Book Review: Collective Creativity: Art and Society in the South Pacific

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Dustin Kidd Collective Creativity: Art and Society in the South Pacific

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REVIEWS

Immigration and Religion in America:Comparative and Historical Perspectives, editedby Richard Alba, Albert J. Raboteau, andJosh DeWind. New York: New YorkUniversity Press, 2009. 407pp. $26.00 paper.ISBN: 9780814705049.

PIERRETTE HONDAGNEU-SOTELO

University of Southern [email protected]

A quick perusal through the indexes of migra-tion books published in the 1980s and 1990sreveals an absence of religion, as though itwas important neither to immigrants norU.S. society. This lack began to change witha 1998 book on immigrant congregations,Gatherings in Diaspora, spearheaded byStephen R. Warner and coedited with JudithWittner. Since then, we’ve been livingthrough something like a mini EvangelicalReformation, as sociological studies of immi-grant religion have flourished.

Immigration and Religion in America stemsfrom a working group sponsored by theSocial Science Research Council, whichbrought together social scientists, historians,and religious studies scholars to continuethe study of migration, religion, and socialintegration. Sociologist Richard Alba, reli-gious studies scholar Albert Raboteau, andJosh DeWind of the SSRC conceived of thisas a comparative project, connecting socialscientists with religious studies scholars,and contrasting old and new migrationmovements that seemed to share certainsocial and religious characteristics. Mexicansand Italians, for example, were chosen forcomparison because they exemplify low-wage labor migrations and share manyaspects of folk Catholicism; Japanese andKoreans were compared because their originsare non-Judeo-Christian Asian societies; East-ern European Jews and contemporary ArabMuslim immigrants were compared becausethey maintain monotheistic religious identi-ties in the midst of Christian hegemony;and early twentieth-century black migrantsto the north were contrasted with contempo-rary Haitian immigrants, with a focus on

religion as a tool for blunting the violenceof slavery and racism.

The editors tried mightily to stick with the2 3 2 design, with the intention of revealingpatterns of immigrant social incorporationand religion that hold up over time andspace. Things did not go exactly as planned.Participants joined the group and left, otherschose to coauthor when they were supposedto solo-author, and participants raisedquestions about the selected comparisoncases. This must have been frustrating, butthese tensions were ultimately fruitful. Thecollective efforts of the authors, and the lead-ership provided by the editors, have resultedin a valuable contribution to our under-standing of the varied ways in which religionis inflected in immigrant social integration.The strengths of the book include the highquality scholarship, the comparative focus,the attention to both historical and contem-porary cases, and a dialogic tone that is gen-erally missing in most edited volumes.

Is it possible to study the religious life andsocial incorporation of an immigrant groupfrom the past and come away with someinsights that illuminate what is happeningwith a contemporary immigrant group? Theanswer is yes, but historical nuances and thedifferent foci chosen by the authors makethis a tricky endeavor. Richard Alba and histo-rian Robert Orsi offer a rich, finely texturedportrait of folk Catholicism among Italianimmigrants and Italian Americans, detailingthe role of street festivals, women healers,and home saints and shrines. They concludethat although Mexican Catholics share similarelements of religious life, the magnitude oflegal discrimination experienced by Mexicansprevented similar mobility outcomes as thosereached by Italian Americans. The subsequentpaired essays show how the Catholic Church,rather than serving as a source of support,imposed its own exclusionary borders onMexicans. Roberto Lint Sagarena offers an his-torical and regional portrait of MexicanCatholicism in the west from 1848 to 2000,revealing a Catholic church that was lessthan 100 percent welcoming to Mexicans.Sociologist David Lopez goes even further in

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suggesting the ways that Catholicism mayhave impeded the integration and socialmobility of Mexicans, particularly with regardto education. He argues that while theCatholic Church has become a public leaderin immigrant rights and charitable efforts, ithas failed to promote the social integrationof Mexican Americans and their children,largely because of the patriarchal, top-down,priest-centered structures of the parishes.Italian American youth of earlier generationswere the beneficiaries of church-sponsoredyouth programs and an expansive parochialschool system, but Latino youth—who makeup more than one half of all Catholicyouth—remain relatively underserved by par-ochial schools today. Catholic schools are nowincreasingly geared toward the middle class.

All of the 12 essays offer importantinsights, but space constraints here allowfor a preview of only a few. Religious studiesscholar Jane Iwamura analyzes the annualpilgrimage to Manzanar as a Japanese Ameri-can civil religion that is organized aroundracial-ethnicity identity rather than Chris-tian or Buddhist religious traditions. YvonneHaddad’s comprehensive essay examinesthe complex history, political incorporation,and exclusion of Muslim Arab immigrants,who today seek inclusion as American Mus-lims. The chapter by Elizabeth McAlisterand Karen Richman shows how trans-national religious politics affect Haitianimmigrant Catholics, Protestants, and Vodou-ists. There is no grand synopsis at the conclu-sion of this book, but each section opens upwith a valuable orienting essay by theeditors. The book is a pleasure to read andan important contribution to the field.

Rise of the Red Engineers: The Cultural Revolutionand the Origins of China’s New Class, by JoelAndreas. Stanford, CA: Stanford UniversityPress, 2009. 344pp. $27.95 paper. ISBN:9780804760782

GUOBIN YANG

Barnard [email protected]

In this carefully researched, well-written,and thought-provoking book, Joel Andreasargues that today’s China is ruled by red

engineers, a technocratic class composed ofthe children of the peasant leaders of theChinese Communist Revolution and the off-spring of the old educated elite. The firstgroup not only inherited the political powerof their parents but also gradually gainedcultural capital. The second had culturalpower and then gained political capital.These two groups converged into China’sdominant new class in the recent economicreform era.

That China is ruled today by a technocraticclass is not surprising. What is surprising isAndreas’s central thesis, which states thatthe groundwork for the emergence of thisruling class was laid during the CulturalRevolution. To explain how this happened,he uses Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of capitaland examines elite struggles over politicaland cultural capital in one eliteinstitution—Tsinghua University.

The book has four parts. Part Four delin-eates the installation of the new class in thereform era and shows glimpses of TsinghuaUniversity basking in its present glory ofpower and prestige, perched as it is on thetop of China’s new class order. The first threeparts, however, are the most interesting. PartOne argues that after the founding of thePeople’s Republic in 1949, the Chinese Com-munist Party promoted a technocratic visionemphasizing both political and educationalcredentials in China’s postrevolutionaryorder. By the early 1960s, the new politicalelite and old intellectual class had begun toconverge. Andreas notes that it was to attackthese two privileged groups, and thus tocontinue the Communist class-leveling pro-ject, that Mao launched the Great ProletarianCultural Revolution.

Part Two studies factional conflicts atTsinghua University during the high tide ofthe Cultural Revolution, from 1966 to 1968.In examining the situation at the middleschool attached to Tsinghua University,Andreas finds that the students dividedinto opposing factions along the lines of theirfamily origins, an argument consistent withthe long-standing social explanation of RedGuard factionalism. However, factionalismin Tsinghua University was much morecomplex. And the most puzzling questionwas why, after defeating the conservativefaction with Mao’s support, the rebel faction

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Contemporary Sociology 39, 2



split into two opposing camps. This is animportant but neglected issue in the studyof Red Guard factionalism (see AndrewWalder’s new book Fractured Rebellion: TheBeijing Red Guard Movement, 2009). Andreastackles this question by suggesting that thetriggering event was Mao’s call in early1967 to establish revolutionary committeesnationwide as a new form of power struc-ture. Faced with the task of setting up sucha new power structure at Tsinghua Univer-sity, the rebel faction split into a moderateand a radical wing, displaying an elementof internal power struggle. Andreas alsoshows that the moderates were more closelyattached to the established order than theradicals. It is in the composition of the mod-erate faction that Andreas discerns signs ofa new alliance between the political andthe cultural elites, for he finds that themoderates consisted of children of bothrevolutionary cadres and intellectuals. Heconcludes that Mao’s simultaneous attacksagainst the political and cultural elites inad-vertently brought them closer together.

The third part studies Mao’s attempts toinstitutionalize the Cultural Revolution inthe later years, from 1968 to 1976. It discussesnew forms of university management thatempowered workers, propaganda teams,and students and disempowered professors,intending to eliminate the distinction be-tween mental and manual labor; and afterTsinghua University was reopened in 1970,the adoption of a recommendation systemin lieu of college exams in order to admitworkers, peasants, and soldiers into college.This part shows that efforts to level the cul-tural field were partly successful, but theattempts to level the political field were not.

From these three parts, the following pic-ture emerges: the initial convergence ofpolitical and cultural elites before the Cul-tural Revolution, the Cultural Revolutionas an endeavor to halt that convergence,the ironical result of the Cultural Revolutionin resuscitating that inter-elite unity, and theweakening of the cultural but not the politi-cal elite. This picture does not bear outAndreas’s central thesis perfectly, for onemight just as well argue that the ground-work of the new class in today’s China waslaid before the Cultural Revolution, notbecause of it or during it. It may even be

asserted that it was because the CulturalRevolution failed to dismantle that founda-tion that the new class triumphed in thereform era. And if, as the third part of thebook shows, some degree of success wasachieved in the redistribution of power inthe cultural field, then it cannot be saidthat the class-leveling project of the CulturalRevolution was a total failure. These are ofcourse debatable propositions, but if sub-stantiated, they would make the Chinesereform look more like a counterrevolutionthan a reform. Joel Andreas does not gothat far in his critique. Yet his conclusion,where he ponders the larger meaning ofhow elite struggles for power and prestigethwarted all the Communist class-levelingprojects in the twentieth century, doesconvey a deep sense of pathos and poignancy.

Behind the Development Banks: WashingtonPolitics, World Poverty, and the Wealthof Nations, by Sarah Babb. Chicago, IL:University of Chicago Press, 2009. 313pp.$25.00 paper. ISBN: 9780226033655.

MICHAEL GOLDMAN

University of Minnesota, Twin [email protected]

Behind the Development Banks is a fascinatinglook into the political machinations of theWashington Beltway on the theme of devel-opment banking. Sarah Babb explores the‘‘black box’’ in the scholarship on the inter-national finance institutions and aid, lookingdeeply into the political debates animatingthe requests by the executive branch formoney from Congress for the developmentbanks (e.g., the World Bank). This politicaldance becomes for Babb a valuable lens onthe complex and often secret world of devel-opment politics.

One of the book’s clearest messages is thatthe United States often dominates decisionsat the development banks, but the form andpurpose of that dominance is up for grabsbased on the politics of each U.S. president’sadministration. The idea of giving money tothe banks must be argued and defended bythe Treasury Department, and the shark pitof politics gets revealed in this seeminglysimple task. For Washington, the big

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question of development is, How can devel-opment finances benefit one’s Congressionalconstituency, on the one hand, and anadministration’s foreign policy stance, onthe other? Clinton’s people argued to Con-gress that the rise of U.S. exports to Indiain the mid-1990s was a direct result of theWorld Bank’s insistence on tariff reductionsamong its borrowers and Treasury SecretaryBrown’s push ‘‘to bring U.S. companies tothe development banks’’ and have themgain from these policies (p. 151). At onepoint, the U.S. Treasury Department circu-lated annual reports to Congress calculatinghow much ‘‘bang’’ (in revenues) was beingreturned to each Congressional district foreach ‘‘buck’’ spent on development aid.Bush II’s administration pressured hard forfunds to rebuild occupied Iraq and Afghani-stan, claiming national security and the waragainst terror as its rationale.

Babb effectively combs the Congressionalrecords for the lion’s share of her data andthe basis for her arguments. There is muchto appreciate in this well-written, well-argued book. Reading the direct quotationsfrom the official records allows us to sensehow rhetorical strategies in Washingtonsway with the political winds, and yet howadministration officials are unwavering intheir efforts to emphasize ‘‘our’’ economicbenefit from any investment in povertyreduction abroad. Moreover, we learn thatdevelopment dollars are understood inWashington primarily as tools for leveragingpower. One can learn much about the role ofdevelopment lending in U.S. foreign policy-making from the internal records discussedin each of these lively chapters.

The book’s razor-sharp focus becomes bothits strength and a weakness. That is, althougha gap in the literature is efficaciously filled byBabb’s insightful analysis, the book could beeven more useful if it had situated these inter-necine feuds in the larger context of devel-opment politics, or had suggested whateffects such wrangling in the Beltway mighthave outside the Beltway (i.e., in the world’spoor). Are the ‘‘project of development’’ anddevelopment banking essentially about polit-ical infighting in Washington, and whosepork barrel gets filled first? If so, what doesthis mean for ‘‘development,’’ of using capi-tal from development banks to ‘‘fight’’

poverty? What does this pork barrel fillingreveal about the nature of U.S.-global Southrelations over the past 65 years of develop-ment banking?

If Washington teaches us, time and again,to view ‘‘Africa’’ primarily as a developmentproblem, and lending capital through thedevelopment banks as its solution, howthen, illuminated by this book’s trenchantcritique of Washington’s dominance, shouldwe rethink development? The book’s con-clusion suggests that Washington shouldgrow up and leave the development banksalone so they can pursue the ‘‘true’’ goal ofdevelopment. Yet, born and bred on Westerncapital and politics, how could we expect thebanks to act differently? Having risen fromthe ashes of colonialism (and continued tofinance it in key African countries until the1960s), the banks today actually receivemost of their capital from internationalfinancial markets and loan repayments, notfrom the benevolence of so-called donorcountries. Hence, it is less a story aboutmisguided charity than about the illusionof development as charity. Since the distancefrom the Beltway to Wall Street is not as faras it seems, it remains unclear what wouldremain in the project of development if weso magically disappeared Washington politicsfrom the banks. In this light, how then canwe think about this political infighting andwhat it may reveal about the fundamentalworkings of development?

Thankfully, we have Behind the DevelopmentBanks to help us work through these andother questions about the nature of Washing-ton politics, and its perverse, though normal-izing, view of the rest of the world.

Riotous Citizens: Ethnic Conflict in MulticulturalBritain, by Paul Bagguley and YasminHussain. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publish-ing, 2008. 193pp. $99.95 cloth. ISBN:9780754646273.

MARTIN BULMER

University of [email protected]

This empirical study by two sociologists atthe University of Leeds is concerned withU.K. urban disorder that took place in the

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summer of 2001, in towns in Yorkshireand Lancashire, focusing on the town ofBradford in the West Riding of Yorkshire.Such urban disturbances in Britain are notnew, going back at least to events in Notting-ham and Notting Hill in London in the late1950s, but the 2001 disturbances displayedmore complex features, including antago-nism between ethnic minorities and thepolice and hostility to the growing influencein these areas of the British National Party(BNP).

Just as the inner workings of British soccercan seem a somewhat remote and even paro-chial activity to Americans, in spite of thegame’s international profile, so understand-ing the urban context of towns such as Brad-ford, Burnley, and Oldham is important asbackground to this study. These are not citieson the scale of Los Angeles, Detroit, or Chi-cago, with vast ethnically homogeneous sec-tions, but rather small working-class townswithin larger urban agglomerations towhich significant colonial immigration hasoccurred within the last 30 years, particularlyfrom countries in South Asia: Pakistan, Ban-gladesh, and India. This study is an attemptto understand the causes of urban disruptionand the conflict along racial lines that itrevealed, particularly insofar as British Mus-lims were involved.

Paul Bagguley and Yasmin Hussain providea theoretically-grounded and empirically-informed analysis of the events of July 2001,based upon a variety of documentary sourcesand quite extensive interviewing among thePakistani population of Bradford. They pro-vide a useful survey of approaches to the studyof the crowd, going back to Le Bon, Park, All-port, and Blumer, and critique the tendencyto reify the existence of ‘‘the crowd.’’ Theauthors seek to place violent disorder such asoccurred in 2001 in its local and historical con-text. They emphasize the extent to which theevents were contested events, the social diver-sity of those involved in them, and the diversi-ty of meaning attached to the events for thoseinvolved in them.

Although the main focus is on Bradford,there is considerable comparison with thedisturbances in Oldham and Burnley, andattention to the extent to which antagonismbetween white and Pakistani residents ofthese towns was fueled by the political

activities of the National Front and the BNP.Again, these right-wing political movementswith over-antagonism to recent immigrantsand an explicit racial agenda do not have pre-cise counterparts in the United States, thoughsimilar movements are found in severalEuropean countries. Bagguley and Hussainprovide a discriminating picture of how therole of right-wing activists in the Lancashiretowns created a situation of alarm andrumor in the Pakistani community in Brad-ford that contributed to the outbreak of thedisturbances.

Pursuing their analysis of the racialdimension of the reaction to the July 2001events, the authors discuss the response ofthe criminal justice system to young Asianmen arrested in the disturbances, and whatthey term the ‘‘strategic repression’’ of thepeople involved and their communities, inorder to teach the ethnic minority communi-ties a lesson. They suggest that the severesentencing policy was endorsed by HomeSecretary David Blunkett. Some of thoseinterviewed were less critical because theysaw it as the result of living in ‘‘anothercountry,’’ while the majority tended to seeit as part of a strategy of shaming the ethnicminority community while treating whiteoffenders more leniently.

The study concludes with an analysis ofhow members of the Pakistani community liv-ing in Bradford made sense of their citizen-ship and identify in the aftermath of theworst urban riots in Britain since the 1980sand for which young members of their com-munity were disproportionately punished.They emphasize the diversity within thePakistani community, particularly betweenthose of different generations, and bring outuniversal elements, particularly themes of‘‘belonging’’ and ‘‘rights’’ with an egalitariantheme. An important claim to difference, how-ever, is that Islam in the Pakistani communityshould be recognized, accepted, and toleratedrather than vilified and constructed as alien.Although a much less dramatic and lower-key set of events than 9/11, this book has con-siderable relevance to the issue of how West-ern democracies handle the presence withinthem of significant Muslim minorities.

Riotous Citizens concludes with a critiqueof official notions of ‘‘community cohesion,’’and by emphasizing the hybridized identities

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of young South Asian men in Bradford. Thisis a fine empirical study of race relations ina West Yorkshire town that has much tosay about wider issues in the relationshipbetween white majority and Muslim minor-ities in Britain, and possibly elsewhere inWestern Europe.

Transnational Tortillas: Race, Gender, and Shop-Floor Politics in Mexico and the UnitedStates, by Carolina Bank Munoz. Ithaca,NY: Cornell University Press, 2008. 202pp.$18.95 paper. ISBN: 9780801474224.

GRETCHEN PURSER

University of California, [email protected]

Transnational Tortillas traces neoliberalism’simpact on the levels of both culture andworkplace via the study of Tortimundo,a Mexican transnational tortilla manufacturer.The book begins with a fascinating accountof the political economy of corn flour andtortilla production and highlights Torti-mundo’s state-subsidized growth and con-tinued efforts to capture an ever-growingshare of the market on both sides of theborder. In the United States, Tortimundohas had tremendous success, marketing thetortilla as the ‘‘deracialized food entity’’(p. 166) known as the ‘‘wrap.’’ The tortilla,in fact, now beats the bagel as the secondmost popular bread type in the UnitedStates. In Mexico, Tortimundo has hadconsiderable more difficulty and companyofficials readily speak of being on a questto both ‘‘modernize’’ the country, ‘‘changethe Mexican palate’’ (p. 30), and reshapethe culture and tradition of tortilla makingby convincing people that store-bought,packaged, manufactured tortillas are just ashealthy and fresh as homemade ones.

The bulk of the book is centered aroundcase studies of two Tortimundo-owned torti-lla factories located a mere 100 miles aparton either side of the U.S.-Mexico border.Working within the well-established laborprocess tradition, Bank Munoz’s core argu-ment is that shopfloor dynamics of laborcontrol ‘‘cannot be explained without look-ing at the role of the state and the intersec-tion of race, gender, and class at the point

of production’’ (p. 162). She finds that man-agers in the two factories utilize a similarlogic of ‘‘divide and conquer’’ (p. 12) to con-struct strikingly ‘‘different modes of laborcontrol according to the vulnerabilities ofeach workforce’’ (p. 163).

The Mexican factory is characterized bya ‘‘gender regime’’ wherein managers subjectfemale workers to rampant sexual harass-ment and pit them against each other on thebasis of skin color. Here, managers and work-ers alike construct the work as ‘‘women’swork,’’ making reference to what Salzinger(2003) has called the ‘‘trope of productivefemininity’’ as well as women’s traditionalrole in feeding the family. The U.S. factory,by contrast, is characterized by an ‘‘imm-igration regime’’ wherein managers pitdocumented and undocumented Latinoimmigrant workers against one another.Here, managers and workers construct thework as ‘‘men’s work,’’ making reference tothe need for strength and the capacity towork with heavy machinery.

The differences between these factoryregimes illustrate not only the malleabilityof gendered constructions of work, but theways in which state policy shapes local labormarkets and managerial tools of coercion.Bank Munoz emphasizes the critical role ofU.S. immigration policy (including the mili-tarization of the border) as a ‘‘hidden laborpolicy’’ (p. 38), resulting in distinct pools ofhighly exploitable workers on either side ofLa Lınea: undocumented men in the UnitedStates and single, migrant mothers in Mex-ico. I suspect that readers will find theU.S. case particularly interesting given itsdetailed account of how management main-tains undocumented workers in a subord-inate status, thereby ensuring demo-bilization, by promising them protectionwhile utilizing the threat of Social Security‘‘No-Match letters’’ to provoke fear andintimidation.

Across both factories, coethnic exploita-tion is couched in a rhetoric of ethnonationalsolidarity: in the U.S. plant, managers aim toconvince workers that U.S. laws will not pro-tect them and that only a Mexican companycan understand their predicament; in theMexican plant, managers strive to obtainloyalty by making appeals to nationalist sen-timents and by distinguishing themselves

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from their American and Asian counterpartswho control most of the foreign-owned fac-tories along the border. In the final sectionof the book, Bank Munoz reports that suchclaims to ethnic solidarity were turned ontheir head during a contract campaign fortruck drivers in the U.S. factory. As part ofthe widespread immigrant-organizingefforts that swept through California inthe 1990s, organizers on this campaignengaged in ‘‘ethnic-based organizing,’’ fram-ing Tortimundo as a binational chupacabras(‘‘goat sucker’’), a mystical, Latin-Americancreature, sucking the blood out of itsworkforce.

Despite having spent three months on theshopfloor of each factory, Bank Munozpresents relatively few fieldnotes, relyingheavily on telling, at the expense of showing,what happens in each site. This is partly theresult of the limitations she faced in thefield—‘‘the one condition of my right ofentry was that I would not have access toworkers’’ (p. 19)—and reflective more gener-ally of the challenges involved in obtainingmanagerial approval to conduct workplaceethnography. Whereas she presents richdata on the part of managers, I would haveliked to have read more about social rela-tions among workers as they played out onthe shopfloor, particularly with respect toher important claim that workers colludewith management by reproducing lines ofdivision and justifying hierarchies of race,class, gender, and citizenship status at thepoint of production.

Ultimately, Bank Munoz has woventogether admirably the macro, meso, andmicro levels of state policies, labor markets,and workplace dynamics, producing a well-written, accessible, and fascinating accountof exploitation and resistance among tortillaworkers along the border. Transnational Tor-tillas should be of considerable value toscholars and students of labor, immigration,and global production.

Reference

Salzinger, Leslie. 2003. Genders in Production: Making

Workers in Mexico’s Global Factories. Berkeley, CA:

University of California Press.

Black Men Can’t Shoot, by Scott N. Brooks.Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,2009. 228pp. $22.00 cloth. ISBN:9780226076034.

DOUGLAS HARTMANN


The last 10 to 15 years have witnessed theemergence of a large and diverse body of lit-erature on race and sport in American cul-ture, much of it focused on basketball. Theresult is a vibrant and sophisticated bodyof work—one that, in my view, is far aheadof conventional sociological theorizing onrace and culture in the contemporary, post-civil rights era. For example, studies ofomnipresent images of African Americanmale athletes in the U.S. mainstream mediahave made manifest that racialization andracism itself results not just from negativestereotyping and active discriminationbut from romanticized consumption thatdepends upon and deepens overarching(and deeply distressing) conceptions of dif-ference. This first book by Scott Brooks isbest understood and assessed in this context.

Black Men Can’t Shoot follows the lives andhigh school ‘‘careers’’ of two young basket-ball players, ‘‘Jermaine’’ and ‘‘Ray,’’ whohave big hopes and dreams for athleticfame in the hotbed that is Philadelphia.Based upon years of fieldwork and inter-viewing, their stories introduce us to theyouth leagues, adolescent and teenage sub-cultures, local networks, schools, and com-munity organizations that actually producethe superstar basketball players who attractso much scholarly and public attention.This book is, in other words, a rare,behind-the-scenes case study of the innerworkings and realities of the developmentalwing of the basketball industry.

The book’s obvious strength is its vividdocumentation of the social milieu of eliteyouth basketball and how that world is expe-rienced and understood by its most active—while easily overlooked—participants andpotential beneficiaries. In this sense, BlackMen Can’t Shoot nicely supplements andextends Ruben May’s recent, award-winning treatment of high school basketball

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in Georgia. And Brooks’ treatment makesseveral additional, subtler contributionsto the literature on race and basketball,and sport studies more generally. Perhapsmost useful is its description of the structureand organization of elite-level youthbasketball—the many different and compet-ing leagues, teams, tournaments, coaches,and sponsors that constitute the extensive,patchwork system by which elite athletesare recruited and developed in the UnitedStates. It is worth pointing out that whilePhiladelphia basketball may have been anearly example, it is no longer an extremecase. Indeed, the sports development systemthat Brooks captures is eerily similar to trav-eling leagues all over the country for sportsranging from soccer and skiing and volley-ball to tennis, golf, and softball.

Also emphasized throughout the book isthe ‘‘making’’ of reputation among aspiringbasketball players. In Brooks’ eminentlysociological description, this involves notjust what these young athletes do to ‘‘getknown’’ via their performance on the court,but also the social networks and institutionalstructures that they must navigate in orderto be recognized as up-and-coming players.Brooks also talks a great deal about thecoaches, advisors, and mentors—the ‘‘oldheads’’—that initially identify promisingyoung prospects and then help guide anddirect them through the system. With thisidea, Brooks highlights the role that keycommunity members (often in unofficialpositions) occupy in the construction of elitelevel youth sport as well as the way in whichthe entire system is constituted in intergen-erational, life course terms.

With its easy narrative style and back coverblurbs from a host of sociology and bas-ketball standouts (including, respectively,Howard Becker and NBA All-Star JasonKidd), this book has the trappings of a bigseller. But it is not the prototypical productof a top university press. For example, thebook’s 24 staccato chapters (not includingthe introduction, conclusion, and epilogue)may make the book accessible for studentreaders or a popular audience, but they donot allow the more sustained interpretationor broader contextualization one usuallylooks for in a scholarly monograph. Mostuncomfortable on this score is Brooks’

treatment of his chief informant and person-al mentor. Brooks’ extensive depictions of‘‘Coach Chuck’’ exhibit very little distancefrom a subject whose attitudes and practicesembody much of the authoritarianism, paro-chialism, and patriarchy that sport scholarsand activists have spent careers workingagainst.

In previously published chapters andarticles, Brooks has demonstrated a realcapacity for deeper, more critical analysis.This includes impressive sociological cri-tiques of the young black basketball playeras an exploited laborer, and powerful argu-ments that basketball represents an alterna-tive to the chaos and dysfunction of inner-city neighborhoods as previously describedby his academic mentor Elijah Anderson.But in the absence of clearer, more explicitanalysis, one can’t help but worry that BlackMen Can’t Shoot will reinforce commonplacestereotypes about both sport and race, evenas it illuminates the social complexity of elitehigh school basketball and all that it meansto the young African American men whoparticipate in it.

The Sexuality of Migration: Border Crossingsand Mexican Immigrant Men, by LionelCantu, Jr., edited by Nancy A. Naples andSalvador Vidal-Ortiz. New York, NY: NewYork University Press, 2009. 245pp. $22.00paper. ISBN: 9780814758496.

HECTOR CARRILLO

Northwestern [email protected]

The publication of The Sexuality of Migrationoccurred under unusual circumstances. Thecore of the book consists of an edited collec-tion of articles written by Lionel Cantu, Jr.before his sudden and untimely death in early2002. Cantu was in the process of revisinghis PhD dissertation and transforming itinto a book manuscript, a project that heleft uncompleted. With admirable dedica-tion to his work and his memory, Nancy A.Naples and Salvador Vidal-Ortiz undertookthe labor of compiling and adapting Cantu’spublished articles, as well as incorporatingsome of his unpublished writing (mainly inthe book’s introduction and conclusion),

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while also explicitly maintaining Cantu’sown voice. The editors added their ownshort introduction and conclusion, as wellas an afterword written by Cantu’s class-mates at the University of California atIrvine that honors his exceptional commit-ment to collaborative scholarship and com-munity building.

In the body of work that became The Sexu-ality of Migration, Cantu explicitly sought to‘‘queer’’ migration studies, ‘‘to expose howmigration research and literature is framedby heteronormative assumptions that notonly deny the existence of nonheterosexualsubjects but also cloak the ways in whichsexuality itself influences migratory pro-cesses’’ (p. 21). This goal resulted in thebook’s most important contribution: thearticulation of a theoretical framework thatincorporates political economy and queertheory into a primarily social constructionistanalysis of the ways in which sexuality influ-ences the migration of Mexican gay men tothe United States. In his inquiry, Cantuasked intriguing questions meant to eluci-date how these men’s sexualities motivatethem to move to the United States, and inturn how their homosexuality affects theirparticipation in U.S. life. He also focusedon how these men’s sexual identities areconstructed and sought to provide explana-tions that take into account both culturaland structural influences.

Cantu believed that various structuraldimensions play a central role not only inpropelling international migration but alsoin shaping immigrants’ sexualities. He wasconcerned about what he saw as an overem-phasis on culture (at the expense of struc-ture) in studies of Latino sexualities. Hecorrectly noted, for instance, that ‘‘culturebecomes the mechanism by which differenceis reified’’ (p. 75) and that ‘‘Latino culture iscommonly represented as if it were fixed orstatic’’ (p. 78) or deficient. In response, Cantuemphasized the importance of consideringhow social structures shape sexuality. Fur-thermore, in one of the book’s most excitingcontributions, Cantu proposed that sexualityitself constitutes an important structuraldeterminant of migration—one that hasbeen overlooked by migration scholars. TheSexuality of Migration thus helps destabilizea sociological understanding of Mexican

migration that privileges economic factors,and it broadens the landscape in regard tothe various reasons why Mexicans chooseto migrate, one of which, importantly forsome segments of the Mexican population,is a desire for sexual freedom.

Throughout the various chapters in TheSexuality of Migration, Cantu fleshes outthis argument by examining the wide rangeof structural factors that affect the case thatconcerns him, that of sexually motivatedmigration by Mexican gay men. To under-stand such migration, Cantu suggests, wemust attend to a long list of issues thatinclude the heteronormative biases of immi-gration policy and citizenship, the creationof red-light districts in border towns, thenegative attitudes toward homosexualitythat sometimes inform police actions inMexico, the homophobia that prevails inthe immigrants’ families, the explicit pursuitof social change and modernization in Mex-ico, the influx of foreign gay tourists to Mex-ican beach resorts, the racialized attitudestoward Mexican men that some Americangay men hold, the geography of Latino gayidentities in large U.S. cities such as LosAngeles, and the efforts by U.S.-based La-tino community organizations to empowergay Latino men.

As an edited collection of Cantu’s articles,The Sexuality of Migration has some limita-tions that are worth noting. First, althoughthe empirical chapters are successful at high-lighting various interesting structural issuessuch as the ones noted previously, it isunclear how they link together towardaccomplishing the book’s overall goal ofdelineating the contours of a queer politicaleconomy of migration. Second, in critiquingcultural studies of sexuality, the book attimes appears to pit cultural approachesagainst structural ones. As a result, eventhough Cantu in fact relies on both sorts ofexplanations, he misses the opportunity tofully examine how cultural and structuralfactors operate in tandem. Finally, the bookdraws upon an incomplete and limitedunderstanding of the various forms thatmale same-sex desires take within thediverse Mexican sociocultural landscape,which Cantu developed mostly by critiquingthe research conducted by American scholarsand by conducting a few interviews of his

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own during a short two-week trip to Guada-lajara. This problem is further exacerbatedby the book’s overall lack of considerationof, and engagement with, the now robustbody of work by Mexican scholars on thetopic of Mexican male homoeroticism andgay identities, which the editors ideallymight have incorporated along with otherrecent literature that they considered whenmaking revisions and writing new sections.

One can only wonder what The Sexuality ofMigration would have been if Cantu had hadthe opportunity to finish revising his disser-tation and produce the full manuscript thathe intended. In spite of the limitations thatI have noted, as a compilation of Cantu’swork this book provides a clear sense ofhis insightful approach, as well as his pas-sion for improving the lives of the Mexicanimmigrants whom he studied. Subsequentscholars of the links between migration andsexuality owe a considerable debt to Cantu,as well as to Naples and Vidal-Ortiz forproviding greater access to his scholarship.

Crime, Culture and the Media, by EamonnCarrabine. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press,2008. 234pp. $65.95 cloth. ISBN:9789745634654.

LYNN S. CHANCER

Hunter [email protected]

Eamonn Carrabine’s Crime, Culture and theMedia has the great virtue of combiningbreadth and brevity. It covers a remarkablerange of perspectives and debates thatshould interest both the initiated criminolog-ical scholar and general readers eager tolearn more about how crime has been cov-ered across an array of media, past and pres-ent. As Carrabine clearly understands, thesubject of crime has fascinated publics forcenturies—both in the form of popular cul-tural representations and as a focus ofnews reporting—all the while, new mediahave exploded, increasing the ways out-lawed behaviors enter cultural conscious-ness en masse.

Carrabine, who teaches sociology at EssexUniversity, is clearly knowledgeable aboutcultural studies and criminological research

in the United States as well as the UnitedKingdom. Helpfully for the reader, he hasstructured this rich but compact volumearound three dimensions of ‘‘crime, cultureand media’’ all the while recognizing thatsuch divisions are artificial: in the ‘‘real’’world, these aspects intersect in dynamicand complex ways. First, Carrabine takesup audience research, treating readers to athorough overview of approaches to under-standing media effects and public reactions.Second, Carrabine moves on to ‘‘representa-tions’’ of how crime has been portrayed overthe centuries from the Middle Ages to thetwenty-first century. This section is trulysynthetic, offering insights and informationabout how perceptions of crime altered asoral traditions evolved with the discoveryof the printing press to more currently recog-nizable modes of crime coverage.

Reflecting Carrabine’s determinedlyencyclopedic approach, a wonderful chapterin this segment of the volume correlatesthe rise of detective novels like ConanDoyle’s Sherlock Holmes volumes in latenineteenth-century Britain and the work ofAgatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, and G. K.Chesterton in the early twentieth centurywith larger historical changes involving therise of industrialization and modernity. Aninteresting analysis is included of historical/social changes in spectatorship from thefamiliar Foucauldian notion of the panopti-con (‘‘idealized forms of power relationshipsin which the few see the many,’’ p. 116) to therelatively lesser-known development of syn-opticism as described by Mathiesen(enabling ‘‘the many to see the few,’’ p.116)as people have become more and more inter-ested in police-centered investigations and‘‘reality’’ television crime viewing amid oth-er crime-related cultural genres.

