Review of \"Memorylands. Heritage and Identity in Europe Today\" by S. Macdonald

$Page 1: Review of \"Memorylands. Heritage and Identity in Europe Today\" by S. Macdonald$
Adams, Vincanne. 2013. Markets of sorrow,labors of faith. New Orleans in the wake ofKatrina. Durham,NCandLondon:DukeUniversityPress. 228pp. Pb.: €16.60. ISBN: 978-0-8223-5449-9.

Most of us still remember the news coverageabout Hurricane Katrina that devastated NewOrleans in late August 2005. More than thedestruction wrought by the hurricane itself, whatperhaps astonished media audiences around theworld (including the USA) most was what hap-pened subsequently: how spectacularly theworld’s richest and most powerful nation failed,at virtually every level, to help one of its majorcities to recover from the disaster. Much hasbeen said and written about this failure, whichwas commonly ascribed to the Bush administra-tion in particular and to government inefficiencymore generally. Yet such critiques – though justi-fied in many ways – overlook (or even reinforce)the larger and far more disturbing dynamics thatmade Katrina into the catastrophe that it was.Vincanne Adams’ outstanding book fills thisgap with her trenchant analysis not only of whatwent wrong in New Orleans, but also of what iswrong with neoliberal governance and ‘marketfundamentalism’ more generally. In this sense,as she notes, ‘this book is not about HurricaneKatrina’ (p. 1), but rather is a brilliant ethnographiccase study illustrating ‘the inefficiencies of profit’that potentially affect us all in an increasinglyneoliberal capitalist world.

Based on research carried out by Adams andher team between 2007 and 2011 inNewOrleans,Markets of sorrow traces the trail of destruction leftnot by the hurricane itself (which only causedminor water damage in the city), but by a patternwhere the federal government outsourced itsresponsibilities, such as maintaining levees or pro-viding disaster relief, to private contractors. Bothaspects of the catastrophe – the floods and thefailed recovery – were thus entirely man-made(chapter 2). Recounting how especially the latteraspect impacted the lives of Katrina’s victims, theethnographic narrative of the subsequent chapters

follows a well-designed arc, advancing the tragedyfrom sad to outrageous to hopeless, before provid-ing ambiguous relief by focusing on the relativesuccess of faith-based recovery programmes(chapters 6 and 7). Adams describes how themiddle class was impoverished and the wealth ofthe rich erased (chapter 3) through the orches-trated failure of federally funded, but privatelycontracted, recovery projects like ‘The RoadHome Program’ (chapter 4). Yet it was thepoorest, weakest sections of society that werehit hardest by the ‘regimes of dispossession’inherent in market-oriented relief work, push-ing many into hopeless situations from whichthey could and would not recover (chapter 5),even when faith-based organisations finally didprovide some effective help (chapter 6).

The strength of this book lies in the wayAdams effortlessly manages to connect thetragic stories of individuals with a larger analysisof what she calls ‘disaster capitalism’ and an‘economy of affect’. Thus, disaster capitalismdescribes the process whereby private compa-nies insert themselves as intermediaries betweenthe government (which provides the funds) andits disaster-affected citizens, promising betterandmore efficient services than the governmentalapparatus. However, their efficiency andaccountability is limited tomaking profits, whichrequires them to be as inefficient intermediaries aspossible – hence the ‘inefficiency of profit’. Thisinvolves not only diverting (taxpayers’) moneymeant for the needy, but also exploiting the freelabour offered by volunteers. Both the suffering ofvictims and the compassion of volunteers becomeprofitable economic resources for unscrupulouscontractors like Halliburton, Blackwater or theShaw Group. Far from being the win-win scenarioportrayed by advocates of outsourcing governmentresponsibilities to the private sector, such disastercapitalism ends up funnelling money intended forthe poor upwards into a few rich, corporate hands,while instituting bureaucratic failure as a businessmodel (p. 173). Since these arrangements are notwidely known, the public interprets this failure asproof of government inefficiency, thus furtherlegitimising the involvement of private firms.

Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale (2014) 22, 4 487–520. © 2014 European Association of Social Anthropologists. 487doi:10.1111/1469-8676.12092

Reviews

It is difficult to imagine a more cynicalarrangement than this. One hopes that Katrinais a particularly extreme case – an ideal type ofdisaster capitalism if you will – that does notnecessarily reflect on humanitarian aid elsewhere.Still, Adams provides critical insights into thecapitalist dimensions of ‘humanitarian reason’,which Didier Fassin’s (2012) book so strangelyignored, and exposes some persistent myths ofneoliberalism (most of all about the ‘efficiencyof the market’) and the dire consequences ofmarket-oriented governance. At the same time,Markets of sorrow is a respectful homage to boththe victims and the volunteers affected by‘Katrina’, who deserve their stories – and, moreimportantly, the truth about what happened –

to be heard. This is public anthropology at itsbest, not only addressing core topics of our disci-pline but also illuminating social, economic andpolitical issues that concern us all.

Reference

Fassin, D. 2012. Humanitarian reason. A moralhistory of the present. Berkeley, CA: Universityof California Press.

STEPHAN KLOOSInstitute for Social Anthropology, Austrian Academyof Sciences (Austria)

Anghel, Remus Gabriel. 2013. Romanians in

Western Europe. Migration, status dilemmas

and transnational connections. Lanham, MD:

Lexington Books. 207 pp. Hb.: US$65. ISBN:

978-0-7391-7888.

Through the lens of two case studies, this bookanalyses migration from Romania to WesternEurope in recent decades, from incipient forms inthe 1990s to becoming one of the largestmigrationwaves within Europe. By comparing two differentmigration processes from origin to destination,incorporation and transnationalism, Anghelseeks to determine why migrants with bettersocioeconomic status perceived they hadsuffered a loss in the course of migration,

whereas those with lower status perceived theyhad gained. The introduction offers a very goodoverview of the literature on Romanian migration,also browsing literature on other Europeancircumstances. The author then presents his twocase studies: German ethnics from Timişoara andtheir migration toGermany, and Romanian ethnicsfromBorşa and their irregular migration to Italy. Indoing so he uses the extended case-study method,focusing intensivelyonanumberof individual cases.Thus, the ethnography is sometimes shallow.

Given the titleRomanians inWesternEurope,I was initially sceptical and puzzled by the choiceof starting with a case study based on a ‘niche’category of migrants such as the German ethnics.One might also question the choice of bringingtogether these two case studies in the same analy-sis, as the first involves ethnic/political migrationand the second economic migration. However,the validity of this choice becomes more apparentas the book progresses. First, Germany was theinitial destination of Romanian migrants after1989. Awealth of literature has shown that migra-tion to Germany, of both German and otherethnics from Romania, was the catalyst for widerRomanian migration to Western Europe. Second,the author intends to break the imageofRomanianmigration restricted to Romanian (or Roma forthat matter) ethnics, as if other ethnicities did notexist in the country.

The case studies highlight exquisitely howethnicity is not a fixed category; once inGermany, many of the ethnic German migrantsmentally remained very anchored in Romania.They regularly visited their former land; many ofthem married Romanian girls and brought themto their new home, thus ending up speaking moreRomanian than when they were living there. Theauthor shows how ethnic German migrationdiverges in several ways from the general assump-tion of transnational social fields/spaces. Anothercliché of transnational migration that Angheldeconstructs is that of networks being ethnic.Once in Germany the migrants’ networks mingle,as Romanians, Hungarians and Turks live closelytogether.

What is interesting in the second case study,more recognisable to the general audience as

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© 2014 European Association of Social Anthropologists.

Romanianmigration to theWest, is that the struc-tural outcome of Italian laissez-faire led to muchmore closed networks, not only ethnic but evenregional – see the author’s very good example ofthe ‘ZamaCamp’. Inmost of the Italian cases thereis a constantly evoked return to Romania, whichremains only imagined or temporary. The absenceof a facilitating investment context at home left themigrants with the almost exclusive possibility ofinvesting in real estate. Anghel tries to explain thecomplicated rationale of the house boom due tomigration and its link to local prestige. However,the author fails to demonstrate how policies ofthe receiving state impact on migrants’ perceptionof status in Italy, only addressing them in hisconclusions.

The initial question regarding the correlationbetween migrants’ rights and their prestige findsits answer throughout the book and iswell synthe-sised in the conclusion. Whereas the traits of theGerman minority migration were based onrespectability abroad – as equals to Germans –

the Romanians in Italy based their success on theirreputation back home. The relatively better socialcapital that the German ethnics had did not helpthem attain better statuses; even though successfulon the labour market, they suffered a loss of pres-tige. Romanian migrants to Italy juggled severaljobs and built most things themselves, vianetworks. This reveals the waysmigrants can con-struct their (own) social statuses. Inmanyways thebook is a beautiful lesson in expectations: the storyof German ethnics is largely one of high hopesbrought down to earth, while the Romaniansstarted from very little to achieve more.

RALUCANAGYLeeds Metropolitan University (UK)

Bellwood, Peter. 2013. First migrants. Ancient

migration in global perspective. Chichester:

Wiley-Blackwell. 326 pp. Pp.: €23.50. ISBN:

978-1-4051-8908-8.

Wehave always been on themove, even beforewewere human beings. This is exactly what Peter

Bellwood shows us in the 300 pages of his book.Throughout the ten chapters the author takesus along our archaic and sapiens ancestors intheir movements over the entire globe.His mainhypothesis is thatmigration played a central rolein human evolution and that humanity has beenshaped to a very large extent by mobility. Theauthor looks at changes in language, materialculture and biology, searching for supportingevidence of human mobilities. In doing so, heapplies an interdisciplinary approach that com-bines insights from several disciplines (mainlyArchaeology, Comparative Linguistic, Geneticsand Anthropology), while arguing continu-ously against strong anti-migrationist views ofhuman prehistory.

Firstmigrations of the genusHomo (includingourselves) during the Palaeolithic are covered inchapters 3 to 5. Theories about the geographicalorigin of our ancestors and ourselves – modernHomo sapiens – as well as first expansions bothwithin and beyond Africa are laid out in chapter 3.Once all connected mainland was inhabited,Homos’ epic story continued beyond the sea intothe Pacific and America (chapter 4). Ancestralmodern humans performed impressive migrations,reaching and settling on all continents except forAntarctica. Migrations by Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers have been in geographical extent thegreatest in prehistoric times and strongly influ-enced by climatic conditions as the postglacialperiod shows (chapter 5).

Bellwood gives great importance to the impactfood production rather than just foraging had onancientmigration, andhe structures thewhole bookaccordingly. He labels the context-specific featuresof the ability to produce food ‘food productioncomplex’, particularly regarding associated cropsand domesticated animals. Since Neolithic times,when food production complexes first appeared,movement of populations often coincided withdemographic increases resulting from the develop-ment of food production complexes.

Chapters 6 to 9 focus on theNeolithic periodand the different food production complexes onEarth. The first and most important one, theFertile Crescent Food production complex origi-nated in the Levant and Anatolia, where crops

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and animals werefirst domesticated. As the authorstates, ‘population spreads [associated with theFertile Crescent Food production complex] thatoccurred between 6500 and 2000 BC led to distribu-tions of languages, genes, and economic lifestylesfrom Gibraltar to Bangladesh, and North Africato Scandinavia, that still underpin the WesternWorld as we know it today’ (p. 173).

Equally important, the East Asian andWestern Oceania food production complex(7000 to 4500 BC), based on rice, millet andpigs, can be traced back to the Yellow andYangzi basins in what is now central China(chapter 8). Its associated Neolithic popula-tions spread in a three-way expansionthroughout Southern China and mainlandSoutheast Asia reaching India; into the Pacificthrough Island Southeast Asia; and north-wards to Korea and Northeast Asia. This meansthat today almost half of the world’s populationowes a good part of its origin to the expansion ofthis food production complex.

Africa andAmerica developed intensive foodproduction systems only several millennia laterthan parallel developments in the Fertile Crescentand East Asia (chapter 9). Africa’s first firmlyattested food production was introduced fromthe Levant around 6000 BC. Similar to Africa, theAmerican food production complex lacked do-mesticated indigenous animals. Mesoamerica andthe Andes were the two main foci of earlydomestication in the continent and the spread ofmaize farming the most remarkable feature of thiscomplex.

