Rethinking_urban_parks._public_space_and.pdf

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. ´ de In the 16th century, in his Relacion ´ (ed. by Miguel Rivera, Madrid: Yucatan Historia 16, p. 161), Friar Diego de Landa described the Peninsula of Yucat´an 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)

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.

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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 ¨ Hannover (Germany) Leibniz Universitat 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.

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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  C 2008 European Association of Social Anthropologists.

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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’insecurit´ e. S´ ecurit´ e sociale et genre en Inde et au Burkina Faso. Etudes de cas. M¨unster: 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:  C 2008 European Association of Social Anthropologists.

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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 SCHRODER-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 rather than Africa of the twentieth century’.  C 2008 European Association of Social Anthropologists.

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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 hi´ erarchies sociales: Retour r´ eflexif sur la situation d’enquˆ ete. Paris: Karthala. 327 pp. Pb.: €26.00. ISBN: 2 84586 598 8. Selon l’id´ee que ‘si l’ethnologue construit son “terrain”, ce dernier le “fabrique” a` son tour’

(p. 24), cet ouvrage a pour objectif de d´ecrire le contexte de production du savoir en d´efinissant la place de l’ethnologue dans les hi´erarchies sociales. Au contraire des pays anglo-saxons, la d´emarche r´eflexive sur la situation d’enquˆete en France a davantage men´e a` des r´ecits de voyage qu’`a des travaux m´ethodologiques. Dans son excellente introduction th´eorique et historique, Olivier Leservoisier remarque que les monographies, qui consacrent le travail de terrain, demeurent silencieuses sur l’exp´erience du chercheur. La pratique d’enquˆete, allant au d´epart de soi, n’a donn´e lieu a` un questionnement qu’il y a vingt-cinq ans, mˆeme si, comme le rappelle Laurent Bazin dans son article, l’analyse des hi´erarchies commence avec celle du rapport colonial par Balandier dans les ann´ees 1950. Loin d’ˆetre e´ vidente, l’observation participante passe parfois pour un ‘art de terrain’ (p. 9), voire ‘une simple “´evocation esth´etique”, comparable a` une œuvre “po´etique”’ (p. 18). Une implication trop grande empˆechant d’adopter le recul n´ecessaire, les notes de terrain, qui consignent le ‘hors-texte’, se r´ev`elent pr´ecieuses et peuvent eˆ tre appr´ehend´ees comme des donn´ees. Citant la recherche de Favret-Saada, Leservoisier pose l’analyse de l’implication du chercheur sur le terrain comme condition a` la production du savoir, en plus d’ajouter de la rigueur et des possibilit´es de recoupement. Conscient du risque du travers inverse, Leservoisier critique les post-modernes chez qui l’obsession du texte, sous pr´etexte de restituer la dimension dialogique, limite les conclusions au travail d’ex´eg`ese et tend a` e´ luder l’essentiel, l’objet de la recherche, a` force de se focaliser sur les chercheurs. Les post-modernes omettent en outre de rappeler que les r´esultats de l’enquˆete demeurent une interpr´etation de l’ethnologue, ou comme l’exprime Deli`ege d’une autre mani`ere: ‘mˆeme les proph`etes les plus radicaux du relativisme culturel ne reviennent jamais de leur exp´erience de terrain en disant que les valeurs de la population e´ tudi´ee sont si diff´erentes qu’il est impossible de les comprendre’ (p. 65). Avant la r´edaction du texte, Leservoisier s’int´eresse a` la production du savoir sur le  C 2008 European Association of Social Anthropologists.

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terrain de fac¸on compl´ementaire mais visiblement plus cibl´ee que ses pr´ed´ecesseurs, comme dans De l’ethnographie a` l’anthropologie r´eflexive de Christian Ghasarian, publi´e en 2002. L’ouvrage se poursuit par deux articles intelligents et bien e´ crits. Jean-Pierre Warnier, dont l’int´eressante d´emonstration r´epond exactement a` la probl´ematique, approfondit ses interrogations d’une belle plume. Ensuite, dans un article syst´ematique et structur´e, Robert Deli`ege critique ceux qui qualifient la moindre exp´erience personnelle d’exp´erience de terrain et constate que les critiques les plus virulentes vis-`a-vis de l’ethnographie sont formul´ees par ceux qui la connaissent le moins. Il souligne l’exercice de l’intuition et l’importance des qualit´es personnelles dans l’aboutissement de l’enquˆete de terrain, traits souvent omis, mˆeme dans les ouvrages d’anthropologie r´eflexive. Dans un article subtil et fouill´e, Val´eria A. Hernandez montre que les anthropologues ne s’int`egrent jamais que partiellement aux niveaux de pouvoir ˆ de auxquels ils sont associ´es et souligne le role la fronti`ere entre vie publique et vie priv´ee dans les logiques de communication. Le livre s’ach`eve par un article brillant, qui aurait tout aussi pu eˆ tre propos´e comme pr´eambule: Tcherk´ezoff nous expose son raisonnement sur la construction occidentale des hi´erarchies appliqu´ee au terrain. L’id´ee mˆeme d’in´egalit´e est a` remettre en question, car l’anthropologue en juge en transposant a` la soci´et´e observ´ee ses propres r´eflexes politiques. L’auteur distingue la hi´erarchie de statuts, bas´ee sur une gradation d’interdits, de la stratification, bas´ee sur un acc`es autonome aux avoirs. La premi`ere se construit sur une interd´ependance, absente de la seconde. Il montre enfin comment la confusion entre les deux a parfois justifi´e, de la part des Occidentaux, un interventionnisme mal a` propos face a` une situation de ‘chefs’ ou de ‘r´egime aristocratique’ absents en tant que tels des classifications indig`enes. Dans ces articles et dans d’autres, l’insertion malgr´e lui de l’ethnologue dans des hi´erarchies locales se r´ev`ele capitale, notamment quand il sert de faire-valoir, voire que les observ´es se r´eapproprient ses  C 2008 European Association of Social Anthropologists.