Admirably, Carrabine does not hesitate totake a broad theoretical and historical per-spective throughout Crime, Culture and theMedia. In line with the rich interdisciplinarytradition of British criminology—not nearlyas well known in the United States as itshould be, and within which falls the impor-tant work of Stuart Hall et al., Jock Young,and Stan Cohen, among others—he refusesto allow ‘‘crime’’ to be examined except rel-ative to far-reaching social, philosophical,and political changes evolving in and

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around the law. Last, in the third section ofthe book, Carrabine turns to the productionside of media and news. This is familiar ter-ritory but, as is consistent with this work onthe whole, these chapters excel at providingfine analytic summaries. Consequently, here,we find four explanations—economic, polit-ical, social, and cultural—for how newscomes to be organized. Moreover this sec-tion’s chapter ‘‘revisiting’’ Stan Cohen’snotion of a moral panic could easily beassigned as an article or supplemental read-ing in and of itself: Cohen’s idea remains rel-evant and an ongoing source of lively debatein and outside criminology.

Throughout, Carrabine carefully drawsattention to recurrent themes and divisionsthat have emerged across these areas in thestudy of crime, culture, and the media. Onehas to do with the issue of media ‘‘effects.’’How has the development of mass culture,including but not limited to the social prob-lem of crime, affected audiences’ politicalattitudes? Going back to the ‘‘mass culture’’tradition of the Frankfurt School heraldedby Horkheimer and Adorno, older debatesmay seem to be forgotten but (as Carrabineshows) have lately been reincarnated innewer forms. Is there a cause-and-effect rela-tionship between images and our reactions toit—or are viewer reactions more com-plicated? Obviously, this question has rearedits head in specifically criminological set-tings. For instance, research on the fear ofcrime (in Britain and the United States) isinseparable from debates about ‘‘effects’’ ofviolence when viewed on TV or in film; anal-ogously, feminist arguments about the harms(or liberating possibilities?) of pornographyreiterate contrasting views about how audi-ences respond to on-screen images.

Another ongoing debate—related to, butnot identical with, the media effects debate—entails structuralist semiotic traditions (i.e.,studying texts themselves) as opposed tomore ‘‘situated’’ social scientific approachesthat emphasize interviewing and investigat-ing sociologically diverse audience reactions.A range of qualitative methodologies arehighlighted, including the interesting psycho-analytically oriented work of Tony Jeffersonand Wendy Holloway on fear of crime.

Carrabine does a beautiful job of coveringall this. A minor criticism is that sometimes,

amid the very thoroughness of what hasbeen surveyed, I found myself losing trackof the book’s own distinctive voice. Carra-bine is obviously a sensible media scholar,and someone who advocates nuanced posi-tions (e.g., neither denying the influence ofmedia nor granting it all-encompassingpower). Still, even in this admittedly syn-thetic volume, I wanted to hear Carrabine’sown arguments developed in more detail.All in all, though, Crime, Culture and theMedia is a laudable effort and a great boonfor faculty and students interested in explor-ing culture, crime, and media in all theiroverlapping complexities.

Four Generations of Nortenos: New Researchfrom the Cradle of Mexican Migration, editedby Wayne A. Cornelius, David Fitzgerald,and Scott Borger. La Jolla, CA: Centerfor Comparative Immigration Studies,University of California, San Diego, 2008.250pp. $24.50 paper. ISBN: 9780980056006.

A. GARY DWORKIN


CHARLES MUNNELL


For over one-third of a century, Wayne Cor-nelius, emeritus director of the Center forComparative Immigration Studies at theUniversity of California at San Diego(UCSD), has been supervising the fieldwork of his students on the topic of Mexicanmigration to the United States. Four Genera-tions of Nortenos presents findings from themost recent studies conducted in 2007 inthe town of Tlacuitapa in the state of Jalisco,which along with Michoacan, Guanajuato,and other states in the Central Highlandsconstitute the largest sending region of Mex-ican migrants to the United States. Residentsof Tlacuitapa began migrating to the UnitedStates under the auspices of the Bracero Pro-gram in the 1940s, and their descendantscontinue that journey today, even thoughmany do so without legal authorization.

Each of the eight chapters is authored bygroups of UCSD students who performedthe survey and ethnographic research onwhich the findings are based. The topics

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vary widely, but cover many of the mostimportant subfields in current immigrationscholarship. These topics include factors inthe migration decision, U.S. border enforce-ment and legalization policies, remittances,changing social relations in Tlacuitapa, andthe Latino health paradox. The methods,focus, and quality of individual chaptersvary, although for the most part, the findingsare well within existing literature in thefield. Perhaps a more extensive discussionof that literature might have helped the readerto understand how the work of the individ-ual authors challenges, confirms, or other-wise contributes to that literature. Thechapter on changing family relations, forexample, details how families must renegoti-ate gender roles once the male head ofhousehold migrates to the United States.The authors argue that far from becomingless ‘‘macho’’ in the process, men living inthe United States become more patriarchalin their attitudes, in part because they failto understand fully how social relationshave changed in communities of origin dur-ing their absence. The chapter on theMigrant Health Paradox observes that, forthe most part, only the healthiest individualsmigrate in the first place. Once in the UnitedStates, however, they are subject to a largenumber of new health challenges such aschanging diets, depression, dangerousworking conditions, and reluctance to seekhealth care when it is needed.

While the chapter on the increasing relianceon coyotes to help migrants cross dangerousterrain largely follows the work of DavidSpener, it sheds additional light on the opera-tional methods employed by these smugglers,how they make contact with migrants, andhow migrant women, including pregnantwomen, are treated. The chapter dealingwith impediments to lawful migration comesto the unremarkable conclusion that currentlaw does not permit legal entry or residence.At the same time, it suggests that the reasonlegal Mexican permanent residents (greencard holders) have the lowest naturalizationrates among immigrant populations in theUnited States is because they retain a strongsense of identity with Mexican culture. Final-ly, the chapter on remittances agrees withmost scholarship that for structural reasons,the money sent to communities of origin

contributes not to the economic develop ofthe small rural towns from which Mexicanmigrants have traditionally come, but ratherto economic growth in larger regional urbancenters with a more balanced economy andconsumer base.

Some of the chapters estimate the odds ofvarious migration decisions, and as such,rely upon logistic regression analysis. Inmost instances the tables agree with therespective text describing the tables. How-ever, there are a few instances where the dis-played odds ratios appear to have beenmiscalculated. This has resulted in small tomoderate errors in the conclusions. It ismost likely that the errors were made incopying computer output and in later proof-reading of the tables. The first two tables inthe first chapter contain a few such errors.

Despite these reservations, the chapters inthis volume should provide a solid basis forclassroom discussions on the topics theyaddress. We hope the book will find itsway onto the syllabi of a variety of under-graduate courses on immigration.

Media Bias?: A Comparative Study of Time,Newsweek, The National Review, and TheProgressive Coverage of Domestic SocialIssues, 1975-2000, by Tawnya J. AdkinsCovert and Philo C. Wasburn. Lanham,MD: Lexington Books, 2009. 161pp. $26.95paper. ISBN: 9780739121900.

JAMES LANDERS

Colorado State [email protected]

Thirty years ago, the sociologist Herbert J.Gans studied the processes of news selectionand presentation at CBS, NBC, Newsweek,and Time. ‘‘Ideologists are not wanted bythe news media,’’ Gans wrote, ‘‘for mostjournalists believe ideology to be an obstacleto story selection and production.’’ Ganspublished this statement not too long afterthe end of the Watergate political scandaland the Vietnam War. His words undoubt-edly brought jeers and sneers from thoseconservatives who blamed a liberal newsmedia for military failure in Vietnam andthe resignation of President Richard M.Nixon.

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Now, two sociologists have extendedresearch into the presentation of news witha comprehensive examination of articlesseen in the two largest American weeklynewsmagazines and two venerable journalsof opinion during the presidencies of GeraldFord through Bill Clinton. Their conclusionsabout presentations by Newsweek and Time ofinformation concerning crime, environment,gender, and poverty affirm the statement byGans: neither newsmagazine was an ideo-logue, but each was almost centrist; andalthough both newsmagazines were slightlyliberal, their center-left perspective matchedprevalent public opinion on the same issues.The scholars also conclude, not surprisingly,that National Review was truly conservativeand Progressive was truly liberal.

A positive aspect of research by TawnyaCovert and Philo Wasburn was a quantitativeassessment of articles published by each ofthe four magazines pertaining to crime, envi-ronment, gender, and poverty. The authorsprovided perspective on the ideological iden-tity of information sources, the types of poli-cies associated with conservatives andliberals to resolve problems, and the generalpatterns of news coverage. Other scholarscan use this work as a model for examina-tions of media presentations pertaining tospecific subjects.

The authors of Media Bias? developeduseful protocols for a taxonomy of sourcesattributed in articles published by the fourmagazines. Among the categories wereadvocacy groups, business organizations,citizens, experts, foundations, governmentagencies, nongovernmental organizations,and public officials. Each source categorywas assigned a putative ideological identityas conservative, liberal, or nonpartisan. Thepurpose of this taxonomy was to allow eval-uation of sources cited in each article by eachmagazine, which permitted quantitativeanalysis on the basis of preponderance ofsources. Simply put, an article with more lib-eral sources than conservative was ratedthusly by a factor that reflected a ratio.

Citizen sources were presumed to benonpartisan; this was acceptable becausetheir presence in articles was an artifactanyway—journalists typically choose ordi-nary people to represent a situation, whichthen becomes the focus of an article that

other sources explain, interpret, and proposespecific actions or policies relevant to thesituation. However, experts and nongovern-mental organizations also were presumed tobe nonpartisan if they did not espouse anadvocacy position identifiable as eitherconservative or liberal; this was worrisomebecause experts and nongovernmental organ-izations can skew reports by emphasizing oromitting certain information.

The authors astutely categorized (byconservative or liberal ideology) the costs,causes, and solutions presented in newsarticles. For example, within the subject ofenvironment was the topic of pollution.Conservatives addressed the cost of pollu-tion by citing economic burden, explainedthe cause of pollution as attributable to thenation’s standard of living and populationgrowth, and proposed a solution that wouldemphasize better awareness by citizens andresponsible action by individual manufac-turers and producers. Liberals focused onthe cost of pollution to public health andenvironmental harm, cited the cause of pollu-tion as resistance by industry to invest inclean technology and safer chemical prod-ucts, and argued that a solution must includeregulation by government and remedialaction by industrial sectors. The authors offerplenty of quantitative data and statisticaltables to help navigate the findings.

A negative aspect of the research was a lackof analytical detail. Absent was thecontext within which these news presenta-tions appeared—extant economic, political,and social factors. News media do not residein a cocoon. Editors, who nominally decidewhat to publish, and publishers, who moni-tor the responses of the public (newsstandsales and subscriptions) and of advertisers,pay attention to events and issues thatpresumably have an effect on their readers.

The authors took an important first step todetermine context by dividing coverage pat-terns of news presentations by presidentialterms during the 1975–2000 study period,then by further subdividing these patternsaccording to periods of density of pres-entations. This allowed only general conclu-sions, however. More specificity would haveemerged if patterns of presentation wereexamined to ascertain if the magazineswere reacting to presidential primary

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campaigns, presidential election rhetoric,off-year congressional elections, and unusu-al economic or social conditions, such asa recession or racial unrest. News mediaoften ‘‘discover’’ a subject after a controversyor dramatic occurrence.

As it is, Media Bias? is an interesting work.Unfortunately, it is of uncertain value toscholarship on media performance.

Defiant Dads: Fathers’ Rights Activists inAmerica, by Jocelyn Elise Crowley. Ithaca,NY: Cornell University Press, 2008. 306pp.$27.95 cloth. ISBN: 9780801446900.

MARTIN D. SCHWARTZ

Ohio [email protected]

In the 1970s and 1980s, women’s advocateswere successful in getting legislation in placeto force fathers to pay court-ordered childsupport after the breakup of a relationship.These mechanisms have been marginallysuccessful in raising support payments,according to the Green Book (U.S. House ofRepresentatives, 2004), but there has beena loud backlash. A fathers’ rights movementhas arisen to argue for mandatory joint cus-tody of children and low or no payments bymen. Overall, they see men as the victims ofwomen and the state as the thief who stealstheir money to force support of theirchildren.

Jocelyn Elise Cowley’s qualitative study ofleaders and members of such groups pro-vides some important insight into the natureof these groups. Crowley did 158 one-hourunstructured interviews with members of26 groups mostly by telephone, in additionto observing general informational meetingsof eight groups. These men were mostlywhite and middle class, and not only bla-tantly antifeminist, but generally antagonis-tic to women in general.

Probably the most important finding inthis study is that while these groups havean increasingly well-known neoconservativepolitical philosophy, in general the men joineither to gain information or advice on theirown cases or else to get emotional support.Thus, there is both a political and personalside to these groups. Crowley is encouraged

by the personal side, and feels that they couldserve a useful purpose in working with thesemen to promote good relations with theirchildren and former partners.

Unfortunately, she says that observationmakes it clear that these men want to cutoff their partners and children with no sup-port at all, or else to pay as little as possible.Sometimes this is based on an extreme neo-conservative philosophy that each person isresponsible for his- or herself, so that thesemen have no responsibility for fathered chil-dren. Those who do believe in this responsi-bility argue for no child support andmandatory joint custody, based on an essen-tialist notion that men are crucial for childdevelopment, which Crowley points out isnot supported in the literature. In fact,although she does not mention this, 25 per-cent of all U.S. presidents and two currentSupreme Court justices grew up withoutfathers.

It is hard to determine how importantthese groups are. They are loud, sometimesinfluential, and often headed by ideologues.They can take money away from services towomen by suing them (for not providingshelter to men) or demanding funding theydon’t need on the grounds of equal treat-ment. Yet, they are still relatively small,lose members rapidly, shut down regularly,and tend to burn out when their leadergets tired or when infighting gets too strong.Still, they have succeeded in obtaininga great deal of publicity, especially wherethey find sympathetic members of themedia. Crowley says that these groups arenot simplistic right-wingers, but insteadhave developed a convenient alliance withneoconservatives as an opportunistic rally-ing cry. It is somewhat hard to follow thispoint, since she reports that what bringsthem together is uniform strenuous anti-state and antifemale arguments. She evidentlyfeels that there may be some issues where theywould disagree with neoconservatives, butdoes not point to any.

Interestingly, Crowley centered her sampleon groups that discuss child custody, and cen-tered her interviews on child custody and cur-rent relations with ex-partners. She came outof the interviews convinced that some groupsoccasionally can be positive, because they pro-vide legal information, methods of discussing

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issues that do not escalate tensions, and sup-port for men’s positive relations with children.Still, after reporting the views of her inter-viewees, she does point out that overallwomen and children suffer tremendousfinancial hardship after family breakdown,while the problem is less drastic for men,some of whom are better off.

One thing that only occasionally comes uphere is the notion of abuse against women,except for claims that such accusations arefalse. While Crowley is disturbed by the some-what central claim and political action bymany of these groups that women are notthe main victims of physical abuse (‘‘Thisposition is just flat-out wrong’’), the bookspends very little time on the issue. No matterhow fundamental it is to the politics of mostfathers’ rights organizations, there were noquestions on it in her interview schedule. Itwould be surprising to me if many of thesemarriages had not broken up because ofabuse. Some fathers’ rights leaders haveadmitted to me a history of arrests for domes-tic violence, and not asking that question, orexplaining why the question was not asked,is a startling gap.

Txtng: The Gr8 Db8, by David Crystal.Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008.239pp. $19.95 cloth. ISBN: 9780199544905.

DANAH BOYD

Microsoft [email protected]

As a researcher who examines the intersec-tion of youth and social media, I am regularlyapproached to comment on how technologyis destroying kids’ attention, social skills,work ethic, friendships, etc. Needless tosay, txt-speak is often introduced as proofof technology’s corrupting force. When Iopened up David Crystal’s Txtng: The Gr8Db8 and found his preface lamenting thephone calls he receives and how said phonecalls drove him to write this book, I couldn’thelp but smile. It is easy to get stuck on thenewness of technology; it is much harder tostep back and provide a calm, rationalaccounting of why what some think is newis not and how what appears to be a radicalbreak from the past is actually part of

a coherent and consistent evolution. Yet,this is precisely what Crystal has done.

Txtng is a love story, an ode to the beautyof language and texters’ playful dance withwords. Chock-full of examples, the bookexamines the practice of texting from vari-ous angles with a consistent message: thelinguistic patterns of texting stem from com-pletely rational practices that are in line withwhat people have always done with lan-guage. Yet, instead of dryly harping on thatmessage, Crystal invites the reader to takean historically situated journey with him,intoxicating the reader with his passion forlanguage. Only at the end does he return tothe doomsday prophets who are convincedthat language is being destroyed, politelydeconstructing each of their argumentswhile pointing out that this moral panic,like txt-speak itself, is nothing new.

The book itself is filled with linguisticfactoids, historical trivia, and delightful exam-ples, making it feel more like a coffee-tablebook than a scholarly treatise, but Crystalfrequently steps back and reminds the readerthat his argument is steeped in a long traditionof research into both language and texting.And then he returns to fun cases that ticklethe mind. I am particularly fond of the assort-ment of txt-poetry and txt-literature that heuses to highlight linguistic decisions madeby texters and the geek in me burst out laugh-ing when I encountered a rewriting of the Brit-ish national anthem that began with‘‘Gd CTRL-S r gr8sh Qun’’ (p. 81).

Texting is filled with pictograms andabbreviations, nonstandard spellings anddisemvoweled words. As Crystal patientlyshows, all of these have roots in Englishand other languages. Many of us forget orare unaware that laser is an acronym orthat bus is a shortening. While people havealways altered language for a variety ofreasons, texters have a good incentive: tap-ping out words on itsy numerical keypadsin 160-byte chunks is not a natural mode ofexpression (p. 66). Yet, efficiency alonedoes not explain why texters do what theydo or why they develop complex linguisticnovelties that are quite challenging toencode into phones [e.g., @@@@8-) to por-tray Marge Simpson]. Simply put, we mustconsider the fun texters have when theymanipulate linguistic elements as part of

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their creativity. Just as Oulipo writersjoyfully embrace constraints and ErnestWright carefully crafted a novel devoid ofthe letter e, texters develop techniques thatsimultaneously embrace constraints andpush the boundaries of language.Communicating via the mobile is full ofconstraints, making it ripe for ludic play.Efforts to improve the input process—suchas predictive texting—do not stifle this; rath-er, they often create new opportunities. Forexample, T-9 reasonably suggests either‘‘book’’ or ‘‘cool’’ for 2665, motivating sometexters to intentionally input ‘‘book’’ asa substitute for ‘‘cool’’ (p. 68). Such socio-technical humor is only amusing to thosewho are in on the switch.

To give the presumably English-speakingreader a sense that txt-speak is not only anEnglish phenomenon, Crystal highlights thesimilarities in other languages while also indi-cating how certain languages’ affordancesinflect texting practices. For example, initial-isms are uncommon in Welsh because ‘‘the ini-tial letters of words traditionally mutate,depending on the grammatical context’’(p. 143), and Chinese texters frequently employnumerals ‘‘to represent a character with thesame or similar sound,’’ a practice that is wellestablished in Chinese (p. 136). While the corepractices are universal, each linguistic commu-nity has its own particular variants.

Txt-speak may look bizarre to someonewho only sees written language in its mostformal incarnation, but there is a long tradi-tion of using shortcuts and pictograms innote taking, letter writing, and other writtengenres. This works precisely because peoplecan decode the message with relative ease.The linguistic moves texters make are notarbitrary, as the goal is still to communicate.For example, texters rarely remove conso-nants because, although most English wordscan be understood when their vowels areremoved, especially when in context, remov-ing consonants makes a message completelyillegible (p. 26).

Crystal concludes his ode by asking thereading public to calm down. ‘‘Texting isone of the most innovative linguisticphenomena of modern times, and perhapsthat is why it has generated such strongemotions. . . . Yet, all the evidence suggeststhat belief in an impending linguistic

disaster is a consequence of a mythologylargely created by the media’’ (pp. 172–73).Arguments that suggest the sky is fallingfail to recognize that to be able to play withwords as texters do requires a mastery oflanguage. The most creative and innovativetexters are anything but illiterate. Using sim-ilar logic, Crystal accounts for why publicfears are unwarranted and invites the readerto delight in the emergence of txt-speak for,‘‘in texting we are seeing, in a small way, lan-guage in evolution’’ (p. 175).

Txtng is a delectable exploration of thelinguistic conventions of texters. The argu-ments may not be new and the discussionmay be driven by examples rather thanempirical data, but the book serves its audi-ence well as brain candy for anyone whoappreciates language.

Cruel and Unusual: The Culture of Punishment inAmerica, by Anne-Marie Cusac. New Haven,CT: Yale University Press, 2009. 318pp.$27.50 cloth. ISBN: 9780300111743.

MATTHEW SILBERMAN

Bucknell [email protected]

This book provides a fascinating accountof the history of punishment in America,from the colonial era to the present day. Thecentral thesis of the book is that currentretributive responses to punishment reflectthe religious traditions of the early settlerswho believed that we are all born sinnersand, while it is possible to overcome thewickedness in human nature through gooddeeds, for many, evil must be rooted outthrough strict and severe punishment. Theauthor argues that this doctrine is so deeplyembedded in American culture that it mani-fests itself in ‘‘cruel and unusual’’ punish-ment from time to time. Its latestmanifestation has been in the use of massincarceration, the death penalty, and the useof torture in our prisons, including AbuGhraib and Guantanamo Bay.

The central theme of the book is that, sincethe 1970s, there has been a return to a punish-ment regime in America that justifies theadministration of painful forms of punish-ment to those who have engaged in both

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immoral and illegal conduct. Arguing that‘‘nothing works’’ when it comes to rehabili-tation programs, the federal prison systemand many state prison systems abandonedthe rehabilitative ideal in favor of a greateremphasis on the incapacitation of prisonersthrough long-term incarceration. By the1980s, religious fundamentalism broadenedthe appeal of corporal punishment at homeand in school, long prison terms, and theexpanded use of the death penalty. Never-theless, there is considerable evidence thatAmerica never fully abandoned extremeforms of punishment prior to the 1970s, norhas America completely abandoned therehabilitative ideal since. The widespreadabuse of the mentally retarded in institutionssuch as Willowbrook and the abuse of pris-oners in Arkansas and elsewhere providea more complete story of the contradictionsin American culture concerning punish-ment. Similarly, the courts have continu-ously expanded prisoners’ rights since the1970s, limiting the arbitrary use of force byprison officials and requiring more humanetreatment as a matter of law.

As a journalist, the author does a fine jobof providing anecdotal evidence of culturalsupport for extreme forms of punishment,from flogging in the schools of colonialAmerica to the use of stun guns in contem-porary American prisons. The author alsodescribes the humane countertrend derivedfrom both the Enlightenment philosophyand the religious traditions associated withthe Universalist principles of influentialpolitical figures such as Benjamin Rush,one of the founders of the American repub-lic. Rush contributed to the development ofthe modern penitentiary, designed to isolateprisoners from the negative influences ofother prisoners and encourage them toseek redemption by reading the Bible. Rushalso invented the ‘‘tranquilizer’’ chairdesigned to calm the agitated inmate. Theseinnovations, which were designed to bemore humane than the public flogging andother cruelties of the past, have morphedinto the isolation and control of prisonersused in the supermax prisons of today andthe ‘‘restraint chair’’ used to control unrulyinmates in many contemporary jails.

From a sociological perspective, it is diffi-cult to assess an analysis based on the

presentation of extreme cases of the use ofpain to control and/or punish offenders.What we do not learn from these historicalaccounts is the extent to which these meth-ods were not used. Similarly, human rightsorganizations are likely to investigate com-plaints of cruel and unusual treatment inAmerican prisons, but they are not likely toinvestigate claims of good treatment.

While it is true, for example, that manyAmerican jails use the restraint chair to con-trol or punish inmates, many do not. Whatare some of the structural and situational fac-tors that might explain why some jails haveadopted the restraint chair while othershave not?

The author persuasively argues that reli-gious fundamentalism, past and present, isat the heart of cultural support for extremeforms of punishment. Some orthodox Pres-byterians (self-styled Reconstructionists)not only advocate violence against disobedi-ent children but also support extreme acts ofviolence against abortionists and homosex-uals. Yet it is hard to accept that somehowthese extremists have had a major influenceon the cultural values of the wider society.The reader is still left wondering why thisrejection of more liberal policies becameso influential during the latter half of thetwentieth century.

This reviewer would like to have seena greater emphasis on the cultural conflictbetween the Enlightenment philosophyrepresented in the prohibition of crueland unusual punishment embodied in theEighth Amendment of the Constitution,and conservative religious traditions thatjustify extreme forms of punishment. Howdoes the author account for recent courtdecisions abolishing the execution of juve-niles and the mentally retarded and thediminished use of the death penalty outsideof the American South? How does theauthor account for the fact that fewer andfewer states permit the use of corporal pun-ishment in the public schools? By empha-sizing one side of the equation, one is leftwith a sense that the history of punishmenthas only been partly explained. The restor-ative justice movement and its historicalantecedents are as much a part of the Amer-ican story as the moralism of the early Prot-estant settlers.

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Desire for Race, by Sarah Daynes and OrvilleLee. New York: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2008. 242pp. $ 31.99 paper. ISBN:9780521680479.

MARA LOVEMAN

University of Wisconsin, [email protected]

Is race real? The authors of Desire for Raceclaim it is not. Confronting the social con-structivist mantra that race is real becauseit is real in its consequences, Sarah Daynesand Orville Lee contend that race ‘‘is neitherreal in nature nor in society.’’ Rather, theyargue, race exists purely as ‘‘a thing ofbelief.’’ Daynes and Lee do not deny theexistence of racial experiences—the real lifeconsequences of the belief in race—but theyreject the common claim that such experien-ces testify to the existence of a ‘‘racial objectthat can be treated as a theoretical concept’’(p. 7). Building from this provocative prem-ise, Desire for Race seeks to understand theconditions for the persistence of the beliefin race over time, despite its evident ‘‘false-ness,’’ and despite several decades’ worthof constructivist scholarship that has soughtto undermine it.

The book’s argument is presented in twostages. First, the authors build the case fora new conceptualization of the object ofinquiry in this field. In chapters on the con-cept of race in American sociology, Marxism,British social anthropology, and British cul-tural studies, the authors examine theapproach to analysis of race in the work ofseveral influential thinkers. These chapterscover much familiar ground, but with a criti-cal edge; any of these individual chapterswould stand alone nicely as supplementaryreading in a graduate race theory course.Based on this survey, Daynes and Lee con-clude that ‘‘there has been up to this pointa confusion between two objects of inquiry:‘race’ and the ‘belief in race’ ’’ (p. 120). As aconsequence of this confusion, they argue,even the most stridently constructivist theo-ries of race have retained kernels ofessentialism.

The suggestion that all previous work hasultimately conflated ‘‘race’’ and ‘‘the beliefin race’’ is perhaps overstated—especially

in light of their own discussion of Durkheim,Weber, and contemporary writers like PeterWade. But Daynes and Lee go further thanother theorists in making this analytical dis-tinction central to their conceptualization ofthe nature of race as a social phenomenon.This is a critical analytical move becauseit facilitates a clean epistemological breakbetween theoretical and commonsense con-ceptions of race, a break they see as manda-tory to avoid scholarly essentialism.

Daynes and Lee propose a new approachto research and theory on ‘‘race.’’ They arguethat scholars of race are not dealing with oneobject (‘‘race’’), but with four distinct objectsof inquiry: ‘‘the phenotype, the perception ofphenotype, racial ideas, and racial practice’’(p. 137). By clearly distinguishing these fourobjects, and focusing analysis on the rela-tionships between them (which they term‘‘the racial ensemble’’), the authors believethat scholars can break with the inadvertentessentialism that so often blemishes other-wise rigorous research in this area.

Of the four objects in this ‘‘racial ensem-ble,’’ Daynes and Lee see racial ideas as pri-mary. With racial ideas in play, the fourelements of the ensemble work together tonaturalize and reproduce social relation-ships of domination that seem to be rootedin nature. Without racial ideas, however,the other three elements of the ensemblecease to be racial at all. Absent the belief inrace, race could not exist as a social fact.Thus, Daynes and Lee arrive at their coreargument: theories of race ought to be cen-trally concerned with understanding theconditions for the production and reproduc-tion of belief in race.

Race is a belief, the authors insist, but thisdoes not mean it is ‘‘purely ideational or dis-cursive’’ nor that it is merely a post-structur-alist ‘‘text.’’ Threading a fine line betweenexisting ideational understandings of race,Daynes and Lee state that what differenti-ates their understanding of race-as-an-ideais their explicit recognition that it is an ideafirmly rooted to ‘‘something in the world.’’Racial ideas have a concrete referent in thesphere of nature; they attend to phenotype.Nature, they write, is a ‘‘necessary limit con-dition on belief.’’ But the reader remainsunclear how rigorously this rule is to beinterpreted. What of cases where physical

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referents are absent or ignored? Does theidea of race always hinge on an objective ref-erent in nature?

With belief in race defined as the principalobject of inquiry, the second part of the bookturns to the question of how to explain theproduction and persistence of race as belief.Here the authors draw creatively from con-ceptual resources developed in the sociologyof religion and the sociology of collectivememory to theorize race as a ‘‘process ofbelieving.’’ More controversially, the authorsalso turn to Freudian psychoanalysis fortools to understand the affective dimensionof racial belief. Where other scholars havedrawn on cognitive social psychology or the-ories of embodiment and habitus to gainleverage on the ‘‘unconscious dimension ofmeaningful action,’’ Daynes and Lee lookto the concept of libido (desire) to understandthe ‘‘attachment’’ to racial beliefs. The forayinto psychoanalytic explanations for theperpetuation of racial ideas will likely bemet with skepticism by many sociologists—as the authors readily admit (p. 212). But anysuch skepticism about this particular direc-tion for future sociological research on raceshould not detract from the larger contribu-tions of this work.

Desire for Race is a serious, innovative,thought-provoking contribution to socialscientific theory of race. In an area of thediscipline that is never short on controversy,but where the controversies are often over-rehearsed and under-thought, Daynes andLee have written an insightful, challenging,and unconventionally controversial book.Few, if any, readers will agree with everyargument advanced in Desire for Race,but the authors present important futurechallenges for scholars of race: to confronttheir part in the reproduction of the beliefin race; to question the complacency of con-structivist truisms; to define the object ofinquiry in studies of race with precisionand consistency; and to broaden our theore-tical horizons, drawing creatively froma much larger arsenal of conceptual resour-ces in our efforts to theorize race and under-stand its implications for everyday life.

Struggles Before Brown: Early Civil RightsProtests and Their Significance Today, by JeanVan Delinder. Boulder, CO: ParadigmPublishers, 2008. 197pp. $29.95 paper.ISBN: 9781594514593.

ALDON MORRIS


There are golden nuggets in Struggles BeforeBrown: Early Civil Rights Protests andTheir Significance Today. They yearn to shinethrough the formidable flaws of this book.I will highlight the contributions of thiswork and lay bare the faults that couldhave been avoided.

Jean Van Delinder illuminates a number ofimportant and often overlooked aspects ofthe civil rights movements. Through inter-views, archival research, and secondarysources, she developed a conceptual frame-work to analyze civil rights struggles thatoccurred in Kansas and Oklahoma beforethe 1954 Supreme Court Ruling in Brown v.Board of Education of Topeka. This ‘‘BorderCampaign’’ framework argues that to und-erstand social movements, analyses musttake into consideration local determinants,indirect cautious protests that unfold behindthe scenes, value rational agency of individ-uals functioning outside existing organiza-tions and leadership, and the genderednature of movements.

Delinder makes a persuasive case regard-ing local determinants. She argues that theearly civil rights protests in Kansas andOklahoma contrasted sharply with those inthe Deep South that usually serve as theempirical base for civil rights studies. Inthese two border states, the color line wasoften fluid, ambiguous, and contradictory;in some instances, racial segregation wasenforced while integration was permittedin others. Thus, the type of regime plays animportant role in structuring protests aimedagainst it. Because oppression was not asdirect and brutal in Kansas and Oklahoma,blacks prior to the Brown case often did notseek to overthrow segregation but to make

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adjustments within it. In this analysis,protests in border states often sought to influ-ence white elites to honor their constitutionalobligations by making black institutionsequal to their white counterparts. Such chal-lenges, it is argued, constituted protests andshould be analyzed as such. These bordercampaigns usually were not highly confron-tational or spectacular. Rather, they wereindirect, relatively quiescent, negotiatedbehind the scenes, and moderate in demands.Nevertheless, they were important protests,for they used innovative tactics includingsit-ins and boycotts, blazing the trail for theexplosive confrontations that rocked theSouth following the Brown decision.

It is claimed, though not fully supportedby Delinder’s own data, that border cam-paigns were often initiated by ordinary indi-viduals largely working outside of formalorganizations, institutions, and establishedleadership. These individuals were self-starters whose activist careers were spurredby their personal values for justice. In thisrespect, analyses need to capture this impor-tant agency that is inextricably embedded inhistory, social structure, and individualactivists.

Delinder beautifully describes how theseborder protests were often initiated by blackand white women. By profiling the biogra-phies and protests of women, the authorshows how important female agency is formovements. The painting of a masculineface on the civil rights movement canvasdoes not square with the facts. Indeed, theretrieval of obscure activist careers and rela-tively forgotten protest campaigns and treat-ing them as a core theoretical problematic ofthe civil rights movement is the true value ofthis book.

Delinder falters when she attempts toposition the border framework as theoreti-cally superior to resource mobilization andpolitical process explanations and my ownanalysis elaborated in The Origins of the CivilRights Movement (1986). By condensing theseapproaches into what she calls the MasterNarrative, Delinder glosses over importantdifferences within this vast literature. Sheclaims that the Master Narrative employsa one-dimensional causal direction, focusesonly on spectacularly large confrontations,ignores agency and protests of ordinary

individuals and of women due to a mascu-line logic, and ignores protests and activistswho operate outside of formal organizationsand charismatic leadership. She argues thatthese blind spots cause the Master Narrativeto overlook and leave unanalyzed the centraldynamics of the border campaigns that setthe stage for the later confrontations in theDeep South.

Using my own work as an example, thefallacies of Delinder’s approach are obvi-ous. Local dynamics, activism by indiv-iduals as well as groups, and localcircumstances are at the core of Origins asepitomized by its guiding concept of ‘‘localmovement centers.’’ Some of the same pro-tests in Kansas and Oklahoma that Delinder‘‘rescues’’ are analyzed in Origins and shownto be important to the rise of protests in theDeep South. The agency of women isdetailed in Origins and the contributions ofsome of the same border women discussedby Delinder—Clara Luper and Vera Pigee—were analyzed by Morris over 20 years ago.This is also true for male activists like FredSuttlesworth, Ronald Walters, and E. D.Nixon who Delinder claims the dominantapproach ignores. Neither does Origins con-centrate solely on large confrontations givenits analysis of protests in locales like BatonRouge and northern Louisiana parishes. Itis puzzling that Delinder makes these falseclaims using a fictitious Master Narrativestraw man.

But there is value in Delinder’s borderanalysis. She illuminates the importance ofindividual agency, women’s activism, varia-tion between regimes, and small campaignsof collective action to an unusual extent. Itis unfortunate that she failed to heed herhigher theoretical angel whose counselmust have been to privilege the real contri-butions of her book rather than trying to dis-place a vast and often superior literaturewith a specific framework designed toexplain a limited, but important, set of bor-der dynamics.

Reference

Morris, Aldon. 1986. The Orgins of the Civil Rights

Movement. New York: Free Press.

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Body Panic: Gender, Heath, and the Sellingof Fitness, by Shari L. Dworkin and FayeLinda Wachs. New York: New YorkUniversity Press, 2009. 227pp. $22.00 paper.ISBN: 9780814719688.