This book results fromBellwood’s remarkableeffort to compile references, studies, evidence anddata from archaeological sites, while analysing allthat material with migration in mind. This way hecan assess the great importance of migration inhuman history and in creating human patterns ofdiversity. His multidisciplinary approach is proba-bly the book’s main strength. Although this makesfor an engaging book, it is not an easy read –

which is not surprising given the time frame andgeographical span the author covers. Firstchapters are particularly harder to approach dueto the myriad hypotheses presented. As the timespan shortens, more solid evidence becomes

available and the argumentflowsmore smoothly.The reader is in the end rewarded with a novel,refreshing perspective on human mobility inprehistoric times.

DIANAMATA-CODESALUniversity of Deusto (Spain)

Bernal, Victoria and Inderpal Grewal (eds.)

2014. Theorizing NGOs: states, feminisms,

and neoliberalism (Next Wave: New Directions in

Women’s Studies). Durham, NC and London:

Duke University Press. 392pp. Pb.: US$22.46.

ISBN: 978-0822355656.

At a time when non-governmental organisations(NGOs) have taken over much of the publicdiscourse across the world on women’s welfare,Theorizing NGOs offers timely and insightfulperspectives on the intersection between NGOs,women’s experiences of NGOs and feminismacross theworld. Bringing together scholarlywrit-ings on women’s experiences with NGOs fromdifferent parts of the globe is definitely one of thehighlights of the volume. In the well-craftedintroduction, Inderpal Grewal and Victoria Bernalargue that the practical workings of NGOs areclosely related to the logics of states. They rightlysuggest that NGOs should be studied asentrenched within ‘developmental regimes andprograms of social welfare’ as well as ‘neoliberalarticulations of productivity, entrepreneurshipand empowerment’ (p. 10). In these changinginteractions betweenNGOs and states, new kindsof female and feminist subjectivities emerge.Therein lies the focus of this volume.

The 11 chapters are divided across threethemes. The first part, ‘NGOs beyond Successor Failure’, brings out the complex dynamics ofthe relationship between NGOs, developmentdiscourses, statemaking processes and notions ofwomen’s empowerment. The chapters in this sec-tion, by Elissa Helms, Lauren Leve and AradhanaSharma, show how these relationships produceunintended consequences for women’s activism.Leve, for instance shows that NGO work in

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women’s education in rural Nepal led to thosewomen taking up Maoism rather than becomingneoliberal subjects. Sharma, through her researchof Mahila Samakhya, a state–NGO partnershipin rural India, argues that even though the aimwas to empower women in a neoliberal sense,Mahila Samakhya ended up reproducing existingsocial hierarchies.At the same time, it also gave riseto certain kinds of rights-based politics.

The four contributions that make the secondsection on ‘Postcolonial Neoliberalisms and theNGO Form’ show how NGOs, despite aimingat social change, exacerbate existing divides(North–South, rural–urban, elite–subaltern) andreinforce hierarchies of gender and class. LamiaKarim, for example, shows how microcredit inBangladesh, touted as the panacea to poverty, endsup further strengthening unequal gender relations.Far from making them neoliberal entrepreneurs,microcredit pulls poor women into a rural moraleconomy where failure to repay the debt resultsin humiliation and loss of assets. In her chapterLeeRay M. Costa shows how women’s NGOsin Thailand function as elite spaces to which ruraland subaltern women have little access. AndKathleen O’Reilly’s text about the NGO boomin northern India and women’s participationargues that despite their limitations, developmentpolicies such as participation open up spaces forwomen’s agency.

Part three ‘Feminist Social Movements andNGOs’ brings forth debates on the relationshipbetween feminisms and NGOs. What comesacross from the four contributions is that trans-national NGOs have taken a crucial role in fem-inist politics, creating both opportunities as wellas constraints for feminists. In her chapter SabineLang argues that the co-option of feminist poli-tics by the European Union represents a loss offeminism’s radical edge. Saida Hodžić howeversees the rise of NGOs as having offered differentproductive possibilities for feminist politics.Likewise, Sonia Alvarez shows that the feministwork pursued through NGOs in Latin Americahas opened up new avenues of agency and activ-ism. So, on the one hand, NGOs’ reliance onstates and donors and their institutionalisationof feminism creates problems for women’s

movements, while on the other hand NGOsmight still create spaces for feminist activism. Assuch, NGOs become important sites of strugglefor feminists. The editors suggest in the conclu-sion that feminists have an ongoing stake in stra-tegically engaging with NGOs and at the sametime continuing to critique them.

Grewal and Bernal’s achievement is todemonstrate, both in the introduction and inthe selection of essays, how gender comes toacquire centrality in the process ofNGOisation.They point out that the NGOs themselvesbecome part of the processes that produce womenas diverse gendered subjects, and feminists too areproduced by these very processes. Further, theirargument about the gendered processes ofNGOisation being closely linked to the state andmimicking its bureaucratic rationalities has crucialimplications not just for feminist scholarship andpolitics, but for those studying the changing natureof states under neoliberalism and globalisation.This volume is a must read for anyone interestedin gender and development, and in the anthropol-ogy of the state.

LIPIKA KAMRAUniversity of Oxford (UK)

Bolten, Catherine. 2012. I did it to save my life.

Love and survival in Sierra Leone. Berkeley, CA:

University of California Press. 296 pp. Pb.:

US$29.95. ISBN: 978-0520273795.

I did it to save my life sheds light on the meaningof personal ties in the everyday struggle forsurvival of people whose lifeworlds are markedby chronic crisis and violence. From the perspec-tive of one specific place that played a crucial roleduring the decade of civil war in Sierra Leoneand the survival stories of seven individuals, Boltencreates an intimate portrait of the strategies peopledeploy to encounter the damaging forces that areat play in war and to protect their social worldsfrom collapsing. The seven people whose storiesform the heart of the book come from variousbackgrounds: a soldier, a former RUF rebel, a

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student, a trader, an evangelist, a father and a politi-cian, each with very different accounts of how theyexperienced the war and its aftermath. While theyall represent very different struggles, ideals andworldviews, they are connected through their lovefor thecityofMakeni, aplace thatwasof strategic im-portance and therefore sufferedabuse fromthediffer-ent factions involved in the conflict. Their stories arealso connectedby the centrality of social relationshipsand emotional ties in surviving the war.

The main aim of the book is to rethinkcommon conceptualisations of conflict that seewar and emotionality as separate phenomena.Bolten stresses the importance of understandingthe role of emotions in everyday experiences ofconflict. In the context of Makeni and the sevenstories she focuses on, the concept of love provesto play an essential role. Rather than stylisinglove as a romantic sentiment, she emphasises theimportance of understanding love as a culturalpractice, as an intersubjective web of relationshipsthat constantly spins its threads towards a balanceof reciprocity. In Sierra Leone, Bolt holds, peopledo rather than feel love. It is the work people putinto nurturing each other and into keeping eachother alive. As the stories surrounding Makenishow, love shouldn’t be romanticised. To enablesurvival during times of crisis and chronic uncer-tainty, people are forced to constantly manipulatetheir relationships to achieve the best possible out-comes for themselves and their close ones, creatingan atmosphere of suspicion and a constant fear ofbetrayal. What is more, because emotional tiesplay such a crucial role in Sierra Leone, they arealso open to political abuse. Bolten shows howthe very roots of the conflict can be traced backto the cultural practice of love. She argues thatthe RUF gained momentum among inhabitantsof Makeni by playing into these narratives, usinglove as a recruitment strategy. This only worked,however, because people felt that the state hadstopped looking after them. This comes to the forein the story of Kadiatu, a trader, who turned to-wards theRUFbecause she felt that the governmenthad stopped loving the people of Makeni. Sheinterprets the government’s fatal attacks on the cityduring the end of the occupation and its refusal toinvest in infrastructure and trading as a refusal by

the state to live up to its responsibility to love andnurture its citizens in equal terms. In Kadiatu’sreading of the conflict, the government didn’t leaveher with any other choice but to cut losses with herloyalty to the nation and look for better relation-ships that allowed her and her children to survive.

Whether in politics or people’s everydaylives, love appears throughout the book as a com-plex web of relationships, a continuous balancingact between the will to utilise emotional ties inorder to survive and the danger of pushing it toofar and thereby losing one’s standing in the world.By creating a tapestry of experiences, voices andperspectives, Bolten provides a nuanced image ofthe seemingly banal steps people take in times ofhardship, which allow them to maintain or recre-ate their social worlds. The seven individual storiesof survival are the book’s strongest asset. Whilesome stories, particularly the story of the evange-list, the student and the trader, are successful inconveying the depth of experiences of love andsurvival in Makeni, others remain somewhatopaque and hidden under Bolten’s own readingsof their accounts. As a result, the concept of loveis often spoken about by the author rather thanthe narrators themselves. However such a balancebetween words and lives is hard to achieve and ithas haunted many ethnographies based on lifestories. In the end this does not take away fromthe richness of Bolten’s ethnography and thebook’s accomplishment in highlighting the impor-tance of emotional ties in times of conflict.

ANNIKA LEMSSwinburne Institute for Social Research, Swin-burne University, Melbourne (Australia)

Coe, Cati. 2013. The scattered family: parenting,

African migrants, and global inequality. Chicago,

IL: University of Chicago Press. 256 pp. Pb.:

US$21.91. ISBN: 978-0-226-07238-8.

In her ethnography Cati Coe explores howGhanaian transmigrants living in the USA orUnited Kingdom and their children fosteredby relatives in Ghana adapt to being ‘scattered’

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transnational families, that is, families dispersedbetween multiple nations. Based on interviewswith parents abroad and children in Ghana,Coe’s main intervention is complicating thetransnational literature that finds that lack ofparent–child co-presence disrupts expectationsof family life, breeding conflict and tensions thatnegatively impact transmigrants’ children.

While acknowledging that some childrenfind separation from parent(s) as disruptive,Coe’s work goes further to demonstrate howfor many children, parents’ provisions of remit-tances and gifts – made possible through migra-tion – are expressions of affection and parentalobligation, emotional depth and closeness.Rather than an imperfect replacement for familialco-presence, many of these children understandtransmigration as allowing their parents to be‘good’ parents. Indeed, Coe writes, ‘to the extentthat a parent’s migration leads to better supportfor a child, a migrant parent can be a better parentthan one who lives in Ghana’ (p. 181). In this,Coe’swork adds empirical evidence to theorisationson the materiality of care and provider love.

This less disruptive reception to parents’migration is the result of what Coe terms aGhanaian repertoire, or rather, cultural resourcesand frameworks throughwhichGhanaians adaptto – in this case – parent–child separation.Repertoire is much like habitus, a set of perceptions,dispositions and actions that predispose a personto act in particular ways, but adaptive to unprec-edented situations. Unlike habitus, however,Coe’s use of repertoire signals a multiplicity ofknowledge, practices and beliefs; repertoires tendto be more easily visible and, therefore, discussedamong its practitioners. These factors renderrepertoires open to historical analysis and explo-rations of changes over time (pp. 14–29).

Coe traces how a Ghanaian repertoire ofcontemporary transnational parenting has beenproduced andnegotiated historically in the contextof previous economic instability in Ghana andsubsequent internal or international economicmigration, as well as kinship practices of foster-ing the children of migratory parents. Thisopens up culturally appropriate possibilities onwhich parents can draw when they migrate.

This repertoire has changed, however, produc-ing tensions and conflicts for transmigrantsand their children in Ghana. As internationalmigrants, transmigrants are socially positionedsuch that, traditionally, they would raise theirchildren and foster-in the children of others.Within the context of strict immigration laws,poor working wages abroad and concerns for chil-dren’s development outside of Ghana, transmigrantsfind themselves fostering-out their children torelatives inGhana.Thishappens at a timewhennovelmiddle-class ideals of nuclear families increasinglyinfluenceGhanaian expectations of kinship practices,critiquing fosterage as second-best or a safety net forfamilies in crisis. Tensions subsequently arise asparents attempt to foster-out their children into othermiddle-class, urban families or seek out other novelcare practices (e.g. commercial arrangements) thatdisrupt familial reciprocity and wealth flows.