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d´ecouvertes comme le montre Elisabeth Cunin. L’´echelle sociale qu’elle met en e´ vidence construit des nuances de couleur de peau, au sujet desquelles il n’existe pas de consensus collectif, ce qui rend l’investigation anthropologique malais´ee sans offenser ` l’inverse, Leservoisier note quelqu’un. A l’erreur fr´equente d’appr´ehender des soci´et´es a` travers la vision qu’en ont leurs dirigeants. Il s’attarde aussi aux cons´equences pour les populations observ´ees d’adresser la parole a` l’ethnologue, et d´ecortique son contact avec ceux qui cherchent a` e´ chapper aux classifications. Ind´ependamment de la d´emarche m´ethodologique et de l’ind´eniable qualit´e de la plupart des contributions, certaines sont in´egales, voire peu e´ toff´ees. L’utilisation du ‘nous, ethnologue’ et d’une troisi`eme personne de convenance, d´enonc´ee dans l’introduction, se retrouve dans certains apports, jusqu’`a nuire a` la lisibilit´e du texte comme dans l’article de Gilles Holder et d’Emmanuelle Olivier. Enfin, suivant l’objectif g´en´eral de d´econstruction des circonstances de production du savoir, la place de l’ethnologue dans les hi´erarchies sociales n’est pas l’argument principal de tous les auteurs, qui gagneraient sans doute a` pousser leur enquˆete de terrain plus loin tout en gardant la probl´ematique de l’ouvrage a` l’esprit. ASTRID DE HONTHEIM Universit´e 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 ethnography’, 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  C 2008 European Association of Social Anthropologists.

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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, E´ lise. 2005. L’autre Turquie. Le mouvement al´ eviste 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 ¨ uc ¨ u, ¨ the between the good patriots and the bol 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 ¨ or not (p. 306). However, the Ataturk 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, Elise Massicard provides a useful discussion of how a movement, step by step but also in contradictory manners, constructs the identity that it claims. ¨ KATERINA SERAIDARI Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire Soci´et´es Solidarit´es 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 Cordoba 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

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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 ¨ Hannover (Germany) Leibniz Universitat

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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

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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  C 2008 European Association of Social Anthropologists.

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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. Borders: 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’ann´ees certains anthropologues ont pos´e les bases d’une sorte de nouveau paradigme exp´erimental qui vise a` interpeller, de mani`ere r´ealiste, au premier ou au second degr´e, la perspective centrip`ete dominante qui fait la part belle aux traditions occidentales, tout en accordant un poids e´ gal aux autres points de vue possibles, ceux des pays du sud, des traditions autochtones ainsi que des conceptions tout a` fait transnationales. Cette d´econstruction propose une vision e´ minemment politique de la discipline, en termes d’in´egalit´e de pouvoir, d’h´eg´emonies institutionnelles et de traditions scientifiques et id´eologiques nationales; et, en ce qui concerne les auteurs r´eunis dans cet ouvrage, elle dessine un mode d’action et d’organisation pour changer l’´etat des choses. Comme le dit si bien Eduardo Archetti dans son chapitre consacr´e a` l’anthropologie franc¸aise: ‘Combien y-a-t-il de centres et de p´eriph´eries en anthropologie?’ Johannes ˆ e, dans son texte Fabian sugg`ere de son cot´ ‘Anthropologies du monde. Questions’, de consid´erer les anthropologies du monde comme un concept flottant ou mobile, qui ne s’enracine dans aucun syst`eme en particulier, et qui signale que les relations entre  C 2008 European Association of Social Anthropologists.