NATALIE BOERO

San Jose State [email protected]

In Body Panic: Gender, Health, and the Selling ofFitness, Shari Dworkin and Faye LindaWachs analyze 10 years’ worth of women’sand men’s heath and fitness magazines tobetter understand the intersections of gen-der, race, sexuality, and bodies in today’sconsumer culture. Dworkin and Wachs usetheir extensive data to show how these mag-azines and the consumptive practices theyencourage, indeed mandate, are at the centerof the individualizing of responsibility forhealth at the core of the neoliberal projectof turning attention away from structuralinequalities and placing responsibility forhealth, fitness, and prosperity onto individu-als. Linking healthy and fit bodies to notionsof good citizenship, morality, as well as thereinscription of dominant constructions ofrace, sexuality, and gender, Dworkin andWachs show how as the range of acceptablebodies narrows, the stigmatizing of nonpri-vileged bodies and populations expandsthrough this ‘‘healthism.’’

The book begins with an articulation of thetheoretical grounding for the book. Viewingtheir data through the lenses of queer theory,the sociology of health and illness, socialconstructionism, cultural studies, feminist,and multiracial feminist theory, Dworkinand Wachs construct new theoretical insightsto bolster their claims that constructionsof idealized bodies in these publications isnot only about the construction of ideallygendered bodies, as feminist scholars havelong observed, but also part of a trendtoward individualized self-surveillance thatlinks good health to increased consumptionof products and services. This review,though somewhat dense, is thorough andspeaks to the authors’ theoretical depthand provides a comprehensive frameworkfor subsequent chapters.

In their second chapter, Dworkin andWachs report their most interesting empiricalfinding, that the individualized imperativesrepresented in heath and fitness magazinespoint to a convergence in the objectificationof women and men in terms of their expectedbody maintenance regimens and consumptivepatterns. Without suggesting that men arenow constructed as objects in the same waywomen have been, the authors show howthe exhortation of men to have a very particu-lar type of fit body and to engage in similartypes of grooming practices as women goesbeyond a male as subject, female as objectdichotomy. They illustrate how contemporaryconsumer culture, with its need to expandmarkets, can result in the objectification ofmen’s subjecthood and the subjectification ofwomen’s objecthood.

This convergence, however, still rests onideas about gendered difference. In the thirdand fourth chapters of the book, the authorsshow how men and women are constructedas separate even as there are increasing sim-ilarities in how women’s and men’s bodiesare objectified.

In Chapter Three, the authors use imagesfrom men’s magazines to detail the construc-tion of hegemonic masculinity during a con-temporary crisis in masculinity spurred onby anxieties about war and the state of thenation, as well as by women’s continuallyshifting roles. Men’s magazines produce anideal of masculinity not only built aroundmen’s size and power but a particular visionof that size and power that reinforces a white,heterosexual masculine norm.

In Chapter Four, the authors offer a uniqueand compelling account of the construction ofidealized femininity and motherhood throughan analysis of the magazine Fit Pregnancy.Weight gain during pregnancy presentsa challenge to the aesthetic imperatives ofemphasized femininity even as it allowswomen to achieve motherhood, a core mar-ker of successful womanhood. The maga-zine attempts to resolve this contradictionby focusing on women’s ‘‘training’’ for theevent of labor and instructing them on howto ‘‘get their bodies back’’ postpartum. Sug-gesting that bodywork has now becomewomen’s ‘‘third shift’’ the authors showhow the white, middle-class, and heterosexual

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focus of the magazine creates a circum-scribed femininity in which women of colorand lesbians are always on the outside.

In the final empirical chapter, the authorsuse a case study of the now defunct maga-zine, Women’s Sports & Fitness, from 1974 to2005 to show a trend in health and fitnessmedia away from a focus on women’s sportsand athletic achievement and toward indi-vidualized body projects predicated on theconsumption of fitness and beauty products.They suggest that the feminist project of inde-pendent publications like Women’s Sports &Fitness has been co-opted and stripped ofany exhortation to collective action, as suchpublications were bought up and transformedby media monopolies like Conde Nast.

Dworkin and Wachs conclude with a sum-mary of the book and a statement of theircore theoretical contribution: that the crea-tion of idealized bodies in health and fitnessmagazines depends on relations of powerthat privilege white, thin, wealthy, and het-erosexual bodies and designate people ofcolor and nonheterosexuals as unhealthy.

Body Panic is a carefully researched andinsightful theoretical and empirical contri-bution to the growing literature on bodies,health, gender, race, and sexuality. It is alsoa timely book given current debates abouthealth care. The only drawback to the bookis that its theoretical depth in some placesdetracts from the authors’ core arguments,and the extensive citation and reiteration ofthe work of others takes away from high-lighting the authors’ own innovative andimportant theoretical contributions. Overall,Body Panic is an excellent and compellingbook and an important statement on the con-struction of bodies in a consumer capitalisteconomy.

Making the Cut: How Cosmetic Surgery IsTransforming Our Lives, by Anthony Elliott.London, UK: Reaktion Books, 2008. 155pp.$19.95 paper. ISBN: 9781861893710.

ANN BRANAMAN

Florida Atlantic [email protected]

This book analyzes the relationship betweencosmetic surgical culture, self-transformation

projects, and the ‘‘new economy of advancedglobalization’’ (p. 10). Anthony Elliott’s title,a double entendre, conveys his thesisregarding one of the primary reasons thatan ever-growing number of women andmen have undergone plastic surgery or con-sider it likely that they may do so at somepoint in the future: the fear of being con-signed, alongside piles of old models ofcountless consumer products, to the dumpheap of society. In the precarious economyof advanced globalization, many people cal-culate that plastic surgery may enable themto avoid standing out in the workplace asan old, tired, and used-up product in needof replacement by a new and younger model.To ‘‘make the cut,’’ in other words, more andmore people seek surgeons to ‘‘make thecut’’ on their various body parts.

Elliott’s book is heavily influenced byZygmunt Bauman’s recent analyses of liquidmodernity. Employing Bauman’s logic inanalyzing the relationship between eco-nomic, cultural, and personal change, Elliottanalyzes the rise of cosmetic surgical cultureas an extension of the liquid modern emphasison flexibility and the ‘‘new paradigm of self-making in which individuals are required topick themselves up by their bootstraps andget on with the tasks of daily reinventing,restructuring, remolding and resculptingthe self’’ (p. 45).

Drawing on interviews with plastic sur-geons and consumers of plastic surgery aswell as data (derived primarily from news-papers and magazines) on popular attitudesand plans for cosmetic surgery among peo-ple in various countries around the world,Elliott documents the growth of cosmeticsurgical culture as a worldwide phenome-non and analyzes its subjective meaning tothose who have undergone or consideredplastic surgery. Plastic surgery mania hasspread not only throughout the United Statesand Western Europe, but has also accom-panied the ‘‘tidal waves of globalization’’ inspreading rapidly throughout Asia. TheChinese, for example, spend more than $2.4billion (US) on cosmetic surgery, as individ-uals ‘‘invest’’ in themselves in hopes of bet-ter career and life opportunities. The basicquestions of this book, in the author’swords, are ‘‘Why, as a society, are weincreasingly held in thrall to cosmetic

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surgical culture? And what drives people tocontemplate extreme reinvention by under-going the surgeon’s knife?’’ (p. 41).

Elliott argues that two popular answersgiven by media and academics—celebrityculture and consumerism—are simplistic.The first suggests that celebrity culture ‘‘iscatapulted into our daily lives from outerspace’’ (p. 42), underplaying the deeperemotional and societal factors that driveindividuals toward self-reinvention. Thesecond views plastic surgery as an extensionof consumerism, representing the new styleof shopping not for ‘‘things’’ but rather for‘‘identity commodities.’’ Neither explana-tion, however, focuses direct attention onlarger economic transformations and theirconnections to changes in self-identity. Thelatter is the primary aim and contributionof Elliott’s book.

In the second and third chapters, Elliottconsiders the two popular explanations,‘‘celebrity obsession’’ and ‘‘want-now con-sumerism.’’ Addressing the limitations ofother accounts that link the rise of plasticsurgery to celebrity culture, he argues thatwe need to understand the emotionaldimensions of people’s appropriation ofplastic surgery. Celebrity culture influencespeople, Elliott argues, because it ‘‘penetratesto the inner sanctum of human identity’’(p. 65). ‘‘From the viewpoint of ordinarypeople, or fans, celebrity is routinely experi-enced as a realm of unconstrained possibili-ty. For the fan, the celebrity is one who istrue, free, and transcendent. To worshipcelebrity in this way is to project part of theself onto the idealized other, and thus to exper-iment with a safe . . . fantasy of life’s possi-bilities’’ (p. 67). The contradiction in this,Elliott notes, is that individuals who seekindependence through such identificationfind themselves in a debilitating dependenceon an idealized screen image all too oftenundermined by tabloid exposure of the lessthan ideal aspects of celebrities’ lives. Oneway we manage these contradictions, Elliottsuggests, is by shifting focus away fromcelebrity personalities to celebrity body parts(p. 73).

The consumerist logic employed by con-sumers of plastic surgical culture in theireffort to ward off signs of aging and mortal-ity is similarly contradictory, according to

Elliott’s analysis. Elliott draws on Bauman’sargument that the consumer industryemploys two strategies in maintaining peo-ple’s attachment to consumer markets:devaluation of products soon after theyreach a saturation point and satisfyingneeds/desires/wants in such a way thatthey give rise to new needs/desires/wants(p. 86). This logic, Elliott suggests, extendseasily to anti-aging projects and cosmeticsurgery; people seek personal changethrough cosmetic surgery, but in the sameway that other consumer goods are limitedin their ability to provide sustained satisfac-tion, consumers of plastic surgery frequentlyfind that their procedures satisfy only for theshort term.

Rather than viewing rising rates ofcosmetic surgery as an indication of inc-reased levels of narcissism or vanity amongthe world’s population, an interpretationthat is not only popular but also offered bymany who have themselves undergoneplastic surgery, Elliott argues that thisunderstanding is a mask that ‘‘occludestheir own subjection to the unfathomablepowers of multinational capitalism’’ (p. 111).Interestingly, Elliott suggests that the goal ofplastic surgery for many workers aroundthe world is not to stand out but rather toavoid being noticed (and targeted for layoffor replacement). In a world where few cancount on lifetime employment, where down-sizing and short-term contracts become nor-mal, track records or work commitmentcount for little; instead, ‘‘the capacity tochange and reinvent oneself has becomefundamental’’ (p. 122). Fear of disposabilityin the precarious economy of advancedglobalization, Elliott proposes, drives thecultural obsession with plastic surgery (andother projects of self-transformation).

Making the Cut builds on the theme of anearlier book by Elliott and Charles Lemert—The New Individualism: The Emotional Costs ofGlobalization. Elliott’s interpretation of therise of cosmetic surgical culture in thisbook is an extension of the new individual-ism discussed in the earlier book. Like theother book, this one draws on socialtheory—particularly the work of Bauman—as the basis for the interpretation it offers.But also as Lemert and Elliott had for theirearlier book, Elliott has done something for

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this book—namely, empirical research—thatarguably departs from the ordinary practiceof most social theorists. Elliott’s ‘‘social theo-rist’s light’’ version of empirical researchundoubtedly will fail to satisfy the more rig-orously empirical in the discipline; socialtheorists, for their part, may find Elliott’stheoretical contribution in this book to beequally light, insofar as his conceptualiza-tion of plastic surgery draws so heavily onBauman’s thinking. Nonetheless, Elliott’sdiscussion of interviews and other sourcesof casual data combined with his theoreticalanalysis make for an engaging and easilyaccessible read.

Transmitting Inequality: Wealth and the AmericanFamily, by Yuval Elmelech. Lanham, MD:Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.,2008. 239pp., $29.95 paper. ISBN:9780742545854.

EDWARD N. WOLFF

New York [email protected]

This volume is a very impressive effort. Themain focus of the book is on the effects thataging and changing family patterns overthe last half-century have had on the distri-bution of wealth and on asset holdings. Hecenters his empirical work on the UnitedStates. In Chapter Two (after an introductorychapter) Yuval Elmelech demonstrates thatinequalities in the control of material resour-ces have affected individual life chances andoutcomes. Moreover, these asset-based divi-sions are not due to only human capital andlabor market differences. Instead, kinship-based transactions of material resourcesplay a critical role in determining socioeco-nomic disparities. This result forms a basisfor stratification analysis. Previous literaturehas established a strong association betweenparental wealth and children’s socioeco-nomic outcomes. Elmelech, instead, concen-trates on the social mechanism for thiscorrelation.

His main innovation is to develop a newtheoretical model of the social transmissionmechanism, which he calls the ‘‘Family

Transactions Model’’ (FTM). This modellinks labor and commodity market pro-cesses through two social mechanisms—marriage and inheritance. In so doing, itestablishes the key role played by middle-aged Americans on the verge of retirement—what Elmelech calls the ‘‘pivot generation.’’

In Chapter Three, Elmelech goes on toargue that asset-based inequality is criticalto both class structure and the determina-tion of life chances. It also directly impactssocial status and lifestyle as indicated byconsumption behavior. In another impor-tant contribution to the literature on socialstratification, Elmelech develops a newtypology in which the concept of socialclass is broadened to include a consider-ation of both net worth and asset composi-tion. In his view, both life chances andlifestyles have become increasingly linkedto capital accumulation potential, whichreflects both the store of wealth as well asincome flows.

Chapter Four changes focus to the role ofthe state in asset accumulation. Elmelechdescribes and then analyzes the role asset-based policies in the United States haveplayed in generating and transmitting socio-economic advantage across generations. Hisanalysis of the liberal welfare state empha-sizes the somewhat contradictory elementsof the intensive use of means-tested formsof welfare by the state coupled with private,market-based insurance. This combinationleaves many families dependent on familyresources for asset building. Chapter Fivecontinues the themes of Chapter Four byfocusing on the beliefs and practices thatunderlie the private transfers of financialresources. Elmelech analyzes the attitudesand norms regarding such transfers. Particu-lar attention is placed on the disposition ofthe wealth of older Americans and also ofyounger age cohorts to support the elderlyfinancially. Also treated is parental invest-ment in children and how this affects theireconomic well-being. Elmelech looks at thesocial and demographic factors that accountfor the pattern of parental investment. Inter-national comparisons with other advancedeconomies are made to highlight how dis-tinctive the relationship between individual-ism and familism plays out in the UnitedStates.

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Chapters Six and Seven look into racialand ethnic inequality in the United States.It is well known that the wealth gapbetween African American householdsand (non-Hispanic) white households farexceeds that of income. A similar findingis evident for the wealth gap betweennon-Hispanic whites and Hispanics.This chapter presents several competinghypotheses to explain the extreme assetgap between whites and minorities. Unlikemuch of the earlier literature on this ques-tion, Elmelech singles out differences indemographic processes, particularly immi-gration, marriage, and divorce, to accountfor the uneven distribution of wealth. Healso presents empirical findings to examinethe extent to which racial and ethnic varia-tion in immigration status, family structure,and, notably, intergenerational transfers areresponsible for the asset gap betweenwhites and minorities. Elmelech also high-lights the somewhat puzzling finding thatthe inequality of assets is higher in minoritycommunities (both blacks and Hispanics)than among whites. He offers severalexplanations for this finding.

This book is clearly written, well orga-nized, and engaging. The author weavesa compelling story of the rise of assets asthe basis of social class. The book has manyexcellent insights and provides a new andwell-grounded basis of stratification in con-temporary America.

My main concern with the volume is thatit is overly reliant on secondary data sour-ces. The book mixes up data from differentwealth data sources, including the well-regarded Survey of Consumer Finances(Chapter One, p. 19, for example) and therather unreliable (with regard to wealthdata) Survey of Income and Program Par-ticipation (Chapter Two, Table 1, p. 30, forexample). The author should have beenmore discriminating in the use of second-ary data sources. The original data workcontained in the book is based on theHealth and Retirement Survey, 1992,wave (HRS-92). This seems a curioussource to use for the calculations in thebook, since the age range of the survey isrestricted and dated (1992). A more recentSurvey of Consumer Finances wouldhave been preferable.

The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into theCondition of Victimhood, by Didier Fassinand Richard Rechtman, translated byRachel Gomme. Princeton, NJ: PrincetonPress, 2009. 305pp. $24.95 paper. ISBN:9780691137537.

MICHAEL BARNETT


The Empire of Trauma is a grand achievement.The discourse of trauma is now widelyaccepted and has become something ofa badge of honor in some circles: to haveexperienced trauma is to be a victim, andto be a victim is to be a moral category wor-thy of compassion in the modern age. But itwas not always so. A century ago, those indi-viduals who experienced symptoms nowassociated with trauma were ridiculed,reviled, and assumed to have weakcharacters—for instance, after World War I,soldiers coming home from war with ‘‘shellshock’’ were viewed as lacking manhood.How trauma has become accepted as a ‘‘cat-egory of truth,’’ and the varied consequencesthat follow, is the subject of this fascinatingbook.

The introduction provides the foundationfor the book’s analytical, historical, and mor-al arguments, making ‘‘strange’’ the categoryof trauma and suggesting how it becamenaturalized in and through various kindsof events, including the Holocaust, and byexpert communities such as physicians,and by victims-rights groups. What is atstake? A great deal. While accepting that‘‘trauma’’ exists, they nevertheless inquireinto how the discourse became so centralfor communicating suffering that lingerslong after the triggering event, and whatare the political and moral consequencesonce the discourse of trauma helps to pro-duce modern victimhood.

Part One, aptly titled ‘‘The Reversing ofthe Truth,’’ offers a genealogical explanationfor how trauma became part of a ‘‘regime oftruth.’’ These fascinating, detailed, and inti-mate chapters situate the different historicalcontexts—from military physicians, to veter-ans groups, to Holocaust survivors, tovictims movements—in which different

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kinds of groups begin to appropriate theemerging language of trauma, and witheach appropriation give a slight twist to themeaning and politics of trauma. This sectionof the book bursts with insights and provo-cations, and two are particularly notewor-thy. One is that the modern category oftrauma has several origins, emerging fromdifferent sets of events, politics, and commu-nities. In most of these instances, those whowere affected by the events began to use thecategory of trauma to diagnose and commu-nicate their symptoms and sentiments. If thelanguage of trauma was ‘‘useful,’’ it wasbecause its association with medical knowl-edge invested it with an objectivity that tran-scended the politics of the victim. There nowexists ‘‘posttraumatic stress disorder’’(PTSD) thanks to the psychiatric profession(with some prodding from pharmaceuticalcompanies). Symptoms that were onceviewed as having doubtful legitimacy arenow accepted and demand sympathy andcompensation.

Second, and related, trauma is the great mor-al equalizer. We are all victims now. Victim sta-tus is no longer monopolized by those whowere brutalized; it is a language also availableto those who perpetrated brutalities. Holo-caust survivors who endured the unspeakableand Nazi prison guards who were ‘‘forced’’ tocommit and witness unspeakable acts bothsuffer trauma. The American soldier returninghome from Vietnam now being treated forPTSD is a victim. If all are victims, then allhave equal status, and assigning responsibility,guilt, blame, and condemnation becomesincreasingly difficult. If all are victims thenthe very category of victimhood becomes triv-ialized. If trauma defines how we rememberhistoricevents, thehistorywillmelt intoapack-age of symptoms.

The second half of the book demonstratesthe effects of the discourse of trauma on var-ious events and fields of action. Once a cate-gory is produced, legions of professionalsand rights-based activists who assume thattrauma exists go around the world lookingfor it, have difficulty imagining sufferingthrough any other lens, and use the lan-guage to express their own political commit-ments. The authors examine the politics andpower of trauma in several instances. A dev-astating set of explosions in Toulouse in late

September 2001 offers a vehicle to discuss‘‘psychiatric victimology,’’ in which trauma,loosened from its medical roots, becomesa social fact that everyone is assumed toexperience. The emergence of ‘‘humanitari-an psychiatry,’’ in which humanitarianworkers look not only for physical woundsbut also for emotional scars, assume that allthose who witnessed violence must be vic-tims, use the language of trauma to expresstheir own political leanings, and begin tospeak on behalf of the ‘‘victims’’ on thegrounds that they are best able to communi-cate the invisible effects of trauma. And, lastly,the ‘‘Psychotraumatology of Exile,’’ inwhich those who have the authority toassess the validity of the asylum seeker’sclaim must try to discern the authenticityof the trauma. In all of these chapters‘‘experts’’ are increasingly the voice of trau-ma, asked to authenticate the pain of others,and become authorized to speak on behalf ofthe victims. Victims, in turn, lose any agencythey might otherwise have had.

The Empire of Trauma is learned, provoca-tive, rigorous, balancing the empirical andthe normative, and deserves a wide reader-ship. Rare is the book that can provide a com-pelling genealogy of a medical and moralcategory without overlooking the politicsand institutional context of history, canmake ‘‘strange’’ what is now understoodas a natural category of our moderntimes, can force an uncomfortable dialoguebetween the science of trauma and its moralpolitics, and can demonstrate its effectsthrough a series of intimately written casehistories. This is a rare and remarkableachievement.

A Quantitative Tour of the Social Sciences,edited by Andrew Gelman and JeronimoCortina. New York: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2009. 350pp. $32.99 paper. ISBN:9780521680035.

STEPHEN L. MORGAN

Cornell [email protected]

Andrew Gelman and Jeronimo Cortina offerto the social sciences an excellent volumethat will open up new lines of understanding

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between sociologists, political scientists,economists, psychologists, and historians.As its title indicates, the volume presentsa tour of quantitative social science, shapedby the purpose for which the volume was ini-tially constructed—a series of lectures devel-oped for Columbia University’s QuantitativeMethods for the Social Sciences program.This pioneering program was led, at thetime the volume was commissioned, byAndrew Gelman, a professor of statisticsand political science at Columbia.

The resulting quantitative tour is purpose-ful and instructional, open and inviting. It isnot a theory construction manual thatimplores readers to develop theories withclear mathematical properties. Rather, the23 chapters present applications of quantita-tive methods of data analysis, groundedin theoretical models drawn from eachauthor’s respective discipline. Overall, thefocus of the volume is the connectionbetween theory and empirical analysis ofquantitative data. The unifying goal is todemonstrate the ways in which this connec-tion varies across the social sciences.

For example, the distinguished Columbiasociologist Seymour Spilerman (with co-author Emanuele Gerratana) offers fourchapters. First, in ‘‘Models and Theories inSociology,’’ Spilerman offers a brief charac-terization of functionalist theoretical models,following very much in the tradition of Mer-ton, as elaborated by Coleman and Stinch-combe. Then, in ‘‘Explanations of theRacial Disturbances in the 1960s,’’ Spilermandetails his familiar first-rate work from the1970s. He lays out alternative models of theoutbreak of race riots from 1961 to 1968,showing why Poisson models are too con-strained and hence do not fit the data. Hethen develops an alternative negative bino-mial model, which allows for between-cityheterogeneity and fits the data better. Hislast two chapters, ‘‘The Time Series of Lynch-ings in the American South’’ and ‘‘Attain-ment Processes in a Large Organization,’’are written with an analogous structure, dis-cussing measurement challenges and thendemonstrating the process of moving froma simple mathematical model toward its eval-uation with empirical data.

Most other contributions to the volumefollow this basic structure. Each is

illuminating in its own way, though the rela-tive attractiveness of the chapters will surelyvary for each reader. I found the contributionby historian Herbert S. Klein (with coauthorCharles Stockley) to be among the mostenjoyable. In describing the usage of quanti-tative analysis in historical studies, he offers,as an historian should, a full treatment fromMalthusian historical demography onward.Much of his contribution can be read asa lament on the shift in his discipline awayfrom a balanced profile of scholarship thatincluded quantitatively informed social sci-ence toward the near dominance of culturalhistory approaches in most history depart-ments today. Klein concludes, ‘‘I thinkmuch has been lost by the cession of largeportions of our discipline to political science,sociology, and economics, while in compen-sation we have added cultural studies mod-eled on what is done in the English andcomparative literature departments. I don’tthink this has been a fruitful trade, and Ilook forward to the time when a reactionagainst this post-modern trend will set in’’(p. 51).

The unity of the approach taken in the vol-ume is established early by the lead editor,and it is most clearly expressed in Gelman’sinsightful piece, ‘‘The Allure and Limita-tions of Mathematical Modeling: GameTheory and Trench Warfare.’’ In this contri-bution, Gelman launches a frontal assaulton Axelrod’s game theory explanation ofcooperative behavior. The focal exampledeveloped by Axelrod, and attacked by Gel-man, is the decision of opposing soldiers inWorld War I to cooperate with each otherby remaining in their trenches and choosingnot to shoot, contrary to the orders of theircommanding officers. For Axelrod, thisbehavior can be interpreted through anapplication of the prisoner’s dilemma,wherein each side is better off when bothrecognize that they should cooperate witheach other by not shooting. Gelman’s centralobjection is simple: the taken-for-grantedassumption that soldiers have immediateincentives to fire is wrong. Firing revealsone’s own position to the enemy, and killinga single enemy soldier does not substantiallydecrease the probability of being shot whenrising above the ridge of the trench. Becausean immediate disincentive to fire exists,

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Gelman maintains that the prisoner’s dilemmapayoff schedule does not apply. Gelmanconcludes that, for this case, ‘‘cooperationis completely natural and requires no specialexplanation’’ (p. 24). He continues, stating,‘‘This is an example of a sophisticated mathe-matical model being created to explain behav-ior that is perfectly natural’’ (pp. 24–25).

The implication of this statement is thendemonstrated in the chapters that follow.Fancy math is fine, and formal models areworth development. Yet, the utility of suchapproaches to social science is best realizedwhen models are submitted to appropriatebut rigorous empirical evaluation. Notably,Cortina ends the volume with a presentationof the counterfactual and potential outcomemodel of causality, which is growing inprominence as a cutting-edge method toevaluate empirical evidence. Overall, theapproach to social science presented in thevolume is appealing and, from my perspec-tive, consistent with the best traditions ofsociological analysis.

Colossal Control Failures: From Julius Caesar to9/11, by Jack P. Gibbs. Boulder, CO:Paradigm Publishers, 2009. 304pp. $36.95paper. ISBN: 9781594515279

ROBERT GRAMLING


Jack Gibbs’ basic premise is that many/mostsituations can be seen as attempts by humanactors to control something (themselves,other people, and inanimate objects) and con-sequently many events that happen area result of control failures. ‘‘Have you everrisked big money and lost it? Been turneddown for a loan? . . . Ever been unable to starta car?’’ (p. 3). Gibbs moves from these com-mon and relatively trivial failures and in thefirst two chapters of Colossal Control Failuresdevelops a relatively complex typology toanalyze control mechanisms. He then usesthis typology to examine 11, chapter-lengthexamples of significant historical events.The examples range from Hoover’s effortsto stem the Great Depression, the prosecu-tion’s attempt to convict O. J. Simpson, Cae-sar crossing the Rubicon, AIDS, 9/11, and six

other mega-historical events. The last twochapters attempt to draw conclusions fromthe 11 examples.

Assessing control failures does appear tohave a place. This is basically what theNational Transportation Safety Board does.TWA Flight 800 explodes over the Atlantic;the Exxon Valdez collides with Bligh Reef.These are catastrophic events, but they arecontained in time and place, are usuallydue to less complex human interaction,and the details are not lost in history. I ques-tion whether at least some of the types ofcomplex, amorphous, historical events thatGibbs chooses are appropriate for this meth-odology. I have problems with Gibbs’ analy-sis for four basic reasons.

First, it downplays human interactionand subtlety and seems to lead us to over-simplification. Control and control failuresare based on decisions, but decisions arecomplex and they are rarely made in a vacu-um. Take the Simpson example. By defini-tion, a trial, the events leading up to it,and the jury deliberations are an intenseinteraction process. It is perhaps the posterchild of the construction of social reality. Injust the jury deliberations, 12 individuals,none of whom is allowed to have any first-hand knowledge of the event in question,must through their interaction come upwith an answer to the basic guilty/innocentquestion. This is after being presentedvarious kinds of ‘‘facts’’ designed to contra-dict one another and during a media circus.To cut through all of this and identify twodecisions as the control failures (where tohold the trial and the decision not to usea jury consultant) would seem to be anoversimplification.

Likewise, Gibbs’ argument concerningHoover and the Great Depression boilsdown to three basic points:

� Hoover’s strategy was to convinceindustry leaders to continue to employtheir labor forces although sales werefalling.

� This was not in those leaders’ self-interest and in most cases, they didnot do it.

� Hoover was ideologically opposed todirect governmental assistance to theunemployed and he did not propose it.

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Many historians would probably agreethat these were important, but I suspectthat most of them would also have takena much more nuanced approached to thebeginnings of the Great Depression. Whatabout the control of the stock market bya handful of elite players? What about analmost unregulated banking system?

Second, the historical record is simply not asdefinitive as Gibbs would like it to be. WithCaesar’s crossing the Rubicon, the paucity ofthe surviving historical record simply limitswhat we can know and the certainty that wecan attribute to what we think we do know.

Third, some things are simply not amena-ble to the analysis of social considerations—decisions. Durkheim got it wrong—there isa physical world out there. By the time weget to the chapter on AIDS, the discussionshifts to ‘‘accepted AIDS theory’’ (AAT)and to nine criticisms of that theory, that cover15 pages. In the end, however, it comesdown to ‘‘The colossal control failure inconnection with AIDS is the unsuccessfulattempt to develop effective preventivemeasures, especially an effective vaccine’’(p. 199). In light of this it would seem thata simple ‘‘medical research has not perfecteda vaccine for AIDS’’ would suffice instead ofa convoluted attempt to force the analysisinto a control failure format.

Finally, by focusing on control failures,Gibbs seems to limit his analysis of control.Why not control successes as well? If Simp-son’s acquittal is a control failure by theprosecution, presuming he was guilty, thenis it not also a control success for thedefense? And, more importantly, to returnto the first point, how can we ignore thecomplex interaction effect between the twoand between all the parties involved?

Gibbs’ approach presumes history can beunraveled like a sweater, definitive cause andeffect demonstrated, and even the causalityof alternative actions established. If Hooverhad acted differently, would we have hadthe Great Depression? If the prosecutor hadacted differently, would Simpson havebeen convicted? These are critically impor-tant, though fundamentally unanswerablequestions, because the answers determinewhether the factors Gibbs identifies are thereasons an event happens, or are of minor,or even no historical consequence.

There are several irritants (at least to thisreader) in the book. A minor one is a slightlypresumptive and arrogant writing style. Forexample, those who disagree with the assess-ment of Hoover are relegated to the ‘‘cottageindustry of historical revisionism’’ (p. 58). Or‘‘Only the mentally challenged will denythat’’ (p. 42); or ‘‘One would have to be naıveor obtuse to deny. . . .’’ (p. 119). A major prob-lem is the acronyms. I found myself constantlyhaving to go back and figure out what theacronyms in a particular sentence stood forin order to make sense of what the authorwas trying to say. In one instance, an acro-nym was created in one sentence, used twosentences later and, as far as I can tell, wasnot used again in the volume. Perhaps Ihave a poorer memory than most, but inorder to retain the interest of those afflictedlike me, more English and fewer blocks ofcapital letters would be useful.

Gibbs is certainly not the first author toargue forcefully that certain trigger eventsbrought on subsequent events, calamities,or even historical epochs. He may be the firstto attempt to establish a method for homingin on virtually all defining events and estab-lishing the specific set of actions, or inac-tions, that determine historical outcomesby using a single analytical approach: focus-ing on control failures.

Collective Creativity: Art and Society in the SouthPacific, by Katherine Giuffre. Burlington,VT: Ashgate, 2009. 163pp. $99.95 cloth.ISBN: 97807546766415.

DUSTIN KIDD

Temple [email protected]

How does an artisan become an artist? Thecontemporary art world includes many formsthat have existed for ages, alongside newerforms that have been created thanks to newtechnologies and creative developments. Theolder forms may have existed for generations,but they have not always been art in the waythat we think of them today. The artisansand craftsmen who built great architecturalstructures, beautiful pottery vessels, andexquisite furniture in the past were rarelyafforded the sort of esteem that artists todayreceive. One of the key questions facing the

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sociology of art is that of how these crafts havetransformed into art and what precisely itmeans for them to do so.

The question of how an artisan becomesan artist is actually a paraphrase of a sectionheading in the third chapter of KatherineGiuffre’s intriguing study Collective Creat-ivity, but in many ways it also serves as thedriving research question for the book.Through ethnographic analysis on the SouthPacific island of Rarotonga, Giuffre is able tountangle the roles of politics, tourism, glob-alization, education, heritage, and the mar-ket in the development of the Cook Islandsart world.

Collective Creativity is based on a year thatGiuffre spent living on Rarotonga during2002–2003, interviewing artists, gallery own-ers, audience members, and those folks whohave no particular interest in art at all. Shearrived there in the midst of an art boom,characterized best as the creation of a Raro-tongan art world and of Rarotongan art itself.Although some of the forms of art thatappeared in this time were actually alreadyin existence, they were not previously iden-tified as art. One of Giuffre’s respondentsinsisted Rarotonga had no art world, eventhough a variety of expressive styles werecommon. The year when artisans becameartists on Rarotonga seems to have been dur-ing 2002.

Cultural transformation does not happeneasily or without controversy. On Rarotonga,the emergence of the art world revealedsocial divides between native residents, for-eign residents, tourists, and expatriatenatives now living mostly in New Zealand.It also raised issues of cultural heritage,which came to a head in an intellectual prop-erty case where a temporary resident fromNew Zealand was sued for painting a nativewoman standing in front of her quilts, and forselling prints of the work. The designs on thepatchwork behind the woman were treatedas the cultural property of the Cook IslandsMaori. The suit did not succeed legally, butit served as a battleground in the fight overwho would be defined as a Rarotongan artist.Ultimately, the emergence of the art worldwas mediated by powerful gallery owners,the development of an international market

for Cook Islands art, and the delineation ofspecific genre for this art.

This book makes interesting use of a varietyof theoretical perspectives. Giuffre opens witha focus on theories of creativity, including bothpsychological and sociological paradigms.This discussion was somewhat surprisingsince the emergence of an art world is verydifferent from the emergence of creativity,and it is unclear how creativity itself wasemerging or transforming in this historicalmoment on Rarotonga. Clearer is the discus-sion of cultural, social, economic, and symboliccapital that Giuffre used in her consideration ofthe key elements of the art market develop-ment, drawing on work by Pierre Bourdieu,Paul DiMaggio, and Harrison White.

Another chapter, accompanied by a sub-stantial appendix, presents a social networkanalysis of the artists of Rarotonga, basedon asking artists in interviews to name thetop three artists on the island. Guiffre wasable to identify four clusters of artists, distin-guished by levels of in-group density, posi-tion within the art market, as well aseducational and nativity differences. TheStars, with the highest in-group density, areall born and educated in New Zealand, aremostly men, and their work auctions at thehighest prices. The Acolytes are the mostdiverse group in terms of their origins, edu-cations, and gender. They are fairly new tothe art world, although their talent is wellnoted, and their in-group density is fairlylow. The Midwives had an in-group densitylower than the Stars and higher than theAcolytes. Predominantly women, theseartists have long histories on the CookIslands, even if their places of birth vary.The name refers to the role that they playin nurturing the developing art world. Fin-ally, the Old Guard is a low-density collectionof primarily self-taught artists with lengthyties to the islands. These groups were initiallyidentified through the mathematical model-ing of the social network analysis.

Collective Creativity bridges ethnographicmethodologies, sociological analyses of art,historical perspectives of the South Pacific,and a variety of theoretical paradigms. Thebook provides an excellent observation ofthe transformation of artisans into artists.

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Lives in Science: How Institutions Affect AcademicCareers, by Joseph C. Hermanowicz.Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,2009. 323pp. $55.00 cloth. ISBN:9780226327617.

DIANA CRANE


This book is a sequel to a previous book bythe same author. The earlier book, The StarsAre Not Enough: Scientists—Their Passionsand Professions (1998), examined the samegroup of physics professors at an earlierstage of their careers. Together these booksprovide valuable information about thecharacteristics of academic careers in phys-ics and of the institutions in which theytake place, as well as about physicists’ per-ceptions of their careers and how these per-ceptions change over time.