Analysing the ways in which Ghanaiansinteract with those they meet abroad and howthosewho remain inGhana speak of transmigrants,Coe illustrates how this repertoire of migration andkinship is a cultural pattern to which transmigrantscan turn when confronted with barriers to raisingone’s children. It is not, however, the preferred op-tion.Moreover,whilemost childrenfind separationfromparents to be beneficial,many also do notfindit ideal. Indeed,Coe’s strongest analyses are those ofchildren’s interviews in which she traces the finelynuanced and complicated tensions in children’snarratives.

The theoretical arguments of Coe’s workare weighted in her introduction and conclusion,with the middle chapters fleshing out the detailsof a contemporary Ghanaian repertoire fortransmigrant parenting. Her work also adds tothe literatures on migratory motivations beyondeconomics (e.g. Ghanaian-American childrenmigrating to Ghana for education), and thetransnational lives of whole families, not justtransmigrants. My two critiques are slight. Thefirst Coe recognises: this work relies heavily oninterviews with little participant-observation toenrich analyses. While discourse is habitual andconventional, revealing what people think isappropriate to reveal to themselves and others(p. 35), oftentimes actions belie discourse. Finally,

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while ethnographically rich and well situatedwithin the literature, thiswork offers an interestingand important case study rather than a novelanthropological approach to analysing transna-tional parenting. These minor critiques aside, CatiCoe’s The scattered family is a meticulouslyresearched and analysed ethnography detailingthe many ways Ghanaian families adapt historicalkinship practices to approach contemporary trans-national parenting.

CHELSEA CORMIERMcSWIGGINBrown University (USA)

Copans, Jean. 2014. Georges Balandier. Un

anthropologueen première ligne. Paris: Presses

Universitaires de France. 313 pp. Pb.: €29.

ISBN: 978-2130607670.

Originally Jean Copans (born 1942) had wantedto write a rather different book about his formerteacher Georges Balandier (born 1920), who isintroduced as ‘an anthropologist in the front line’in its title. He had envisaged devoting two thirdsto an analysis and evaluation of his writings andone third to a sociologically informed account ofthe wider context and impact of Balandier’s work.It is not clearwhyCopansmore or less gave up thesecond aim of his project. It is also noteworthythat although he informs us that at times he wasvery close to Balandier when writing this book,he does not indicate how this affected his work.

However, in the course of writing Copansstill had to refer to some of the conditions thatinfluenced Balandier’s publications and their re-ception.Depending on the knowledge that readersalready possess, his fragmentary and too oftenrather allusive treatment of this context mayrequire some effort to understand correctly.Unfortunately in his footnotes Copans is moreinclined to indulge in personal reminiscences thanto provide helpful additional information. Heseems to presuppose a readerwho not only knowsmuch about the recent history of France and its(former) colonies, but also about (French) aca-demic developments during his lifetime, although

at times he appears to realise that some explicitcomments are necessary, at least for another gener-ation. A serious drawback is the absence of anyindex. A list of abbreviations and their meaningwould also have been desirable in view of themany institutional acronyms.

Balandier’s work can be divided according tothree stages in his career, but retrospective publica-tions and revisions of and additions to new edi-tions complicate such an analysis considerably.Although Copans claims to have been readingBalandier’s publications assiduously ever since1963, for the preparation of the present book hefelt compelled to read much of his work again,but admits that he was still left with much uncer-taintywith regard to the finer details of his currentinterpretation. There is no comprehensive bibliog-raphy of Balandier’s approximately 400 separatepublications. The 100 titles that Copans eventuallyconsulted are listed thematically at the end of thebook, 40 of which are referred to regularly in themain text.

Between 1946 and 1955 Balandier conductedresearch in French colonies in West and CentralAfrica, much of which found its way to his well-known and often-translated Sociologie actuelle del’Afrique noire. (The English translation of its titleThe Sociology of Black Africa lacks the stress onBalandier’s innovative approach to modern condi-tions.) This book recognised African propheticmovements as an autonomous indigenous responseto colonial subjugation, topics that had beenneglected by French ethnologists until then. From1955 until his retirement in 1985, Balandier occu-pied various important positions in institutions foradvanced higher education and for academic andapplied social research in tropical Africa. In 1962he was also appointed to a chair of sociology atthe Sorbonne university. His kind of anthropologywas very different from the then prevalentstructuralism, but he also kept his distance fromneo-Marxist approaches that several of his formerstudents (Augé, Meillassoux, Terray) adhered to.Turning away from a preoccupation with ThirdWorld problems, Balandier came to emphasisethe importance of political anthropology as funda-mental to any social analysis. Politics is for him the‘order of orders’. After 1985, Balandier became

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interested in new (or newly named) phenomena inan increasingly globalised world, such as digitalisedforms of communication, on which he wrote in anon-academic way.

Copans is by no means uncritical in hisevaluation of Balandier’s importance. He deploresthat Balandier never applied his political anthro-pology to the new post-colonial African states.He also notes a lack of interest in an explicit meth-odology for the determination of what one isexactly going to investigate and how one can bestrepresent one’s empirical research data, problemsthat characterise much of contemporary (French)social science practice. Such criticism is kept inbalance in Copans’s summing up assessments ofhis work that culminate in his statement that thework of Balandier can help us achieve intellectualfreedom as his thought lacks any trace of dogma-tism (p. 13). However this may be, this revieweralso found in Copans’s book many other goodreasons for having a closer look at different aspectsof Balandier’s work than those with which he wasalready familiar.

JAN DEWOLFUtrecht University (The Netherlands)

deMunck, Victor and Ljupcho Risteski. 2013.

Macedonia: the political, social, economic and

cultural foundations of a Balkan state. London:

I. B. Tauris. 256 pp. Hb.: US$67.55. ISBN:

978-1848859364.

This volume, which represents the most recentcontribution to the underdeveloped field ofMacedonian anthropology, achieves a lot in spiteof failing to live up to its overambitious title. Evenits 12 chapters spread over 300 pages cannot coverevery aspect promised in the title. What is missingin particular is the economic analysis, since there isno single chapter that could classify as a work ofeconomic anthropology besides somebackgroundinformation provided by contributors on the gen-eral economic setting. Nevertheless, this collectionof essays contributes in significant ways towardsenriching the scarce English language literature

onMacedonia. Particularly welcomed is the inclu-sion of essays that deal with Turks and Roma ofMacedonia, which often tend to fall outsideresearchers’ attention usually dominated by thehighly politicised inter-ethnic relations of the twolargest ethnic groups in the country, Albaniansand Macedonians.

The overall excellence of individual chaptersis dented by the two contributions of one of theeditors Victor C. de Munck, who participates intwo different chapters as co-author. One finds itdifficult to accept the generalisations, evenstereotyping, used in these contributions that rushthrough broad topics such as gender and inter-ethnicrelations. However, these chapters are balanced byexcellentcontributionscomingfromVictorFriedman,Galina Oustinova-Stjepanović, Rozita Dimova,Ilka Thiesen, Burcu Akan Elis and AnastasiaKarakasidou, which make the volume more than avaluable resource for anthropological scholarship.

Using himself and the events that unwrappedaround him recently and throughout his longacademic career, Friedman manages to unpack sev-eral complex aspects of the politicised Macedonianidentity and involvement of academics in thesepower struggles that are supposedly outside theacademic realm. Friedman uses the concept of ‘era-sure’ to seize the Bulgarian and in particular Greekpolicy aimed against the existence of multilinguism,multiculturalism and specifically against Macedo-nian identity both internally and internationally. Inher contribution, Karakasidou offers an account ofenvironmental depletionas anoverarchingproblem,proving that nationalism should not be the sole con-cern for anthropologists and the people they study.Thiessen focuses on the role of symbolic borderscentral for the identity formation of Macedoniansin times of great uncertainty. Her account, rich inethnographic detail, allows us to see these processesfrom the everyday perspective, thus enriching theanalysis of otherwise distant and cursory viewthat social scientists usually produce for interna-tional and EU policymakers. Even if one bookchapter cannot overcome the huge gap in theliterature, Ellis’ bold attempt to offer a compre-hensive picture of the situation in which theTurkish minority finds itself in present-dayMacedonia commands respect. The author discusses

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the shift of fortunes of the Turkish minority provid-ing the historical context, discussing recent politicalentanglements of Macedonian ethnopolitics and thecreation and maintenance of transnational links.Another little gem in this volume is Oustinova-Stjepanovic’s chapter on Roma quest for ‘true’ spiri-tuality. Elegantly interweaving elements of theory,historical accounts and ethnography, this rich andhighly informative contribution expands the narrowregional or national focus towards the field of post-colonial studies and wider comparative frameworks.Inher contribution,Dimova traces the social, politicaland demographic changes in Kumanovo through ananalysis of urban spatiality, distribution, movementand the transformation of residential areas and publicspace in this little town. This analysis, supported byarchival and historical data and conflicting memoriesofKumanovoresidents,allowsDimovatocut throughthe complexity of radical social, political and economicchanges, or ruptures as she describes them.

Further contributions to the volume authoredby Trpeski on the development of the grotesqueMacedonian nationalism, Schubert on the clash ofpatriarchal values and modernity, Plaut on themanipulation of the plight of Roma by NGOsand politicians alike, and Schwartz on the impactof NGOs for raising environmental concerns inthe border area with mixed population, offer addi-tional valuable material for students of Macedoniaand those interested in this turbulent region morebroadly. Overall, the volume is a welcome contri-bution to the rather neglected field of Macedonianstudies, and its combination of veterans and youn-ger anthropologists yielded remarkable results.

GORAN IANEV‘Sts Cyril and Methodius’ University, Skopje(Macedonia)

Fedele,Anna. 2013. Looking forMaryMagdalene:alternative pilgrimage and ritual creativity atCatholicshrines inFrance. Oxford:OxfordUniversityPress. xii + 320 pp. Pb.: US$36.95. ISBN: 978-0-19-9898420-8.

Anna Fedele’s text,Looking forMaryMagdalene,invites the reader on a pilgrimage of pilgrimages.

Each chapter of the book, winner of an AmericanAcademy of Religion Award for Excellence,delightfully leads the reader through the south ofFrance as neo-pagan pilgrims move betweenshrines linked toMaryMagdalene’s life. As Fedeletraces the experiences of the sojourners, sheconstructs a compelling case that creativity is a corecomponent of ritual.

Fedele’s data are drawn frommore than threeyears of fieldwork accompanying three unique,unconnected, alternative pilgrimages through theshrines of Mary Magdalene. The groups vary inleadership, class, composition, origin and theology.Most importantly the groups vary in their adher-ence to rituals. One all-female group has structuredrituals around femininity, menstruation and theearth. Another group, led by a neo-shaman, relieson energy harnessing techniques. The final group,headedby a Jungianpsychotherapist, has no explicitrituals.Yet, they are all rich examples of the constantritual negotiation that occurs in contemporaryspirituality.

Without diminishing their diversity, Fedelesuccessfully identifies a few central similaritiesamong the groups. They are all attracted to MaryMagdalene as a feminine force, a healer and aguide. Magdalene is used to challenge patriarchalreligion and celebrate the sacredness of sexualityand femininity. Also, energy is the guiding princi-ple and arbiter of the pilgrims’ experiences. Fedeleshows how unique rituals are invented aroundthese ideas and how these rituals create meaningfor the pilgrims.

Fedele’s work of expertly excavating pil-grims’ ritual creativity challenges anthropologistsand religious studies scholars to consider ritual assomething in process, negotiated and alwayschanging. Rituals must be studied not merely asrepetitive acts, but with a hermeneutic that privi-leges life narratives. After one particular ritual,the pilgrims’ descriptions were seemingly in-congruent with one another, as if they had allperformed different rituals. In effect, they had.Ritual is not only the gestures and actsperformed, but more importantly it is the signif-icance of these acts in conjunction with lifenarratives. Part of ritual creativity is the syncre-tism of combining or subverting elements from

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multiple traditions (Catholicism, Protestantism,Indigenous and Feminist traditions). But eventhe borrowing of other traditions is usually partof a larger life narrative, for example, one’sdiscontent with the Catholic Church. Ritualcreativity is a process of reflexivity that adaptsacts, gestures and objects to make sense of,transform and challenge past, present and futurelife experiences. This discussion could have beenenriched with broader consideration of whetheror not the claims about ritual creativity could beextended to all new and/or traditional religiousmovements. Fedele faintly acknowledges thepossibility that all ritual is creatively negotiated,but she does not step away from her specificpilgrims for very long.

