressing the issue of
intermarriage. The relevance of the chapter
and of the entire volume, for that matter, is
therefore indisputable. The volume presents a
refreshing insight into phenomena of
intermarriage, bringing together classical
anthropological themes with migration and

C 2008 European Association of Social Anthropologists.

globalisation, one of the central themes in
contemporary social sciences.
MOJCA VAH
Institute for Slovenian Emigration Studies,
Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian
Academy of Sciences and Arts, Ljubljana
(Slovenia)
Wardlow, Holly. 2006. Wayward women.
Sexuality and agency in a New Guinea
society. Berkeley: University of California
Press. xii + 284 pp. Pb.: £13.95. ISBN: 0
520 24560 1.
To be a woman in contemporary Huli society
is to be naturally wayward; to be a man is to
be responsible for containing such a
destructive essence. Wardlow explores the
significance of female agency amid such
regimented antimonies in Wayward women,
by carefully traversing the two potential
agentive avenues available to Huli women
(p. 65). Put simply, women can either
cooperate with the social body by becoming a
wali ore (good woman), which requires
‘encompassing’ their agency within Huli’s
patriarchal reality through marriage, or, they
can obstinately refuse to participate in such
relationality by becoming a pasinja meri
(passenger woman). To be a passenger
woman, then, is to occupy a social position
that is both highly stigmatised and
transgressive and requires amputating their
most socially valuable asset from their clan:
their sexuality. Wardlow’s rich ethnography
delves deeply into the cultural and ideological
dimensions of Huli female agency to
demonstrate that such a contradictory
empowerment is not only responsive and
disruptive to the structures that are meant to
encompass women, but that the structures
themselves are implicated in Huli social and
political relations as they are enmeshed within
and responsive to the ever-changing cultural
and economic forces of modernity.
Wayward women is divided into two
abstract but fundamental parts that mirror
Wardlow’s theoretical framework. The first
attends to the processes that fuel and frame