The present book is based on 60 in-depthinterviews with physics faculty, almost allof whom were selected randomly and inter-viewed for the previous book. The subjectswere located at six American universitiesthat represented three levels of prestige—top, middle, and bottom—using rankingsof graduate programs by the NationalResearch Council. Because of the small sam-ple size, the author uses small-N compari-sons of his three institutional cases, insteadof statistical analysis. He presents his datain cross-tab tables and includes lengthyquotations from his interviews. His focus iscontinuity and change in academic careers,using three theoretical perspectives, sociol-ogy of occupations for the study of careers,sociology of the life course for his analysisof the effects of aging on careers, and Merto-nian sociology of science for his study of aca-demic stratification.

Joseph Hermanowicz’s major variablesare age and institutional location. At differ-ent levels of prestige, environments of theseuniversities constitute elite worlds, wherethe emphasis is placed on research; pluralistworlds, where both research and teachingare valued; and communitarian worlds,which promote teaching. The author providesdetailed information on the types of changesthat have taken place in these institutions

since he conducted his first study. In general,conditions for research in institutions at allthree levels have deteriorated due toa decline in the availability of federal fund-ing, which has produced a situation inwhich there is ‘‘constraint and growingstringency.’’ Hermanowicz’s goals are tofind out how satisfaction with academiccareers in the three types of universitieshas changed over time and how it variesby the prestige of the university in which itis taking place.

Dividing his sample into three cohorts,early- to mid-career, mid- to late-career,and late- to post-career, Hermanowicz findssubstantial differences in perceptions oftheir careers and of their institutions amongmembers of these cohorts and within eachcohort, by prestige of institution. Most mem-bers of the youngest cohort start out withhigh ambitions for scientific achievement,but by mid-career, only the physicists at eliteinstitutions have retained those ambitions.Physicists at mid-rank institutions stressteaching as well as research while those atlow-rank institutions are primarily orientedtoward teaching. Academic location isstrongly correlated with level of satisfaction.Physicists at elite institutions are very satis-fied with their careers while those at theother types of institutions are not.

These differences between physicists withdifferent types of careers become more pro-nounced in the mid- to late-career stage. Sat-isfaction with their institutions and withthe scientific reward system remains highamong elite physicists but plummets amongcommunitarians and, to a considerableextent, among pluralists.

Paradoxically, Hermanowicz finds thatsatisfaction with their careers and with thescientific reward system decreases amongelite scientists when they are on the vergeof retirement or after retirement while satis-faction with their careers increases duringthis period among those who are located atless prestigious schools. He explains thesefindings by the fact that rewards at presti-gious schools diminish with age along withpositive perceptions of the scientific rewardsystem while, among physicists at less pres-tigious schools, scientific rewards cease to beimportant. At the same time, physicists atless prestigious schools become more

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satisfied with their academic environments.After retirement, physicists at less presti-gious schools are likely to abandon research,particularly communitarians, while elitephysicists persevere in the face of diminish-ing rewards.

In order to interpret his findings, Herman-owicz draws on theories from his three theo-retical perspectives and develops a set of 40propositions he presents in an appendixunder several categories, including anomieand adaptation, reference groups and socialcontrol, and social control of the life course.Physicists in all three groups experienceanomie as their expectations for achievingscientific rewards diminish although theirmodes of adaptation, such as ritualism,retreatism, and rebellion, differ. Hermano-wicz finds that discontent with the scientificreward system is widespread at all levels ofthe system. Physicists in the three groups areoriented in different degrees toward refer-ence groups, such as leading scientists. Elitesevaluate their accomplishments in relationto those of eminent scientists. Pluralistsgradually cease to conform to the norms ofthese reference groups, preferring to evalu-ate their accomplishments on their own.Most communitarians rapidly begin to eval-uate their performance in terms of teachingrather than research.

In his concluding chapter, the author alsodiscusses the relevance of his findings forother academic fields. Although the bookmakes an important contribution to the rela-tively neglected field of academic careersand stratification, almost all of the referencesin Hermanowicz’s bibliography were pub-lished in the previous century, most ofthem decades ago.

The Fate of Young Democracies, by Ethan B.Kapstein and Nathan Converse. Cam-bridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,2008. 188pp. $29.99 paper. ISBN:9780521732628.

JAMES BURK

Texas A&M [email protected]

The hope is long-lived that the world wouldbe a better place if more countries were

governed by strong democratic regimes. Inrecent years that hope has been backed byforeign policies and international programstrying to promote democracy where it isnot well established. The open question iswhether and how that can be done. EthanKapstein and Nathan Converse claim thatit is possible and that the chances for successimprove when leaders of young democra-cies build institutions that disperse econo-mic and political power and are supportedin this by the international community.

Kapstein and Converse are not interestedin democracies per se, but rather with epi-sodes of democratization. A democratizingepisode is defined as an increase, in any givenyear, of six points on a country’s score on thePolity IV index of democracy. It is the move-ment toward democracy that matters, notthe level of democracy attained. In principle,by this measure, a country might be democ-ratizing and yet still be classified as ‘‘undem-ocratic’’; this did not happen in fact. Anepisode of democratization fails when it isstopped by a revolutionary antidemocraticchange in governance. The risk of reversalis not small. Of the 123 episodes of democra-tization occurring between 1960 and 2004,56—about 46 percent—were reversed.(Methodological details and the empiricalclassification of cases are nicely summarizedin the book’s appendices.)

To understand the fate of young democra-cies, Kapstein and Converse encourage us torevise two major ideas we hold aboutdemocratization. One is that the fate ofyoung democracies is determined mainlyby the ‘‘initial conditions’’ a democracy con-fronts when assuming power. Among diffi-cult ‘‘initial conditions’’ are a high degreeof ethnic fragmentation, high levels of pov-erty, and dependence on oil revenues. Theseconditions create deficits of trust because itis hard for leaders to deliver on their prom-ises. Their credibility suffers. Without credi-bility, it is difficult for leaders to be acceptedas legitimate. Here is a catch-22. Time isrequired to build credibility as a ground onwhich legitimacy rests. But without legiti-macy, there is no time to build credibility.Caught in this dilemma, Latin Americanleaders sought to circumvent the issue, pur-suing short-term populist programs at theexpense of long-term economic well-being.

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Still, Kapstein and Converse reject an ‘‘initialconditions’’ determinist perspective. In Lat-in American, they show, political and eco-nomic leaders can choose and sometimesact to overcome challenges posed by unfa-vorable conditions.

The second idea is linked with moderniza-tion theory. It states that democratization isa product of economic performance, withhigh growth conducive to democratizationand low growth conducive to democraticreversals. Poverty, high infant mortality rates,and low economic growth are all factors thatcontribute to democratic reversals. Even so,economic variables do not tell the wholestory. Countries have confronted theseobstacles and also consolidated their democ-racies. Doing so since the 1990s has dependedpartly on a supportive international commu-nity. Despite poor economies, Eastern Euro-pean countries allied with the democraticEU have successfully built institutions thatthwart or prevent the concentration of exec-utive power. Contrast this with the experi-ence of countries allied with Russia.

Consider also democratic success and fail-ure in East Asia. Modernization theoristsmight explain democracy’s rise in the ‘‘tigereconomies’’ of South Korea and Taiwan asa by-product of authoritarian presidentialrule. But, as Kapstein and Converse explain,matters are more complex. Authoritarianregimes (say in Pakistan or Myanmar) donot always sustain economic growth orlead to stable democracies. And, as shownby the reversal of democracy in Thailand in2006, even when authoritarian regimes sus-tain economic growth, they may not shoreup democracy. Generalizations are hazard-ous. There is no linear path to democracythrough economic growth.

In sum, Kapstein and Converse concludethat the success or failure of democracies isshaped by the interaction of initial condi-tions, economic performance, political insti-tutions, and support from the internationalcommunity. It is hard to quarrel with them.

No doubt practitioners in the field willwant a fuller discussion of variables men-tioned all too briefly in the book. I wouldhave liked more attention paid to war andthe military. Others would pay more atten-tion to government spending. But thesequibbles detract little from the book’s major

accomplishments. Kapstein and Converseprovide a succinct and valuable guide towhat we know about why young democra-cies survive or fail. Most important, theydemonstrate over and over again that youngdemocracies are more likely to succeedwhen their leaders build institutions thatconstrain and disperse political and economicpower. This is not easy to do. But it has beendone. It remains an urgent question, not onlyfor policymakers and scholars, to ask whatencourages leaders to choose this path andwhat empowers them to follow it.

Members Only: Elite Clubs and the Processof Exclusion, by Diana Kendall. Lanham,MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers,Inc., 2008. 191pp. $29.95 paper. ISBN:9780742545563.

KARYN LACY


A distinguishing characteristic of privatesocial clubs is that they are free to admit orreject whomever they want. Civil rights leg-islation prohibiting discrimination in publicaccommodations does not apply to privateclubs. How elite club members activelyengage in exclusion and what gains arereaped from doing so is the subject of DianaKendall’s sobering book Members Only. Ken-dall’s central argument is that elites enhancetheir privileged social standing in societybehind the walls of private clubs wherethey accumulate coveted resources that arenot available to outsiders. These organiza-tions are truly havens for America’s old elitefamilies. Because it is impossible to acquireclub status on the basis of money alone,even the parvenu cannot gain access to thekind of exclusive lifestyle that is conferredthrough membership in elite social clubs.

Elite clubs’ strict reliance on traditionthroughout the recruitment process ensuresthat clubs will only admit new memberswho have the same characteristics and orien-tation as the existing members. In fact, newrecruits must be sponsored by an existingmember, who makes the case, convincingthe membership committee that the appli-cant is ‘‘one of us.’’ Thus, by this standard,

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individuals perceived as lacking the rightconnections are never approached aboutjoining an elite club; women, blacks, Jews,gays, and ‘‘new money,’’ Kendall explains,are routinely overlooked by elite clubs’membership committees. Even when anapplicant possesses the requisite social ties,he cannot be certain that an elite club willaccept him. To be sure, membership commit-tees evaluate an applicant’s income, sincethe person must have sufficient economicresources to manage hefty initiation fees,monthly dues (typically $500–$800 permonth), and additional incidentals such asgolf fees, bar tabs, and dining bills. Theseexpenses alone would prohibit most Ameri-cans from joining an elite club. But, alongwith income requirements, the membershipcommittee also imposes moral judgments,scrutinizing an applicant’s lifestyle, fromhis family of origin and that of his wife toinformation on other types of club member-ships and business connections. Here, as inall aspects of elite club life, what mattersmost is fitting in. The membership commit-tee walks a fine line, balancing the occasionalneed for new members with a desire touphold the club’s reputation as ‘‘very diffi-cult, if not impossible, to join’’ (p. 45).

Once admitted, new members are social-ized into an elite club subculture, character-ized by its own distinctive values, norms,and lifestyle. Developing respect and anappreciation for how things have alwaysbeen done at the club is essential to becom-ing a good club member, and the club workshard to ensure that its traditions, values, andbeliefs are not dispersed beyond its member-ship base. New members gain access to theclub’s membership lists, activities, newslet-ter, and bylaws, all of which are carefullyguarded by existing members and the lead-ership, but this unrestricted access carrieswith it a commonly understood form ofsocial restraint: a commitment to protectingthe privacy of existing members by notrevealing their personal information, suchas unlisted phone numbers and personale-mail addresses, or any information learnedthrough interactions at the club.

Elite clubs can be distinguished further bythe kind of networking, dining, and dresscodes that clubs privilege. Some membersinvite potential business associates to their

club, under the assumption that if the club’smembers enjoy socializing with them, thena positive business relationship is likely.Others speak fondly of the elaborate lunchbuffets and seated dinners, opportunities toentertain close friends over a meal preparedby a five-star chef. Members’ children areexposed to the good life too, as they partakein tennis or golf lessons and lounge by theclub’s Olympic-size pool. Adults enjoy pri-vate sessions with experts, from conversa-tions with art dealers to wine tastings toreceptions with politicians and top govern-ment officials. Typically, elite clubs requiremen to wear a coat and tie in the main diningroom, and most clubs prohibit jeans, sweat-shirts, and miniskirts. These unique clubcharacteristics encourage club members tothink of themselves as superior to others;clubs recruit the most powerful membersof society, and the club subculture reinforcestheir social standing.

Most people can only imagine what actu-ally happens inside the walls of elite clubs.Kendall’s book is a fascinating account ofthe ways in which elite groups carveout exclusive spaces for themselves at theexpense of less privileged groups. Althoughher study included a handful of black andLatino male club members, we do not hearmuch from them in the book, raising inter-esting questions about how minority groupsperceive their elite status. But this is a smallquibble about a work that brings us a giantstep closer to understanding the social worldof the upper crust.

The Biopolitics of Breast Cancer: ChangingCultures of Disease and Activism, by MarenKlawiter. Minneapolis, MN: University ofMinnesota Press, 2008. 397pp. $25.00 paper.ISBN: 9780816651085.

CHRIS GANCHOFF

Michigan State [email protected]

Since the end of the 1960s, the dynamics ofactivism in and around health, illness, andmedicine have undergone many transforma-tions. Scholarly analyses of the conditions,causes, and effects of this distinct field ofactivity have also changed, broadening and

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deepening perspectives on the complicatedintersections among patient organizations,political agencies, economic organizations,and health care institutions. Maren Kla-witer’s contribution to these lines of researchis an important one for many reasons. Kla-witer examines the changing forms ofbiomedical and biopolitical discourses, prac-tices, and organizations that constitute thediagnosis, treatment, and social organizationof breast cancer from a broad historical per-spective. Her book combines keen theoreti-cal work, synthesizing social movement,poststructuralist, and feminist modes of the-orizing with detailed empirical researchdrawn from extensive fieldwork in theNorthern California (San Francisco) BayArea.

Klawiter begins by developing a theoreti-cal framework she calls ‘‘social movementswithout the sovereign,’’ designed to openup analyses of health social movementsand avoid some of the blindspots of earliertheories. She elaborates her approach by pri-oritizing different ‘‘structuring practices’’ ofhealth activism, such as the varied usesand performances of the body by breast can-cer activists. She contextualizes analyses ofthese practices through attention to ‘‘diseaseregimes,’’ or collective historical forms ofunderstanding health and illness. In aninsightful section, Klawiter argues that theconcept of disease regimes shifts the analyt-ical focus away from discrete levels ofbiomedicalization (such as subjective experi-ences or institutional control) and towardthe myriad practices that comprise patientactivism. This move from levels to practicesallows her to disaggregate breast canceractivism across history, organizationalstyles, and forms of clinical treatment. Inher analysis, disease regimes serve as bothfoundations of action and sites of conflict;she meticulously documents these regimesworking through Foucault’s concept of bio-power, moving from public health ‘‘adminis-tration’’ of breast cancer (Foucault’s‘‘biopolitics of populations’’) to the clinical‘‘management’’ of cancer treatment (or the‘‘anatomo-politics of individual bodies’’).

In Part I, Klawiter describes two regimesof breast cancer in the United States. Thefirst (the ‘‘regime of medicalization’’)stretched from the late nineteenth through

the late twentieth centuries and was charac-terized by the construction of breast canceras a ‘‘curable’’ disease, professional domi-nance (namely, cancer surgeons) throughtechniques like the ‘‘one-step’’ biopsy andmastectomy procedure, and norms of secrecysurrounding post-procedure social life formany women. By the 1970s, a new regime(the ‘‘regime of biomedicalization’’) beganto take shape, influenced by technicaladvances in medical screening and imaging.In addition, emerging less radical (in termsof surgery) treatments were becoming popu-lar, promoted in some cases by breast cancerpatients themselves.

These changes in the diagnosis and treat-ment of breast cancer set the stage for PartII of the book, which foregrounds the con-cept of ‘‘cultures of action’’ (or COA).COAs are permeable and fluid sets of actors,composed of individuals, groups, formalorganizations (patients and their groups,governmental agencies, and pharmaceuticalcompanies among others), and coalitions,held together through shared affiliations,goals, and campaigns. Over half of thebook is devoted to close empirical descrip-tion and analyses of three COAs, whichKlawiter segments according to differentvariables, including public symbols, atti-tudes toward science, and forms of bodypolitics and political culture. The Susan G.Komen Breast Cancer Foundation and theirwell-known Race for the Cure epitomizethe first COA, described as ‘‘the culture ofearly detection and screening activism.’’The second, ‘‘the culture of patient empow-erment and feminist treatment activism,’’challenged the previous COA on severalfronts, such as constructing critiques of can-cer screening and cultivating a broader‘‘emotional culture,’’ antagonistic towardthe perceived ‘‘pinkwashing’’ of breast can-cer. The final COA, ‘‘the culture of cancerprevention and environmental activism,’’drew upon feminist arguments, as well asanti-corporate and environmental justiceframes and rhetorics. In examining eachCOA, Klawiter uses multiple methods,including thick ethnographic description,interviews, and visual forms of data likephotographs to draw out the nuances ofeach kind of cultural production. She con-nects distinct lines of activism in each COA

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with local social contexts (or what she calls‘‘fields of contention’’) and focuses attentionon why location matters for health socialmovements.

She concludes in Part III with an extendedcase study of one breast cancer patient, fol-lowing her across the changing contours ofBay area COAs. She also looks at changesin these COAs in the twenty-first century,using concepts of risk to examine emergingassemblages of technologies, discourses,and forms of embodiment and subjectivityin and around the biopolitics of breastcancer.

Klawiter deftly synthesizes complextheoretical literatures, expansive historicalhorizons, and detailed ethnographic andinterview data and crafts a remarkable nar-rative that contributes to multiple fields ofresearch. She also provides a helpful concep-tual vocabulary for further research into ter-rains of patient activism. This book will be ofvalue to anyone interested in social move-ments, the politics and policy of breast can-cer, and patient activism and organization.Sociologists of all stripes will find somethingof value in this important book.

Pedagogy of Democracy: Feminism and theCold War in the U.S. Occupation of Japan, byMire Koikari. Philadelphia, PA: TempleUniversity Press, 2008. 226 pp. $54.50 cloth.ISBN: 9781592137008.

BARBARA MOLONY

Santa Clara [email protected]

Mire Koikari’s study of the American occupa-tion of Japan (1945–1952) overturns old para-digms. Her book is centered on the role offeminism and women’s rights—before thewar, during the occupation, and in the histor-ical memory of the occupation constructedduring the past half century. But her book isnot limited to women’s rights issues. Rather,it addresses and undermines almost allaspects of the occupation era, includingthose, like the writing of the postwar consti-tution, usually not analyzed in terms of gen-der. She challenges both the triumphalistAmerican image of wise occupation propo-nents of democracy teaching misguided

Japanese (a view shared by many Japanese)as well as the opposite historiographicalview—a position I call the ‘‘Madame Butter-fly’’ approach (Molony and Uno 2005)—thatthe occupation was an example of Americanmasculine dominance over a feminine, subor-dinate Japan. Neither of these views grantsagency to Japanese women.

Koikari’s approach does. She notesthat Japanese women of a variety ofbackgrounds—from middle-class feministsand working-class factory workers toprostitutes—and American women occupa-tion officers were imbricated in many wayswith one another (and in the case of prosti-tutes, with American men), and this destabi-lized cold war reform ideology. Thesewomen intersected in ways that ‘‘chal-lenge[d] essentialist notions of women andmen, occupiers and occupied, and whiteand colored, . . . reveal[ing] heterogeneity,difference, and hierarchy embedded withineach category’’ (p. 190).

Koikari takes an approach that some willfind challenging; I found it convincing. Heruse of data is exhaustive. Her linking of indi-viduals whom historians have not discussedin tandem (e.g., historian Mary Beard andoccupation official Ethel Weed) presentsa new picture of the occupation. Beard andWeed admired one another, and theycommunicated frequently by letter, con-sulting on topics dealing with women’srights in Japan. This kind of interaction,Koikari notes, was an example of the ‘‘leak-age’’ that undercut the ‘‘containment’’ (ofwomen, communism, nuclear weapons, racial‘‘others,’’ sexuality, disease, and subversion),features of the occupation believed essentialto America’s role in the postwar world.

Koikari describes ‘‘leakage’’ of the policyof containment of women in four chapters.Chapter Two analyzes the occupation’s twomajor ‘‘feminist liberation narratives’’(p. 34): that General Douglas MacArthurgave Japanese women the vote, and BeateSirota Gordon gave women constitutionalequality. These narratives, the heart of theAmerican triumphalist view, eradicated thehistory of Japan’s prewar women’s rightsmovement. At the same time, because thisview ignored prewar feminism, it alsoerased feminism’s linkage with the wartimeJapanese state. Koikari notes that, ironically,

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feminists, by working with the occupation,were linked to empires both during and afterthe war. In this chapter, Koikari also showsthat Gordon was a complicated historicalfigure. The constitutional changes Gordonproposed, most of which she did not get,were modeled on European welfare states,not the United States. As a naturalized U.S.citizen of Russian Jewish descent, she wassuspect in the eyes of conservative occupi-ers. Despite her centrality to the story ofthe occupation, Gordon was a destabilizingfigure.

Chapter Three discusses the imple-mentation of gender policies. The centralcharacters are Americans Ethel Weed andCarmen Johnson of the occupation’s CivilInformation and Education Section and Jap-anese members of groups like the WCTU,YWCA, and Women’s Democratic Club.Instructional meetings and lectures werethe main method of disseminating informa-tion. Close bonds of professional collabora-tion among Japanese and American womenled to great consternation on the part ofsome men in the occupation. Homosocialbonds, Korikari notes, were anathema tomen who stressed the rightness of heterosex-uality. One even denounced women’s sec-tions in unions as a form of ‘‘Jim Crowism.’’

Chapter Four examines ironies amongwomen on the left. Many stressed solidaritywith Asian women in the face of cold warrivalries. Just as the middle-class womendiscussed in Chapter Three used Americanwomen as examples, women on the left usu-ally used Chinese and Soviet women asmodels. Some viewed Japanese women asvictims of wartime sexism and imperialismand, like their middle-class feminist counter-parts, downplayed Japan’s imperialismtoward Asia and their complicity in it.

Chapter Five analyzes the most destabiliz-ing group of Japanese women—prostitutes.At a time when American masculinity wasexhorted to stand up with virility to commu-nism, thousands of soldiers with venerealdiseases (VD) were seen as morally degener-ate. The occupation rounded up Japanesewomen of all classes for VD testing. Femi-nists were outraged; Japanese men wereinsulted by American men’s seizure of‘‘their’’ women and the insinuation thatthese women were not ‘‘sexually and racially

pure’’ (p. 171). The anti-VD movement madestrange bedfellows: middle-class feministsbriefly joined with working-class women toassert their purity against the prostitutes,whom they wanted to take off the streets.In the end, gender issues complicated theoccupation; the occupiers were underminedby Japanese feminists’ agency, working-classwomen’s activism, and prostitutes’ subjec-tivity. Within each of these categories, therewas heterogeneity—not all occupiers weremen, and not all feminists, workers, andprostitutes thought alike. Koikari showspersuasively that hierarchies and differen-ces among women and men, and thebridges built over these differences, shapedthe occupation and America’s cold warstatus.

Reference

Molony, Barbara and Kathleen Uno, eds. 2005. ‘‘Intro-

duction.’’ P. 16 in Gendering Modern Japanese History

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center.

Cultural Movements and Collective Memory:Christopher Columbus and the Rewriting of theNational Origin Myth, by Timothy Kubal.New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.261pp. $95.00 cloth. ISBN: 9781403975775.

JENNIFER A. JORDAN

University of Wisconsin, [email protected]

In Cultural Movements and Collective Mem-ory, Timothy Kubal turns to a phenomenonthat was long overdue for sociologicalinvestigation—the multiple and sometimespowerfully conflictual meanings attachedto Christopher Columbus. These meaningsflare up with particular intensity on October12, Columbus Day, from Boston to Denver,and from Mexico City to Caracas. Kubalhas chosen an inherently intriguing phe-nomenon and has investigated it in a sys-tematic, thorough, well-researched, andwell-organized way. The chapter headingsalone make resolutely clear that a singleobject of collective memory can be profound-ly polyvalent: ‘‘Patriotic,’’ ‘‘Religious,’’ ‘‘Eth-nic: American Indian,’’ ‘‘Ethnic: Hispanic

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American,’’ ‘‘Ethnic: Italian American,’’ and‘‘Anticolonial.’’ The substantive chapters ofthe book reveal a fascinating sequence ofevents that shed light on a particularly pow-erful symbol in the United States and beyond.

Kubal writes about the efforts of NativeAmerican groups in the United Statesand beyond to replace Columbus Daywith Indigenous Peoples Day, the way thatColumbus became an organizing principlefor panethnic Italian identity, and the useof Columbus Day to galvanize protestsagainst colonialism. In most of the cases,he examines, very different groups of peo-ple are brought together under the umbrellaof broad panethnic identities. The holidaybecomes a polyvalent flashpoint for manydifferent groups, a way to anchor activismand identity formation. One of the mostintriguing sections of the book is the discus-sion of Columbus Day in the context of LatinAmerican social movements and politicalmobilization. In Mexico City, Zapatista leaderRamona comes out of hiding in the jungleto attend a Columbus Day march in October1996 (p. 96). ‘‘In 1997, Columbus Day inEcuador included thousands of Andeanand jungle Indians who mobilized to capturethe capital city. In the Honduras [sic]capital, a crowd gathered at the downtownColon Plaza to smash a Columbus statue’’(p. 97). And ‘‘in 2004, Venezuelan protestersgathered at the Columbus statue on Col-umbus Day, tore it down with huge ropes,and then dragged it away with a truck’’(p. 99).

Kubal relies somewhat heavily on whatseems to have been a preestablished theo-retical framework, ‘‘three political processtheories—political opportunity, resourcemobilization, and framing’’ (p. xiv) whenin fact his findings speak to a much broadersociological and interdisciplinary literatureon both collective memory and socialmovements. The book could have benefitedfrom a more thorough engagement of thelikes of Barry Schwartz on Lincoln andWashington, as well as Gary Fine, Jeff Olick,and Lyn Spillman, not to mention PierreNora and Maurice Halbwachs (the lastthree do not even appear in the references).In the discussion of civil religion, Dur-kheim is curiously absent, but his inclusionwould have aided the author in drawing

out the larger significance of his fascinatingdata.

While the substantive chapters are bothintriguing and instructive, the theoreticalframing of the book does not always do jus-tice to the richness of the author’s data andfindings. This contrast is most present inthe introduction and conclusion, whereKubal relies heavily on a notion of powerand powerlessness that fits neither the sub-stantive findings of the book nor state-of-the-art theories of power and culture. Thisis actually a relatively frequent issue in stud-ies of collective memory. In fact, under cer-tain circumstances, people outside of theconventional channels of ‘‘power’’ (or gover-nance, or income) exert surprising and suc-cessful levels of control over memoriallandscapes and messages. The oppositionthat Kubal and other scholars make betweenthe powerful and the powerless is linguisti-cally dismissive of the recurring ability ofa wide range of people to shape collectivememory in ways that are not always con-trolled by captains of industry or well-connected politicians. In the introductionKubal writes that ‘‘Powerless individualscan rewrite the past, if they unite throughcollective action’’ (p. xv)—but doesn’t thisability to rewrite the past imply that, at leastin some respects, they are not powerless? Inthe conclusion Kubal asserts that ‘‘as groupsgain power, they will lose control over cul-tural resources like memory. . . . It is notthe powerful that control the past, but ratherit is the ‘soon to be’ powerful that control thepast’’ (p. 171). There is little evidence for thisstatement in the book itself, and certainly notin the broader literature on collective mem-ory. What the author has stumbled on insteadis the coexistence of multiple forms of mem-ory, created and sustained with varyingmodels of ‘‘power.’’ Sometimes official col-lective memory comes with a united voicefrom the grassroots, sometimes it appearswith a heavy hand from the state, but thesemultiple and sometimes contradictory possi-bilities are well worth observing.

A final comment I have is actually an issuewith the publisher, regarding the placementof citations and tables. It is not clear to mewhy the citations are placed in footnotes.Given the presence of a bibliography, whynot just use standard in-text author-date

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citations? Similarly, the data would havebeen better served by integrating at leastsome of the 73 tables and figures into thetext rather than relegating them to theappendix. Again this is clearly an issuewith the press rather than the author, butthe author’s extensive research would havebeen better served by these changes in thelayout of the book.

Secularism and State Policies Toward Religion:The United States, France, and Turkey byAhmet T. Kuru. New York: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2009. 313pp. $27.95 paper.ISBN: 9780521741347

ROGER FINKE

Penn State [email protected]

This book is part of the Cambridge Studiesin Social Theory, Religion, and Politics series.Like previous contributions, this bookattempts to understand religion-state rela-tions and the larger consequences of theserelations. Moving beyond previous norma-tive arguments, Ahmet Kuru explains thatpolitical science is now trying to understand‘‘how religion and politics interact, not wheth-er they should’’ (p. 3). He proposes to take usbeyond the economic determinism (modern-ization theories), the religious determinism(civilizational theories), and the assumedpreferences (rational choice theories) of pastexplanations by analyzing ideological strug-gles and how these struggles shape state-religion relationships. Although the bookfalls short of offering a new theoreticalframework for analyzing these relationships,it makes important contributions to the the-oretical discussions and contributes a wealthof information on religion and politics inFrance, Turkey, and the United States.

Central to the author’s discussion on ideo-logical struggles is his distinction betweenassertive secularism, which requires the stateto take an assertive role in excluding religionfrom the public arena and passive secularism,which obliges the state to play a more pas-sive role and to allow religion a visible pres-ence in the public sphere. Though othershave made similar points, using a slightlydifferent vocabulary, Kuru goes on to offer

extensive evidence on the important differ-ences between various secular states and todocument the ongoing struggles betweenassertive and passive secularists withineach country. For Kuru, these two distinctforms of secularism frame the ideologicalstruggles and help determine the state poli-cies that result.

Using detailed case studies of France, Tur-key, and the United States, Kuru illustratesand tests his arguments. Relying on anextensive list of legal and political docu-ments, interviews with political elites, andexisting research sources, he gives an histor-ical and contemporary view of religion andstate relations in each country. For eachcountry he addresses both how the currentrelationship emerged and the consequencesof this relationship. The United States servesas his example of passive secularism. Hemarches through a series of court cases toillustrate the struggles that have occurred.France and Turkey serve as examples ofassertive secularism, with each state takinga more active role in excluding religionfrom public areas. Here, he points to theimportance of ancien regimes in shapinghow the state reacts to religious expressionand voice in the public arena. In the case ofTurkey, he notes that the courts argued a rig-id secularism was needed to control the all-encompassing guidelines of Islam and thatassertive secularism was imported fromFrance in an attempt to modernize thenation. Building on de Tocqueville, heargues that France’s assertive secularismarose from the church’s connection to theancien regime and the strong anti-clerical-ism that resulted.

For those interested in religion-state rela-tions in France, Turkey, and the UnitedStates, this book is essential reading. Hiscareful review of primary documents givesan inside look at how the relationshipbetween religion and state is negotiated incurrent times. From legislation to court casesto administrative actions, he reviews howassertive and passive secularists strugglewith religion policy. As mentioned earlier,his review of historical documents also helpsto establish why and how different secularstates were founded in France, Turkey, andthe United States. His review of Turkey isespecially insightful as he tries to solve the

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puzzle of how the Ottoman Empire gaveway to an assertive secularist state. And,though he divides the secular states intothe dichotomous categories of assertive andpassive, he is well aware of the fine distinc-tions and variations that exist.

The most significant shortfall of the bookmight be viewed by some as a strong point:his research did little to challenge civiliza-tional and rational choice theories. Ratherthan taking the reader beyond civilizationaland rational choice theories, as he proposed,he often relied heavily on these explanationsand found many areas where the variousarguments were complementary. The histori-cal arguments, in particular, often relied onstructural, institutional, and human agencyarguments rather than ideological explana-tions. The author concludes a chapter on theUnited States by noting that ideology‘‘trumped’’ other explanations, specifyingthat the ‘‘struggle between the anticlericaland conservatives in France was primarilyideological’’ (pp. 99, 158). But his evidencefor these bold statements was far more mod-est. Despite these minor quibbles, Kuru hasproduced an impressive body of research.He has shown effectively that ideology canshape preferences and frame debates. More-over, he has illustrated the wide variation insecular states and the ideologies they promote.In short, Kuru’s Secularism and State PoliciesToward Religion helps us understand boththe origins and consequences of the varietyof secular states and the policies that result.

Daughters of Aquarius: Women of the SixtiesCounterculture, by Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo. Lawrence, KS: University ofKansas Press, 2009. 234 pp. $24.95 cloth.ISBN: 9780700616336.

MARION S. GOLDMAN


Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo confronts stereo-types about ‘‘hippie chicks’’ in the 1960s and’70s. She asserts that the Second Wave ofAmerican feminism was not confined to col-lege campuses and New Left political organi-zations. Informal, highly personal feminismalso emerged among young women who tried

to change their own lives by making choicesthat made an enduring collective socialimpact.

Daughters of Aquarius is grounded inassumptions that culturally rebellious womenin cities, suburbs, and rural areas producedsome significant innovations that politicalactivists absorbed and integrated into theirown theories and practice. Moreover, thecounterculture itself, particularly women,inspired social change without resorting tomass actions or rhetorical flourishes.Lemke-Santangelo describes how womenleft traditional roles at home, at school, andin the workplace to challenge establishedgender constructs. They usually departedfrom their homes individually, but latercame together in inexpensive urban neigh-borhoods in places like San Francisco, Den-ver, and Boston, or they joined the motleycaravans attempting to establish communesand collectives in the countryside. A numberof counterculture women became widelyrespected advocates for home birth and mid-wifery, informally contributing to the wom-en’s health movement and various medicalinnovations that are now widely accepted.They also shared and wrote about tradition-al herbal remedies, and their work nour-ished the growth and spread of holistic andnaturopathic approaches to wellness and ill-ness. In the early ’70s, Alicia Bay Laurel soldclose to 500,000 copies of her book abouthomespun cures, organic gardening, andvoluntary simplicity.

Songwriters and singers like Joni Mitchell,Judy Collins, and Gracie Slick strongly iden-tified with the counterculture. They wroteand performed songs that changed popularmusic. These women of the counterculturewere role models for others attempting tovoice their own experience and avoid beingback-up singers or smiling robots perform-ing material that was written by and aimedtoward men. Women were also central tothe development of alternative spiritualityand magical practices in the ’60s and ’70s.They were disproportionately representedin a number of new religious movementslike the Divine Light Mission and the SanFrancisco Zen Center. The daughters ofAquarius also popularized individualizedpractices like tarot card reading, palmistry,and labyrinth walking. They participated in

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the founding of varied branches of Wiccanand Neopagan groups that emphasize wom-en’s spirituality and that are still active in thetwenty-first century.

The women singers and soldiers of thecounterculture were usually between 16 and30 years old and they were almost alwayswhite. Lembke-Santangelo asserts that indi-viduals from middle-class families felt finan-cially secure enough to depart from themainstream and embark on personal questsfor more authentic and fulfilling ways of liv-ing. It is possible that voluntary simplicity ismost attractive to people who have enjoyedprosperity and still feel that something cru-cial is missing from their lives.

She also observes that women and men inthe counterculture both idealized and alsomarginalized women of color. However,Lemke-Santangelo does not fully explorehow issues of ethnic diversity and the poli-tics of race unfolded in the counterculture,although the tension between women of colorand white feminists is a central theme in his-tories of the Second Wave of American Fem-inism. Lemke-Santangelo alludes to thecounterculture women’s appropriation ofIndian tribal symbols and practices, and cul-tural appropriation is another importanttheme that could have been explored in rela-tion to urban aesthetics and rural communallife. She offers tantalizing examples of theintersections of gender and race in the per-sonal politics of the ’60s, without fullyexploring the implications.