Fedele’s analytical acuity is most evident inher parsing of rituals of menstruation. Two ofthe groups link Mary Magdalene closely to men-strual blood. By creating rituals around menstrualblood the pilgrims modify the meaning of men-struation. Such rituals are an opportunity forhealing, empowerment and a privileging of thebody. Whatever the original intent of the ritual, itwas transformed by each pilgrim in light of theirlife narrative. Very often it was used to healwounds related to sexuality, sexual relationships,reproduction or religion. Fedele’s own experi-ences, a sort of sensuous scholarship, could havebolstered this account. She accompanied thesepilgrims, took part in their rituals, and partook ofmenstrual blood. She writes a few brief notes ofher discomfort during the blood rituals but noth-ingmore. In a text filledwith rich and sympatheticcharacters, the brevity and limited engagement ofher own experience is detached and incohesive.

Fedele’s chapter on energy may be the mostimportant contribution of this book. The pilgrimsunderstand the world as constituted by energy.Energy is the arbiter and goal of every ritual.Energy techniques are invoked to increase positiveenergy or disencumber those laden with heavyenergy. Her idea of ‘energy grammar’, althoughthe phrase only shows up once, is helpful andshould endure as an analytical frame (p. 272).Energy is increasingly the discourse of religiousexperience and Fedele is correct to illuminate thisfrom the pilgrims’ narratives.

It is Fedele’s deft handling of her subjectsthat sets this book apart. The text refreshinglyavoids inundating the data with excessive theory.Mostly, Fedele relies on themes that emergethrough her expert curating of the materials.Her descriptive abilities enliven the subjects andallow the subjects’ voices to be clearly heard. Thistext is a comprehensive example of remarkableand revealing ethnography. Fedele is extraordi-narily careful and sensitive in her claims andnever overextends her findings. The claims arenever pushed much beyond what they mean forthese particular pilgrims. But perhaps theyshould be extended. The work here outpacesmanyworks in religious studies and provides im-portant, concrete evidence that more work mustbe done exploring ritual creativity and energy.

NATHANAEL J. HOMEWOODRice University (USA)

Fedele, Anna and Kim Knibbe. 2013. Gender

andpower incontemporaryspirituality. Ethnographic

approaches. Routledge Studies in Religion.

London: Routledge. 238pp. Hb.: US$125.00.

ISBN: 978-0-415-65947-5.

What do peoplemeanwhen they call themselvesspiritual? In analytical terms, is ‘spirituality’indeed something that can be distinguishedfrom ‘religion’? Are the practices developed bycontemporary spirituality as empowering as itsadvocates claim? What roles do gender andpower have in contemporary spiritual groups?These are some of the questions that Fedeleand Knibbe address in the introduction to thisedited volume that appeared in the RoutledgeStudies in Religion series.

This book marks a turning point in researchon gender, power and spirituality, and should berequired reading for anyone interested in thechanging terrain of contemporary religiosity. Itcomprises 11 case studies besides the introduction,with ethnographic research from a wide variety ofplaces such as Germany, Mexico, France, TheNetherlands and Portugal. Against the common

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reading of spirituality as a substantially differentphenomenon than religion, and going beyondthe dualistic thinking that has informed muchprevious research in the field, Fedele and Knibbeprove the relevance of thinking in terms of conti-nuities. Referring to Talal Asad’s work on theunderstanding of the secular, the editors pointout that while ‘Asad has argued that the secularcan be thought of only in reference to religion;similarly, “spirituality” seems to be inextricablylinked to “religion”’ (p. 4). They stress theanalytical need to transcend the dichotomic viewof religion/spirituality by paying more attentionto the complex interplay between the two.Several chapters follow up in this vein, exploringtheir relationship in concrete contexts: EugeniaRoussou’s contribution on Greece reminds usthat religion and spirituality are not alwaysseparate endeavours from the participants’ point ofview; Anna Fedele’s chapter on Mary Magdalenepilgrimages in the south of France shows that thereis ‘not only rupture but also a striking continuitybetween these pilgrims’ spirituality and vernaculardevotion to the Virgin Mary, past and present’(p. 97). Asa Trulsson’s chapter on goddess-orientedgroups follows in the same vein, emphasising thesimilarity between spirituality and lived religion.

Fedele and Knibbe’s work also challengesmainstream discourses on spirituality (emic andacademic as well) that characterise the ‘spiritualrevolution’ as an egalitarian, non-authoritativeand empowering movement that offers itsfollowers the ability to resist and counteract thedevils of a patriarchal and neoliberal society.According to such discourses, this new spiritualityis characterised by the freedom of spiritual practi-tioners, who theoretically do not rely on externalsources of power (as traditional religious followersare caricatured as doing) but on their ‘inner’ self,which is perceived as a ‘free-floating’ entity ableto make free choices. However, as the excellentchapter by Hegner on urban witchcraft in Berlinshows, ‘this approach often ignores the fact thatthe self, and thus the internal authority, is in andof itself a product of social configurations and thusthe interplay of different external authorities’(p. 143). Knibbe’s chapter on the spiritual milieuin The Netherlands develops a profound critique

of those approaches that are blind to power issues;drawing on Bourdieu and Foucault, Knibbe arguesthat power works ‘through the exercise of all kindsof subtle cultural scripts that are ultimately embodiedin such away that they structure the apprehension ofthe world, diffusing power’ (p.191). Further contri-butions by Viola Teisenhoffer on Umbanda practi-tioners in Paris, Monica Cornejo on Soka GakkaiBuddhists in Spain and Rachel Werczberger on aJewish spiritual renewal community in Israel offerconvincing illustrations of the subtle negotiationsand creative tensions between authority and submis-sion in these settings.

The book also contests those approaches thatconceive of spiritual practitioners as ‘passive victimsof the neoliberal society’ (p.19) or of spirituality as‘a technique of pastoral power in the Foucauldiansense’ (p.14). Spiritual practices per se are neitherempowering nor disempowering, as this dependson what people do with these spiritual practices intheir specific situations. Likewise, if it is true that interms of gender there is not a single ‘empoweringrecipe’ and that ‘a discourse of empowerment forsomewomenmeans thedisempowermentof anothergroup of women’ (p.189), it is also apparent thatcontemporary spirituality offers a creative sourcefrom and through which new models of femininityand masculinity emerge, as the chapters by Ethan P.Sharp, Inês Lourenço or Ehler Voss show.

In conclusion, this book expands existingresearch in the field of contemporary spiritualityin new and exciting directions. The combinationof rich ethnography and a theory-informed per-spective that critically engages with the literature inthe field makes for a lucid and insightful volume.

MARGRIERAUniversitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Spain)

Geismar, Haidy. 2013. Treasured possessions.Indigenous interventions into cultural andintellectual property. Durham,NC:DukeUniversityPress. 328 pp. Pb.: US$20.64. ISBN: 978-0-8223-5427-7.

The Pacific is known for its legacy of interconnec-tion. In her impressively detailed book, Geismar

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foregrounds a different form of connection.Throughout the region, people ‘explore the possi-bility of genuine alternatives to the global policiesand concepts that circumscribe their lives’ (p. ix).They integrate cultural and intellectual property(IP) into the construction of identities and sover-eignties and do so because ‘they wisely perceivethat recognition of their identity is mapped ontotheir power to mobilize and control resources’(p. 19). However, they sometimes fail to acknowl-edge that they have many things to teach eachother. Geismar encourages us – Pacific islandersin particular – to learn from the ‘divergent ways’in which people throughout the whole region‘work to similar ends’ (p. x).

The book draws its substance from a compar-ison of the ways in which global and indigenousdiscourses about cultural and intellectual propertyare articulated in two Pacific nations, both centralwithin the Pacific, but marginal worldwide. Theseare Vanuatu, which became an independent statein 1980 and where more than 95% of the popula-tion is indigenous, and New Zealand, a ‘bicultural’settler state where the indigenous population isaround 15%. They were selected not only becauseof their different histories, but also because theyare both unique in the way they place indigenouspeople and discourses of indigeneity at the centreof projects anddebates about national development.From this vantage point and through this method,the book ambitiously weaves Pacific ethnography,legal anthropology, material culture studies,museum studies and literature on indigenous rights,and it creatively rethinks indigeneity, property,sovereignty and the entitlements of culture.

Each chapter focuses on one aspect of thisprocess of indigenisation. Chapter two preparesthe ground for this comparison through a presen-tation of local histories. Chapter three sketchesthe structure of the comparison through anexploration of the construction of indigenousidentity and law in each location. Geismar arguesthat these are co-produced – with sui generis lawsbeing a case in point – and that they represent com-plementary frameworks for such provincialisingprojects. Chapter four discusses the developmentof copyright legislation in Vanuatu, noting themultiple understandings of law and the well-

articulated and efficacious analogy between copy-right and ceremonially sanctioned entitlements inthe graded societies of North Central Vanuatu.Islanders, she points out, cleverly manoeuvrebetween different legal systems in order toconsolidate their own political and economicinterests. Chapter five centres on the emergenceof the trademark law and Māori trademarks inNew Zealand. Although indigenous value andcolonial law also frame this development, as ithappens in Vanuatu, the outcomes are different:failures of the state’s implementation of this legalcategory have led to disappointment and,consequently, uncertainty about the power ofindigenous IP to become a viable economic tem-plate for the indigenous population. From chaptersix onwards, the focus is on cultural property,indigenousmodelsofproperty (kastom and taonga)and the indigenisation of the market and thenational economy. Chapter six highlights thesignificant role indigenous museums play in theconceptualisation of culture as property. The nexttwo chapters focus on indigenous interventionsinto the commodification of culture and on thepromotion of alternative grounds for commodityexchange. Chapter seven presents Māori activismin the auction marketplace and considerscomplexities in the production of value oftreasured possessions. Chapter eight examines therevitalisation of traditional economy in Vanuatuthrough the Pig Bank Project and demonstrateshow indigenous values can be efficaciouslyincorporated into all exchanges.

This book argues that this form ofindigenisation is a kind of provincialisation ratherthan a dramatic attempt to replace one systemwith another, radically different system. The prov-ince occupies a paradoxical position: it emulatesthe centre and, concurrently, cultivates its indepen-dence from the centre; it does not opt for rupture,but incessantly re-centres the relation between theglobal and the local. The result is ‘much moreradical’, for ‘the conduit of authority, the rationaleof sovereignty, and the obligations of the marketare channelled in different directions, accordingto different values, benefitting different people’(p. 211). By demonstrating that in Vanuatu andNew Zealand ‘(indigenous) culture is not the

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alternative to the market, but increasingly a condi-tion for its existence’ (p. 213),Geismar successfullyprovincialises the anthropology of property.However, the last lines –where she pessimisticallyreflects on the state’s willingness to recogniseindigenous people’s ability and right to place keyresources in a framework of their own making –

cast a shadow on the enthusiasm the book drawson and, simultaneously, generates.

MAGDALENA CRĂCIUNUniversity College London (UK)

Gellner, David N. 2013. Borderland lives in

northern South Asia. Durham, NC: Duke

University Press. 320 pp. Pb.: US$20.50.

ISBN: 978-0822355564.

This collection of articles bymostly young scholarsengaged in exploring a region that the editor claimscan be given a new label, ‘Northern South Asia’,aims to stimulate theoretical discussions on ‘bor-ders’ as a conceptual and heuristic tool of analysis.It also aims to provide empirical data on a regionwhere this concept has not been dealt with as copi-ously as inEurope and theUSA.Themost interest-ing aspect of the volume lies in the variety andnovelty of border situations yielded by this regionand its diversity in terms of the nature of borders:pre-modern, modern, soft, hard, thinly or thicklypopulated and also geological, like mountainousor watery, plain or rugged etc. The dominance ofIndia as a major geopolitical factor in the lives ofthe smaller states – Bhutan, Nepal and Bangladesh– the chequered history of changing political for-tunes aswell as the historical shifting and redrawingof borders run through all the contributions to thisvolume. Three major political lines were drawnhere: the MacMohan line (on the North-East), theRadcliffe line (dividing India and Pakistan) andthe perpetually contested Kashmir line.