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anthropologies ne doivent eˆ tre ni h´eg´emoniques ni hi´erarchiques. Fruit d’un colloque tenu en 2003, cet ouvrage relate les activit´es d’un r´eseau, (qui est e´ galement un r´eseau de r´eseaux) anim´e par A. Escobar, qui vise a` d´epasser aussi bien le provincialisme que le cosmopolitisme gratuit. L’essentiel de l’ouvrage est constitu´e 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 a` fait a` part selon nous. L’ouvrage malheureusement, du point de vue de son e´ conomie g´en´erale, n’est pas a` la hauteur de ses ambitions. En effet la dominance du Sud est ambigu¨e car parmi ces auteurs certains enseignent dans un e´ tablissement universitaire du nord. Les remarques les plus int´eressantes toutefois se trouvent dans les textes ‘transnationaux’, r´edig´es par des chercheurs, a priori e´ trangers en partie a` 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-ˆetre pas surprenant que ce soit une canadienne, J. Smart, qui e´ voque les probl`emes de l’anthropologie chinoise. N´eanmoins 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 d´ec´ed´e et a` qui les e´ diteurs d´edient leur recueil, pr´esente le cas franc¸ais. L’auteur d´ecrit la discipline des ann´ees 1930–1950 et visiblement c’est un e´ l`eve spirituel de L. Dumont qui limite l’anthropologie a` ses traditions les plus ‘id´ealistes’. La tradition africaniste est longuement analys´ee a` travers M. Griaule. Mais paradoxalement il ne nous dit rien de G. Balandier, M. Aug´e ou encore de l’anthropologie marxiste de Cl. Meillassoux et M. Godelier. Le portrait propos´e a fort peu de rapports avec l’histoire sociale et institutionnelle pass´ee et encore moins avec la conjoncture actuelle de la discipline qui reste, malgr´e son prestige symbolique, une discipline de seconde zone en France par  C 2008 European Association of Social Anthropologists.

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rapport a` la sociologie, la science politique internationale ou encore la g´eographie. Sans y voir malice un autre texte pose encore plus probl`eme, celui de Paul Nchoji Nkwi du Cameroun, qui pr´etend parler pour toute l’Afrique noire. Je ne comprends pas la forte in´egalit´e de traitement entre l’Asie et l’Am´erique latine et centrale qui sont envisag´ees non de mani`ere continentale mais a` travers quelques traditions nationales significatives et bien connues des auteurs (la Chine, l’Inde, le Japon d’une part, le Mexique, le Br´esil, le P´erou de l’autre) et l’Afrique noire trait´ee comme un tout par un anthropologue francophone qui ignore tout des traditions anglophones ou lusophones. De plus les particularit´es culturelles, linguistiques ethniques et nationales sont oubli´ees ici au ˆ port´ee vers profit d’un point de vue plutot l’anthropologie appliqu´ee au d´eveloppement. 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 Sib´erie ou encore l’article de Sandy Toussaint sur l’Australie. Bref l’ouvrage est passionnant et dans l’ensemble on y apprend beaucoup: il compl`ete selon moi les monographies r´egionalistes que l’on peut parfois lire dans Annual Review of Anthropology. Mais si j’´emettais plus haut quelques r´eserves c’est pour une raison tr`es e´ vidente, qui m´erite d’ˆetre rappel´ee. A. Escobar enseigne en Caroline du Nord aux Etats-Unis mais on peut se demander comment un auteur r´eput´e pour son point de vue anti-imp´erialiste 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 am´ericaine? Car une des r´eponses a` la question pos´ee 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 vari´ee que l’on peut faire l’impasse sur les apports d’autres traditions nationales y compris celles d’autres pays du Nord. Cette lacune refl`ete un des traits de l’anthropologie am´ericaine qui est capable de

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se remettre en cause de mani`ere radicale (voir les ann´ees 1960 ou encore 1985–1995) sans que l’institution ne sanctionne ces d´eviations car il y a toujours quelque part une universit´e prˆete a` capitaliser sur cette s´ecession interne: l’absence de tradition nationale globale et contraignante dans cette discipline, qui r`egne par d´epartements universitaires interpos´es (Chicago, Yale, Berkeley, Columbia, . . .), est un mod`ele efficace. La conception d’anthropologie du monde est ambitieuse: mais pour r´eussir il faut parfois commencer par balayer tout simplement devant sa porte. Sur ce point nous attendons le prochain ouvrage de ‘l’am´ericain’ A. Escobar, a` moins qu’il ne quitte les Etats-Unis! JEAN COPANS Universit´e 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 Ab´el`es’ 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.

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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 Ab´el`es’ 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 ˇ c to justice. Mladi´c and Radovan Karadzi´ 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  C 2008 European Association of Social Anthropologists.

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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.

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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 march´ e. Paris: CNRS E´ ditions. 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 (Dˆambovit¸a county, in Southern Romania) and local (a village in Dˆambovit¸a 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 Cambridge University Press.

Hann, C. 2003. The postsocialist agrarian question: property relations and the rural condi¨ tion. Munster: LIT Verlag. Leonard, P. and Kaneff, D. (eds.) 2002. Postsocialist peasant? Rural and urban constructions of identity in Eastern Europe, East Asia and the former Soviet Union. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave.

DAMIANA OT¸OIU Bucharest University (Romania) and Universit´e 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.

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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.

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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 ARNASON 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.

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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  C 2008 European Association of Social Anthropologists.

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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

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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  C 2008 European Association of Social Anthropologists.

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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  C 2008 European Association of Social Anthropologists.

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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  C 2008 European Association of Social Anthropologists.

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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.

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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)