This social history draws together a richvariety of documentary sources, along withinterviews archived by the University ofKansas 60s Communes Project, and extendedconversations that Lemke-Santangelocontacted through her own networks. How-ever, there is no systematic methodology tosupport her observations and enlarge thescope of the project. At times, however, seren-dipity may have been as valuable as system-atic research. The estate of Irwin Kline,a noted photographer from the era, suppliedextraordinary illustrations that captured thespirit of the times. First-rate color reproduc-tions of ornate concert posters and illustra-tions also add another dimension to writtenhistory.

After many decades of fading popular andacademic visibility, these vivid women come

alive once more in Lemke-Santangelo’swork. She has looked to the past and openedthe door to future research, when emergingfeminist standpoint theory and newapproaches to social movements willaddress women of the counterculture andtheir historical influence.

The Reconstruction of Space and Time: MobileCommunication Practices, edited by RichLing and Scott W. Campbell. NewBrunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers,2009. 271pp. $49.95 cloth. ISBN:9781412808095.

BARRY WELLMAN


The Mobile Revolution

If you’re over 30, you should remember whentelephones rang only in known places—home tabletops, workplace desktops, orphone booths. They were embedded in thelives of the people who inhabited those pla-ces. Usually, everyone present would knowwho was calling; often everyone wouldknow what the call was about. But telephonesare increasingly linked to persons—not toplaces—and they are mobile. For my stu-dents, they have become a part of their bodiesthat goes with them everywhere—even tobed. Less than a quarter of them use fixed,old-fashioned ‘‘landline’’ phones. Hardlyany wear wristwatches: they check theirmobile phones.

Rich Ling and Scott Campbell’s excellentedited book surveys the mobile revolutionthat is a key component in the networkedoperating system that has swept the world.It is the rapidly proliferating use of mobiledevices to access communication and infor-mation at almost all times—and at thesame time, to be accessible to others.As author Ann Light says, ‘‘the phone(a) becomes one with our body and (b) followsus about’’ (p. 195). Yet they are more thantechnological fads.

Mobile phones have profound sig-nificance for how social systems operate—both in developed and less-developed

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societies—affecting how people relate toeach other, institutions, and information inboth obvious and subtle ways. Their mun-dane use has major social consequences,especially the transformation from group-based place-to-place communication toindividual-based person-to-person commu-nication. They reinstitute the easy direct con-nectivity of preindustrial societies, but theyafford liberation from being bound up inthe same location and within groups.

These studies of the mobile revolution arein stark contrast to the oy vey-ism that per-meates so much sociology. Unlike mostsociological research, the study of ICTs(information and communication technolo-gies) is more about social opportunitiesthan social problems. Ling and Campbell’swide-ranging book is filled with accountsof how mobile phones have affected—andoften extended—people’s lives. Theyremind us that the world may be going tohell in a handbasket, but good things arealso happening.

Diversity

The hallmark of this book is a diversity thatshows how ICT studies, developing for overa decade, come from many disciplines,methods, and countries. The authors hailfrom sociology, anthropology, architecture,communication science, and psychology.Indeed, sociologists have been late to theICT game, although the Communicationsand Information Technologies section of theASA has more than tripled in size in thepast five years—to well over 300 members.Some of the authors work with the researcharms of ICT companies. Corporate ICTresearchers rarely are oy vey-ers. Theirorganizations want to know who is doingwhat and why they are doing it: now andfive years ahead.

The different disciplines bring a variety ofmethods to bear. In addition to the standardsociological armaments of surveys, in-depthinterviews, ethnographic observation andshadowing, and social network analysis,others use longitudinal time-use diaries,conversation analysis, videos of interactions,and experimental manipulation of nonver-bal cues on mobile phones. Several scholarsrely on huge telecom databases of who calls

whom, where, and what they text to eachother. Both the qualitative and statistical evi-dence provide fascinating reports aboutmobile phone use in diverse locales: Eng-land, Finland, France, Germany, India,Japan, Norway, the Philippines, Sweden,and the United States.

Common Threads

Despite the diverse disciplines, locales, andmethods, this is not a book where readerscan compare and contrast findings. To thecontrary, the authors of the 12 chapters tellan integrated story, concentrating on com-munication among friends, family, andcoworkers.

Hyperconnectivity. Some pundits still clingto the now-disproved myth that ICTs isolatepeople. Yet, every article in this book showshow mobile phones expand and enhanceinterpersonal relations. Such mobile connec-tivity operates in concert with other forms ofinteraction. It often sets up face-to-face meet-ings, just as e-mail often sets up mobilechats. Sometimes multiple means of connec-tivity operate together: in cafes, mobilephones on the table allow absent friends tohave a connected presence with those whoare physically present.

Mobile intimacy. Mobile phones are car-ried and murmured into intimately. Severalauthors report that mobile conversationsare more selective than face-to-face interac-tions. Close friends and relatives are mostapt to be called. In such ways, mobilephones are more constricted than Internetcommunication—and perhaps even thefixed landlines of yore.

Networked individuals. Mobile phones areessentially for person-to-person contactbetween individuals—and not betweengroups. People usually connect one-to-one—as individuals. Yet, they are networkedindividuals, using their phones, ICTs, andin-person encounters to connect withdiverse others.

Molly Steenson and Jonathan Donner por-tray one exception to such individualizeduse. Mobile phones are shared according tostrict rules among the impoverished resi-dents of Bangalore, India. The rules for shar-ing reflect and build upon interpersonalkinship and trust relations.

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Geographical extension. Unlike the walledcommunities of the past, people take theirmobile communities with them and are usu-ally reachable wherever they are. This createsa need for context, because even the most inti-mate encounter must be aware of its sur-roundings. Indeed, the first questions callersusually ask are ‘‘Where are you?’’ and‘‘Who are you with?’’ Callers may be acrossthe street or many countries apart, as in Fer-nando Paragas’s study of how Filipino over-seas workers connect with their families.

Surveillance. Several studies show how peo-ple use mobile phones to keep track of others,asking their children or partners abouttheir whereabouts. But it is also easy fortelecoms—and by extension, the authorities—to keep tabs on individuals and groups. To besure, petabytes of data pile up, but severalauthors demonstrate how big computers canmine and crunch these vast stores ofinformation.

Soft location and soft time. Location is lessimportant for mobile connectivity than in theold days of being bound to in-person contact,fixed landline phones and mail to a physicaladdress. Key criteria are physical availability,social availability (‘‘Are you alone?’’), equip-ment compatibility (some people carry multi-ple phones), and cost (national boundariesstill exist). Indeed, most calls remain local:until Internet phoning goes mobile, the globalvillage will be too expensive to afford muchlong-distance contact. But locality and timecan be soft, as people do not have to set fixedaddresses or times to meet—they use theirphones to home in on each other. Moreover,organizations are now homing in, using theinherent ‘‘location awareness’’ of mobilephones to tell your phones what’s aroundthem. People can use these services to findtheir friends, ‘‘Zagat to Go’’-rated restaurants,or McDonalds.

Texting—The new literacy. Several authorsshow how texting (sending short messagesby mobile phones) functions alongsideof—and instead of—talking. It is less obtrusiveto others nearby, and time becomes softer—messages are usually stored and read later.

Where to?

The mobile story is developing. Publicationin print inevitably leaves behind newer ICT

developments. Mobile phones, the focus ofthis book, are being joined by small, light-weight netbook computers, with WiFi,WiMax, 3G, and so on providing higherspeed Web connections. Mobile phonesthemselves are becoming smartphones, theSwiss Army knives of connectivity—withcameras, GPS, compasses, and tens of thou-sands of other ‘‘apps’’ for iPhones, Black-Berrys, et al. providing myriad affordances.A friend’s iPhone app alerts her when oneof her favorite bands is in town. Despite theirindividual nature, mobile phones can pro-vide powerful organizational commun-ication. For example, information aboutimpending demonstrations against the Ira-nian government in 2009 was heavily trans-mitted by mobile phones—broadcasting viaBluetooth on transit and the street.

Ling and Campbell call their book ‘‘TheReconstruction of Space and Time.’’ But itis more than that. The book documents theearly stages of the triple revolution: howmobile phones are going beyond beinginstruments of chat to becoming powerfultools of personal empowerment along withthe Internet revolution and the turn fromgroups to social networks.

School Principal: Managing in Public, by DanC. Lortie. Chicago, IL: University ofChicago Press, 2009. 273pp. $18.00 paper.ISBN: 9780226493497.

PETER MEIKSINS

Cleveland State [email protected]

School principals preside over organizationsthat have undergone rapid change in recentdecades. The shifting demographics of theUnited States have made schools into a focalpoint for discussions of diversity. The adventof high-stakes testing and the perceptionthat American students have fallen behindtheir counterparts elsewhere have put pres-sure on schools to change their practices.Incidents of school violence have trans-formed the perception of schools as safehavens and have encouraged the extensionof sophisticated surveillance techniquesinto the schools. And, the proliferation ofnew types of school (magnet schools, small

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schools, charter schools, etc.) has changedthe way public schools are organized andhave begun to erode the dominance of tradi-tional state-administered public educationsystems.

I opened Dan Lortie’s School Principal:Managing in Public expecting an explorationof principals’ work in a rapidly changingeducational context. However, this is notwhat the book offers. Instead, Lortie hasauthored a fairly straightforward occupa-tional study of principals as a particularkind of middle manager. His book offers lit-tle insight into how principals are cont-ending with contemporary educationalchallenges, focusing, instead, on more gener-al questions regarding how their work isaffected by their social location amongsuperintendents, teachers, and the largercommunity they serve.

School Principal draws on Lortie’s owninterviews with 113 school principals in sub-urban Chicago in 1980 (with a follow-uptelephone interview in 1988) and on contem-poraneous research on Iowa school princi-pals conducted by another researcher.These data are neither current nor represen-tative of the wide range of schools in the con-temporary United States and provide Lortiewith little opportunity to comment on someof the most important issues in contempo-rary American education. He is well awareof this and indicates that he intends thestudy as a kind of benchmark against whichcurrent educational experiences can bemeasured.

His central argument is that principals area special kind of middle manager, whosepower is even more limited than that ofothers. They lack the ability to use monetaryrewards, the promise of promotion, or thethreat of dismissal to manage teachers.Instead, they must rely on personal relation-ships with their staff to gain their coopera-tion. Principals are also constrained by thefact that they are engaged in highly visibleactivities about which the public cares a greatdeal. They must answer to and satisfyparents and the community, groups overwhom they have little direct control. Theresult is a tendency toward conservatismamong principals, who avoid potentiallycontroversial actions for fear that they willalienate the groups with whom they must

interact. This tendency toward conservatismis strengthened by the fact that there are fewagreed-upon criteria for measuring ‘‘suc-cess’’ in school management, so that princi-pals are likely to rely on ‘‘tried and true’’solutions.

Lortie develops a number of other themesin his portrait of the occupation of schoolprincipal. These include his observationthat principals tend to share the value sys-tem of the teachers they supervise, in partbecause they began as teachers, in partbecause some of the rewards available tothem involve working directly with stu-dents. He also analyzes the relationshipsbetween principals and their superiors. Prin-cipals’ promotion chances depend on spon-sorship from above (which also tends toencourage conservatism and a focus on rela-tionships). Principals also are highly depen-dent on those above them for resources andlook to superintendents for backing andclear guidelines (and complain when super-intendents are inconsistent or interfere toomuch in ‘‘local’’ issues).

Even as a benchmark study, Lortie’s SchoolPrincipal leaves the reader with many ques-tions. One learns little from his book aboutthe experiences of the many principals whopreside over urban districts or whose stu-dent populations and communities aremore diverse or economically different.This is not a small thing, as one wonders,for example, whether community/parentscrutiny works the same way in sociologi-cally different districts. Surprisingly, Lortie’sbook also offers little insight into how princi-pals contended with the controversies thatdominated education in the period whenhis data were collected. In general, SchoolPrincipal pays relatively little attention tothe ways in which its findings might havebeen affected by either time or place. Ina concluding chapter, Lortie tries to addresshow things may have changed since hisstudy was conducted. He identifies a num-ber of changes that warrant further investi-gation, including the effects of high-stakestesting, the gradual ‘‘feminization’’ of theoccupation, the advent of computers in edu-cation, and the emergence of competingtypes of schools. He does not consider theissue of school safety, nor does he discussthe changing demographics of American

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communities and schools. And, his com-ments are largely speculative and makesparing use of others’ research on, for exam-ple, high-stakes testing.

School Principal offers readers a somewhattraditional occupational study. It has someuseful things to say about the complex socialposition of the principal. However, its value,even as an occupational study, is limited byits being based on dated research and byits focus on a narrow range of schools.

Dreams in Exile: Rediscovering Science andEthics in Nineteenth-Century Social Theory, byGeorge E. McCarthy. Albany, NY: StateUniversity of New York Press, 2009. 374pp.$80.00 cloth. ISBN: 9781438425870.

DAVID NORMAN SMITH


Is ‘‘classical sociological theory’’ a unifiedparadigm or a melange of conflicting claims?Traditional accounts usually imply the latter,grouping the canonical founding figuresunder the ‘‘classical’’ rubric yet boxingthem into airtight and mutually exclusivecompartments: ‘‘historical materialism,’’‘‘methodological individualism,’’ ‘‘function-alism.’’ The superficiality—and indeed,sheer implausibility—of this conventionallabeling is seldom given due attention. Con-sider, for example, the fact that the ‘‘materi-alist’’ Marx concentrated on a category thatis, he says, ‘‘entirely social,’’ ‘‘containingnot an atom of matter’’—value. Weber, thealleged individualist, devoted himself tothe analysis of collective phenomena suchas economic ethics, world religions, and thespirit of capitalism. Paradoxes of this kindare perplexing, provoking—and demandattention.

George McCarthy has been exploring par-adoxes of this kind for a quarter of a century,and this new book—his eighth study ofclassical sociology and moral philosophy—offers one of the fullest accounts yet pub-lished on these themes. McCarthy affirmsa deep ulterior unity in the works of theclassical sociologists, which he ascribes, inlarge measure, to the influence of Greekand German philosophy. Unburdened by

conventional prejudices, McCarthy delvesdeeply into texts and subtexts that often gounnoticed. In this volume, he unites manyof the insights of his earlier books. The resultis an imposing synthesis. If, as I believe, thissynthesis remains flawed and partial, theimplication is not that McCarthy has failedbut, rather, that further challenges awaithim.

As far back as 1984, McCarthy expoundedthe need to account adequately for the influ-ence of Greek and German philosophy onclassical sociology in the pages of this jour-nal. In the ensuing decade he publishedfour books (including an anthology) onMarx and antiquity, with primary attentionto Aristotle. Two subsequent books drewWeber into the analytic circle. In 2003,McCarthy published Classical Horizons,which linked Marx, Weber, and (now) Durk-heim to Aristotle and Greek antiquity. In thepresent volume, which is nearly twice aslarge as Classical Horizons (374 to 202 pages,with 93 pages of notes), McCarthy amplifieshis earlier positions and adds a major discus-sion of Kant. It could easily seem thatMcCarthy’s odyssey had reached its termi-nus. But signs abound that his work remainsunfinished. Consider the opening of his con-cluding chapter: ‘‘It is difficult to offer a sum-mary of the ideas and theories contained inthe book because of the expanse and com-plexity of the material. Marx, Weber, andDurkheim have much in common and, atthe same time, differ greatly’’ (p. 255). Well,yes. But we knew that already. What McCar-thy has offered us, thus far, has been morefragmentary than systematic, and he hasnot yet drawn his distinctions carefullyenough.

McCarthy is deeply (and reasonably)enamored of Aristotelian moral philosophy,which subtly and powerfully affirms com-munity, justice, need, and reciprocity. Hebrings Kant into the account as well, witha dual emphasis on ethics and epistemics.His method is straightforward, offeringfour chapters, in order, on Aristotle, Aristot-le’s influence on classical sociology, Kant,and Kant’s influence on classical sociology.Many ‘‘echoes’’ of antiquity and Germanidealism are elucidated, ranging from well-known examples to others that havelong remained obscure. On those subjects

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I know particularly well (e.g., Marx on val-ue, Durkheim on representations), he showslively intelligence and fairly expert knowl-edge. (The great classicist N. R. E. Fisher,reviewing Marx and the Ancients in 1994,called McCarthy’s exposition of Aristotleand modern exegesis ‘‘reasonably accurateand thorough’’ as well.) But several lacunæand imbalances mar Dreams in Exile. Here,as elsewhere, McCarthy appears to be moredeeply interested in moral and epistemicphilosophy than in substantive social analy-sis. He allots Aristotle and Kant far morespace than he does the classical sociologists,and he devotes far more attention to the eth-ical underpinnings of sociology than hegives to its detailed elaboration.

I happen to agree with many of McCar-thy’s core arguments (e.g., about Marx’stacitly neo-Aristotelian ethics). But a highpercentage of the themes to which the clas-sical sociologists devoted themselves intheir substantive works—authority, charis-ma, patrimonialism, soteriology, ritual,effervescence, totemism, the circulation ofcapital, profit rates, the working class—appear only glancingly in McCarthy’swork, if at all. Generally, he treats the clas-sical theorists as latter-day Greeks, whosecritiques of alienation and anomie updatebut do not transcend Aristotle’s challengeto chrematistics and money-lust. And he istoo eager to affirm that the influence ofantiquity was direct and uniquely deter-mining. I would argue that this influencewas, rather, a matter of elective affinities,and that other trends (e.g., the philosophyof law) exerted major influences as well.Nor is classical theory, in my opinion,reducible to any kind of philosophy. Hegel,Kant, and Aristotle were certainly sourcesof inspiration for Marx and the others, butI would argue that ultimately their workwas sui generis.

McCarthy should not be satisfied with hisfinal chapter. Waving a hand vaguely at the‘‘expanse and complexity’’ of his argumentis far from sufficient. I’d like to see McCarthyapply his deft pen and keen wit to the socio-logical side of his project, with greater rigorand objectivity. What, in his view, is theenduring substance of classical sociology,leaving the genealogy of ideas aside? What,concisely stated, does he think that classical

theory enables us to say about the hard spe-cifics of contemporary history and society?Can we say only that alienated, acquisitive,and bureaucratized social relations clashwith wisdom and justice? Or can we saymore than this?

The Rise of the Ku Klux Klan: Right-WingMovements and National Politics, by RoryMcVeigh. Minneapolis, MN: University ofMinnesota Press, 2009. 244pp. $22.50 paper.ISBN: 9780816656202.

STEWART E. TOLNAY


Imagine a social movement that advocatesagainst child labor, supports universalaccess to public education and the creationof a federal Department of Education, andwhose official policy condemns violence.Further, consider that this organized groupnearly endorsed Progressive Party candi-date Robert LaFollette Sr.’s bid for the U.S.presidency in 1924. Is it the Ku Klux Klanthat comes to mind? Probably not. Theseare just some of the surprising and fascinat-ing details about the meteoric rise, and pre-cipitous decline, of the Klan in the 1920sthat are the subject of Rory McVeigh’simpressive and meticulously researchedbook.

In The Rise of the Ku Klux Klan, McVeighargues that the Klan of the 1920s was primar-ily a middle-class, urban-based, right-wingsocial movement. The Klan drew its supportfrom the white, native-born, Protestant pop-ulation that longed for a return to ‘‘100%Americanism’’ that was threatened bythe influx of non-English speaking, non-Protestant immigrants. But, according toMcVeigh, it was more than xenophobia,racism, and bigotry that accounted forthe Klan’s rapid growth. He argues fora ‘‘power-devaluation model’’ to explain theKlan’s rise. In short, the economic, political,and status-based capital that traditionallyfavored the Klan’s supporters was threat-ened by ‘‘an increase in the supply of thatwhich individuals have to offer in exchangeand from a decrease in demand for thatwhich they offer in exchange’’ (p. 140).

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McVeigh explains, and documents, howthese simultaneous forces of increasingsupply and declining demand operated tothreaten the traditionally privileged posi-tion of Klan supporters in Americansociety—economically, politically, andwith respect to relative status. Drawingfrom the Klan’s national publication, TheImperial Night-Hawk, and an array of primaryand secondary sources, McVeigh constructsa compelling case for his argument. Indus-trial mechanization reduced the need forskilled labor, while massive immigrationfrom abroad, and migration out of the Amer-ican South, provided an ample supply ofinexpensive, unskilled workers. Female suf-frage, urban political machines, and, again,immigration, threatened to dilute the politi-cal influence of the Klan’s support base.Parochial schools, increasing educationalattainment for blacks, and, again, immigra-tion, diluted the historical educationaladvantage of the Klan’s base. However, thesimultaneous occurrence of these structuralchanges in American society, alone, did notguarantee the rise of a right-wing socialmovement. Rather, the Klan needed toexploit effective collective-action framesthat translated the perception of multidi-mensional power-devaluation into socialand political action. For that, the Klan reliedon the cultural divides and prejudices forwhich it is well known: anti-Semitism, rac-ism, xenophobia, and anti-Catholicism. Inthe world of the Klan, to be ‘‘100% Ameri-can’’ was to be white, native-born, andProtestant.

Interestingly, it was the Klan’s successesthat also help to explain its demise. Theresurgence of the Klan in the 1920s wasextraordinarily brief for a social movementthat grew so dramatically, so quickly. Afterreaching its peak in 1923, it was essentiallymoribund by 1925. What happened?According to McVeigh, the effectiveness ofthe Klan’s framing strategies also hinderedits potential for expanding beyond its corebase. The social and cultural divides thatit relied on to mobilize its membershipwere also obstacles that proved difficult toovercome. In addition, after being rebuffedduring the 1924 presidential election by

Democratic candidate John W. Davis andProgressive Party candidate, Robert La-Follette Sr., the Klan ultimately endorsedCalvin Coolidge for re-election. It then pro-claimed the victorious Coolidge a ‘‘100%American’’ president. Although conve-nient, this posturing by the Klan did notgo over well with its membership base.Not learning from its mistake, the Klan in1928 endorsed Republican Party candidate,Herbert Hoover, and once again anointedhim the ‘‘100% American’’ candidate. Cal-vin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover werenot exactly examples of political actorswho inspire social movements advocatingchange.

The Rise of the Ku Klux Klan is more thanengrossing social history. It is also McVeigh’smost comprehensive application of thepower-devaluation theory of right-wingsocial movements. His primary foils in thisbook are the ‘‘resource mobilization’’ and‘‘political opportunity’’ theories of socialmovements. McVeigh does an excellent jobof articulating, and then supporting withsolid evidence, the advantages of the power-devaluation theory for explaining the rise ofthe Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. I do wish thatMcVeigh had devoted more space and effortto distinguishing his version of power-devaluation theory from the family of‘‘group threat’’ models of minority-majoritygroup relations that can be traced back tothe work of Hubert Blalock. Like McVeigh,Blalock also distinguished economic, politi-cal, and status dimensions to the adoptionof discriminatory behaviors by a privilegedmajority group to impede the opportunitiesof a traditionally subordinate minoritygroup. These parallels, I believe, justify a fullereffort to distinguish between the two theo-retical perspectives than is provided in TheRise of the Ku Klux Klan.

McVeigh’s book is an excellent example ofgood social science research that blendsquantitative and nonquantitative evidenceto tell an interesting and important story. Itis nicely written, in a style that makes itvery accessible to a broad readership; isa welcomed addition to the social move-ments literature; and is a major theoreticalstatement by its author.

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Science for the Empire: Scientific Nationalism inModern Japan, by Hiromi Mizuno. Stanford,CA: Stanford University Press, 2009. 269pp.$55.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780804759618.

MASAMICHI SASAKI

Chuo University, [email protected]

Hiromi Mizuno’s Science for the Empiredescribes a fascinating albeit microscopicslice of twentieth century socio-cultural-political history. Subtitled Scientific National-ism in Modern Japan, Mizuno’s work spansjust 25 years, 1920 to 1944. However, thebook’s scope is immense, for it explores, allwithin the context of science (and technology),issues regarding Japan versus the West,imperial mythology versus technocracy (orEastern ethics versus Western science andtechnology), industrialization, education,and modernity.

Given a seemingly innate Japanese ambi-guity about science (and technology), Miz-uno sets out to ‘‘dissect the politics of thescientific.’’ How did the Japanese deal withtheir former mythology vis-a-vis the ratio-nality implicit in the need to become scien-tific so as to further the imperatives forindustrialization and ultimately for war?And what did all this mean for Japanesemodernity? Equally important, what did allthis mean for Japanese nationalism?

The answers to these questions are soughtfrom three distinct points of view, all metic-ulously and impressively researched anddocumented. Mizuno analyzes the historyof Japanese scientific nationalism fromthe unique perspectives of the so-calledtechnology-bureaucrats, Marxian intellec-tuals, and popular science writers.

In the first instance (Chapters One andTwo), Mizuno writes an interesting and com-pelling history of the conflict between Japan’stechnology-bureaucrats (‘‘technocrats’’) andJapan’s ‘‘law-democrats.’’ Focus is placed onan engineers’ trade union, the K�ojin Club,and its principal founder, Miyamoto Takeno-suke. This group, lobbying for its ownimproved position in Japan’s society and pol-itics, played a pivotal role in the emergingimportance and understanding of sciencethrough the historical period under study.

Chapters Three–Five turn attention toJapan’s Marxist intellectuals, led by TasakaJun, Ogura Kinnosuke, and Saiguso Hiroto,whose group came to be known as Yuiken.Mizuno traces their convoluted history dur-ing the study period in exceptional scholarlydetail. Their monthly publication, alsoknown as Yuiken, wrestled with issues relat-ed to Japan’s previously unscientific past,with fascism, and what was needed to pro-mote ‘‘practical science’’ for Japan.

The third perspective, presented in Chap-ter Six, follows the most prominent exem-plars of Japan’s ‘‘popular science’’ duringthe period. Examined in some significantdetail and with outstanding readability aretwo popular periodicals of the time:Children’s Science and Science Illustrated,with special attention paid to their foundingeditor, Harada Mitsuo. These periodicalsfostered a popular excitement with sciencethat was to have a dramatic and lastingimpact on Japan’s science education programs,as they overcame centuries of national am-bivalence about all things scientific andtechnological.

These three groups’ aims were to promotescience and technology in Japan, subjectspreviously mired in ambivalence by Shintocreation mythology. At the beginning of theperiod under study, these groups were radi-cals of a sort, promoting attitudes contrary totradition. But as the obvious imperatives ofscience and technology emerged, attendantwith industrialization and interwar mobili-zation, the handwriting was on the wall.These dissenters, through the shifting politi-cal character of the nation, slid convenientlyinto the role of collaborators in the wartimeeffort. Where most such groups wouldhave been censored out of existence, manyin these groups came to be seen as coopera-tive and contributive to the wartime endeav-or (though in some cases that may not havebeen their intention). For instance, scienceeducation had to be rewritten to encouragethe nation’s young people to ‘‘do science,’’to become scientifically and technologicallyinclined, so that they might contribute effec-tively to the war effort.

Part of these groups’ task was to define orredefine science and technology. Mizunodelves into great detail regarding the defini-tions of science and technology and how these

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groups brought about significant changes inthe public’s and the bureaucracy’s attitudestoward science and technology.

Thus Japan emerged as a scientific nation,thanks in no small part to the movers andshakers within these three groups (andothers). Mizuno chose these groups for theirparticularly high public visibility. The Marx-ist group fought Japan’s mythological and‘‘unscientific’’ history; the engineers foughtagainst the law-bureaucrats (who didn’tunderstand science and relegated it to aninconsequential place) for a better position-ing of themselves and their science-technology in the nation; and the popularscience writers fought against the nation’sscientific and technological naivete.

To Japan as a nation, science had oncebeen seen as a ‘‘Western thing.’’ But thedevelopments Mizuno describes between1920 and 1944 succeeded in (correctly) uni-versalizing science, lifting it out of the mis-taken notion of being Western. In turn, thisshift facilitated the rise of what Mizuno pro-poses as a theory: ‘‘scientific nationalism’’ inmodern Japan. Indeed, readers may be takenaback by Mizuno’s somewhat unexpectedconclusion. Despite this, her theory of scien-tific nationalism ends up being skillfullyexplicated and forms a compelling view ofmany of the socio-cultural-political eventsof the twentieth century in Japan (andmany other nations).

Globalization and Social Movements: Islamism,Feminism, and the Global Justice Movement,by Valentine M. Moghadam. Lanham,MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009. 168pp.$22.95 paper. ISBN: 9780742555723.

WILLIAM I. ROBINSON

University of California, Santa [email protected]

This slim volume (the actual text is only 128pages) provides an accessible survey of thefield of globalization and social movements.It synthesizes recent literature on the topic,including Valentine Moghadam’s previouswork on transnational feminist networksand on women and gender in the Islamicworld, and presents three detailed case stud-ies on transnational social movements:

Islamic movements, global feminism, andthe global justice movement. Moghadamdefines a transnational social movement as‘‘a mass mobilization uniting people in threeor more countries, engaged in sustained con-tentious interactions with political elites,international organizations, or multinationalcorporations’’ (p. 4). The discussion is framedwithin an eclectic structure that draws onfeminist, world-systems, world polity, andsocial movement theories.

From feminist theory she emphasizes thegendered nature of global institutions andprocesses and the critique of hegemonicmasculinities, which she sees as causalboth to globalizing processes and responsesto them. She draws on world-systems theoryto affirm that social movements are rooted inand triggered by the contradictions ofworld-capitalism. From world polity theoryshe highlights the tendency toward isomor-phism in institutions, values, practices, andnorms around the world, which in turnmake possible transnational social mobiliza-tion and cross-cultural framing. And fromsocial movement theory she draws on thetriple dynamics of resource mobilization,political opportunity, and cultural framingprocesses.

One underlying theme throughout the bookis the challenges that globalization presents tosocial scientific theoretical work and empiri-cal research. Moving beyond what I havetermed in my own work a ‘‘nation-state cen-tered framework of analysis’’ is a prominenttheme in the globalization literature. Mogha-dam highlights the analytical challenge of the-orizing the links between local and global andnational and transnational in the study ofsocial movements that transcend the nation-state in the age of global capitalism. Globali-zation provides ‘‘a new opportunity structurefor social movements—one that enables themto take on a transnational form with a globalreach.’’ What makes transnational activistsdifferent from domestic activists is ‘‘their abil-ity to shift their activities among levels andacross borders, coordinating with groups out-side their own country’’ (p. 26).

Islamic movements, the transnationalfeminist movement, and the global justicemovement have all been stimulated byrecent processes associated with capitalist/neoliberal globalization. Moghadam traces

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the global justice movement to workers,socialist, communist, anarchist, and progres-sive movements that spread in earlier eras ofworld capitalist expansion. She dates Islam-ist movements that spread in the 1970s and1980s to eighteenth- to twentieth-centuryrevival movements that claimed to be fol-lowing the Prophet Muhammad. And shetraces the contemporary global women’smovement to first- and second-wave femi-nism of the twentieth century. As distinctas they are from each other, all three move-ments are in Moghadam’s analysis counter-hegemonic insofar as they oppose ‘‘global-ization’s hegemonic tendencies of neoliber-alism, expansion, and war.’’ And each istransnational inasmuch as ‘‘it targets statesand international institutions, and is a coali-tion of local, grassroots groups as well astrans-border groups’’ (p. 35).

I was somewhat disappointed with Mog-hadam’s treatment of transnational Islamistmovements. She sets up a superficial binarybetween ‘‘moderate’’ and ‘‘extremist’’movements with various ‘‘grey zones’’ of‘‘radical’’ and ‘‘liberal-democratic’’ Islamwedged in between, and she demarcatesthe Islamist movements from the ‘‘non-violent radical democratic or socialistvisions of global feminism and the globaljustice movement’’ (p. 6) by their goal ofachieving state power and their willingnessto use violence to achieve this aim. Such anapproach reproduces in my view a stereotyp-ical characterization of such movements asviolence prone and suggests that Islamicmovements are by definition ‘‘bad’’—animplicit normative assessment that fails tocapture the complex and contradictorynature of these (and all) movements or toappreciate how systemic social contradic-tions and political tensions are played outthrough ideological and cultural framesthat the agents of collective action developon the basis of the particular (local/regional)historical milieus in which they areimmersed.

In this regard there could have been morebalance and analytical purchase, had shechosen to locate Islamist movements withinthe general phenomenon of how the disrup-tions and insecurities of global capitalismbecome articulated through religious dis-course and cultural prisms of mobilizing

agents in distinct historical contexts.She could have made reference to otherreligious movements such as Christian andJewish/Zionist fundamentalism. These twoare transnational, have similar origins inresponse to the destabilizations of globaliza-tion, and often exhibit the same patriarchaland violence-prone fanaticism as theirIslamic counterparts.

Despite these misgivings, this is a usefulvolume suitable for undergraduate courses.Indeed, I plan to adopt the book for use inmy own upper division Sociology of Global-ization course.

Distinguishing Disability: Parents, Privilege,and Special Education, by Colin Ong-Dean. Chicago, IL: University of ChicagoPress, 2009. 203pp. $19.00 paper. ISBN:9780226630014.

THOMAS M. SKRTIC


Distinguishing Disability is a well-argued andsupported account of the class divide in thespecial education process of disability diag-nosis and accommodation in public schools.Although the Individuals with DisabilitiesEducation Act (IDEA) gives parents formalrights to participate in and challenge thisprocess, in practice it is dominated by insti-tutional interests and professional perspec-tives. Colin Ong-Dean’s primary claim isthat, in this institutional struggle, privilegedparents—that is, ‘‘white, middle- to high-income, English-speaking, professional,and college educated’’ (p. 3) parents whohave the most cultural and economiccapital—are best equipped to recognizeand claim the most advantageous diagnosesfor their children and successfully negotiatecorresponding accommodations for them.His secondary claim is that this connectionbetween privilege and advocacy is often‘‘misrecognized’’ by privileged parents asthe sole consequence of their devotion totheir children and understanding of theirrights and needs, and by schools as goodparenting in line with proper home-schoolrelations, the conception of which has beenshaped by privileged groups.

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Ong-Dean uses a range of methods toamass an impressive amount and variety ofevidence to support his claims, includingparent surveys and interviews, an analysisof historical trends in disability diagnosis,a content analysis of disability advice lite-rature for parents, and a mixed-methodanalysis of the nature and effects and demo-graphic distribution of IDEA ‘‘due process’’hearings. These well-written and organizedchapters are preceded by an insightful insti-tutional history of the Education of AllHandicapped Children Act of 1975, the orig-inal statute reauthorized as the IDEA in1990, that sets the stage for his analysis bydocumenting how the egalitarian and demo-cratic impulses of the social movement thatfought for the law were undercut by its actu-al provisions and their institutional and legalinterpretation. In the end, rather than demo-cratic solutions to recognized special educa-tion problems, such as its perpetuation ofracial-ethnic and social class hierarchies,the law merely enabled parents to raise‘‘individualized, technical disputes’’ (p. 10)over their child’s diagnosis and accommoda-tions. Beyond muting broader social con-cerns about special education, reducing itsproblems to isolated cases created ‘‘an indi-vidualized and competitive environment’’(p. 14) in which privileged parents are farmore likely to secure better educational out-comes for their children labeled disabled,thereby perpetuating the hierarchies respon-sible for their own privileges, ‘‘not by help-ing their children stay on top (as privilegedparents of nondisabled children do), but bykeeping them from falling through thecracks’’ (p. 3).