The ways in which the ‘border’ has beeninterpreted and analysed in terms of the technologiesof its comprehension and existence (military powers,physical boundaries, mental and cognitive percep-tions, maps and censuses, concessions and

coercion)bringout thediffuseness and improbabilityof converting an abstract entity into a comprehen-sible and ‘effective’ reality. They also make apparentthe incongruous relationship between the state (initself a shadowy construct) and the people it aspiresto call its own. The overall theoretical emphasis isthus on a historical and processual approach, scepti-cal about taking the relationship between people,places and cultures as timeless and essentialist, or inother words an intellectual opposition to ‘sedentaristmetaphysics’ (p.14).

As aptly discussed in these chapters, not allborders are geopolitical; religion and culture playequally important roles in dividing and unitingpeople. The people of Kargil, for example (Gupta),give more allegiance to their Indian identity thantheir religious (Shia) identity, unlike neighbouringKashmir valleywhere religion comes up as primary.The people of Bangladesh again are vacillatingbetween religion and language in different phasesof the drawing and re-drawing of their borders.

Several contributions (Hausner and Sharma,Evans, Cons, Jalais) focus on the everyday suffer-ing of people caught in the arbitrariness of bordersthat impose artificial boundaries on historicalcontinuities; the ‘enclaves’ of Bangladesh, thelinguistic/cultural identity of India–Nepal andIndia–Bangladesh and the sudden illegalities ofcenturies-old trade or kinship relations. They alsodescribe the strategies and tactics of protest andthe uneasy acceptance of those caught in situationsof state-induced but also informal forms ofviolence by non-legitimate sources of aggression(Hausner and Sharma). Some scholars havepreferred to put an emphasis on people’s ownnarratives of their conditions and lives (Cons),thus criticising the more formal approaches.

Most works on the marginal positioning ofborders have been cast in a highland–lowlandparadigm or based on the physical distancebetween mainland and marginal communities,but works such as those of Jalais and Piliavskyadd a new dimension to marginalisation, as is thecase of the Sundarbans (deltaic Bengal) and theinterior desert regions of Rajasthan. In bothexamples people concerned are marginalised morein terms of their identity (Bangladesh refugees inone case and stigmatised ex-criminals in the other)

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rather than physical location; they are sought to belocated as far away from civilisation as possiblebecause of their stigmatised identity. Thusmarginalised location is more about the metaphoricborders of being acceptable or non-acceptablerather than geopolitical frontiers. A major twist tothe debate about borders is added by Piliavsky’sstudy of the Kanjars that redefines borders as linesmeant to ‘enclose and divide’ (p. 27). Piliavskydescribes the strategic drawing of self-designedboundaries by the Kanjars as they forge survivalstrategies with the state (the persecutor) and police(representative of the state); while the former fadesaway into abstraction, the latter are recast as allies.Since the state actualises itself through its borders,the fuzziness of borders and the difficulty ofdefining them raise important questions on thereality of the state itself, a theme that opens thisvolume and is pursued throughout.

SUBHADRAMITRACHANNADelhi University (India)

Ghassem-Fachandi, Parvis. 2012. Pogrom in

Gujarat. Hindu nationalism and anti-Muslim

violence in India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton

University Press. 352 pp. Pb.: £19.95. ISBN:

978-0691151779.

Ethnic violence in India has been an importantfieldof social scientific analysis, which provided a varietyof explanations for its causes and effects. The bookunder review offers a completely different perspec-tive on the subject,moving beyond the explanationsproposed so far that tended to emphasise the polit-ical gains perpetrators expected to achieve. The veryacts of violence and their multifarious expressionsand structures remained unexplored in the litera-ture, often being treated as self-explanatory. In hisbook Ghassem-Fachandi discusses how violence isconceptualised as cleansing pollution, purifyingspaces, desecrating bodies and profaning objects asthe events of the Gujarat pogrom unfolded (p. 26).He opens his gripping tale of the pogrom throughthe analysis of the events of 2002 mass killing ofMuslims in Gujarat following the burning of the

Sabarmati Express at the Godhra train station on27 February 2002. This triggered the Godhra riots,the harbinger of theGujarat pogrom that witnessedmindless killing of Muslims for three days, orapproximately 72 hours.

Divided into eight chapters plus an Introduc-tion and Postscript, the book offers a tour de forceon the events. The title of first chapter, ‘Why doyou leave? Fight for us!’ is an adaptation of thestatement of aMuslimwoman towards the authorwho wanted to take cover in their locality in theactual context of unfolding violence. This chapterprovides a first-hand account of violence as itunfolded. It explores the ‘fearsome’ image of theMuslim as constructed by the Gujarati Hindus,now accepted and shared across the caste divide,in spite of the heterogeneity of the former. Thisinitial analysis clears the ground for further explo-ration into the nature of violence as it unfolded onthe streets of Gujarat. The author refers to theelements of violence that had acquired a permissiveand carnivalesque spirit expressing a purportedsense of anger. The other dimensions of violenceincluded the peculiar reaction of the middle class,which expressed ‘cultivated and aloof distancing’from the unfolding events, abdication of the civicorder and the passivity of the state police, invoca-tion of sacrifice as the idiom for killing, the dis-cernment of an uncanny presence in sensitive cityspace and imaginative material that mainly con-cerned sexual fantasies about women. The secondchapter, ‘Word and image’, analyses the specificmanner inwhich the violent incidents are reportedin the local media, including the electronic mediaand the tropes that have been used to cover theevents. The author argues that the ‘depth of thestory is constructed not through certainty of factor evidence but through allusion and accumulatedsuggestions’ (p. 90) in which the diabolic stereo-types play a crucial role. What comes out clearlyin this analysis is the sacrificial logic of the events.The third chapter provides readerswith the shock-ing tales of the dance of death; the killing, burning,mutilation and terrible acts of violating dead bod-ies of women that chills the spine of any humanbeing. The infamous killings of Muslims inresidential areas of Ahmedabad such as GulbargSociety and Naroda Patya on 28 February 2002

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are analysed in a very detailedmanner. The authorshows that these incidents of violence, central totheGujarat pogrom, went beyond the usual ‘riots’as the situation became ‘a festival of sorts by onecommunity in the absence of the other’ (p. 93).The analysis of these events from multipleperspectives is provided in chapter four, ‘The lackof Muslim vulnerability’, which opens with thefundamental question of how a familiar neighbourwith whom one interacts and even shares laughs,arouses extreme forms of disgust, fear or anger?Further the author asks how, in the context of po-grom in Gujarat, the neighbour with whom onefrequently interacts was turned into a stereotype.Through the analysis of three individual narrativestold by people who are not votaries of Hindutvaideology and belong to three different communi-ties – the Jain, Rajput and Dalit – Ghassem-Fachandi shows how these individuals identifiedsomething excessive in Muslims that could serveto legitimate the infliction of violence upon them.This refers to the beef-and meat-eating practicealong with butchering that continuously recur inthe Gujarati discourse about Muslims. In orderto buttress his argument, the author draws froma book by an anonymous author titled ‘Autobiog-raphy of a Goat’ that eventually ended up in a(Muslim) butcher’s shop (pp. 144–7).

The cultural dimensions of violence and itslegitimacy are analysed in the following fourchapters. The fifth chapter ‘Vibrant vegetarianGujarat’, begins with a reference to a speech byNarendraModi the then chiefminister ofGujaratwho was complacent in the Gujarat pogrom.Given on the occasion of the 135th birth anniver-sary ofMahatmaGandhi, Modi’s speech referredto Hindu vegetarianism and attitudes towardsanimals as the ‘hidden strengths’ of Gujarat. Suchrecalling of dietary practices in the Gujaraticontext is inextricably linked to communalism;Ghassem-Fachandi argues that the triad ‘diet,sacrifice and death’ were articulated in diverseforms ad infinitum during the pogrom. The sixthchapter, ‘Ahimsa, Gandhi and the angry Hindu’,is a treatise on the issue of non-violence. It openswith a newspaper advertisement of the Modigovernment in Gujarat that carried an aphorismby Gandhi in which the prefix ‘non’ in the word

non-violence was removed, maybe by error.However, Ghassem-Fachandi problematises thisomission as ‘a printed Freudian slip’ (p. 186) thatreveals how the Hindu right in India is cultiva-ting the notion that only those who are powerfulenough to practice violence could in fact arguefor non-violence. This omission, which standsfor ‘a sudden eruption of truth, a public secretin a text authored by the Gujarat government’(p. 212) becomes an open statement of whatviolence meant in the Gujarat society whichhad created its own internal other as a sacrificialobject. The seventh chapter titled ‘Split citybody’ explores the internal boundaries of the cityand their workings, exposing a particular percep-tion of the intimate as separate. This opens awindow into communal relations whereexternality is produced by constantly creatingboundaries within the cityscape. ‘Heterogeneityand the nation’, the eighth chapter raises funda-mental issues related to the Indian nation. It ishigh time those in India understood the fact thatit is cultural heterogeneity that gave credibility tothe idea of ‘India’ and not the monolithic notionthat the RSS and the Hindutva forces uphold.The author argues that the Gujarati Muslimswho are not ‘pure’ Gujaratis should subvert theclaims of their detractors by ‘appropriating theunbound elements of nationalism withoutrenouncing their various religious and socialidentities byfinding away to affirm radical inter-nal heterogeneity’ (p. 272). In other words heargues that Muslims could claim the ‘Indianmir-acle of multiple origins’ even if their middle-class(Hindu) neighbours are averse to it.

The final section, ‘Postscript’, provides acritical assessment of the events leading to thepogrom and the culpability of former Gujaratchief minister Narendra Modi, who seems tohave escaped the law on highly questionabletechnical grounds. Ghassem-Fachandi boldlychooses the term ‘pogrom’ to describe the eventsbecause it exposes the depth of the malaise ofextermination of specific social groups in whichlarge segments of the society become complacentand take part willingly without any expression ofremorse. He further argues that although thisevent has several things in common with any

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form of collective violence, there are specificcultural and psychological processes of individualand collective identification that were unique tothe Central Gujarat region where the pogromtook place. Hindu nationalism in Gujaratworked through quite unexpected terrains, inte-grating the ideology of ahimsa (non-violence) todevelop a politics of violence and ethnic cleansingby deploying the notion of communal sacrifice, acleansing device to make a portion of one’s ownsociety into sacrificial victim (p. 9). Non-violenceprovided thus the necessary legitimacy for theviolence of sacrificial cleansing of the abjectedother of the Hindu nation, namely the Muslim.

The uniqueness of the book lies in the author’sintimate experience of ethnic violence, which is quiteexceptional for academic research on ethnic violencein India.Oftenwritten in thefirst person, the ethno-graphic narrative is powerful and extends beyondthis experience into an in-depth analysis of the largercultural context of violence in Gujarat. This bookwill remain a classic analysis of the politics of theHindu right in India that draws its sustenance fromthe blood of the innocent. The Hindu right is now-adays reaping the dividends of the Gujarat pogromand its aftermath through a curious mix of mediahype and televised images that catapulted Modi, theformer Gujarat Chief Minister, to his new role asIndia’s PrimeMinister.

SANALMOHANMahatma Gandhi University (India)

Grassiani, Erella. 2013. Soldiering under

occupation. Processes of numbing among

Israeli soldiers in the Al-Aqsa Intifada. Oxford

and New York: Berghahn Books. 168 pp.

Hb.: US$90.00. ISBN: 978-085745-956-5.

An emerging literature in the anthropology ofmorality is now exploring the ways dispositional,situational and institutional factors impinge onmoral decision-making. This book strikes at thecore of these concerns, assessing the extent ofsoldiers’ agency in prolonged and uncertainconflict situations, and questioning the degree to

which moral decision-making is displaced up thechain of command in military institutions. Theauthor thus proposes that anthropologists ofmorality take a ‘stepback’ and lookmore at the forcesand structures that enframe the ‘atrocity producingsituations’ that soldiers can find themselves in.

In a systematic study of the Israel DefenceForce, the author marshals a wealth of soldiers’testimonies to build a penetrating analysis ofthe origins of military violence. The book dealswith the on-the-ground quotidian experiencesof soldiers serving in the occupied Palestinianterritories (OPT), showing how soldiers givemeaning to their experiences and how theyattempt tomakemoral sense of the activities theyperform. For example, an Israeli soldier reflectson his service in theOPT, saying: ‘There’s a veryclear and powerful connection between howmuch time you serve in the Territories andhow fucked in the head you get…’ (p. 73), cap-turing the thrust of the book in a few words.