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dominant Huli relational structures: agency,
sexuality and incipient individualism. The
second part of the ethnography examines the
minoritisation, experiences and positionality
of Huli passenger women within those three
frameworks. Wardlow skilfully ties these
together by using practice theory to
demonstrate, rather than simply state, that
‘the system powerfully shapes and is shaped
by human action’ (p. 5).
The existence of a marginalised group,
then, must be understood in relation to the
dominant group, which Wardlow successfully
accomplishes. She explains that Huli women
are socialised within an ‘encompassed
agency’, whereby their (re)productive labour
is ‘fenced in’ by male agency to benefit
‘male-authored projects’. Wardlow argues
that such an arrangement is deemed equitable
by women themselves precisely because of the
bridewealth system and their relational
embeddedness (pp. 66–7). Bridewealth ideally
ensures that in return for women’s numerous
activities and interactions that benefit their
families, clans and society, their male kin will
protect and nurture them (pp. 107, 148).
While women’s contributions are neither
publicly valued nor acknowledged by men, it
is through bridewealth that women are ‘made’
into social actors and accept their ‘bodily
agency’ (p. 69). As women reproduce the
social body indirectly by ‘creating and
sustaining relational identities’ (p. 107), such
an encompassed agency importantly defines
Huli female sexuality, womanhood and
personhood (p. 133).
As bridewealth is central to the definition
of womanhood and enacted in their sexuality
and embodied wealth, women experience its
breakdown most acutely. This was the reality
during Wardlow’s 26 months of fieldwork
between 1995 and 1997 as the shifting
economic and cultural context of modernity
reverberated among the Huli. With increased
male out-migration and the monetisation of
the economy, Huli men’s identification and
responsibilities were altered (p. 149). The
bridewealth system was necessarily affected,
pushing women into a ‘social and moral
vacuum’, which, coupled with men’s growing
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failure to uphold their end of the ‘gendered
social contract’, created anxiety and discord
among many women (p. 150).
Wardlow followed the trajectories of
several women who initially engaged in the
most extreme form of social suicide by
attacking their male kin where it hurts. By
humiliating and economically punishing kin
with an inverted femininity that thwarts Huli
gender ideals by leaving marriages, refusing to
participate in bridewealth, exchanging sex for
money, living beyond the reach of kin, Huli
passenger women refuse encompassment yet
pay a high price, as they are relegated to the
status of ‘non-persons’ (p. 230). Wardlow
frames their agentive subjectivities as negative,
given the destructive path of women
symbolically removing their bodies from
relationality, yet remaining within the
socioeconomic structures of that very society.
Such acts of resistance both embody a
selective form of individualism that reinforces
the ‘dominant structures that define
personhood’ (p. 230), and, importantly, also
brings them into full view to other Huli
women who both sneer at and long for such
agency.
The striking thing about this
ethnography is that it presents women as fully
contextualised social beings, which is a rarity
in prostitution studies. Furthermore, the
book would be analytically useful within all
fields seeking intelligibility of complex social
relations.
DIANNE GRANT
University of Manitoba (Canada)
Weidman, Amanda J. 2006. Singing the
classical, voicing the modern. The
postcolonial politics of music in South India.
Durham: Duke University Press. 349 pp.
Pb.: £14.99. ISBN: 0 8233 3620 0.
In this fascinating study Amanda J. Weidman
brings postcolonial theory to bear upon
music, a field of endeavour largely neglected
by postcolonial scholarship in general.
Brilliantly deconstructing the discursive
elevation of Karnatic music as a ‘classical’
idiom, a project that entailed South Indian
musical practice with ideas of Western
modernity, she enhances our understanding of
the processes by which the bourgeois subject
has been naturalised in postcolonial states.
She focuses on changes in Karnatic music
since the late 19th century, showing that
performance, consumption and debates about
music all became key sites for enacting a
distinctly modern subjectivity. Drawing on
considerable primary source research, she
argues that local intellectuals increasingly
brought ideas about ‘classicism’ to bear upon
the creation, appreciation and transmission of
music. This was an effort to show that Indian
traditions were intelligible to a Western
scientific rationality, one that governed even
such matters as musical notation and listening
behaviour. She also, however, details the
development of a parallel understanding in
which Karnatic music remains irreducible to
Western musical systems, thus preserving
Orientalist notions of Eastern difference and
incommensurability. Rather than resolving
this, Weidman wrings analytical riches from
the tension, describing it as a socially
productive, if fundamentally colonial
discourse, continually producing terms by
which India and the West become
recognisable in opposition to one another.
This doubling is clear, for example, in
Weidman’s discussion of gurukulavasam, a
process of musical apprenticeship that values
oral transmission as the guarantor of
continuity and Indian authenticity, but which
she shows to have been framed as an
alternative to the Western reliance upon
mechanical replication.
The book is dominated by Weidman’s
focus on voice as a key domain for actualising
the modern Indian subject produced via
Karnatic musical discourse. Her aim is to
contest the dominant anthropological
description of the voice, as simply a means of
representing the self. Instead, she argues that
the deployment of the voice itself is enabled
and constrained by particular, historically
situated projects, becoming audible only as
subjects attempt to sustain claims to those
projects. She shows that the adaptation of