Ong-Dean interprets his evidence by relat-ing it to Lareau’s research (with others) oncultural capital and parenting, extendingher findings and insights to parent involve-ment in special education and expandingupon them. Drawing on Lareau’s expansionof Bourdieu’s high-culture conception of cul-tural capital to include resources such as atti-tudes, preferences, formal knowledge andcredentials (which Bourdieu subsequentlyincluded under ‘‘informational capital’’),and, more importantly, her extension ofparents’ use of their cultural capital insideschools, he concludes that parents who over-come the more formidable institutional

barriers of the special education systemdo so by using their cultural capital, just asmiddle-class and upper-middle-class par-ents do in the general education system.Moreover, given the expectation for morerigorous and technically sophisticated needsclaims in special education, effective parentadvocacy is more likely to be seen as tran-scending subjectivity and self-interest, thusfurther obscuring its dependence on privi-lege and making it easier for privilegedparents to misrecognize it as a moral andpersonal difference between themselvesand less-involved parents rather than asa reflection of social class advantage.

Ong-Dean concludes by reflecting on theimplications of his research for the field ofdisability studies and the study of socialreproduction, criticizing the former for,among other things, neglecting the influenceof social advantage in the identification ofdisability and the latter for neglecting theinteraction of social advantage and variationin student ability. In addition to calling formore research like his at the intersection ofthese areas of scholarship, he makes a strongcase for his research as a corrective that, inlight of Lareau’s finding that privilegedparents are most involved when their chil-dren are not doing well in school, mayadvance understanding of parents’ involve-ment in their children’s education moregenerally. To the extent that parents’ involve-ment depends on their resources and theirchildren’s particular abilities and needs,one such advance that Ong-Dean elaboratesis a substantially different understanding ofthe relationship among parent involvement,ability, and student outcomes, one thatimplies a reordered causal relationship inwhich student ability and need precede par-ent involvement and mediate the effects ofsocial background, a process in which,‘‘parents do not create the abilities in theirchildren that lead to success; instead, theyrecognize their children’s needs and pres-sure schools to adapt to them’’ (p. 168).

Given Ong-Dean’s evidence, this is a rea-sonable and logical warrant, but it is evenmore instructive when considered in con-junction with his ‘‘high road/low roadhypothesis’’ (p. 74), another importantcontribution that he makes earlier in thebook. The hypothesis explains the history

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of a disability classification in terms of anearly ‘‘high road’’ phase in which privilegedparents create it to benefit their diagnosedchildren exclusively, and a subsequent‘‘low road’’ phase in which the classificationcomes to serve the institutional needs ofschools by providing a way to remove dis-advantaged students from regular class-rooms, ‘‘a road that [they] travel to furtherdisadvantages’’ (p. 72). Although Ong-Dean doesn’t make the connection, to theextent that privileged parents can pressureschools to adapt to their children’s needs,his high road/low road hypothesis showsthat, when up against the interests of institu-tionalized organizations like schools, eventhe considerable advantages of privilegeare fleeting. My only criticism of ColinOng-Dean’s excellent book is that, giventhe central role of school organization in‘‘distinguishing’’ disability, his analysiswould have been enhanced by a moreexplicit use of institutional theories pertain-ing to educational organizations. The happyirony, though, is that his book will be ofgreatest interest to the very institutional the-orists doing this important work, who areparticularly interested in quality researchlike his on the institutional origins of educa-tional classifications.

Canada’s 1960s: The Ironies of Identity ina Rebellious Era, by Bryan D. Palmer.Toronto, CN: University of TorontoPress, 2009. 605pp. $35.00 paper. ISBN:9780802096593.

MILDRED A. SCHWARTZ

University of Illinois at [email protected]

Bryan Palmer, a Canadian labor historian, haswritten an ambitious and wide-ranging bookdocumenting the tumult of the 1960s in Can-ada. Some of the events that Canada experi-enced were similar to those elsewhere,especially the United States, including a youthrebellion, labor unrest, and the political awak-ening of native peoples. Others were uniqueto Canada, particularly the rise of militantand violent nationalism in Quebec.

It is the book’s subtitle that more specifi-cally captures the author’s intent, which is

to show how changes that took place in the1960s (as well as earlier) had profoundrepercussions for Canadian national iden-tity. Palmer argues that those changes toreCanada away from its dominant British her-itage yet ironically left it, even now, witha still unformed identity.

Although it is true that Canadian identityhad been profoundly shaped by its Britishorigins, this was not uncontested evenbefore 1960, as Palmer alludes to at differentplaces. French origins were obviously alsocritical, affecting relations between Quebecand the central government but also imping-ing on other provinces with notable concen-trations of French speakers and provokingmajor crises in the nineteenth and twentiethcenturies. At the end of World War II, therewere some efforts to deal with the evidentdiscrimination suffered by French speakers,addressed in the 1960s by a soul-searchingRoyal Commission on Bilingualism and Bicul-turalism. Meanwhile, Canada was openingits doors to vast numbers of new immi-grants, largely of non-British origins, whowould deeply affect the ethnic distributionof the population. Even earlier, from theend of the nineteenth century until the GreatDepression, the large numbers of non-Britishmigrants that moved to Canada had alreadymade their mark on its composition, particu-larly in the prairie provinces. But it was thenewer migration that would raise questionsabout biculturalism and redefine it as multi-culturalism. Yet, as an elite status, British ori-gin would continue to find protection byallowing recognition of other ethnicities tocreate a buffer against challenges from thoseof French origin.

There is something arbitrary about usingthe boundaries of a decade to frame a causalchain, given the absence of easy guidelinesfor distinguishing among path dependence,indirect correlations, or the chaotic impact ofevents. Moreover, it can be difficult to knowhow much weight to give to individual eventsand personalities as the motors of change. It isthese issues that lead me to question whyPalmer devotes a chapter to the fight betweenMohammad Ali and George Chuvalo,presenting it as an important metaphor forCanadian-American relations. Or why herelates Prime Minister Pierre-Elliott Trudeau’spopularity to allowing sex in politics to

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become both respectable and marketable, anda harbinger of the coming sexual revolution.As I see them, and as Palmer documents butwithout attributing to them their full causalrole, there are other more critical factors affect-ing the events of the 1960s and the changes inCanada’s identity. Along with demographicchanges and new questions about the placeof Quebec, changes followed from the impactof World War II, which transformed Canadainto an urban, industrial society. This industri-alization would bring new opportunities forU.S. capital to expand into Canada. But Cana-da’s war effort also stimulated acknowledg-ment of its own accomplishments anda desire to establish a more independentidentity. So by 1947, Parliament had passeda citizenship bill that for the first time concep-tualized Canadian citizenship as distinct fromBritish citizenship with Canadian domicile.Canada’s educational system also changedfrom one where only a small minorityreceived a postsecondary education to onewhere significantly more would be acc-ommodated through the expansion of old uni-versities and the creation of new ones,a phenomenon that had occurred earlier inthe United States. In this Canadian expansion,new faculty from the United States wererecruited in influential numbers and thesenew schools were some of the entry pointsfor Americans wishing to avoid the VietNam draft. That war helped encourage bothantiwar protests and a more general anti-Americanism.

Even with the British connection attenu-ated and U.S. influence and accompanyinganti-Americanism accentuated, it is open toquestion whether Canadian identity todayis left without much content. Palmer’s argu-ment downplays the significance of writers,performers, and other contributors to thecultural life of Canada, many of whomhave gained international recognition. Evenanti-Americanism has been transformed toproduce positive assessments of how Can-ada differs from the United States, froma healthier population, thanks to universalhealth care, to a renewed appreciation ofits Scottish forebears who helped found a sta-ble and well-capitalized banking systemable to withstand even the recent economicupheavals. In some quarters, there is alsoa self-congratulatory image of Canada’s

multiculturalism in contrast to a mistakennotion of the U.S. melting pot. The 1960shad their impact; Canadian identity contin-ues to evolve.

Human Dignity and Bioethics, edited byEdmund D. Pellegrino, Adam Schulman,and Thomas W. Merrill. Notre Dame, IN:University of Notre Dame Press, 2009.576pp. $40.00 paper. ISBN:9780268038922.

MICHAEL S. EVANS

University of California, San [email protected]

This is a purpose-driven book. The President’sCouncil on Bioethics, from its inception underformer U.S. President George W. Bush until itsdissolution under current U.S. President Bar-ack Obama, consistently justified its recom-mendations on embryonic stem cell research,human cloning, and other issues throughreferences to human dignity. The concept ofhuman dignity grounds many different kindsof moral projects (see, e.g., the Universal Dec-laration of Human Rights), so in itself sucha move is not unusual. But as several critics,most prominently Ruth Macklin, pointedout, the concept of human dignity as usedby the Council did not seem to have specificand consistent content independent of its rhe-torical value for justifying the Council’s bio-ethical recommendations. The Council’ssecond (and final) chairman, Edmund Pelle-grino, responded to this challenge to Councillegitimacy by inviting contributions thatwould ‘‘illuminate, in a preliminary way, thequestion of human dignity and its properplace in bioethics’’ (p. 4).

The resulting edited volume, first publishedby the U.S. Government Printing Office andhere reproduced largely unchanged by theUniversity of Notre Dame Press, contains 20chapters and eight short commentaries struc-tured around six distinct topics in human dig-nity and bioethics. Readers should not expectto encounter a full range of positions andarguments about human dignity. The proposi-tion that ‘‘the central purpose of bioethics is toprotect human dignity’’ (p. x) is not up for dis-cussion, as the collection simply omits anyessay or commentary that seriously disputesthe concept or utility of human dignity in

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bioethics. The result is a book that is not somuch about whether human dignity existsor is applicable to bioethics, but about whichversion of human dignity is most suitablefor addressing concerns shared by many ofthe volume’s contributors.

Religious versions of human dignity arefeatured prominently. Many of the authorshave religious affiliations, and many of thecontributions make explicitly religious argu-ments about human dignity and bioethics.For such diverse contributors as formerCouncil chair Leon Kass, Robert Kraynak,Gilbert Meilaender, and David Gelertner,religion is the only basis for a concept ofhuman dignity, as the relationship betweenhumans and God provides a comprehensiveanswer to the question of what makeshumans unique in the first place. Essays byPeter Lawler and the late Richard Neuhaushighlight the fundamental role of religionin shaping the sense of human dignity thatobtains in the American context. HolmesRolston III and, less explicitly, AlfonsoGomez-Lobo each work to reconcile per-ceived conflicts between scientific and reli-gious perspectives.

But this is not simply a book-length reli-gious defense of human dignity. While thevolume is hardly comprehensive, there aremany different views represented in itspages, and not all of these align with reli-gious perspectives. Daniel Dennett, forexample, offers a variation on his ‘‘belief inbelief’’ argument: whether or not there isa religious foundation for human dignity, itis probably good that we believe in humandignity and work together based on thatbelief. As commentary by Peter Lawlershrewdly notes, this kind of argument, pre-cisely because it does not attempt to ruleon matters of truth, creates discomfort inthose who rely on truth claims to determinewhat is good, even when they agree withDennett on the importance of the conceptof human dignity for bioethics. Similarly dis-comfiting is Patricia Churchland’s sharpwarning against the danger of moral certi-tude in the face of uncertainty, which sheillustrates with several examples of past

religious moral certitude that did not turnout very well.

Yet the reader is left with little doubt thatreligious perspectives have patterned thisbook, particularly in the organization ofessays and uneven distribution of com-mentaries. The most aggressive and least civ-il commentaries are directed against essaysby Dennett, Churchland, and MarthaNussbaum that challenge religious argumentor suggest policies at odds with religiousbelief. Exchanges of essay and commentaryare usually set up to resemble debates, butthese are debates in the same way that profes-sional wrestling matches are sporting events:matches may unfold in various ways, but theoutcome has been predetermined. Instead ofpairing Nussbaum’s contribution with PaulWeithman’s constructive criticism of hercapabilities approach, the editors insteadoffer Diana Schaub’s dismissive and briefcommentary, the substantive content ofwhich is that Schaub does not like Nuss-baum’s policy recommendations. Similarly,after failing entirely to engage the thrust ofChurchland’s argument about moral certi-tude, Meilaender’s commentary on Church-land’s chapter suggests that sinceChurchland does not understand RomanCatholic perspectives on in vitro fertilizationor contraception, she should remain silentaltogether. When Richard Rorty referred toreligion as a conversation-stopper, this isprobably the kind of thing that he hadin mind.

Readers interested in the content of elitepublic bioethical debate will find this bookinformative, though not exhaustive ofdebate and certainly not dispositive on theconcept of human dignity. In terms of sub-stantive content, there is not much here forsociologists. By and large, this volume is anhistorical record of one part of an elitedebate among professional bioethicistsfrom a narrow range of intellectual back-grounds. But as a practical example of theuse of religious arguments in public debate,it provides interesting case study materialfor courses on politics, religion, and Ameri-can society.

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The Mangle in Practice: Science, Society andBecoming, edited by Andrew Pickering andKeith Guzik. Durham, NC: Duke Univer-sity Press, 2008. 306pp. $23.95 paper. ISBN:9780822343738.

ERIC L. HSU

Flinders [email protected]

The Mangle in Practice is a collection of 12essays edited by Andrew Pickering andKeith Guzik that primarily revolves aroundPickering’s work on his idea of the ‘‘mangleof practice.’’ Yet, a straightforward survey ofPickering’s ideas this book is decidedly not.Largely this is because ‘‘the mangle’’ is neverexplicitly defined by any of the volume’sthirteen authors, including Pickering him-self. What the term mangle means or whyit is an apt metaphor are questions that goperplexingly unraised. Instead, only ideassuch as the ‘‘dance of agency’’ that the man-gle connotes—as set out by Pickering’s 1995monograph, The Mangle of Practice—areexplored.

However, in his contributions to this col-lection, Pickering does not concern himselfwith rigorously fleshing out those particu-lar concepts as he has done elsewhere.That task is left to the other contributorsto cobble together. What Pickering doessuccessfully draw out in the preface andhis opening chapter are the broader aimsthat his idea of the mangle is supposed tohave advanced. On a grand level, this isthe project of promoting an ‘‘ontology ofbecoming’’ in contrast to one that is primar-ily structured and unchanging. Here, Pick-ering makes specific reference to MartinHeidegger’s idea of ‘‘enframing’’ as a coun-terpoint to his own social theoretical enter-prise. Whereas ‘‘enframing’’ is a particularworldview that continually seeks to arrestthe world in toto, Pickering’s idea of themangle is said to offer an alternativeapproach—one where the world is recog-nized for what it really is: ‘‘a place of decen-tred human and nonhuman becoming’’(p. 13). This not only applies to ‘‘painting,philosophy . . . and cybernetics’’ (p. 13),which Pickering explicitly speaks to, butalso to the entire world writ large.

This latter point is also what largelyinforms the rest of the remaining chapters.Though Pickering originally developed hisidea of the mangle in the field of scienceand technology studies and in dialoguewith actor-network theory, the view heldby the rest of the contributors is that Picker-ing’s ideas can be fruitfully applied toa whole host of other topics. And indeedwe find this to be the case with the ninechapters that make up the first and secondsections, titled ‘‘Studies’’ and ‘‘Theory,’’respectively. Here, Pickering’s ideas aremapped onto a variety of different subjects,ranging from Adrian Franklin’s study ofAustralians and eucalyptus trees to VolkerScheid’s research into the practice of Chinesemedicine and Brian Marick’s treatise on‘‘Agile’’ software development.

If the goal of The Mangle in Practice is tocall into question a number of commonplaceassumptions within contemporary socialthought, then by and large it succeedsadmirably. As many of the chapters demon-strate, Pickering’s work is most persuasivewhen it confronts two problematic tenden-cies within social research that offer a deceit-fully centered view of social practice: (1) thesociological habit of accepting atemporalexplanations of agency and (2) the humanistbias that exists in much of social researchthat mistakenly posits the nonhuman mate-rial world as being largely inert and passive.Those interested therefore in exposing theshortcomings of these two practices withinsocial thought will find this collection useful.

However, if the goal of The Mangle in Prac-tice is to provide a groundbreaking para-digm for future social research, then bymany counts it does not succeed. A majordefect of this book is that it fails to engagewith a number of key discussions withinsocial thought that run roughly parallel toPickering’s enterprise. This is glaringly evi-dent in the lack of engagement with post-structuralist and postmodernist thought ofwhich no doubt the mangle is a part. Atmost, only a few cursory nods are made toauthors associated with postmodernist andpoststructuralist thinking such as GillesDeleuze and Donna Haraway. Otherwise,little reference is made throughout thiscollection to these theoretical strands inany sustained fashion, although Maxim

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Waldstein’s chapter on ‘‘Soviet semiotics’’perhaps comes the closest.

In turn, because of this curious occur-rence, the novelty and complexity of Picker-ing’s mangle appears to be grosslyoverstated. Surely, at the beginning of thetwenty-first century, it is no longer sucha radical move to advocate for an ‘‘ontologyof becoming’’—nor is such a move also con-sidered unproblematic. However, thesepoints are never seriously considered byPickering or any of the other contributors—save for a few passing remarks by CasperBruun Jensen and Randi Markussen in theirchapter on Marup Church. As result, TheMangle in Practice reads less as a seriousengagement with the broader field of socialtheory than it does as ‘‘red meat’’ for existingadherents to Pickering’s mangle.

Consequently, because discussion of themangle in this collection takes on a celebra-tory tone, many concerns from other theo-retical viewpoints go unraised. Forinstance, despite the fact that the mangleis said to offer a more sophisticated viewof human behavior because it appreciatesthe agency of nonhuman entities, Picker-ing’s account has almost nothing to sayabout the complexities of the human psy-che. In fact, nowhere is there mention ofhow the mangle addresses the issue ofhuman emotion—a problematic that inrecent times has been explored by certainstrands of social theory. Lamentably, thislack of critical engagement is more thenorm than exception in most of the chap-ters. As such, what could have beena chance to bring the idea of the mangleinto dialogue with many differing strandsof social thought has instead been spenton the more narrow aim of widening themangle’s applicability from the sociologyof scientific knowledge to other sociologi-cal subfields. Given that Pickering’s workdoes raise some interesting questions aboutcertain tendencies within the social scien-ces, it is not unfair therefore to considersome aspects of this book an opportunitywasted.

Ethnographies Revisited: Constructing Theoryin the Field, edited by Antony J.Puddephatt, William Shaffir, and StevenW. Kleinknecht. New York: Routledge,2009. 356pp. $22.95 paper. ISBN:9780415452212.

JACOB AVERY


A challenging dilemma faced by ethnogra-phers is how best to present detail-drencheddescriptions alongside big-picture theoreti-cal frameworks without twisting the formerbeyond recognition or tacking on the latteras an interesting but clunky afterthought.Indeed, though the importance of theory inethnography is undeniable, explicating therelationship between method and theory isa perennial epistemological issue. Moreover,since one goal of ethnography is to developunanticipated, even novel theories, a textthat confronts the ambivalent relationshipbetween ethnography and theory, whileillustrating how new concepts and theoriesare developed ‘‘in the field,’’ is a welcomeaddition to the qualitative methodsliterature.

In their introduction to EthnographiesRevisited, the editors (Antony Puddephatt,William Shaffir, and Steven Kleinknecht)correctly state that there is a large literaturethat deals with the particularities of qualita-tive methodologies. Texts that focus onstudy design and implementation, IRB regu-lations and protocols, interview procedures,and writing field notes, for example, are notin short supply. However, accounting for theconceptual seeds and the formulation oftheoretical ideas during ethnographic field-work remains an elusive practice. Ethnogra-phies Revisited is an attempt, then, to fill thisvoid in the qualitative methods literature: itaims to demystify theory construction bymaking ethnographers’ thinking and analy-ses more accessible and by clearly articulat-ing the relationship between method andtheory.

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As the editors state, their goal is to show‘‘what shaped [contributing authors’] ideasand how the particular organization of theirwork unfolded’’ (p. xviii). To achieve thisend, the editors recruited esteemed practi-tioners of ethnography and asked them towrite about conceptual development in theirrespective book-length projects. The contrib-utors were instructed to ‘‘reflect on the keyconcepts’’ with an aim ‘‘to teach studentsand researchers alike how to think creativelyand thus research most productively in thefield’’ (p. xviii). Through the presentationof firsthand accounts of theory-work duringethnographic projects, a further aim of Eth-nographies Revisited is to detail how ethnog-raphers’ initial and oftentimes fleetingleads and hunches develop into sophisticat-ed theoretical constructs. This adds trans-parency to an otherwise opaque process.The implied warrant of this volume, then,is that in order to achieve a better under-standing of how conceptual theses develop,as well as how to open up possibilities forgenerating new theoretical insights via eth-nographic research, an extensive treatmentthat emphasizes how ethnographers thinkabout their research, in situ, is required.

The editors of Ethnographies Revisited openthe volume with a straightforward introduc-tory statement on the ambivalent relation-ship of method and theory in ethnography,about reflexivity and the ethnographic tradi-tion, and about the variety of theories usedin ethnographic work. Following this open-ing statement, the volume is divided intosix sections, each with a thematic overlay:(1) generating grounded theory, (2) workingwith sensitizing concepts, (3) extending the-oretical frames, (4) conceptualizing commu-nity and social organization, (5) challengingestablished wisdom, and (6) theorizingfrom alternative data. In these sections,contributing authors weigh in with per-sonalized, self-reflexive narratives aboutconceptual and theoretical formation duringtheir own book-length projects.

The individual essays in each of the vol-ume’s six sections are first rate, and collec-tively they pose a nuanced consideration ofthe relationship between method and theory.In addition to providing amusing, interest-ing, and thought-provoking accounts ofhow the contributing authors developed

theory in the field, some essays have practi-cal applications. As someone who was stillconducting fieldwork while reading Ethnog-raphies Revisited for review, I put the doses ofwisdom to good use. These suggestionsincluded ‘‘staying light on your feet’’ (Col-lins); paying attention to one’s emotionswhile conducting fieldwork and how emo-tions might index more generalizable theo-retical notions (Chambliss; Wacquant); andhow writing up regular fieldnotes and con-ceptual memos is such a critical part of thetheory-work that ethnographers do (Dunn;Charmaz).

Perhaps the main contribution of Ethnog-raphies Revisited can be described as addingbricks and mortar to the theoretical scaffold-ing provided by classic manuscripts suchas Glaser and Strauss’s The Discovery ofGrounded Theory, Mullins’s The Art of Theory,and Stinchcombe’s Constructing Social Theo-ries. The editors are upfront about includingprimarily distinguished authors who favorthe grounded theory approach. Thus, read-ers who teach fieldwork methods and/orapproach their own fieldwork througha grounded theory lens may put the volumeto best use. But it would be misleading tosuggest that adherents of other approacheswould not find value in reading this volume,either in whole or in part, or in teaching from it.

What some readers may find unsatisfyingabout Ethnographies Revisited, however, isthat the editors fail to situate the volume’smaterial in relation to other ethnographictraditions by summing up its overarchingcontribution (for an excellent example, seeBurawoy’s Global Ethnography) and theymiss an opportunity to discuss possibilitiesfor creative cross-fertilization in ethnogra-phy (for a convincing justification of thispractice, see Duneier’s ‘‘extended-placemethod’’). Of course lacing together contri-butions from works associated with differentschools of thought is an exacting ideal. Toborrow Mortimer Adler’s phrase, ‘‘men[sic] are finite, and so are their works.’’ Yet,I still wonder if the exclusion of contributorswith alternative theoretical and political pre-suppositions, as well as the exclusion ofa sounding-off statement about how theessays are organically related to one anotherand to other works, are non-trivial errorsof omission that inhibit an otherwise

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exceptional volume from throwing maxi-mum light onto dim epistemological terrain.

Despite its shortcomings, EthnographiesRevisited contributes in notable ways toa timely dialogue about transparency andreflexivity of the ethnographic method,how theory is used in ethnographic research,and how theorizing is influenced by one’ssocial location in a political, economic andcultural context. Although no single author,text, or academic inquiry can capture thefull array of complex issues involved in eth-nographic reporting, the collective wisdomcontained in this volume hints at how crea-tive conceptualization and theory-work canbe, and is, wrestled with and accomplished‘‘in the field.’’

Longing and Belonging: Parents, Children,and Consumer Culture, by Allison J. Pugh.Berkeley, CA: University of CaliforniaPress, 2009. 301 pp. $21.95 paper. ISBN:9780520258440.

PAMELA J. SMOCK

The University of [email protected]

Allison Pugh has written a book I considera ‘‘must-read’’ for a wide variety of sociolo-gists, including those interested in socialinequality, social psychology, families, chil-dren, and more. Its topic? What consump-tion means through the eyes of children.

This is not a book about how the corporateworld and advertising are able to conveytheir messages to children. This is a bookabout what happens when that messagehas been heard. Why must children havethe most recent electronic game, or expen-sive sneakers only to grow out of themrapidly? What do these items mean to chil-dren? How do parents respond?

The setting is Oakland, California, a citywith very substantial social class andracial-ethnic inequality. Pugh takes advan-tage of this variation: in the capacity of vol-unteer, Pugh spent three years observing ata low-income after-school center and sixmonths each at an affluent private and afflu-ent public school. Focusing on five- to nine-year-old children, Pugh concentrates on anage group old enough to communicate their

opinions but young enough so that parentsstill make most of the decisions. In additionto her ethnographic materials, Pugh inter-views 54 of the parents to provide insightinto how parents respond to, and attemptto shape, children’s consumption desires.

Her ethnography is nuanced and insight-ful, uncovering how children’s consumptiondesires are riddled with meaning. Specifi-cally, she unearths what she terms an ‘‘econ-omy of dignity.’’ Products such as games,toys, and clothing, or experiences like mov-ies, birthday parties, and vacations serve as‘‘scrips,’’ or tokens, that children use to feellike they belong in their peer group. A pairof sneakers is not just a pair of sneakers:one has to have the ‘‘right’’ sneaker to takepart in social life and gain entry into child-ren’s ongoing conversation. Being able totalk knowledgeably about the right stuff,from Xbox to movies, are also scrips.

Pugh marvelously demonstrates child-ren’s agency as she brings us into theirworlds. She identifies four ‘‘facework’’ strat-egies involving consumption that childrenuse in their attempts to garner or maintaindignity in their peer groups—that is, tobelong. One such strategy is bridging labor,wherein a child attempts to turn a lack ofsomething into an asset.

The book opens with a perfect example ofbridging labor. Children at the after-schoolcenter are discussing what they are goingto be for Halloween. Marco, a recent immi-grant from Mexico, will not be getting a Hal-loween costume. But Marco deftly insertshimself into the conversation by proclaimingthat he is going to go as ‘‘himself,’’ declaringthat humans are the scariest part of the mov-ie Dawn of the Dead. Marco’s move is creativeand successful.

And so it begins, and Pugh helps us navi-gate the meanings of consumption to chil-dren, and how their parents respond.Affluent parents practice ‘‘symbolic depriva-tion’’ via rules and the use of allowances;they are often concerned about signalingthat they are not overly materialistic. Allow-ances, for example, not only assist childrenwith their consumption desire but also teachthem restraint. Rules involving when, andfor how long, children can play electronicgames is another strategy affluent parentsuse to just say ‘‘no.’’

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Pugh also overturns some common cri-tiques of the spending behavior of low-income parents. For these parents, provi-sioning signals good parenting. But due tolack of income and instability of income,they practice what Pugh calls ‘‘symbolicindulgence.’’ For example, they are quiteselective about what to buy for their childrenand buy only the items or experiences thatwill have the most social impact. Theseparents also tend to have a longer-termtime horizons for purchases than affluentparents. Many purchases require a gooddeal of planning ahead (e.g., finding cou-pons, putting money away for a long timebefore buying). Unlike affluent parents,low-income parents cannot just stop off ata clothing or toy store on the drive home.Also unlike in affluent families, items suchas computer games serve an enormouslyimportant purpose: they keep childreninside when it is dangerous to be outside.

In the end, Pugh shows us that, for chil-dren, belonging involves possessing and,for parents, care means provisioning. Mostbroadly, this book demonstrates how themarket is intricately intertwined with thelife of families, as parents try to be goodparents and children seek to belong. Whetheryour specialty is social psychology, family,social inequality, or the sociology of chil-dren, this is a book you will want on yourbookshelf. You will find yourself assigningit to your students, both graduate andundergraduate, and recommending it toyour friends and family. Longing and Belong-ing is both that compelling and that accessi-ble; first-rate research and engaging prosemake this a book that will be read andremembered.

Genocides by the Oppressed: Subaltern Genocidein Theory and Practice, edited by Nicholas A.Robins and Adam Jones. Bloomington, IN:Indiana University Press, 2009. 217pp.$24.95 paper. ISBN: 9780253220776.

CLARK MCCAULEY

Bryn Mawr [email protected]

Most studies of genocide have emphasizedthe importance of state power in organizing

and carrying out mass political murder. Theidea animating this volume is that some-times mass murder is perpetrated by thosewho rebel against the state. Several exam-ples of genocide ‘‘from below’’ are featured.The Pueblo Revolt of 1680 in New Mexicokilled perhaps 400 of 2,000 Spanish settlers.An Indian revolt in what is now Peru andBolivia slaughtered perhaps 100,000 lighter-skinned people—Creoles, mestizos, andSpanish—between 1780 and 1782. The Hai-tian slave revolt killed hundreds of thou-sands between 1791 and 1804, includingdriving out or killing about 40,000 whites.

The chapters of this edited book includeinteresting material, often briefer versionsof books written by chapter authors. InChapter One, Nicholas Robins provides anoverview of his Native Insurgencies and theGenocidal Impulse in the Americas (2005) andPriest-Indian Conflict in Upper Peru (2007).Indians victimized by white men wantedto kill everyone lighter than themselves.Chapter Two, by Adam Jones, offers briefvignettes of slave revolts (Nat Turner),native rebellions (King Philip’s War), peas-ant revolts (Emiliano Zapata), and anticolo-nial wars (Algeria’s FLN). Jones suggestsa common denominator of hatred and bru-tality when the oppressed turn against theoppressors, even if the violence does notrise to the level of genocide. Chapter Threedescribes the ethnic cleansing of 12 to 15 mil-lion Germans from Central and EasternEuropean countries after World War II; thedeath toll is estimated at 2 million. Eric Lan-genbacher acknowledges, however, the keyrole of post-WWII Communist governmentsin forwarding the cleansing project. In Chap-ter Four, Alexander Laban Hinton arguesthat the Cambodian genocide (1.5 millionkilled) is a case of subaltern genocide.Oppressed rural Cambodians took revengeon urban elites and foreigners, employinga Cambodian instantiation of revenge thatcalls for a head for an eye rather than aneye for an eye. In Chapter Five, David Mac-Donald reprises his Balkan Holocausts?(2002), telling the story of Serb violenceagainst Muslims in Srebrenica in 1995. Thisviolence is interpreted as a response to theSerbian experience of genocide at the handsof Croat forces in World War II: ‘‘myths ofvictimhood’’ prepared Serbs for violence

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against Muslims despite the fact that the his-torical victimizers were Croats.

In Chapter Six, Christopher Taylor draws‘‘Visions of the ‘Oppressor’ in Rwanda’sPre-Genocidal Media’’ from his own experi-ence living in Rwanda as the genocidebegan, an experience presented in greaterlength in his 1999 book, Sacrifice as Terror:The Rwandan Genocide of 1994. Only 15 pageslong including five cartoons, this chapter canbe useful in showing students the sexualenvy associated with Hutu internalizationof European ideas: that Tutsi women aremore intelligent and more beautiful thanHutu women. In Chapter Seven, EvelinLindner applies the ideas of her 2006 book,Making Enemies: Humiliation and InternationalConflict, toward understanding genocide.She raises important questions: Why doesmass killing often seem to be more abouthumiliating the enemy than about efficientlyeliminating them? Why are rape and mutila-tion so common? Her answer is that theexperience of group humiliation (see Chap-ter Six) is purged when humiliating the per-petrators in return. In Chapter Eight, E. O.Smith asks whether there is a biological basisfor genocide. After describing some cases ofprimate coalitions attacking (usually indi-vidual) conspecifics, Smith reaches the fol-lowing conclusion. ‘‘The real value of thecomparative data is to demonstrate thecapacity of all individuals to commit lethalviolence under the right set of circumstan-ces’’ (p. 176). In Chapter Nine, ‘‘When theRabbit’s Got the Gun,’’ Adam Jones sets sub-altern genocide in a continuum of victim vio-lence against perpetrators that includes, forinstance, the approximately 1,700 Plaas-moorde or ‘‘farm murders’’ in South Africasince apartheid ended. These are murdersof mostly white farmers by groups of blackmarauders. Consistent with Lindner’s focuson humiliation, the killing often includesrape, mutilation and torture, and sometimesnothing is stolen.

On balance, the book makes a case thatmass killing can occur without state power,but the examples advanced suggest thatmass killing without state power is relativelyrare. Positive examples include the Indianand slave revolts in the New World, butthere can be no doubt of the role ofstate power in the mass murders that took

place in other cases discussed: Cambodia,Rwanda, Srebrenica, and the cleansing ofethnic Germans after World War II. Never-theless, the book raises an interesting possi-bility: that the experience of victimizationand humiliation is an important source ofmass killing, no less for groups with statepower than for subaltern majorities attack-ing state power. Perhaps the emotional sub-strate is the same for state murder andsubaltern murder, only the state has moreresources for organized killing. In pointingto the importance of emotions in intergroupconflict, the book offers connections betweenmass killing based on ethnicity and masskilling based on religion or politics, andbetween mass killing and the usuallysmaller killing of riots, massacres, and hatecrimes. Although the book is framed asa challenge to genocide theory, perhaps itsgreater challenge is to any account of inter-group conflict that does not attend to inter-group emotions.

Debugging the Link between Social Theoryand Social Insects, by Diane M. Rodgers.Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana StateUniversity Press, 2008. 214pp. $22.95 paper.ISBN: 9780807133699.

ULLICA SEGERSTRALE

Illinois Institute of [email protected]

This book involves two main types of analyt-ical ambitions. One is to establish linksbetween the theorizing of (early) sociologistsand students of insect societies, and to drawsome general lessons from this. It turns outthat sociologists and entomologists alikehave worried about social disorganizationand found support in one another, withinteresting results. For instance, famousentomologist William Morton Wheeler wasinfluenced by Herbert Spencer and quotedDurkheim’s view on the division of labor,which was inspired not only by Adam Smithbut also the zoologist Milne-Edwards. (See-ing society in nature and nature in societywas of course famously suggested by Marxand Engels, and Diane Rodgers providesthe apposite quotes.)

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This book is also a kind of sociology ofknowledge by examples. The author hasmined the entomological literature for casesillustrating how social insect societies maybe used to convey moral and political mes-sages in general. She has found interestingand illustrative quotations—we learn forinstance about the concern that males werebackward in regard to socialization. How-ever, how representative are these cases?The reader is left with too little informationabout the context of the quotations and thestanding and actual impact of the variousindividuals presented. Many well-knownnames are included, but others are moreunknown, and the fact that someone wasthe author of a book, for instance, does nottell us about his or her standing or the book’simportance. An annotated list of who was (oris) who would have been helpful. It is oftenthe author herself who provides the per-ceived implications of various scientific state-ments (sometimes I think she is stretching theinterpretation a bit). This kind of critical read-ing exercise is fun to do, it yields results andputs the analyst on the moral high ground.

Still, this makes the book sometimes readlike a treatise by the group called Sciencefor the People from the heyday of the socio-biology controversy. That group appliedwhat I have called a ‘‘moral reading’’ styleto biological texts describing social behavior,accusing their targets of ‘‘legitimating’’ suchthings as social inequality and sexism(Segerstrale 2000). In the present book, colo-nialism and Western bias have been addedto the list of textual crimes.