The book is based on interviews, testimoniesand over a hundred descriptions of incidents,citing much documentation from ‘Breaking theSilence’, an organisation of Israeli ex-combatantsthat collects testimonies following soldiers’ servicein the OPT. The key argument is that the spatialsurroundings of the territories powerfully influencesoldiers’ behaviour, ultimately leading to ‘moralnumbing’. This numbing process entails verbalstrategies of legitimation and denial of actions,which help soldiers cope with their experiencesand actions, thereby allowing the conflict situation,and concomitant atrocities and indignities, to persist.

The historical period of the study is2000–2005, during the so-called ‘SecondIntifada’ (or Al-Aqsa Intifada) – the uprisingthat demonstrated the anger, frustration anddisillusionment of the Palestinians with theirexperience living under occupation. The overallcontext of the Intifada, however, is more deeplyone of disaffection and disillusionment with the1993 Oslo Accords, a process that failed to takethe steps towards a long-term peace solution.The Intifada properly ignited in September2000 after a provocative visit by Ariel Sharon –

the then opposition leader of the Likud party –

to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The violence

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and sporadic attacks of the uprising included sui-cide bombings on both military and civilian tar-gets, inside Israel as well as in the territories.The attacks elicited a heavy Israeli retaliation.More than a million bullets were fired by Israelitroops within the first three months alone. Israelconsequently made a change in its mode ofengagement with the Palestinians, moving awayfrom controlling Palestinian lives from a distance,previously achieved through methods of disci-plinary ‘biopower’, towards tighter control ofPalestinian space, with more checkpoints andpatrol roads, and stricter regulations on humanmovement between villages and across internalborders. The overall effects of this move towards‘sovereign power’ included an increase in invasivepractices, such as house and body searches, theclosure of villages, curfews and inflexible borderclosures. These policies created great frictionbetween the Palestinians and Israeli soldiers,particularly at checkpoints in the West Bank,where daily life was interrupted, with individualsfrequently subjected to body searches andprolonged delays, oftentimes without any justifi-cation or explanation.

For the young soldiers on duty in theterritories conducting such searches, theenvironment was reportedly draining. Fears ofattacks, harsh weather conditions, uncomfortablework spaces, lack of sleep and the simple mono-tony of guard duty, all contributed to boredomand irritation, causing a dwindling of alertness,gradual moral decline and a general sense ofdisengagement and removal from the immediatesituation. This sensation of disconnection madesoldiers find it easier to be harsh or humiliatingtowards the Palestinians they stopped at check-points. This goes for soldiers on patrol, as wellas those conducting planned house raids.

The author draws on theories of space tointerrogate the nature of the militarised environ-ment that the soldiers inhabit and dominate whilein the territories, borrowing her theoretical framefromFrench philosopherHenri Lefebvre. A rela-tional theory of space ties the particularity of ahostile environment to the social activity that itcoordinates, entailing a notion of ‘spatial practice’that sees spaces to be products of local culture as

well as longer histories, trajectories and politicalimaginaries. Taking the physical surroundingsof the territories into account heavily, the authorshows how the long-term impact of time servedin the territories produces a ‘numbing effect’ insoldiers. This numbing is manifest at three levels:emotional, physical and cognitive, culminating in‘moral numbing’, yielding indifference to theharassment, inconvenience and insults caused. Thisapproach to the study ofmilitary spaces emphasisesthe conditioning of soldiers’ practices by theconcrete environment itself. This makes for an as-tute critique, but at times verges on an apologeticsfor the morally indefensible acts of violence andinvasion, where the ultimate causes of violencedissolve into the diffuse affective landscape.

The purpose and strength of this mode ofattention, however, are to identify the situationalfactors and dynamics that create the conditions ofsoldiers’ violent behaviour. Born out of theauthor’s discontent with the official Israelidiscourse and media portrayal of suspects of thedisturbing atrocities that are relayed from theterritories as one-off ‘rotten apples’, the studyinstead takes amore inclusive ‘structural perspec-tive’ to yield a more complete picture of Israelisoldiers as an occupying force in the space ofthe OPT. The key questions that drive the studyare thus: What happens when soldiers serve asoccupiers? What changes do they experience intheir moral commitments? What factors influ-ence their behaviour? And what is the impacton moral decision-making?

Unsurprisingly, the end result of long hoursof border duty, coupled with a diminished sensi-tivity to the experience of Palestinians, leads towhat soldiers themselves term moral ‘attrition’(shkhika). On the other hand, soldiers may alsoexperience surprising sensations of power andpleasure from their duties. The book reportssoldiers enjoying – even getting ‘addicted’ to –

the feelings of strength at being able to makepeople do whatever they want. By virtue of carry-ing aweapon, soldiersfind they can getPalestiniansto stop and go at the simple wave of a finger.But these feelings of pleasure with their enhancedpower also lead to anger and violent outburstswhen that power is questioned, so that soldiers’

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enjoyment of authority and the proclivity tocommit violent acts appear tied. The authorargues that soldiers ‘addicted’ to such a sense ofpower and almightiness easily lose the ability tomake morally just decisions.

Conversely, the nature of soldiers’ proximityto the Palestinians is difficult for some soldiers tocope with. Controlling Palestinians up close leadsto issues of discomfort with intimacy, making itdifficult to treat individuals as unique personsdeserving respect, increasing the tendency to treatthem mechanically and unsympathetically. Thisaccords with prior work that describes the treatmentof Palestinians under the broad ‘othering’ categoriesof ‘Arab’, ‘Palestinian’ or depersonalised terms like‘pregnant woman’, ‘old man’ etc. (Ben-Ari et al.2004). But soldiers also report internal conflict withtheir own feelings of insecurity. Stuck in anunpleas-ant, frightening and threatening environment, thesoldiers often just want to get through their shiftand not think too much about the work theyperform. Their common use of the expression‘small head’ (rosh katan) (p. 97) points to the kindof soldierly disposition that does not ask too muchabout what one is doing but just doing what one istold. While the author acknowledges that somesoldiers do think about the nature of the occupationand recognise that there should be more reflectionon the impact of their work, it is clear that to getthrough the difficult and emotionally taxing experi-ence of service in theOPT,many soldiers disengagefrom reflective thought altogether.

Frankfurt school thinkers Max Horkheimerand Theodor Adorno, and philosopher HannahArendt, argued trenchantly that the singular prob-lematic of modernity is the withering of criticalthought in the midst of an ethically unmooredand expanding instrumental bureaucracy. In herreport on the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, forexample, Arendt (1963) famously located the rootsof the evil that enabled the Nazi Holocaust inthe banal relinquishment of the capacity to thinkcritically. Disturbingly, analogous conditions aredescribed in the context of Israeli military activitiesin the OPT, with soldiers gradually losing theability to engage the big picture and make morallyjust decisions. Indeed, soldiers succumbing tomoral numbing use many discursive strategies to

voice their senseof powerlessness, frequently saying‘What can you do?’ (ma la’asot?) or ‘There isnothing you can do’ (ein ma la’asot) (p. 105). Theoverall effect of such verbal strategies of disavowalis to diminish individual moral responsibility, evenin cases where soldiers recognise that the situationthey are involved in is unpleasant and morallydubious. Consequently, soldiers refer to servingin the territories as doing ‘dirty work’ (avodashehkora) (p. 108). Soldiers need to normalise such‘dirty work’ by explicit reference to their role inprotecting their fellow soldiers or other Israelicitizens. Professionalism, moreover, is alluded to asthe soldierly virtue of carrying out orders withoutquestioning. One soldier confesses ‘it’s much easierbeing a machine than a human being in situationslike that’ (p. 120). In this regard the explicit virtueof rigid obedience facilitates the emotional attritionthat allows for moral numbing to take hold.

In her final analysis of ‘moral numbing’, theauthor mostly focuses on the multifariousrelations that constitute the uncertain workspaceof theOPT. In her reading, the space itself createsthe sense of insecurity and danger that soldiersexperience.An analysis that identifies the broaderspace and landscape over the responsible actorsthemselves, however, breaks with Lefebvre’s dia-lectical theory of spatial practice, which regardshuman practices and physical spaces as ontologi-cally entangled: A space such as a military check-point overdetermines soldiers’ practices while thesoldiers’ practices stabilise and sustain the powerrelations at stake. By dwelling almost entirely onthe ways in which spaces condition soldiers’moral behaviour, there is a tendency to brushover the ways soldiers voluntarily reproducemorally numbing spaces and their regimes of vio-lence. Essential to the development of ‘numbing’would be the military’s disciplinary technologiesthat anaesthetise soldiers to the onset of moraldecline. The military’s modes of subjectivationand institutionalisation that render soldiersparalysed in the grip of an ‘apparatus’, however,are absent in the author’s analysis. The less well-articulated lesson of the book is that soldiersmustrecognise responsibility for their actions, andcrucially, retain the ability to think and analysethe spaces they find themselves in. Indeed, the

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bookmakes it clear that precluding the corrosiverationality of military bureaucracy demandsembracing the ability to think and continually en-gaging in moral reasoning. The book makes thisargument well, and is an important contributionfor scholars interested in spatial theory as itpertains to military morality.

Some straightforward and unequivocalpolicy lessons also emerge from the book. Forexample, it is clear that the ‘eight hours on/eighthours off’ regime for checkpoint duty is exhaustingand counterproductive, causingmoral ‘attrition’, thefirst step of the process that leads to ‘moral numb-ing’. Implicit, also, is a call for more scholarship onviolence andmoral decay in institutions that operatein harsh anduncertain conditions. In this regard, thestudy is exemplary, and its contribution should bewell received.

In conclusion, the book is a valuable additionto the anthropology of the military as it intersectswith the anthropology of morality, as well as toIsrael- andMiddle Eastern studies. The text is wellwritten and gives a clear, balanced and sympatheticpicture of the conditions Israeli soldiers endured intheAl-Aqsa Intifada. Senior military leaders reallyshould read this book, as should professionals andvolunteers working in conflict situations, as allmight benefit from a nuanced understanding ofhowmoral numbing overcomes soldiers, an even-tuality that can lead to pernicious and tragicoutcomes. Otherwise, this book should be foundon the shelves of scholars interested in the dubiousmorality of institutions, or indeedof curious readersinterested in the institutional embeddedness of theintractable Israel–Palestine conflict.

ReferencesArendt, H. 1963.Eichmann in Jerusalem. NewYork:

Penguin Books.Ben-Ari, E.,M.Maymon,N.Gazit andR. Shatzberg.

2004. From checkpoints to flow-points: sites offriction between the Israel defence forces andPalestinians. Jerusalem:Harry S. Truman Institutefor the Advancement of Peace, the HebrewUniversity.

IAN VINCENT MCGONIGLEHarvard University (USA)

Grønseth, Anne Sigfrid. 2013. Being human,

being migrant: senses of self and well-being.

New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books.

184 pp. Hb.: £53. ISBN: 978-1782380450.

This edited collection, focused on migrants fromdifferent backgrounds and various locations inEurope, makes for an engaging read withwell-argued essays. Conceptualising migrants aspeople living in-between, researchers analyse dif-ferent experiences related to migrants’movementsacross space. The contributors have chosen a phe-nomenological approach in their ethnographies,attempting to capture the everyday lives of mi-grants. Their adaptive strategies are not seen in anegative sense, but rather as occasions to createagency through the creative use of availableresources. These essays capture how senses of selfare recreated and how they allowpeople to experi-encewell-being even in amigrant condition, draw-ing a link between the status of a migrant and thegeneral human condition.

Thefirst chapter is focusedon asylum seekersin Italy and the various interactions with the hostsociety that shape their new lives. Barbara Pinellipresents a case study that highlights the mannerin which refugees manage to transgress the diffi-culties caused by a faulty welfare system. Trappedin the liminality of waiting for help from authori-ties, women like Iolanda, the refugee presented inthe chapter, find their agency fuelled by fantasiesof a better future. Anne Sigfrid Grønseth, theeditor of this collection, focuses in her chapter onthe identity and wellbeing of Tamil refugees inNorway. She shows how social ties and migrants’connectionswith the homeland become importantfactors for a refugee’s sense of self and group iden-tity. Sometimes, the distress caused by such shiftstransgresses from emotional states to bodily reac-tions such as undiagnosed pains and aches.Attuned to Pinelli’s case study, the continuumfrom past to future is marked by a liminality zonethat brings about both its ambiguity and opportu-nities for re-creating a good life in the future.