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Western bourgeois subjectivity, with its
attendant tropes of interiority, authenticity
and individual authorship, made the Karnatic
musical voice into the style’s privileged
medium. Nevertheless, she details two
distinct discourses of voice, one describing it
as the vehicle for the singing subject’s inner
state, and another as the actualisation of the
social body, via oral history. As with the
double discourse mentioned above, Weidman
allows this tension to stand, showing how it
sustains discussions about the nature of
Indian musical modernity.
Following the introduction, the book is
divided into six chapters, each detailing key
moments in the 20th-century development of
Karnatic music’s vocal discourse. She begins
by describing the local adoption of the
Western-classical violin as a precursor to later
appropriations of classicism. In her second
chapter, she shows how class-based musical
publics emerged among the bourgeoisie of
20th-century Madras, providing a ground for
staging such accoutrements of modernity as
concert series and concert behaviour. Her
third chapter demonstrates that performance
became linked to emergent ideologies of
gender, as music was domesticated for use by
‘respectable’ women. The fourth turns to
language ideology, showing how the parallel
adoption of a Western idea of an ‘interior’ self
and the notion of a ‘mother tongue’ enabled
demands for Tamil-language performance,
and resultant debates about the problem of
expressing the self via music. The last two
chapters focus on Western musical
technologies, including musical notation and
recording, showing how each entered and
sustained discussions about Indian musical
difference.
Overall, this book is well-written and
cogently argued, and it should be suitable for
use in graduate classrooms. It should also be
of particular interest to anyone interested in
postcolonial theory, modernity, performance
and Indian music more generally. As fine it is,
however, it has some limitations. Weidman’s
focus on the cultural constitution of the voice
is novel and thought-provoking, but as an
analytical term her use of ‘voice’ often

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becomes imprecise. Assigning the notion to
various concrete and metaphorical instances,
it becomes difficult to determine exactly
which register of meaning is signalled in her
use of the term, and what the specific relation
is between them. On a different note, the
thinness of her musical analysis limits the
book’s usefulness as a text about music. With
no sustained musical description, no notated
examples (except those that serve as examples
of notational practice), and no discography or
listening recommendations, the non-specialist
with be left with little idea as to what Karnatic
music sounds like. Since the book’s ostensible
topic is the relation between music and
discourse as constituted via the singing voice,
one wonders why the music is slighted while
the discourse is not.
Finally, given that her work strikes an
interdisciplinary pose, Weidman’s persistent
mischaracterisation of ethnomusicology is
puzzling. Though claiming to radically
challenge the terms of the field, her approach
is by and large as commonplace in
contemporary ethnomusicology as in
anthropology and cultural studies. For
scholars of music, it is certainly exciting to
find a work that so persuasively demonstrates
music’s role in constructing, rather than
simply reflecting or expressing, subjectivity.
However, both as a rhetorical move and as a
mode of analysis, this has been an
ethnomusicological trope at least since the
1990 publication of Christopher Waterman’s
landmark Juju: a social history and
ethnography of an African popular music.
Likewise, Weidman’s negative evaluation of
ethnomusicological approaches to
globalisation and musical change is
surprisingly off the mark. Based on a single
reference 20 years out of date, her dismissal
belies the sophisticated accounts of socially
constitutive appropriation, mimesis and
global circulation that define current
ethnomusicology. A familiarity with the work
collected in such excellent volumes as Western
music and its others: difference, representation,
and appropriation in music by Born and
Hesmondhalgh (2000) or Music and the racial
Imagination by Bohlman and Radano (2000)
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would have greatly enriched the theoretical
contribution of this otherwise excellent
monograph.
References
Bohlman, P. V. and Radano. R. (eds.) 2000.
Music and the racial imagination. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Born, G. and Hesmondhalgh, D. (eds.) 2000.
Western music and its others: difference,
representation, and appropriation in music.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Waterman, C. Alan. 1990. Juju: a social history and
ethnography of an African popular music.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
JOSHUA TUCKER
University of Texas at Austin (USA)
Williams Jr, Vernon J. 2006. The social
sciences and theories of race. Urbana and
Chicago: University of Illinois Press. xiii +
151 pp. Pb.: £12.99. ISBN: 0 252 07320 7.
This book focuses on the contribution of five
scholars – Franz Boas, George W. Ellis,
Booker T. Washington, Ulysses G. Weatherly
and Monroe N. Work – to anthropological
and sociological writing on ‘race’ and ‘race
relations’ in the United States between the
1890s and the early 1940s. Drawing on a range
of material (including biographical,
autobiographical and archival sources), the
author sets out to examine the different ways
in which their ideas about ‘race’ and culture
evolved over time, in response not only to
intellectual developments within the social
sciences, but also to wider social, cultural,
political and economic changes. In the
process, he pursues two important additional
objectives: one is to highlight the role of Ellis
and Work as contributors to ‘subaltern’
(African American) traditions of
anthropology and sociology which challenged
the claims of ‘racial science’ during this
period; the other is to defend and promote an
‘externalist’ approach to intellectual history
which emphasises ‘the saliency of external
social structural forces’ (p. 10), as well as
shifts in the ‘internal discourse’ of the social
science disciplines, in explaining the career of
ideas such as ‘race’ or culture.
All but one of the book’s seven main
chapters, and even the conclusion, have
previously been published (‘albeit in
somewhat different forms’, p. ix): the earliest
in 1989, the rest between 1997 and 2003. They
vary considerably in length, from 5 to 31
pages. The two longest chapters, devoted to
Boas and Work, are arguably the most
successful, as the author is able to combine an
interesting account of the scholar’s life, a
detailed examination of the evolution of his
thought, and an insightful analysis of the ways
in which both life and thought were shaped
by ‘external social and political pressures’
(p. 4) and intellectual developments within the
disciplines. In the first of these chapters, the
author explores how Boas’s views on ‘race’
and on African Americans evolved between
the publication of an early article in 1894 and
the last edition of The mind of primitive man
in 1938. His central argument is that there was
an enduring tension or ‘paradox’ in Boas’s
work between, on the one hand, a belief in the
reality of certain ‘racial’ differences (reflecting
the assumptions of 19th-century physical
anthropology) and, on the other, a
recognition of the importance of ‘racial
prejudice’ in determining the socio-economic
position of African Americans. The chapter
on Work, an African American social scientist
who collaborated with both W.E.B. Du Bois
and Booker T. Washington and was also
influenced by Boas, emphasises the
importance of his contribution to establishing
the empirical tradition in US sociology
(through early studies of crime and African
American property ownership) and his use of
empirical (predominantly statistical) data to
challenge prevailing (racist) assumptions
about African Americans. The kind of
detailed, wide-ranging analysis developed in
these chapters contrasts favourably with the
sketchy nature of the extremely short
chapters devoted to ‘Historiographical
concerns in the history of anthropology’ and
‘The internalist-externalist controversy in the
history of racial thought’, where the author is