Like the critics of sociobiology, the currentauthor seems to believe that certain termsshould not be used at all because of theirlegitimizing social function. Moreover, itseems to me that she believes these termsare not only socially dangerous but also fac-tually wrong—because society is not (shouldnot be?) like that! So, out with such things asslave-making ants, hierarchy, and caste!Such terms obviously reflect incorrect inter-pretations of social structure, influenced byprejudice from earlier times! But what ifinsect societies are hierarchical? What ifcastes do exist? And what if the reason forthe use of the term ‘‘slave’’ in regard toants is that their behavior does look justlike that—even considering that different

types of slave arrangements have histori-cally existed in human society. (Interestingly,the author seems to approve of science whenit provides results of the right kind— forinstance, a useful early finding that the rulerof the colony was not a King but a Queen.She also approvingly cites biologist DeborahGordon and her conception of ant societiesas networks with differentiated tasks ratherthan hierarchically organized castesocieties.)

The author notes a paradigm shift under-way in insect research today. It seems tohave some positive features, but she is notcompletely happy. She warns scientists thatunderlying their contemporary conceptsare remnants of prejudiced concepts fromearlier times. Therefore, according to her,what is needed is a total debugging. Well,how deep do we go? How deep can wego? Who is ‘‘we’’? And who is to debugthe debugger? Might not the debugger, too,despite good intentions, be influenced byold conceptions that may unwittingly cloudher analysis? The status of the analyst is ofcourse a standing problem in the sociologyof knowledge, and something that has notbeen satisfactorily answered by the socialconstructionists. So why not let the scientistsfight it out among themselves? In science,getting to the truth does not lie in criticizingand eliminating somebody’s bias, but inachieving a consensus among fellow scien-tists that a particular claim is true. Scientistsare each other’s most serious critics, which isalso why renewed efforts are made to con-vince skeptics, which in turn require betterdata, methods, and theories. There is a con-tinuous discourse going on, sometimes flar-ing up in controversy. The idea of caste, forinstance, is alive and well, although the ori-gin of castes is being reconsidered. There isnow a move toward a flexible view of casteas a genetic potentiality in social insects;the particular caste in which an individuallands depends on such things as environ-mental conditions and societal needs. Thisview, in turn (partly inspired by Gordon),is supported by close behavioral observationand chemical testing with the help ofadvanced scientific instruments (Holldoblerand Wilson 2009). In fact, questioning pre-vailing authority is part and parcel of whatit means to be a scientist. Take for instance

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feminist sociobiologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdywho through her early field researchsuccessfully challenged the male-biasedethological view of sex roles in primates(Hrdy 1981).

Diane Rodgers’s book is written withverve, and is a provocative and suggestivestarting point for a number of more compre-hensive analyses. However, in order to beconvincing, much more consideration hasto be given to the science itself. What is neededis in-depth studies of the kind that manyempirically-oriented historians of science orfield sociologists conduct: research thatexamines the interaction of scientific andsocial factors without reducing the formerto the latter. This kind of research wouldlook at such things as the problems of the sci-ence at the time as well as cognitive and stra-tegic scientific concerns of individualscientists, in addition to politically andsocially relevant factors.

References

Holldobler, Bert, and E. O. Wilson. 2009. The Super-

organism. New York: W. W. Norton.

Hrdy, Sarah. 1981. The Woman That Never Evolved.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (1999

paperback with new preface)

Segerstrale, Ullica. 2000. Defenders of the Truth: The Battle

for Science in the Sociobiology Controversy and Beyond.

Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Weaving Self-Evidence: A Sociology of Logic, byClaude Rosental, translated by CatherinePorter. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UniversityPress, 2008. 294pp. $24.95 paper. ISBN:9780691139401.

STEVE G. HOFFMAN

University at Buffalo, [email protected]

If the attempt to prove a logical theoremlooks much like how a novelist gets her firstbook published, a novice playwright gets thebacking of a production house, or a socialscientist publishes a journal article, can weput to rest the notion that scientific knowl-edge is guided primarily by principled argu-mentation? Claude Rosental stays too closeto his meticulously detailed case to draw

such unprincipled analogies. However, bytaking on the ‘‘hard case’’ of logic, WeavingSelf-Evidence repeatedly raises this broaderproblematic around scientific proof. Scholarsof science studies, rhetoric, and cultural the-ory should find Rosental’s book highly illus-trative in this regard.

The book revists a mid-nineties contro-versy over fuzzy set theory initiated by anarticle published by the young computer sci-entist Charles Elkan. The proof, published ina 1993 artificial intelligence conference pro-ceeding, claimed that fuzzy logic actuallyreduces to classical logic, which permitsonly two truth-values, rather than a moreparadigm shifting system allowing for anindefinite array of them. Elkan’s proof, alongwith a subsequent paper award, heats upa debate on an electronic bulletin board.Rosental documents these exchanges as ritu-alistic performances that gradually movefrom a boiling Usenet discussion to simmer-ing journal forums to their eventual coolingto room temperature with no clear resolution.

Rosental successfully explodes the imageof logicians dreaming up proofs individuallyand proceeding toward truth in a stepwise,univocal fashion. Rather, all parties to thedebate pull together heterogeneous resourcesand ‘‘de-monstrations’’ aimed at showingthat the correct position is ‘‘self-evident.’’Supporters and detractors mobilize savvyrhetoric and subtle textual modifications tore-represent the original theorem in contra-dictory ways. Debaters engage in multipleregisters of proof, as position taking movesswiftly from the ‘‘law of the excluded mid-dle,’’ political biases against fuzzy logic in‘‘mainstream AI,’’ fundamental differencesbetween Western and Eastern philosophy, toangry denunciations of stifling political cor-rectness. Elkan proves a skilled rhetorician,subtly reformulating his paper so as to leavemost parties reasonably satisfied that theirposition remains correct while still exudingconfidence in his initial theorem. Overall,the practice of logic is convincingly describedas the ritual engagements of a multivocal castof practitioners who share a ‘‘form of life’’ butlack consensus over which axioms yield cred-ible and indisputable proof.

I have three main criticisms. First, I doubtRosental managed to satisfy his goal ofappealing to readers with no interest or

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background in logic as well as those with spe-cialized knowledge (which, given his subjectmatter, is no easy task). Although he beginswith a fascinating chapter on the materialand embodied practices involved in teach-ing the fundamentals of logic, subsequentchapters present too much unorganizeddetail to keep a nonspecialist interested.The book does a poor job, as a mentor oncewrote on an unrelated matter, of separatingthe metal from the dross. Second, Rosental’sanalysis seems to transpire in an historicalvacuum. Other than describing how a Usenetoperates, he makes little effort at historiciz-ing the technological modality or the disci-pline of logic. If, as I suspect, the mid-1990swere a high point of participation on discus-sion boards among computer scientists, thislikely contributed to the ferment and multi-vocality around Elkan’s theorem. Themodality and timing created a situation hun-gry for controversy.

Third, Rosental’s analytic contribution istoo flat, in the sense that he struggles toaccount for why some voices rose above thedin while others dissipated into the digitalether. As such, the book lacks a coherentconclusion. For example, who were themoderators who made the decision to postcertain responses to the board’s FAQ? Accord-ing to what criteria did they make this deci-sion? Similarly, Rosental merely speculateson why certain individuals were chosen torepresent the debate in journal forums: repu-tation, partisan demonstrations of force, rhe-torical savvy, backstage social skill, or theconsistent clarity of their expositions. YetRosental does not want to reduce any of thesefactors to any other. The result of this ‘‘non-reducibility’’ is a detailed description of rheto-ric but no explanation for how the controversymoved through its multiple phases. As a con-sequence of this analytic flatness, the (blas-phemous!) possibility remains that thoseactors who mobilized the most substantivelysolid logical expositions won the day withintheir respective teams, despite the fact thatno singular synthesis arose between teams.

Rosental does a very neat job of fusingactor-network theory with a Bath-style focuson scientific controversy. He accomplishesthis with an interesting use of Goffman’sdramaturgical analysis. As such, for thosespecialists who occasionally unearth the

fossils of old scientific controversies, Rosen-tal hints at an avenue toward closure for theone between these two traditions in sciencestudies. Along these lines, this book couldbe served up as a chewy case study for anadvanced graduate seminar in the sociologyof science, cultural sociology, or the rhetoricof proof.

What Do We Owe Each Other?: Rights andObligations in Contemporary AmericanSociety, edited by Howard L. Rosenthaland David J. Rothman. New Brunswick,NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2008. 123pp.$39.95 cloth. ISBN: 9781412807234.

JANE A. GRANT

Indiana University-Purdue University, [email protected]

This sobering volume might well have beentitled What We Fail to Do for Each Other. Theauthors examine how contemporary Ameri-cans view the common good, assessing theimplications for political, social, and eco-nomic equality. The book continues the anal-yses of Etzioni (1993), Sandel (1996), Hacker(2002), Grant (2008), and others who haveexplored the subject of ‘‘values,’’ virtue,and shared fates from the center-left end ofthe political spectrum. From the late 1960sthrough the first years of the twenty-firstcentury, public discourse on ethics in theUnited States has been dominated by a nar-row, Christian, fundamentalist orientationthat placed the traditional nuclear family atthe center of the social system and madeindividual liberty, a free market economy,and the voluntary ties of community itskey attributes. Those espousing a more pro-gressive orientation, whose voices were sub-merged after the din of the late 1960ssubsided, but which have periodically re-emerged, most notably during the 2008 pres-idential campaign, focused instead onexpanding rights and incorporating thosepreviously excluded from the polity. Theseprogressive advocates had less to say aboutthe values or structures that would promotea shared civic ethos in an increasinglydiverse society.

Howard Rosenthal and David Rothmanwere motivated to write about mutual

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obligations in contemporary America becauseof two concerns: increased economic inequal-ity in the last two decades and growing evi-dence of Americans’ selfishness. Their bookspans a range of subjects: levels of ‘‘social sol-idarity’’ during the Depression, conditionsunder which politicians advocate for ‘‘collec-tive obligations,’’ inequities in our educationaland health care systems, and those left outsideof the social contract. The editors note thatwhile Americans value individual libertyand their own freedoms, the thin safety netthat currently exists in America leaves its citi-zens decidedly less well-off on a number ofindices, including lower life expectanciesand higher incarceration rates, than those inother industrialized societies. Although theeditors and the authors of the volume wish itwere otherwise, they are pessimistic thatAmericans will dramatically change directionin the near future.

The chapter by Katherine S. Newman andElisabeth Jacobs, ‘‘Brothers’ Keepers?: TheLimits of Social Solidarity in the New DealEra,’’ is a compelling look at the disparitybetween public policy and public opinion inthis period. While the programs of the Roose-velt administration are proudly viewed bycontemporary liberals as a triumph of publicconcern over private plights, Newman andJacobs discuss the low level of overall publicsupport for relief expenditures during thisperiod. Only old-age insurance, created underSocial Security, and tied to work and individ-ual contributions, had strong public support.African Americans, many of whom workedin jobs not initially covered under Social Secu-rity, the unemployed, transients, and immi-grants, were not entitled to benefits in theoriginal program. Interestingly enough, thepublic did not favor these exclusions.

‘‘The Troubled Quest for Equality in SchoolFinance,’’ by Sean B. Corcoran, ThomasRomer, and Howard L. Rosenthal, and‘‘What Body Parts Do We Owe Each Other?’’by David Rothman, Natassia Rozario, andSheila M. Rothman, deftly deal with theissues of equity in these arenas. Corcoran,Romer, and Rosenthal argue that while pub-lic spending across school districts hasbecome more equal in the United States,this is the result of a more equitable distribu-tion of revenues and not increased spendingon education. They discuss a number of

reasons why this is so, but the consequence,they believe, is that the United States is seri-ously underinvesting in education. Roth-man, Rozario, and Rothman examine howour willingness to give to others, particularlyin the case of organ donations, is largely con-fined to members of our own family anda close circle of friends. Generosity and com-passion are restricted to those we know. Nobroadly understood ‘‘fraternitie’’ here!

This volume, although a good contributionto the literature, has several weaknesses. Asin other edited volumes, the quality of thechapters is uneven. More importantly, thebook lacks a clearly articulated theoretical ormethodological framework. The latter wouldnot be essential if there were a more ‘‘collec-tive’’ theoretical orientation. A concluding sec-tion would have filled this purpose, but therewas none. Also, there were many typographi-cal errors in the book. Nonetheless, this bookcould be a useful addition to courses on con-temporary American politics, the modern wel-fare state, or emerging social problems.

References

Etizioni, Amitai. 1993. The Spirit of Community: Rights,

Responsibilities, and the Communitarian Agenda. New

York: Crown Publishers, Inc.

Grant, Jane A. 2008. The New American Social Compact:

Rights and Responsibilities in the Twenty-First Century.

Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Hacker, Jacob S. 2002. The Divided Welfare State: The Battle

over Public and Private Social Benefits in the United

States. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Sandel, Michael J. 1996. Democracy’s Discontent: America

in Search of a Public Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: The

Belknap Press of Harvard University.

Drug Use and Social Change: The Distortion ofHistory, by Michael Shiner. London, UK:Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 238pp. $85.00cloth. ISBN: 9780230222724.

PATRICIA A. ADLER


PETER ADLER


Plus cxa change, plus cxa reste la meme. . . .

Or, such is the main thesis of MichaelShiner’s new book on the continuity of illicit

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drug use in late industrialized society.Shiner’s argument is that illicit drug usehas become well established in contempo-rary youth society, but the centrality of thisbehavior is nothing new; over the past 50years, drug use in Britain, where he con-ducted his research, has remained largelythe same.

Based on two large surveys, the 1998 BritishCrime Survey (BCS) and the 1998/9 YouthLifestyles Survey (YLS), Shiner uses aggregatedata to make generalizations about changes, ortheir lack thereof, in teens’ drug-using behav-ior. Given that he sees his book as a ‘‘historyof the present,’’ it is odd that his data are nowa decade old, eons in our rapidly changingand transformative times. It is also problematicto rely solely on survey data, particularly indealing with illegal behavior; even Shineracknowledges that ‘‘the self-report method-ology appears to be least reliable in criminaljustice settings which is, perhaps, unsurpris-ing given there are clear disincentives tohonest reporting in such an environment’’(p. 7). Furthermore, although theories ofdrug use have been popularized in the UnitedStates, Shiner’s work remains remarkablyAnglocentric. Little attention is paid to theenormous amount of research that has beendone in North America recently.

Shiner reviews the literature that will befamiliar sledding to most deviance and crimi-nology scholars: primarily Britain’s ‘‘new’’deviancy theories of the 1960s and the time-worn ideas of labeling theory. Even a novicereader will be familiar with the names ofBecker, Duster, Young, and Sykes and Matza,although theories of drug use and deviancedid not end with these now classical treat-ments. With the exception of a few referencesto 1990s British authors that grew out of thepopularity of Ecstasy and raves, Shinerappears unaware of the spate of researchthat was conducted elsewhere, and practicallyignores the first decade of the twenty-firstcentury altogether.

The remainder of this brief book (169pages of text) is devoted to parsing out theresults of the two surveys upon which Shinerrelies to determine the extent of drug usetoday—or a dozen years ago. He provides

copious tables that illustrate the prevalenceand frequency of ‘‘recent’’ drug use for myr-iad substances. These data will also not sur-prise researchers who use similar drugsurveys in the United States. Shiner arguesthat patterns of drug use continue to prevail,with most young adults who use illicit drugsconsuming the less harmful ones, particu-larly marijuana. Harmfulness, then, contin-ues to drive people’s relative abstentionfrom the so-called harder drugs.

Exploring variables such as social class,income, sex, ethnicity and religion, andregion and neighborhood, Shiner interpretsthe data to find that drug use among peoplefrom relatively privileged backgrounds isnot particularly new. This provides evidenceof continuity, not change, over the latter partof the twentieth century. Shiner also showsthe link between smoking and alcohol asprecursors to further drug use, positingthat these drugs tend to ‘‘serve as a gatewayto illicit drug use’’ (pp. 119–20). Treating thisas a truism, Shiner should at least acknowl-edge that there are other factors operatinghere that could account for this correlation.Finally, Shiner takes a life-course perspec-tive, looking at age, work status, and domes-tic circumstances as indications of the onsetof and desistance from drugs. Again, notmuch new here: young adults are the prima-ry users of illicit drugs, and as they acquireadult roles and responsibilities there isa strong tendency toward quitting andabstinence.

Shiner concludes that drug use exhibitsmore continuity than has previously beenacknowledged. Changes have occurred, newlifestyles and leisure pursuits have croppedup, and the night-time economy and the sub-culture of subterranean play have had a tre-mendous impact on youth, but drug-usepatterns have remained remarkably similarthrough the years. Written with an arcaneargot, twisted syntax, and exorbitantlypriced, this book would not be accessible toundergraduates. For the seasoned drugscholar, there is not enough of an originalcontribution here to sustain the argument orto recommend this book as an accurateportrait of the contemporary drug scene.

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Obesity Among Poor Americans: Is PublicAssistance the Problem?, by Patricia K.Smith. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt Uni-versity Press, 2009. 197pp. $22.95 cloth.ISBN: 9780826516367.

VIRGINIA W. CHANG


Critics of welfare typically claim that publicassistance leads to unintended consequencessuch as reduced work incentives, decreasedmarriage, and out-of-wedlock births. Patri-cia Smith argues that obesity has now earneda place on this list as well and aims to exam-ine the extent to which the existing literaturecan offer empirical support for the claim thatpublic assistance causes obesity. But to whatdegree is obesity actually being deployedas leverage against welfare in the UnitedStates, and to what degree has public assis-tance per se really been cast as a new andnoteworthy culprit in the so-called ‘‘obesityepidemic’’? Smith opens the introductionwith the fact that Douglas Besharov of theAmerican Enterprise Institute has argued,in testimony before a congressional commit-tee, that the Food Stamp and NationalSchool Lunch programs contribute to obe-sity (p. 1). Beyond this point, however, thebook does not offer much background onthe current place or circulation of such argu-ments in policy or public health domains northe extent to which they have achieved trac-tion in debates over public assistance in par-ticular. While it may very well be true thatobesity is now propped up as an unintendedconsequence of welfare, more space couldhave been devoted to situating this claimand the sociopolitical controversy it inspires,mostly because it serves as the central moti-vation for the book.

Nevertheless, the causal question itselfremains quite interesting, at least to thisreader, and Smith does a wonderful job ofengaging the empirical literature at hand.The volume of work that directly or indir-ectly relates to the basic question of whetherpublic assistance causes obesity is large, sothe project is ambitious and the author is tobe commended for reviewing and organiz-ing the literature from multiple disciplines

(e.g., economics, epidemiology, nutrition,psychology, etc.) in a careful, consistent,and highly thoughtful manner.

Smith employs a conceptual frameworkwith four models or hypotheses, each ofwhich would lead to the empirical observa-tion of an association between public assis-tance and obesity: (1) public assistancecauses obesity, (2) obesity causes publicassistance, (3) poverty causes both publicassistance and obesity, and (4) some ‘‘factorX’’ causes both public assistance and obesity.Each of these models is accorded a chapter inthe book, and the author systematically sum-marizes and evaluates the existing evidencein support of each model. Moreover, sub-pathways are delineated within these mod-els, which are also quite helpful in parsingout prior work.

For Model One, Smith concludes that pro-grams such as the Special SupplementalNutrition Program for Women, Infants andChildren (WIC) and school food programsdo not contribute to childhood obesity. Foradults, Smith finds some evidence that par-ticipation in the food stamp program (FSP)is associated with a small-to-modest weightgain in women, likely through increasedpurchasing power and the monthly paymentcycle, which can affect patterns of intake.Conclusions, however, remain tentative.For Model Two, there is sufficient evidencethat obesity can function as a barrier to fac-tors such as education, occupational attain-ment, earnings, and marital prospectsamong women, but no one has tested dir-ectly whether BMI affects the probability ofbeing on public assistance. For Model Three,poverty leads to public assistance by defini-tion. As for the influence of poverty onobesity, Smith focuses on how poverty influ-ences food intake and physical activity.Potential mediators with varying degreesof empirical support include educationalattainment, access to healthy foods, opportu-nities for physical activity, mental health,food insecurity, stress, and time preference.Lastly, Smith considers five possible ‘‘X fac-tors’’ in Model Four: disabilities, mentalillness, physical and sexual abuse, low intel-ligence, and high time preference. Onlyphysical and sexual abuse garner empiricalsupport as causes of both public assistanceand obesity.

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So what does one conclude? In the finalchapter, Smith summarizes the evidence ina table showing that each of the four modelsfinds some support, though some pathwaysare considered ‘‘possible’’ and while othersare ‘‘probable’’ (p. 133). In particular, ModelOne, which taps the central concern thatpublic assistance causes obesity, is ‘‘possible’’in the case of women’s long-term food stampreceipt. But what is the relative contributionof each pathway (or subpathway) to theobserved correlation between public assis-tance and obesity? Two pathways can beequally supported empirically but varywidely in significance or importance withrespect to explaining population-level asso-ciations. Although it would have been help-ful, Smith doesn’t really weigh in orspeculate on this matter.

The issue of determining causality israised throughout the book, and the authorgenerally notes that random experimentswould be ideal, but lacking such data,we need to focus on ‘‘studies that employsound statistical techniques to adjust forthe problems associated with nonexperi-mental design’’ (p. 6). A key contributionand strength of this book is that Smith ishighly rigorous and systematic in her evalu-ation of the methodological strengths andlimitations of prior work, making her overallassessment of each of the four models/hypotheses robust and well grounded. Given,however, the importance of methodologicalconcerns in prioritizing one study overanother, I think it might have been usefulto include a short discussion of some of thetechniques that are commonly used (e.g.,fixed effects, instrumental variables, exoge-nous inputs, etc.). A variety of methods arefrequently noted in passing without muchexplanation. On the other hand, it may bequite difficult to address these issues ina simple fashion, and a detailed discussionmay be beyond the scope of this work.

Overall, the book is well written with clarityand consideration. Given the sheer volume ofstudies that are summarized one after another,however, the book can be a bit difficult asa front-to-back read. Nevertheless, somereaders may have a particular interest incertain pathways, or subpathways, and foreach component under consideration, theauthor provides a summary that is thorough

and an evaluation that is balanced andinstructive. On the whole, Smith has takenon an immense volume of literature fromseveral domains, and the overall review isreally quite impressive. Mostly importantly, Ithink she has indeed arrived at the bestanswer we can have at this juncture to thequestion of whether public assistance leadsto obesity among poor Americans.

Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite andDivide, by Cass R. Sunstein. New York:Oxford University Press, 2009. 199pp.$21.95 cloth. ISBN: 9780195378016

ARTHUR L. STINCHCOMBE


Cass Sunstein surveys what we know aboutthe effects of conversational discourse insmall face-to-face groups on questions ofpublic policy. In the end, he is especiallyinterested in a ‘‘crippled epistemology’’ (amarvelous phrase). The ‘‘extremes’’ of thetitle are especially bad if they are stupid, illinformed, and injurious. The cap of crip-pling epistemology is a group systematicallybuilding barriers to learning that they arewrong, by excluding people and evidencebecause they disagree.

He starts with innocuous effects of ‘‘pola-rization’’ in heterogeneous small groups dis-cussing in unstructured (i.e., probablyuniversity) settings. People slightly liberal(e.g., Democrats) become more liberal; slightlyconservative more conservative. So tospeak, each side fills in blanks in a sociallypolarized worldview. Such drifts appearespecially in the experiments with one-dimensional, socially-named divisions, aboutwhich people do not have deep feelings (e.g.,in the United States, not abortion or capitalpunishment). Such divides have sociallyestablished zeros, where people satisfy thecomment about Bertrand Russell, ‘‘such anopen mind the wind blows through.’’ Theone-dimensional character of experimentalcauses and outcomes means that the resultscannot be generalized to multiparty systems:for example, voters for extreme Nazism inthe last open Weimar election were stronglyProtestant rather than Catholic, and strongly

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against secular social-democratic ideology.That does not fit on one dimension. TheCharles E. Osgood tradition from the 1950s,much enriched by the affect control theorydevelopments recently (e.g., Smith-Lovinand Heise 1988), would fit a good deal better.That work also helps to study experimental-ly one of Sunstein’s sources of crippled epis-temology: his suggestion of ‘‘inherentrhetorical advantage’’ of some arguments.

Most of the middle of the book is about thevarious ways that a crippled epistemologycan take place in such small groups. Formany of these, the generalization to every-day life and politics is deeper in Erving Goff-man’s Strategic Interaction (1969). ButSunstein’s book gives a quicker survey insmaller doses, and he is as good a writer asGoffman. Sunstein’s is a fun book to read.

Now to a brief comment on the cripplingof Sunstein’s epistemology, adopted mostlyfrom the experimental branch of behavioraleconomics, which usually uses, for example,one causal variable, often dichotomous, andalmost always uncalibrated. Variation isusually created by a verbal manipulation.The lack of calibration means the size ofthe effects cannot be quantitatively estimated,and causal strength cannot be generalizedquantitatively to the world, and so the causecannot be compared with other causes:‘‘rational action,’’ cultural socialization, ordegrees of uncertainty.

Consequently when Sunstein generalizesto real-world group behavior, his level ofethnography is perforce ‘‘shallow,’’ in thesense that the complexity of the situationcannot be analyzed in any nuanced waywith only one variable. His scholarship inthe descriptions he gives is almost alwaysgood, but none of it would ‘‘complexify themind’’ of the reader. The experiment sup-ports a model, then (as also happens withmodels from ordinary microeconomics)comes to the real world and asks a singlequestion. Since the variables are ordinarilynot calibrated, that one question cannotmanage the additional question of ‘‘Is theeffect important?’’ If one calls it ‘‘terrorism’’when analyzing young male Muslims and‘‘drone attacks’’ when analyzing Americansoldiers in Pakistani mountains, one has nometric for comparing effects. I have talkeda lot about public affairs in the last 50 years,

but am only a bit less extreme left than that16-year-old, suggesting a small effect.

I am myself addicted to the method ofbuilding simple models, ‘‘sometimes truetheories,’’ as James S. Coleman called them,where a plea of ‘‘ceteris paribus’’ excusesus from specifying scope conditions of theo-ries. The recklessness of then generalizing tothe world raises the a priori probability thatSunstein or I have the hypothesis right highenough to say, ‘‘This might be worth study-ing seriously, with calibrated variables forgeneralization of experiment to world, withdeep description of the context so as to studythe scope of the theory.’’

Sunstein is a brilliant writer, learned andclever. I recommend him strongly to thosewho would like to dress up our theoreticalapperceptive mass with slightly higher a pri-ori probabilities about public opinion, terror-ism, or the epistemological virtues of the FirstAmendment’s free speech provisions. Andmay we come to calibrate an independentvariable.

References

Goffman, Erving. 1969. Strategic Interaction. Philadel-

phia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Smith-Lovin, Lynn and David R. Heise, eds. 1988. Ana-

lyzing Social Interaction: Advances in Affect Control The-

ory. New York: Gordon and Breach Science.

A Historical Sociology of Childhood: Develop-mental Thinking, Categorization and GraphicVisualization, by Andre Turmel. Cambridge,UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 362pp. $35.99 paper. ISBN: 9780521705639.

BARBARA HEYNS

New York [email protected]

Andre Turmel has an ambitious agenda: toanalyze how contemporary conceptions ofchildren and childhood emerged, thus con-tributing to a historically grounded sociologi-cal approach to childhood. This book is not,however, a study of cultural artifacts fromthe Middle Ages and the discovery of child-hood, as Aries would have it. Nor is it an over-view of expert opinion on child rearing

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through the ages. Turmel’s focus is on thenineteenth and early twentieth centuries, onthe birth of statistical reasoning, and on howmeasurement and graphing techniques per-mitted classifying, monitoring, and regulatingchildren and parents. Science, in Turmel’s tell-ing, was invoked as the means to bring orderand understanding to the ‘‘chaos’’ of child-hood. The ‘‘childhood collective,’’ consistingof parents, teachers, pediatricians, nurses,and a variety of social reformers, adopteddevelopmental thinking as the preeminentcognitive form describing normal growth asa series of predictable stages. Children werethereby reduced to numerical representations,to height-weight-age charts and visual distri-butions of other traits, including intelligenceand character. Means and average scores tab-ulated by age were used to impute normalgrowth—as well as to define worrisome indi-cators of pathology or abnormality. The prolif-eration of seemingly innocent charts andgraphs led to the developmental conceptionof growth and maturation, and propelledwhat Turmel refers to as ‘‘the rationalizationof childhood’’ in modern societies.

Turmel asserts, correctly I think, that whilethese statistical methods were widely usedby early sociologists, the sociological gazeturned away from childhood rather quickly.Psychology became the discipline most inti-mately involved with human development,while sociology was left with studying thefamily or schools. Simplistic theories ofsocialization predominated in sociology,presuming that ‘‘society’’ imposed norms,values, and behavioral expectations on theyoung who internalized them, thus ensuringsocial reproduction. Children were, however,largely irrelevant as either a social group oras social actors. Children reentered thesociological domain only in the last decadesof the twentieth century. Turmel acknowl-edges recent efforts to construct a ‘‘new’’sociology of childhood, with children’sagency and viewpoint as primary issues,but his interests revolve around historicalprocesses and the social technologies thatconstruct childhood and constrain both chil-dren and parents to be ‘‘normal.’’ Turmelargues that the developmental paradigmsthat emerged in the early twentieth centuryendure as predominant descriptions ofpresent-day children even though they are

no longer appropriate. No doubt statisticaltabulations and graphs cannot capture thediversity of contemporary childhoods, butexactly how conceptions based on age-specific averages are inadequate is nevermade clear. There is little evidence thatsuch data constitute the basis for either inter-vention or authoritative advice to parents,and even less that it is actually followed.Less than 25 percent of all pediatriciansreport using standardized developmentalindicators as a means for understanding oradvising parents, even though their filesare replete with such information. How caneither parents or children be regulated or‘‘constrained’’ by developmental data whenthe majority of practitioners ignore it?

Science has doubtless had an impact onchild rearing and on the culture of childhood.However, Turmel’s contention that categori-zation and visualization provided essentialnormative devices influencing parent-childrelations is unpersuasive. Moreover, theconcept of developmental thinking is muchtoo broad and all-inclusive to lead to thestandardization of views or practice.

The book is fairly dense and quitedetailed. Most of the material has beenpresented and analyzed before, althoughTurmel’s narrative seems comprehensive.The book may be most useful as referenceand bibliography, but less so as assignedreading in sociology classrooms. A carefuleditor or proofreader could have improvedthe style considerably as well as removedexcessive jargon and corrected the numeroustypos.

Theoretically, the book is written as anexpose, but without a villain, much as Fou-cault analyzes professional mentalities andsocial change without specifying mecha-nisms of social control. I cannot get outragedor even particularly indignant when shownhow pediatricians used rather weak scienceto cajole or browbeat parents into takingnutrition and hygiene seriously. Nor do Ithink that parents were or have been intimi-dated or forced to alter their relationshipswith their children because they wereapprised of their children’s percentile posi-tion in height, weight, or even school perfor-mance. To be sure, the theoretical discourseis largely developmental, but this seemspreferable to a deterministic account. It

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strikes me as much more humane to havecounselors and clinicians tell parents thattheir children are in danger of becomingdelinquents or may run afoul of the lawwithout better supervision than to have reli-gious leaders label them as corrupted bySatan at birth so that even decent parentsare unable to be sufficiently strict. Raisingchildren is inherently uncertain and anxietyprovoking; scientific charts and graphsseem, however, less likely to terrify andharass parents than hearing dire pronounce-ments from the pulpit about original sin.

In sum, Turmel summarizes an enormousamount of historical work on the develop-ment of measurement and data collectionon and about children. He is not convincingthat this defines child development or that itleads unavoidably to criteria for normalcy orstandards for evaluating and monitoringchild rearing.

Safe Motherhood in a Globalized World, editedby Barbara Wejnert, Suzanne K. Steinmetz,and Nirupama Prakash. New York:Routledge. 2009. 179pp. $125.00 cloth.ISBN: 9780415488167.

BARBARA KATZ ROTHMAN

City University of New [email protected]

Safe Motherhood in a Globalized World is anedited volume, originally published as a spe-cial issue of Marriage and Family Review. It isan ambitious project that unfortunatelypromises far more than it delivers. Thebook presents itself in the very first line asproviding ‘‘cutting edge information’’ onsafe motherhood in a global context. Butwhat does that actually mean? There issuch a scramble of ‘‘statements’’ in thisbook—it begs the question of what consti-tutes information.

On page 3 of the introduction by the editors,we are told without any citation that ‘‘mostmaternal deaths occur in the postpartum per-iod and more than half within a day of deliv-ery.’’ This may be true, but there are hugeproblems with reporting maternal deaths,and the closer the death is to the time of thebirth, the more likely it is to be counted asa maternal death. But it gets worse. Again,

with no citations, the editors say, ‘‘However,a skilled attendant at every birth is the singlecritical factor that could save many lives.’’ Inthe next sentence they report a 1998-99 (fulldecade old, not so cutting edge) survey inIndia which found that only 14.8 percent ofpregnant women delivered at a health facility,whereas the rest did so at home. Skilledattendants attend home births all over theworld: absence of hospitalization does notequal absence of skilled attendance, and theworld data do indicate that home birth, inappropriately matched samples, is as safe orsafer than hospital births. The editors thengo on to say (and we are still only on page 4)that half the girls in Rajasthan India conceiveat an average of 17.6 years old, and that ‘‘inHindu communities early marriages beforemenstruation are the most preferred.’’They then inform us that the Time of India(sic) reports that ‘‘most young females areundernourished, anemic and cannot sustainhealthy pregnancies.’’ And this has what todo with place of birth? And what to dowith cutting-edge information?

Part I of the book is called ‘‘GeneralConcepts of Safe Motherhood in Relation toGlobalization.’’ But it is such a hodgepodgeof pieces, it is hard to know what to makeof it. There is, for example, a seven-page arti-cle ‘‘Consequences of Pain in Early Life andIts Remedy: Maternal Responsibility.’’ In theabstract of the book on the first (unnum-bered) page, the authors refer to a topicincluded as ‘‘revelation of mysteries of conse-quences of pre-birth pain in the early life ofchildren.’’ This article was the closest I couldfind to that. It was not about pre-birth pain.The article is a study of post-natal pain,pain in babies and children, and—in a cutting-edge finding my great-grandmother wouldhave completely endorsed—it was foundthat sweets, literally chocolates and toffee,help. But don’t give too much. Chocolatesand toffees for pain are for children, notinfants, let alone for ‘‘pre-birth pain.’’ Andwhat does that have to do with safe mother-hood? With globalization? With maternalresponsibility? Am I missing something?

An article titled ‘‘Impact of Culture onLactation Policies: The Case of the UnitedStates and Liberia’’ draws on data for Liberiafrom a personal communication from a PeaceCorps nurse who served in Liberia in the

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1980s. An interesting enough tale istold—but that is the last we hear of Liberia.And the U.S. policy discussion is based onan oft-told and important case, but one thatdates to 1991, of a woman who called a hot-line to ask about whether it was normal fora woman to become aroused while nursingher child. A rape hotline and then the policewere involved, the woman was arrested andthe child put into foster care. It was of coursea nightmare. But it is not informative of lac-tation policies, and it is most assuredly notcutting edge—the child is now over 20.

There are of course stronger articles in thebook—but sadly there are others that are justas problematic and weak as these. A stron-ger editorial hand was needed: both forweeding through and using only work thattruly contributes to our understanding ofsafe motherhood in a globalized context,and for the more ordinary editing—the ESLissues, the standard grammatical problems,and so on. The book has the sloppy editingand production we’ve come to expect of aca-demic presses in general, and maybe Rout-ledge in particular (disclaimer: the authorof this review is herself a disgruntled Rout-ledge author). The book starts with some-thing called ‘‘note from the editor,’’ whichis actually a biography of an artist witha photo on the page, presumably of the artistbut unmarked. And only by looking at thetiny print on the back cover of the bookwould one learn that the artist did the coverdesign. Then there are the odd big blankspaces that start each chapter—missingabstracts perhaps? But they are randomlyrepeated here and there, so maybe not? May-be just sloppy editing. It’s a problem.