Maruška Svašek’s chapter moves the reader’sattention further along the imaginary map of mi-grations, looking at Dutch migrants in NorthernIreland. This case study is different from the

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others, presenting the experiences of people whohave migrated by choice. Resettlement, althoughin different circumstances in these cases, alsohas a significant effect on human well-being.The woman presented here is caught in acircular movement, of moving back to hernative Netherlands from Northern Ireland.Svašek analyses how the past is presented andre-contextualised at different moments in time,reflecting the migrant’s personal transformation.Northern Ireland is also the setting for NaokoMaehara’s case study of Japanese migrants.To analyse psychological processes related tomemories and their respective effects at anemotional level, Maehara chose to develop aphoto-diary project. Diary notes charted theadjustment process of a recent migrant, whenunfamiliar places generated a sense of loss anduncertainty that impacted on her well-being. It alsocharted, however, further along, how negativeexperiences are replaced with recent positivememories as the body adjusts to the environment,a new gained sense of place prompting well-being.

Christina Georgiadou’s contributionfocuses on Afghan refugees in Greece. Theproblems refugees encounter here are akinto those captured in other contributions,although Georgiadou’s chapter presents anotable air of optimism. The two Afghanmen included in this case study, while lead-ing lives fraught with constraints of all sortsdue to their refugee status, have managed toturn coercion into creative energies thathave changed their lives significantly,allowing them to experience well-being in ahostile environment.

Maša Mikola’s last chapter, centred on asy-lum seekers in Ljubljana, is the least positive inthe collection. Mikola investigates extreme caseswhen refugees, usually conceptualised as power-less individuals, gain a voice through acts of self-harm. Faced with a restrictive, Kafkaesque regime,where silence brings about fears of all sorts, suchresistance acts disrupt the power relations andbring refugees some long-sought sense of agency.

This collection ends with an epilogue writtenbyNigel Rapport. Rapport ponders on the title ofthe book, offering some interpretations of the

various links that can be drawn between a generaltalk about humans and migrants. He goes on toanalyse the particular case migrants represent, thatof living between twoworlds. In suchmovements,he sees an opportunity for an increased awarenessthat could draw the migrant further away from‘isms’ (i.e. nationalism) and closer to the experienceof human diversity.

The theoretical approach and diversity ofcases offered by this volume recommend it for abroader readership beyond migration studies.CRISTINA CLOPOTHeriot Watt University, Edinburgh (UK)

Hafez, Sherine and Susan Slyomovics (eds.)2013. Anthropology of the Middle East andNorthAfrica: into the newmillennium. Bloomington,IN: Indiana University Press. 414pp. Pb.: US$26.52. ISBN: 978-0-253-00753-7.

Based on a 2010 conference in the Center for NearEastern Studies in UCLA, this volume will invari-ably disappoint anyone who, perhaps misled byits title, seeks an exhaustive overview of the fieldof Middle Eastern and North African (MENA)anthropology. However, to the extent that it offers‘selected anthropological studies of theMENA thatrepresent a trend in opposition to the historical pat-tern of Orientalizing peoples of the region’ (p. xiv),especially through ‘the potential of ethnographicmethodologies to serve as a catalyst for theoreticaldebate’ (p. xv), this volume is a good addition tothe anthropological body of work on the region.

The book is divided in four sections. Thefirstsection examines the historical and institutionalconstitution ofMENAanthropology. Slyomovicsstarts by critically assessing major works in thefield’s history, starting from Carleton Coon’sCaravan to Said’s Orientalism. With a similarapproach, Shami and Naguib outline, in broadstrokes, the changing conceptions of identity anddifference in MENA anthropology. Contrastingwith these textual overviews, Anderson highlightsthe role of archaeological institutions in encourag-ing early MENA anthropologists to embark onethnographic fieldwork, while Silverstein exam-ines anthropology’s influence on identity-makingin the Maghreb since colonial times. Finally, in a

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very interesting survey of current MENA anthro-pologists in the USA, Deeb andWinegar bring tolight the political pressures placed by Americanacademic institutions on the study of the region,including surreptitious censorship on any engage-ment with the Palestinian question.

Following the first section, the book suffersfrom a clear lack of cohesiveness. The second sec-tion, by far the least cohesive, comprises a frugalchapter on youth in the Middle East (Joseph);some reflections on memories of violence amongSudanese and Eritrean refugees (Hale); an ethno-history of negotiations between the Harasii tribeand the Omani State (Chatty); and an analysis oftrust receipts in neoliberal Port Said, Egypt(Hegel-Cantarella). The third section, coalescingaround a more defined theme (religion/secularism),begins with a strong Asadian essay on the falseopposition between Islam and rationality (Hafez),followed by essays on the history of secularism inTurkey (Shively); on historical encounters betweenShari’a and Western legal systems (Dahlgren); and,less on topic, on female experiencesof contraceptionin Morocco (Hughes). The final section, focusingon media, includes three case studies on the role ofnational television in the 1975 Green March inMorocco (Spadola); the online redefinition of tribalidentity in Saudi Arabia (Maisel); and the role of theArab and Iranian blogospheres in MENA politics(Karagueuzian and Chrabieh Badine).

The central arguments in each chapter are toooften overshadowed by political overgeneralisations.For instance, when Shami and Naguib write that‘new forms of knowledge about identity anddifference in this region are central to the newsocial imaginaries that are emerging and beingcontested in city squares and streets every day’(p. 24), the statement’s political optimism is notonly too vague to constitute serious politicalanalysis, but it obscures the significance andthe specific definition of the ‘new forms ofknowledge’ presented by MENA anthropol-ogy. Beyond overgeneralisation – a minor issueoverall – there is an evident gap between the firstsection, which very aptly covers the academiclegacy of MENA anthropology, and theremaining sections, which inadequately covertheir allotted themes (respectively, subjectivity,

religion and media). Even when we considereach chapter individually, the balance betweentheory and ethnography is often lacking, eitherby the depth of description (Joseph; Maisel) or,in cases where the description is strong enough,by theoretical ingenuity (Shively; Karagueuzianand Chrabieh Badine). Among more balancedchapters, one should cite Chatty’s analysis,which ties the history of relations between theHarasiis and the Omani State to issues of iden-tity-making among nomadic tribes in modernnation-states, as well asHegel-Cantarella’s anal-ysis, which ties the economy of trust receipts inPort Said to more general issues concerning thetrustworthiness of economic exchanges in legalregimes, which are materially supported bydocuments. Also worthy of mention is Hafez’schapter, a well-written genealogy of the notionof ‘rationality’ in European and Islamic intellec-tual history.

All in all, this book will interest the non-specialist seeking introductory case studies inMENA anthropology, but it may fall short forthe specialist, who will find few chapters com-bining ethnographic substance with theoreticalfinesse. The first section should provide somesolace, however, since it presents interestinginsights into the intellectual and institutionalhistory of MENA anthropology in the USA,the implicit academic locus of the volume.

CHIHAB EL KHACHABWolfson College, University of Oxford (UK)

Hindman, Heather. 2013.Mediating the global.Expatria’s forms and consequences in Kathmandu.Stanford, CA: California University Press. 288pp.Hb.: US$36.00. ISBN: 978-0804786515.

Mediating the global is an engaging monographportraying expatriates as globalisation’s middlemen.The book explores historically the expatriate scenein Kathmandu over a period of six years (1994 to2000), pointing out changes in overseas work rela-tionships, shifts in the local situation in Nepal andin expatriate sending countries along with widerglobal changes in work, employment and gender.

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Building on the work of Malkki andAppadurai, the author coins the concept ofExpatria,which she sees as ‘anetworkof associationof elite overseaswork’ (p. 11) createdbetweencareerdiplomats, professional aid workers, business peo-ple, professionals mostly working as volunteersand consultants living abroad. Although global inexpanse, Expatria has the characteristics of a smalltown, while expatriates live provincial lives, theauthor insists. Expatriates experience continuousgeographical displacement surmounted by socialcoherence, dependence on (similar) institutionaland bureaucratic frameworks and a life centredcontinuously around labour, wherever they are onthe globe.

The first part of the book presents ‘packageexpatriates’ in their ‘typical form’ (p. 11) as astory of rules and institutions governing expa-triate employment. Global, transcultural andabove-all local models of labour fail due to spe-cific and unaccounted for circumstances; whilegeneral measures remain in contrast witheveryday realities of living in Kathmandu,Hindman argues. These measures are further-more colonial in nature: expatriate practices inNepal can be tracked back to colonial times,British governance in India having also madeuse of family units with gendered division ofspace and employment of locals in the house-hold as a tool of governance. The second partof the book focuses on changes such as globalshifts in the attitude towards work and gender.Looking at employer tests of cultural compe-tency, the author pinpoints how in the globalgame of distribution some differences mattermore than others: for example, race is consid-ered of utmost importance while discussions ofculture often exclude power, history and belief.Besides, as employers and institutions startpreferring the single white-male-internationalcitizen model of employment, expatriates withfamilies fall in disgrace. This model of employ-ment reshapes institutions dealing with expatsand inspires a decline in both women in posi-tions of power and the number of non-whiteexpatriates.

Throughout the book the author points outthe less rosy side of being part of Expatria. The

unending packing and moving reconfigures sig-nificant relations, drawing spouses and childreninto the sphere of the employer while a systemof compensation is designed to make the workertruly feel at home. Although these forms of in-tervention are meant to reduce stress, they in factcreate new concerns and new problems through‘the displacement of links of caring’ (p. 67): adouble shift of labour for women who try toboth ameliorate the difficulties of living abroadand to address the difficulties of living under a‘regime of accountability’. Besides, the inclusionof the family into the work sphere as the em-ployer takes over responsibilities such as hous-ing and schooling creates surveillance andregulation of behaviour along the constructionof (new) norms about what constitutes a properfamily.

Besides the problematic relationshipbetween expats and their employer, globalchanges in employment patterns have createdeven more challenges. A preference forsubcontracting enhances distance between the‘problems’ and the people who address them.The lack of contact between the field and man-agers ensures squandering knowledge and re-sources, while short-term projects make thelocal populationwonder ‘what are the crazy for-eigners going to come up with next’ (p. 6). Peo-ple hired to do a job have shorter contracts andare seldom interested in the context of the coun-try they are delegated to. Also, changes in thelanguage and terminology of aid programmesdue to fast turnout in governmental and NGOproposals and ‘bids’ from subcontractors ensurea superficial proliferation of buzzwords thathave little to do with actual local circumstances.

Hindman not only places expatriate lifein perspective but also considers the actualimpact of the development work and expatri-ate life as lacking efficiency. Her critiquereaches also the hierarchy of nations and cul-tures implied in the expatriate model. Thesecritical positions make the book an engagingread. However, due to the lack of thoroughcomparison, the book remains a mere sketchof changes in expatriate life in Kathmandubetween 1994 and 2000. Published 13 years

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after the last date of fieldwork the bookremains mainly an instrument for historicalcomparison.

CAROLINA IVANESCUErasmus University Rotterdam (The Netherlands)

Kwon, SooAh. 2013.Uncivil youth: race, activism,

and affirmative governmentality. Durham, NC: DukeUniversity Press. 184 pp. Pb.: US$19.86. ISBN:978-0822354239.

Uncivil youth examines the activist work of ayouth collective, Asian/Pacific Islander YouthPromoting Advocacy and Leadership (AYPAL),constituted by participants from six differentAsian ethnic organisations in Oakland, California.As a volunteer staff member and ethnographer,Kwon sought to understand how AYPALoperated as a site of youth development and activ-ism in a neoliberal state. Through ethnographicdescriptions of two campaigns undertaken byAYPAL combined with historical and theoreticalanalyses, Kwon argues that we need to have morenuanced understandings of youth activism in theneoliberal era, rather than uncritically celebratingyouth’s role in creating amore socially just society.The book’s focus on Asian American and PacificIslander (API) youth counters effectively imagesof API youth and adults as ‘model minorities’.