C 2008 European Association of Social Anthropologists.

able to do little more than highlight a few key
points from the relevant literature (including,
nevertheless, a valuable reminder of the
importance of St. Clair Drake’s 1980 article on
‘Anthropology and the black experience’).
Among the book’s strengths are its focus
on the work of both anthropologists and
sociologists about ‘race’ and culture over this
50-year period, exploring the similarities in
and differences between their views; its highly
effective use and analysis of archival material,
in particular extracts from the correspondence
of the social scientists in question; and, as
already mentioned, its careful examination of
the complex, dynamic, at times ambivalent or
even contradictory thinking of, notably, Boas
and Work on ‘race’ and ‘race relations’ in the
US, together with its demonstration of the
significant (but rarely acknowledged)
contributions made by Work and Ellis to
early 20th-century sociology and
anthropology. Nevertheless, the book has two
serious weaknesses. The author’s stated
commitment to an ‘externalist’ approach to
the history of science is rather undermined by
a failure to provide an extended analysis of the

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impact of specific social structural and
political factors on the ideas of the writers
concerned, with the result that changes tend
to appear almost entirely as the outcome of
intellectual exchanges with other social
scientists. A more thorough-going overhaul
of all the previously published papers was also
needed in order to eliminate unnecessary
repetition between chapters; expand the
shorter essays by engaging much more fully
with anthropological work on ‘race’ and
racism produced over the past 15 years; and
provide a conclusion which related more
directly to the actual content of the preceding
chapters. For all the book’s merits, this reader
was left feeling overall that the author had
missed an opportunity here to make a more
significant intervention in current debates.
Reference
Drake St Clair. 1980. ‘Anthropology and the black
experience’, Black Scholar 11(7): 2–31.
ROBERT GIBB
University of Glasgow (UK)