Violence: A New Approach, by MichelWieviorka, translated by David Macey.Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2009. 183pp.$39.95 paper. ISBN: 9781847875464.

LOIS PRESSER


Michel Wieviorka’s new book suggests thatthere are more things in heaven and earththan are dreamt of in our philosophy—andour psychology and sociology—of extreme

violence. The book is divided into Part I,where Wieviorka builds the claim thata new paradigm is needed and gathers thelessons of classical approaches to violence,and Part II, where he lays out his new para-digm, focused on ‘‘the subject.’’ Each partcomprises four chapters.

Wieviorka reviews classical treatments ofviolence, including theories that view vio-lence as a psychological tendency of per-sons, a reaction to strain, or a reflection ofone’s subculture. He concludes that thesetheories fail to explain violence adequatelybecause they ignore the violent actor andthe meaning of violence to that actor, theydo not scrutinize the violent action itselfand its victims, and as such they also fail totheorize the cruel excesses of extreme vio-lence. Yet the classical theories have gener-ated a helpful (if limited) distinctionbetween instrumental and expressive vio-lence. That distinction is a springboard forWieviorka’s thinking about the excessive,elusive nature of violence, and the centralityof the agent who potentially creates meaningin and of his or her existence—the subject.

In Chapter One Wieviorka considers therelationship between violence and conflictas exemplified by class struggle and theCold War. In Chapter Two he grapples withthe relation between the state and violence,and with the larger question of the legitimi-zation of violence. In Chapter Three Wie-viorka points out the emergence of thevictim in discussions of violence in the late1960s, and studies its implications. ChapterFour examines the relationship betweenthe media and violence, including what weknow of violence. As a whole, Part I unpacksthe modern science of violence and itsconceptual results.

In Chapter Five Wieviorka lays out histheory of violence, focused on meaning orthe loss of meaning. Chapter Six problemat-izes the non-meaning hypothesis, epito-mized by Arendt’s notion of ‘‘the banalityof evil.’’ Chapter Seven addresses the ques-tion of why cruelty characterizes so muchviolence, by asking: does cruelty have mean-ing for the perpetrator? In Chapter EightWieviorka shares at length his conceptionof the subject as one with the potential tomake consequential choices for oneself. Heidentifies different logics of violence based

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on five different ‘‘figures’’ of the subject: thefloating subject, the hyper-subject, the non-subject, the anti-subject, and the survivor-subject.

The floating subject lacks a space withinwhich to act, or a project, such as a conflict,in which to engage. The hyper-subject findsa new space within which to act, one thatcontains an overabundance of meanings:fundamentalist religion is an importantexample. I found Wieviorka’s discussion ofthe floating subject and the hyper-subject tobe high points of the book due to their con-temporary global relevance. The non-subjectis the player of roles, the follower of com-mands, and thus not a subject at all. Theanti-subject, whose violence provides satis-faction and whose relationships are sadisticgenerally, denies the victim’s subjectivity.Finally, the survivor-subject perpetrates vio-lence to defend his or her survival in the faceof real or imagined danger.

What is new about Wieviorka’s ‘‘newapproach’’ to violence? His main innovationis to locate explicitly the grounds of violencein a non- or presocial phenomenon—thesubject. (He rejects a Lacanian notion of thesubject as constituted by a symbolic order.)In the first instance, the actor craves mean-ing: the desire for meaning precedes (social)meaning. Yet, Wieviorka insists that his the-ory is sociological because it could beapplied to a project he does not take on:investigating the social conditions for differ-ent patterns of violence.

The book, especially Part I, reads likeexplorations or spirited conversations withold ideas rather than a refutation of them:these conversations end untidily or not atall. Only the most advanced students in soci-ology and criminology courses will graspwhat Wieviorka actually thinks about otherperspectives on violence, for once and forall. But this is not a ‘‘for once and for all’’sort of book. Part II likewise leaves certainmatters untouched. For example, Wieviorkahere deals little with the micro-macro (onemight say, subject-subjects) relationship.How would he explain the ways in whichthe subject positions of many individuals cul-minate in mass violence, which is the mostdamaging sort? Do the various agents ofgenocide or terrorism occupy the same sub-ject position, if only in the notional stages of

their attack? What about the subject posi-tions of leaders versus followers?

Whereas Wieviorka considers state vio-lence, including ‘‘illegitimate’’ violence, inChapter Two, such violence is actually hardto reconcile with his own theory. If heattended to the role of government inmuch of today’s mass violence, he wouldhave to grapple with synergies among sub-ject positions and meanings. Notwithstand-ing such unfinished business, Wieviorka’sbook is as lucid and thoughtful as any thathas been written on the topic of violence.His idea of the ‘‘non-subject’’ will stimulatediscussion of the nature of agency. His‘‘anti-subject’’ will be used to scrutinize therelation between meaning-making aboutthe self and the other. His view of the essen-tial mystery of extreme violence will givepause to those of us who try to get to the bot-tom of it.

Consumption and the Transformation ofEveryday Life: A View from South India, byHarold Wilhite. New York: PalgraveMacmillan, 2008. 205pp. $90.00 cloth. ISBN:9780230542549.

SANJOY MAZUMDAR

University of California, [email protected]

Harold Wilhite of the Centre for Develop-ment and Environment at the University ofOslo, wishes to uncover how local peoplemake consumption choices in this era ofglobalization and transnational corpora-tions, how these choices affect daily practi-ces, and why consumption of householdgoods and commodities is growing rapidly.Consumption is defined as ‘‘the acquisitionand use of things, including goods, productsand increasingly, household appliance tech-nologies’’ (p. 3). This anthropological studyis primarily of the middle class in theKumarapuram neighborhood of Thiruva-nanthapuram or Trivandrum, in the south-ern Indian state of Kerala. He refers tothem as Malayalees (speakers of Malaya-lam). Data collection techniques includedinterviews with 80 families, daily diarieskept by 20 of them, notes on TV programs,advertisements, and watchers, as well as

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a survey consisting of 38 structured inter-view questions with fixed-response alterna-tives asked of 408 households in fournearby neighborhoods. Wilhite takes a socialand materialist perspective claiming thatanthropologists have largely neglected tostudy consumption and technology, andthat few have researched people’s everydaypractices or changing consumption in devel-oping economies.

Wilhite’s book provides a welcome forayinto consumption in a country that until1991 had severe import restrictions. He cov-ers much ground, providing a short histori-cal background and a Malayalam glossary(though not all terms are used in the book)to help understand the context, anddescribes cultural practices, such as familyrelations, marriage and dowry, women’sroles, education, work abroad, TV and howit is changing family relations, beauty andconsumption of clothes and cosmetics,cleanliness and use of soap, and householdgoods such as mixes, microwaves, andrefrigerators. Interesting glimpses includethe acquisition of cars and larger sport utilityvehicles (SUVs) as well as of houses, facili-tated in many instances by dowry and gift-giving. Hot water is not seen as necessaryfor good hygene as cleanliness is achievedthrough multiple baths a day, wearing fresh-ly washed clothes, and rigorous hand wash-ing, especially before and after meals, allwithout the use of hot water and untilrecently only moderate use of cleaningagents, such as soaps. Use of soap is, howev-er, being promoted by the World Bank andsoap manufacturers.

Wilhite shines when he takes up environ-mental effects. He describes how the increas-ing use of soap is polluting water supplies,how the use of thachushastram, which con-tained age-old wisdom on house designand construction and prescriptions for selec-tion and orientation of the plot and house,the placement and sizes of windows aimedat comfort, natural cooling utilizing passivesolutions, and employment of viswakamos,artisans knowledgeable in thachushastram,is declining and being replaced with moderndesigns by architects and engineers. Inade-quate cooling by these new house designsis increasing consumption of air condition-ing in spite of common power shortages

and brownouts. This, posits Wilhite, is ‘‘rath-er the result of a socio-material change in thehome as technology, new ideas about how toachieve comfort from returning workermigrants, and increased availability andaffordability of air conditioning’’ (p. 119).

Welcome and informative as this book is,it is not without omissions and issues.Some may bewail the lack of a central argu-ment by stating ‘‘there is no single, compos-ite theory that works for all types ofconsumption in the home’’ (p. 3). The authorexamines less universal questions, but hedoes not explicate why studies such as theone based in Kerala are important. Connec-tions between culture and ‘‘consumption’’require more midi- and mini- narrativesthat point to the limitations of the grandessentializing universalistic view of global-ized consumption. Mediation by culture ofindividual consumption choices wouldhave been fascinating. As a cultural group,did consumers view or use products inways that did not match that of the corpora-tions? Did they affect the design, manufac-ture, or advertisement of products?Examples of such creative agency wouldhave been very interesting. Products maybe culture neutral, culture supportive, ormay negatively affect culture. More detaileddescriptions of the effects of consumption onculture would have been useful. Given thestated focus on Kerala and its culture, thesewere missed.

The way ‘‘consumer’’ and ‘‘consumption’’are viewed could have been questioned. Wil-hite seems to accept the economic lens pro-moted by corporations though his datareveals what I would term the ‘‘tensions’’and ‘‘turbulence’’ of consumption. He showsthat consumption is not neutral and has neg-ative effects, such as waste, energy use, pol-lution, and damage to ecosystems. The lasteighteen years may have caused more dam-age to ecosystems through trash and pollu-tion than decades of ‘‘non-consumerist’’existence.

What is appropriate consumption? What,when, by whom, and how much is appropri-ate, and who ought to decide? People’s ownmaking and consuming of products is notconsidered ‘‘consumption.’’ This privilegesthird party products and does not meshwell with Wilhite’s ‘‘local’’ consumption

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argument. This and conspicuous, symbolic,and social-status-oriented consumptionalso do not receive much attention.

Given the materialist perspective taken, itwould have been useful to connect with theliterature on the inter-relationships betweenpeople (culture) and design of objects (ofconsumption). This research suggests thatchoice of designs (products) by ethnic andcultural groups is affected by cultural val-ues, beliefs, and preferences. Mention of fru-gality, referenced to Gandhi, and thediscussion of religion also raise questionsfrom a non-materialist perspective of appro-priate consumption and whether consump-tion really is freedom or a form of bondage?

The numerous spelling and English errorsshould have been caught by a sharp editorthe publisher clearly did not provide. Useof more standard transliteration (e.g. Durga,dhobi, thachushastram, Sanskrit, Nambu-diri, etc.) would have made reading easier.The maps and pictures helped ground theaccount; more would have been better.

The Politics of Food Supply: U.S. AgriculturalPolicy in the World Economy, by BillWinders. New Haven, CT: Yale UniversityPress, 2009. 274pp. $55.00 cloth. ISBN:9780300139242.

CARMEN BAIN

Iowa State [email protected]

One of the enduring controversies in theUnited States is why farmers continue toreceive public financial support in theform of agricultural subsidies. Such inter-ventionist policies by the state appear atodds with the dominant ideology of thefree-market and of course much of theantigovernment rhetoric in other policyarenas (e.g., the current health care debate).Bill Winders’ The Politics of Food Supplysheds light on the seemingly paradoxicalnature of agriculture policy by analyzingthe class, state, and market forces that haveshaped it for much of the twentieth century.Winders demonstrates how the continualexpansion and contraction of governmentregulatory intervention within agricultureis shaped by the economic interests and

political power of coalitions within agricul-ture itself.

The analytical focus of Winders’ book isthe Federal Agriculture Improvement andReform (FAIR) Act of 1996. However,to understand FAIR, Winders employs anhistorical-comparative approach. Drawingon extensive archival materials, includingagricultural statistics and Congressionalhearings, Winders’ analysis begins duringthe period of the New Deal when the federalgovernment made a sharp U-turn, rejectingthe free market principles that predomi-nated within agriculture and instead adopt-ing policy that emphasized ‘‘supplymanagement.’’ The objective of supply man-agement was to boost commodity prices andthus farm income by managing the supply ofcertain agricultural commodities. Relying onpublic policy rather than market mecha-nisms to control supply and demand cameto an abrupt end in 1996 with the FAIR Act,which fundamentally changed the practice ofprice supports and eliminated productioncontrols on commodities. The puzzle thenthat Winders attempts to answer here is first,how did supply management policy last solong despite significant opposition, and sec-ond, why did it end when it did? The firstpart of the book answers this puzzle byexamining the forces that initially coalescedto create state intervention within agricul-ture, and the second part of the bookassesses the forces that led to the retrench-ment of these same policies.

Winders’ book is important because itdeparts from traditional analyses of agricul-tural policy that draw on contemporaryevents to explain policy shifts. One of themore widely accepted explanations for theend of supply management is that itreflected the shift in political power awayfrom a declining population of farmers andrural interest groups—who supportedit—toward urban and nonagriculturalinterest groups—who were opposed to it.This perspective is problematic because itassumes that farmers are a homogeneousgroup with shared interests, and it deflectsattention away from how changes withinagriculture itself led to policy changes. Theseare two assumptions that Winders success-fully undermines by situating these changeswithin their historical context.

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Drawing on Polanyi, Winders asserts thatU.S. agricultural policy illustrates the ‘‘dou-ble movement’’ of the market economywhereby government regulation expandsand contracts as some groups push for morelaissez-faire market policy while otherspush for more regulation. However, the shiftto supply management and later towardmore market-oriented policies did not reflecteither a pro- or anti-agriculture strategy, butrather was driven by intra class conflict with-in agriculture itself. Winders explains thatthis conflict—and the political coalitionsthat it in turn produced—was the result ofregional divisions (especially between farm-ers in the South, the Corn Belt, and theWheat Belt), historical shifts in agriculturalproduction, and changes in the global econ-omy, all of which differentially shaped theeconomic interests and policy preferencesof producers.

When FAIR was implemented in 1996, theSouth, which had been crucial to shaping thepolicies that instituted supply managementand had steadfastly defended them formost of the twentieth century, no longerhad the political power or economic interestto do so. Instead, economic and politicalpower had shifted towards the Corn Belt,the livestock sector, and agribusiness, all ofwhom were opposed to production controls.Winders explains that this shift was theresult of the expansion of the intensive live-stock sector, including in the South whereafter 1980 poultry production emerged asits most valuable agricultural commodity.Supply management, which keeps the sup-ply of feed grains low and prices high, wasnot in the interests of the livestock sector.Another major shift was the opening of theworld economy, which was particularly ben-eficial to the corn, livestock, and agribusi-ness segments. From their perspective,supply management was unnecessary sinceexpanding global markets was the meansthrough which to manage commodity sup-ply and prices. Finally, the alignment ofthese agricultural sectors with the Republi-can Party, which had gained control of Con-gress in 1994, gave them the politicalinfluence they needed to pass FAIR. Windersconcludes that this ‘‘double movement’’cannot be understood as a struggle betweenthe market on one hand versus the state on

the other. Rather it is at the heart of capital-ism, whereby one cannot exist without theother.

The Politics of Food Supply provides a thor-ough and detailed examination of theeconomic and political forces that haveshaped U.S. agricultural policy for much ofthe twentieth century. Moreover, Winders’focus on how changes within agricultureitself have acted to shape policy offers animportant alternative to most analyses,thus providing a necessary contributiontoward understanding both historical andcontemporary agricultural policy. More gen-erally, this book will prove valuable forsocial scientists and historians interested intopics of food and agriculture, political soci-ology, and public policy.

Chinese Policing: History and Reform, by KamC. Wong. New York: Peter Lang, 2009.263pp. $33.95 paper. ISBN: 9781433100161.

BIN LIANG

Oklahoma State University, [email protected]

With the increased pace of globalization,comparative studies in criminal justice sys-tems have played an increasingly salientrole. Case studies focusing on particular sys-tems in detail are critical because they notonly provide rich data on these particularsystems, but also make further comparisonsbetween different systems possible andmeaningful. Kam Wong’s study on Chinesepolicing is such an example. First and fore-most, Wong’s work provides a systematicand comprehensive study of various aspectsof Chinese policing such as its domesticstudy, history, education, culture, reform,and theory. Despite increased attention, West-ern studies on Chinese policing are often‘‘sketchy, spotty, and superficial’’ (p. 1). Thisbook nicely fills the gap and gives the readera better understanding of the overall pictureof Chinese policing from different angles.

Second, given his education and trainingin both Western and Chinese backgrounds,Wong tries to bridge, though not withoutstruggle (discussed below), cultural differ-ences and to present a meaningful compari-son between both (e.g., his discussion on

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education in Chapter Five and on theory ofcommunity policing in Chapter Eight).Wong tries to avoid problems such as ‘‘eth-nocentrism and cultural ignorance’’ (p. 2),and to study Chinese policing in its uniquehistorical and social contexts.

Third, gaining research access is alwaysa difficult challenge to scholars conductingcomparative studies, especially given thenature of China’s political and legal systems.Wong has managed to gain some access overtime and presents in this book invaluableinformation, rarely known before, such ashow Chinese domestic scholars conductresearch in policing and how Chinese policeeducation is constructed.

There are some limitations in this bookthough. First, the ‘‘comprehensive’’ natureof Wong’s discussion turns out to be botha strength and a weakness. A ‘‘comprehen-sive’’ coverage of various topics in this bookserves well the purpose of a textbook butleaves many places more room to be fullydiscussed and developed. Noticeably, forexample, a discussion on the historicalidea and origin of Chinese policing inChapter Two falls short of a detailedresearch of such critical issues beyondmere repetition of what has been studiedby Chinese domestic scholars (understand-able, given the fact that Wong himself is notan historian).

Second, related to the first limitation,Wong’s effort of putting many topics underthe same title ‘‘Chinese policing’’ in factleads to quality-uneven chapters: whilesome chapters (e.g., Chapters Three andEight) are research oriented with their ownquestions, methods, and conceptual andtheoretical frameworks, other chapters arerather descriptive and loosely knitted intothe overall discussion. His multiple-sourceapproach, including knowledge gainedfrom his personal visits and observations inChina, sometimes rushed him into hastyconclusions without proper foundationsand citations (e.g., his discussion of China’spublic security funding on p. 19).

Third, despite his great effort at criticizingethnocentrism and proposing to study Chi-nese policing ‘‘from inside out and from bot-tom up’’ (p. 10), Wong himself could notavoid such pitfalls by essentializing Westernmodels. Chapter Six seems to be most

troublesome in this regard when he jump-shifted from a discussion on police problems(e.g., corruption and power abuse) in Chinato a discussion of lack of the rule of law andconstitutionalism. Many empirical examplesthat he used to support his arguments areindeed subject to different interpretations(e.g., letter/personal visitation data, citizens’complaint data, administrative litigationdata) and facing competing results by morerecent studies (e.g., the conclusion thathigher officials have been treated moreleniently than lower officials in China). Asanother example, Wong correctly mentionedthat ‘‘There is a tendency to reference PRCpolice as a monolithic entity or treat Chinesepolicing as a uniform activity’’ (p. 7). How-ever, he himself failed to follow up on thiscritical point throughout most of his discus-sions. These examples show that scholars incomparative research still face constant chal-lenges in how to gain research access andcollect data, how to do cross-nation/systemcomparison, and how to avoid ethnocen-trism in such studies.

Fourth, in comparison to his discussion of‘‘history,’’ Wong devoted a full chapter(Chapter Seven) to police reform in China.Unfortunately, this chapter, adapted froma previous journal publication, is not updatedto the most recent reform efforts in China.Data used in this chapter, with few excep-tions, end at the year 1993. As Wong put it,‘‘Subsequent developments, not discussedhere, are more evolutionary in character’’(p. 157). Further discussion of current reformefforts, including daily operations and behav-ior of Chinese police, should be addressed togive the reader a better picture of Chinesepolicing today, especially given the changingnature of Chinese economic, political-legal,social, and cultural conditions. Similarly, itwould be very helpful in Chapter Eight todiscuss how Chinese community policing,the mass-line policing (MLP), and its corre-sponding theory, the ‘‘police power as socialresource theory’’ (PPSRT), have changedover time, particularly facing challengesfrom the increasing globalization.

Lastly, the book would benefit from bet-ter editing. For example, there are manyplaces where Wong used ‘‘pinyin’’ to indi-cate the original Chinese texts/documents.Unfortunately, they are misspelled, which

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causes trouble for readers (especiallyChinese natives).

Boundless Faith: The Global Outreach of AmericanChurches, by Robert Wuthnow. Berkeley, CA:University of California Press, 2009. 345pp.$26.95 cloth. ISBN: 9780520259157.

MARY JO NEITZ


In the last decade, academics, journalists,and religious officials have popularized thethesis that the locus of Christianity hasshifted from the ‘‘global north’’ to the ‘‘glob-al south.’’ This thesis is based partly ona demographic shift marked by the growingChristian populations outside of Europe andNorth America. It also reflects the assump-tion that secularization in North Americaand Europe resulted in a weakened Chris-tianity in comparison with thriving andvibrant expressions in other parts of theworld. In this book, Robert Wuthnow, inhis usual careful way, questions this thesis,and brings an array of data to bear on theissues, reframing the questions and helpingthe reader to see what has changed andwhat has not in the current context.

Wuthnow focuses here on AmericanChristianity. Because the United States andEurope have markedly different patterns ofsecularization, he argues it makes sense tolook separately at U.S. churches and theirtransnational connections. He examineshow they have been influenced by globaliza-tion and what ordinary people are doing toreach beyond the borders through their con-gregations and other religious organizations.Wuthnow begins by observing that the over-whelming predisposition is for congrega-tions to be local. Yet this is in tension—atension present even in the ambiguousmeaning of the word ‘‘church’’—with theperception of most congregants that theirchurch is also part of a global church thatcrosses national boundaries. Without deny-ing the significance of the demographic shiftand the growth of indigenous Christianchurches in the global South, Wuthnowargues that imbalances in wealth mean thatresources and influence still flow from the

United States to other countries and that associologists we need to attend to whatAmerican Christians are doing and theeffects of their efforts.

Before turning to that data, two meatychapters develop a context for thinkingabout what is new. In one, Wuthnow looksat globalization since the 1970s, showinghow church people in the United Stateshave become more connected to other partsof the world through flows of people, infor-mation, goods, and capital. He reviews theliterature on the effects of global monocul-ture and arguments about the persistenceof local diversity, about the growth ofbeneficent markets, and about dislocationand immiseration. Wuthnow argues thatwhile there are no simple effects, globaliza-tion creates new connections that fosterlinks between U.S. churches and people inother places. In a second chapter Wuthnowreviews the history of transnational tiesbetween U.S. churches and people in othercountries through looking at changingforms of social organization. He beginswith the development of mission activitiesstarting in 1810 with the founding of theAmerican Board of Commissioners for For-eign Missions. Through the nineteenth cen-tury, the ABCFM and similar organizationsraised money from local churches to sendprofessional missionaries overseas. Laterin the nineteenth century, changes in inter-national treaties and trade policies, thegrowth of private philanthropy, technologi-cal changes leading to faster communica-tions and transportation facilitated newways of training, recruiting, and deployingmissionaries. In the twentieth century, asreligious groups began to attend more topoverty, hunger, and disaster relief, theydeveloped NGOs that work more closelywith governmental agencies. Most recently,for-profit ministries reach for markets indeveloping countries and individual con-gregations and church members engagedirectly in transnational activities. Wuth-now argues that in order to understandthe changing role of U.S. Christianity inthe world, it is essential to understandhow grassroots mechanisms providedthrough particular organizational struc-tures link people in different parts of theworld.

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In two more chapters, data collected for thisbook are analyzed: first, the national GlobalIssues Survey (2,231 telephone interviewswith church members); second, 300 in-depthqualitative interviews with clergy and layleaders involved in international outreachprograms; and, third, 50 interviews withagency directors and staff. One chapter focus-es on global activities of congregations. Wuth-now reports that most congregations raisemoney for hunger and relief work to be dis-tributed by large trusted agencies. Increasing-ly, however, congregations choose to supportorganizations with which they have moredirect connections including specific projects,churches, or even people—29 percent ofrespondents said their congregations havehelped support a refugee or refugee familywithin the previous 12 months (pp. 145–46).Congregations still sponsor missionaries andthere is some evidence that those missionariesare more likely to be involved in humanitarianwork than in the past (p. 154). Wuthnow alsodocuments the new trend for individuals togo abroad for short-term mission trips: he sug-gests that an astonishing 20-25 percent ofchurchgoers may be involved in such a tripin their lifetimes. The effects for the visitingAmericans, who often return seeing both theUnited States and other cultures in a newlight, are greater than for the sites they visit(pp. 171–85).

A final chapter takes up the question ofwhen and how religious advocacy influen-ces foreign policy. Again, Wuthnow’s cau-tious approach complicates the question ashe reminds us that neither religion nor pub-lic policy is monolithic. Wuthnow assertsthat both political figures and religious lead-ers can gain legitimacy with particular con-stituencies by employing rhetoric assertingreligious influences. But Wuthnow findsdirect influence quite limited in the areas offree trade, human rights, militarism, and for-eign assistance. Religious organizations doengage in advocacy by mobilizing theirmembers, and some international organiza-tions (e.g., Bread for the World) lobby Con-gress and work with other governmentaland nongovernmental organizations on spe-cific policies.

The body of evidence Wuthnow assem-bles here successfully challenges claimsthat American churches no longer play

a part in global Christianity, or see local con-gregations as completely absorbed in meet-ing only the needs of their members, orassume that the political voice of AmericanChristianity in U.S. foreign policy is an univ-ocal one—conservative and evangelical atthat, encouraging imperialism, free trade,and military action. Some readers maywant to know more about the outcomes ofall this charitable giving, transnational travel,and humanitarian work. They may want toknow about the effects on individuals andorganizations in the global south who arethe objects and partners. They will need tolook elsewhere. This book is firmly locatedin the voices and activities of American‘‘people of faith.’’ At the close, Wuthnowties faith to conscience and a sense of respon-sibility: ‘‘recognizing the responsibilityhumans bear to their species wherever theymay live’’ (p. 250). Wuthnow gives us Amer-icans telling how they live out their faith inour increasingly global world.

Gendered Trajectories: Women, Work, and SocialChange in Japan and Taiwan, by Wei-Hsin Yu.Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,2009. 258pp. $55.00 cloth. ISBN:9780804760096.

YOSHINORI KAMO

Louisiana State [email protected]

Married women’s labor force participationhas been fast increasing in Taiwan while ithas stagnated in Japan. Many women inJapan leave the labor force either at marriageor childbirth and come back as part-timeworkers with much smaller incomes, no jobsecurities, and no benefits. A much largerproportion of women in Taiwan stay in thelabor force following marriage and/or child-birth and even if they leave their jobs, mostof them quickly return to full-time jobs.The female-to-male wage ratio is 65.9 per-cent in Japan and 78.2 percent in Taiwan.Upon marriage, Japanese men’s averageearnings increase by 26 percent, and Japa-nese women’s average earnings decreaseby 25 percent. In Taiwan, marriages increaseboth men and women’s average earnings.Who would have thought there was such

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a huge gap in life trajectories for marriedwomen in these two Asian countries? Wei-Hsin Yu beautifully captures the differencesand a few similarities between the women inthese two countries in their labor force par-ticipation, withdrawal, and return.

Readers are introduced in Chapters Oneand Two to the differences in married wom-en’s plights between Japan and Taiwan. Fac-tors considered include labor marketstructures (Chapter Three), patterns of laborforce exits (Chapter Four), work-family con-flicts (Chapter Five), return to the labor force(Chapter Six), and educational attainments(Chapter Seven). Chapter Eight summarizesYu’s argument. Yu analyzed large-scalequantitative data and did excellent fieldinterviews in both countries. Her quantita-tive analyses provide historical and/ormacro backgrounds and the mechanism ofindividual decisions on labor force partici-pation. Her qualitative, often ethnographic,analyses reveal more subtleties for womenat work and in their family. Hostile workenvironments toward married women inJapan and mother-friendly environments inTaiwanese firms make a vivid contrast, forexample. Chapter Three on labor marketstructure and its historical developmentwas the most informative to this reviewer.Japan developed economically earlier, sothat the lack of skilled workers during the1920s was solved with its unique ‘‘perma-nent employment system,’’ large firm sizes(to train their own employees), and internallabor markets. Due to their fertility patternsand emphasis on capital- and skill-intensiveindustries, Japan never faced a need forfemale workers. Taiwan’s economic devel-opment came much later. Since its govern-ment discouraged the development oflarge-size firms, Taiwanese firms couldn’tafford to train their employees and insteadhave depended on women’s labor since themid-1970s. Married women could return tothe labor force easily as long as they stillpossessed job skills (i.e., returns must bedone quickly). The relatively flat earningspattern induces the employers in Taiwan tohire married women while Japan’s highlyage-dependent earnings discourage theemployers to retain or rehire married womendue to their high labor cost. All these mech-anisms are not by design. This ‘‘invisible

hand’’ determined the fate of married wom-en in these two countries.

These highly macro, ‘‘structural’’ factorsthat bring about different situations for mar-ried women in these two countries are sopowerful that any governmental interven-tion (in Japan) or relatively traditional gen-der role attitudes (in Taiwan) do notmatter. Yu also examines differences in thewomen’s ‘‘home front,’’ such as day careand help received from their parents (in-law) and/or husbands. She also investigatesdifferences in commuting times resultingfrom different city sizes and different deg-rees of geographic concentration of busi-nesses, and in the husband’s average wages(if they are sufficient for his family) betweenJapan and Taiwan.

One of the most common criticisms of com-parative studies is ‘‘Why choose these two(three, four) countries?’’ Yu has no problemin answering this question. Japan and Taiwanshare a cultural background based on Confu-cianism, which originated in China. One(Japan) occupied the other (Taiwan) from1895 to 1945, resulting in very similar educa-tional systems. Their histories of economicdevelopment are also similar. Yet, women’sstatus in the labor force is completely differ-ent from each other. There is no better setupfor a cross-cultural comparison.

No book is perfect and this well-writtenbook is no exception. For one, Yu doesn’tconsider a possibility of reverse causationbetween work and family situations; read-ily available supports for married womenin Taiwan may be a result rather than thecause of more married women in the laborforce. Much of Chapter Seven seems outof context. Yu’s argument on top universi-ties is not well connected to her points inprevious chapters. After all, the top univer-sity in Taiwan consists of only .5 percent ofthe cohort. In addition, her interpretation ofthe pre-1979 entrance exam system in Japanis incorrect (it is not similar to the currentsystem in Taiwan as she claims), and theassumed priority of public universitiesover private ones in Japan is also incorrect.Since this book is based on Yu’s PhD dis-sertation (completed in 1999), some ofthe arguments, data, and ethnographicaccounts seem outdated. Given rapid socialchanges in these two countries in the past

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decade, using more recent data would havemade the book stronger.

Due to the worldwide recession, Japan’s‘‘permanent employment system’’ seems tohave crumbled. Many new male collegegraduates are unable to find full-time jobs.Across-firm upward moves in Japan arebecoming more common among both menand women. While Yu tries to incorporatethis change in her concluding chapter usingquantitative data, this is such a subtlechange that she probably should have usedqualitative data or simply speculated forthe future. One technical error in the largelywell-performed quantitative analyses both-ers this reviewer. The odds ratio 2.0 doesnot mean something is ‘‘twice as likely’’ or‘‘probability is twice as large’’ as Yu repeat-edly claims. Despite the minor shortcomingsnoted, Wei-Hsin Yu has published a monu-mental book on married women in Japanand Taiwan. This book will be a classic,‘‘must-read’’ book for those interested infamily and work, women’s issues, and Asianstudies.

Contemporary Chinese America: Immigration,Ethnicity, and Community Transformation,by Min Zhou. Philadelphia, PA: TempleUniversity Press, 2009. 310pp. $28.95 paper.ISBN: 9781592138586.

MARGARET M. CHIN

Hunter [email protected]

Min Zhou’s Contemporary Chinese America isa wonderful addition to the literature onAsian Americans, ethnicity, and immigra-tion. It is also an especially helpful resourcefor students interested in race and class.The chapters focus on the Chinese in Amer-ica who participated in the previous turn-of-the-century immigrant era as well as in thepost-1965 immigrant wave. Highly readableand organized, the book is an asset for every-one interested in these fields.

Zhou paints broad swaths of ChineseAmerica to give the reader an overview andat the same time offers specifics to research-ers to pique their interest for further explora-tion. She covers demographic change, urbancommunity development, new suburban

communities, and the family. She locatesthese new immigrants by analyzing the con-text of reception and the use of ethnic resour-ces, which have both structural and culturalcomponents. In particular, she focuses onChinese immigrants and their children. Thebook discusses how they adapt to living ina variety of settings using ethnic resources.Most often, Zhou analyzes the processes ofcommunity transformation using segmentedassimilation—a construct she helped todefine—where members move up, across,or down the mobility ladder, finding thatChinese ethnic communities can create chan-nels to support their members, without cre-ating urban ghettos.

The manuscript is divided into five parts:the historical and global context surround-ing Chinese population movements; immi-gration after World War II, demographics,and community development in New YorkCity’s Chinatown and Southern California’sAsian suburbs; the organizational structureof the ethnic enclave; the Chinese immigrantfamily, including women’s roles, and inter-generational relationships; and the futureof Chinese America discussing race, ethnic-ity, and assimilation.

Min Zhou refers to examples of her previ-ous studies on immigrant women in NewYork City’s Chinatown and the importanceof their earnings for the Chinese immigrantfamily, the contribution of the urban andsuburban ethnic enclaves to the mobility ofimmigrants, and a specific case study of Chi-nese language newspapers. Her contribu-tions in this area are significant. Accordingto her analyses, ethnic enclaves are not thesame as poor ghettos that often drain funds;in fact they are alternative sites for jobs andinformation and have the capacity to createinstitutions such as small businesses andChinese language schools and newspapersthat provide resources for immigrants andtheir children.

She examines how the second generationutilizes Chinese language schools as a culturalfoundation to help resolve the conflictsbetween immigrant parents and American-born children and the pressure these contra-dictions create. She describes transnationalfamilies and the eventual assimilation ofChinese immigrants and their children.Most significant are her findings that neither

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structure nor culture alone can explain theachievements of many of the Chinese Amer-ican second generation.

Min Zhou uses various research methods—indicating to the reader how important it isto use available data in the final analysis.She uses census data skillfully to emphasizepopulation changes over time. Moreover, tocomplement the statistical measures, sheuses interviews and rich enthographic datato describe the processes that individualsexperience as they adapt to their new livesin the United States.

Finally, the last part offers interestingquestions for future research. How do Chi-nese Americans fit in the racial ethnic sche-ma that is familiar to most in U.S. society?Or as Zhou phrases it, ‘‘Rethinking Assimi-lation: The Paradox of the ‘Model Minority’and ‘Perpetual Foreigner.’’’ The context ofthe circumstances under which Chineseimmigrants left their home countries andhow they were received in the United Statesvery much determines where they fit into

this schema. The census income statisticsand education statistics indicate that thereis some truth that as a minority group, Chi-nese Americans are doing quite well. Themajority of Chinese Americans are also stillforeign born—thus, there is some truth thatmost are foreigners. However, the remainingquestion is: Will the third and fourth gener-ation Chinese Americans be the modelminority and still be considered foreign?As Zhou indicates, Chinese immigrants aswell as other immigrants are making thiscountry more diverse. It seems that ChineseAmericans are assimilating in the UnitedStates just as other immigrants are, and atthe very same time. Current and futureresearchers may find that contemporaryChinese American ‘‘assimilation’’ may bewholly different from that experienced byimmigrants from the earlier wave. Contempo-rary Chinese America by Min Zhou is a mustread for everyone interested in immigration,race, ethnicity, and contemporary AsianAmerica.

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Documents

Book Review: Collective Creativity: Art and Society in the South Pacific