In the introduction, Kwon makes severalimportant claims about youth activism, theneoliberal state and the growing role of non-profits in providing youth services. She arguesthat both youth empowerment and youthcriminalisation are intimately connected astwin state strategies to manage youth, particu-larly youth of colour. Drawing on Foucauldiannotions of the production of disciplined sub-jects, Kwon argues that the neoliberal logic ofthe moment compels young people, especiallypoor young people and young people of col-our, to ‘self-govern’ and to become responsible‘for acting on their behalf, but not necessarilyto oppose the relations of power’ that renderedthem powerless in the first place (p. 11). She

argues persuasively that moving activism andsocial movements under the purview of non-profits, whose finances and functions are gov-ernment-regulated, shifts the emphasis fromorganising collectively for large social changeto becoming ‘good’ individual citizens whovote, sign petitions and volunteer. Kwon’saccount of AYPAL’s activism seeks tounderstand how the youth both challenge andare bound by the constraints of working withinthe framework of a neoliberal logic of self-regulation. To do so, Kwon relies not only onher fieldwork as a volunteer and ethnographerwith AYPAL over the course of three and ahalf years, but also on close readings of reportsby and websites of youth organisations as wellas myriad historical sources.

In the first chapter, Kwon provides a histor-ical and theoretical overview of when and howthe category of youth and adolescence wasproduced in the USA and the subsequent govern-ment regulation of that category. She arguescogently that the production of this category wasnecessary for the regulating practices and policiesthat followed. Kwon notes that the raced, classedand gendered assumptions and concerns thatundergirded the youth programmes of theProgressive era are still evident in current youthinterventions. In chapter 2, she describes how theproliferation of non-profit organisations (12,500in 1940 to over 2 million currently) has shapedthe nature and scope of youth (and other) activistwork. Because youth organising groups have torely on foundation grants to fund their work,Kwon writes, ‘their vision of social change andactivism can be dampened by the mundane tasksof reading through calls for proposals andbalancing budgets’ (p. 65).

In the next two chapters, Kwon draws onher ethnographic work to describe two AYPALcampaigns. Chapter 3 describes the successfulmobilisation of AYPAL youth, along with theirAfrican American and Latino/a peers, to haltthe expansion of a juvenile hall. Chapter 4describes AYPAL’s less successful campaign toconvince their congressional representative tosponsor a bill to halt the deportation of youngCambodian refugees. While the youth’s efforts

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and dedication described in these chapters areinspiring, more in-depth information about theparticular youth involved and their reasons andmotivations for leading the campaigns wouldhave been useful. Kwon hints at, but does notelaborate, on racial, class and gender differencesamong the AYPAL youth in their understandingof and enthusiasm for the campaigns. It wouldhave been helpful to hear more from the youththemselves, especially about how campaignswere chosen.

While Kwon’s caution against uncriticallychampioning youth activism as the sure-fireway to creative progressive social change is animportant one, the force of her argument comesmostly from her theoretical and historical analy-ses rather than her ethnographic material. Oneparticular strength of her work is that it focuseson youth activists who come from a diverserange of Asian ethnic groups; however, Kwon’saccount does not provide the readers with anin-depth understanding of the possibilities andchallenges of how these youth worked withinand across these ethnic and other differences.

ANITA CHIKKATURCarleton College (USA)

Long, Nicholas J. and Henrietta L. Moore (eds.)

2013.Sociality: newdirections. Oxford andNew

York: Berghahn Books. 244pp. Hb.: US$80.00.

ISBN: 978-0-85745-789-9.

As a theoretical and analytic term, sociality iscurrently being used in diverse disciplines, withdifferent aims. The editors of the volume,Nicholas Long and Henrietta Moore, want tooffer a novel and more refined vision thatsocio-cultural anthropology has much to gainfrom. They provide a very broad definition of so-ciality (which has its roots in the 1989ManchesterDebate in Anthropology, cf. Ingold 1996: 50–80)as ‘a dynamic and interactive relational matrixthrough which human beings come to know theworld they live in and to find their purpose andmeaning within it’ (p. 2). With this broad

definition at hand, they advocate for a processualtheory of sociality that can do justice to its diversemanifestations, its plasticity and resilience.

The book consists of an introduction by theeditors and ten chapters by individual scholars.Three of the chapters engage with the topic moretheoretically, while the other seven approach itethnographically. In their respective chapters,Henrietta Moore and Christina Toren addressthe benefits and shortcomings of sociality as aresearch domain in anthropology. Their viewsconverge in envisioning human life as being atonce a social, biological and historical process,and stressing the developmental plasticity of thebody and the brain, and the importance of inter-subjectivity and the imagination. They diverge,however, on the conclusions they draw from this.In Toren’s view, sociality is analytically ineffec-tive. Moore, on the other hand, considers it ana-lytically interesting by emphasising the humanability to imagine, anticipate and assign meaningto emotions, values, objects or actions as distinctlyhuman. In her view, relational or affect theories, incontrast to anthropology, do not take this aspectinto account and therefore fall short of graspingthe distinct quality of human sociality. The thirdtheoretical contribution by Susanne Küchlerreminds us that reflections on human socialitymust consider such things as telecommunicationsdevices and smart textiles, as these extend and dis-tribute cognition in yet unknown forms.

The following chapters provide ethnographiccase studies discussing how people in diversecontexts relate to each other, to other animals orto objects, and how this influences the way theysee the world and create meaning in it. In hiscontribution Peter Geschiere draws on his workin Cameroun, where he has been studying theMaka people since the 1970s. He traces the wayin which witchcraft, intimacy and trust have beenimplicated in each other and have remained fright-fully resilient features of sociality in familynetworks, even while overcoming great distances.Nicholas J. Long takes us along to the virtualworld of Britannia, where in the game UltimaOnline long-term ‘inhabitants’ participate in aform of sociality that is partly self-created, as theyrepresent personas that interact with others. Long

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found that many ‘inhabitants’ enjoyed gettingpraise for their performance in self-taught virtualskills, which was perceived as refreshingly differ-ent from the sociality they experienced outsidethe game. In her chapter, Anne Allisonproblematises Japanese ‘my-homeism’ (mai homushūgi) as a template for ideal sociality in post-warJapan. ‘My-homeism’ captures strong feelingsof belonging, nuclear family making and pros-perity thanks to corporate capitalism. Withincreasing economic precarity and disorientation,‘my-homeism’ is now gradually replaced by otherforms of belonging. Olga Solomon describes theinteraction between childrenwith a formof autismspectrum disorder and dogs. These children, whowould otherwise have trouble playing with otherchildren and developing a sense of ‘we’, manageto establish a form of sociality in this situation.Drawing on her study, Solomon warns of aconceptualisation of sociality too much focusedon language use and complex social cognitiveprocesses, which misses out cases such as these.The last three chapters focus on the comingtogether of large numbers of people. In herchapter, Sian Lazar concentrates on ideologies ofcollectivity, comparing two sets of union leaders indifferent contexts in Bolivia and Argentina. AdamYuet Chau is critical of the usefulness of the termsociality, speaking instead of ‘actants amassing’(p. 133 ff.) in an attempt to capture the comingtogether of large numbers of people, animals, foodand other objects in an annual ritual in Taiwan.And last, Jo Vergunst and Anna Vermehren reflectin their contribution on an art project that centreson slow motion by bicycle, which they see as aninstance of slow-motion sociality.

This book reclaims sociality as a researchdomain for socio-cultural anthropology, as itclearly emphasises the processual and biosocialcharacter of sociality instead of looking at it asa product of social relations or as a biologicalcapacity. The ethnographic case studies pro-vide fine examples of the ever-changing formsin which humans relate to each other, to ani-mals and to the environment, and of how theyinfuse objects and actions with meaning, aswell as anticipate the future and imagine possi-ble worlds.

Reference

Ingold, T. (ed.) 1996.Key debates in anthropology.London: Routledge.

BARBARA GÖTSCHInstitute for Social Anthropology, AustrianAcademy of Sciences (Austria)

Macdonald, Sharon. 2013. Memorylands:

heritage and identity in Europe today. London

and New York: Routledge. xiv +293 pp. Pb.:

£24.99. ISBN: 9-780415-453349.

This volume discusses what the author calls the‘past presencing’ and ‘memory complex’ incontemporary Europe. As she writes, ‘the termmemory complex should be seen as shorthandfor something like “the memory-heritage-identitycomplex” for these are all tightly interwoven’(p. 5). Past presencing can also be conceptualisedas a general preoccupation with and modalityof incorporation of memory, heritage andidentity – or the culturally specific forms theyhave assumed in Europe in the last fewdecades. In short, through the notions of ‘pastpresencing’ and ‘memory complex’, theauthor points outmanymodalities of imagining,experiencing and living the past.

The book comprises nine chapters coveringvarious themes such as traditions, telling, feelingand selling the past, musealisation, cultural andtranscultural heritage, and cosmopolitan memory.Furthermore these chapters offer representativecase studies, an annotated review of the pertinentliterature and a critical discussion on theories andmethods. The way ethnographic examples relateto each other and become integrated into broadertheoretical frameworks is remarkable, and givesthe treatise a stimulating holistic flavour.

The evident priority given to theorisation istempered by a similar concern regarding the riskof methodological ‘presentism’: being aware ofthe recent turns in the discipline, Macdonald fruit-fully engages with their conceptual tools (incorpo-ration, affectivity, phenomenology, materiality,etc.). That said, she also points out that none ofthese methodological turns is conclusive or

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preeminent and that one has to calibrate one’s an-alytic priorities and procedures according to thespecificities of the research contexts.

Europe as a field of study is not uncriticallypostulated in Macdonald’s work. Her perspec-tive is in fact aimed at understanding how identi-ties in Europe and European identities areconstructed through the social mechanisms trig-gered by the memory complex. How, in otherwords, discourses and regimes of time, past andhistoricity relate to notions and practices of tradi-tion, memory, history and heritage, and howthese are manipulated, experienced and used bycommunities, institutions and nations. The bookconvincingly highlights analogies as well as dif-ferences in the ways European communities orinstitutions incorporate, materialise and some-times commodify the past. It also demonstratesthe pan-European dimension of the memory–heritage–identity complex, which is unevenlybut widely spread – even if with a few relevantexceptions, like that of the Roma of CentralEurope. According to Macdonald, Roma are infact characterisedby a verydifferent regimeof tem-porality, a different use ofmemory, and thereforean alternative way to ‘conceptualize the relation-ship between past, present, and identity’ (p. 67).

Assessing differences in constructing andrepresenting ‘Europeanness’ also leads her toexamine how Europe and Islam, Islamic veiland gender issues in Europe relate to questionsof memory, tradition, heritage and national policy.These issues are treated with sensitivity and intelli-gence, though never losing critical acumen. Fur-ther insights are presented on the memory andheritage practices of ethnic, national or religiousgroups that are not geopolitically localised in anyEuropean nation-state (Roma, Jews, Muslims,Africans and other incoming migrants). In thiscase, Macdonald emphasises how actual socialpractices may diverge from public rhetoric in thecultural negotiation with more or less homoge-neous groups considered as non-Europeans or‘others’.

Some aspects of this work can also be sub-ject to criticism. For instance, although the bookcovers enormous ground and shows deep knowl-edge of the pertinent literature, it mentions no

publications inRomanic languages, despite the vastproduction of studies about heritage and memoryin French and Italian. Post-socialist Europewould have probably deserved more space. Thesubject of socialist nostalgia is well presented andthoroughly explored, but a longer discussion aboutthe forms that processes such as musealisation, thereconfiguration of folk traditions and culturalheritages took immediately after the 1989 changesand later would have been pertinent given the over-all topic.

As for the epistemological andmethodolog-ical orientations of the book, two disciplines,namely cultural history and folklore, are under-represented. The former is not completelyabsent, but it is referred to more as a producerof representations and regimes of temporalitythan as a discipline contributing to a better under-standing, on a diachronic level at least, of thememory-heritage-identity phenomenon. Alsofolklore as a discipline is virtually absent fromthe treatise. The bookwould surely have benefit-ted from a brief discussion of the relations andinterconnections between folklore, Europeanethnology and anthropology of Europe. Thesecritiques, however, do not diminish the remark-able achievements of the book. Memorylands isstrongly recommended reading for scholars in-terested in European studies and a must-readfor anthropologists. It is an excellent, extensiveanalysis of memory, heritage and identity in con-temporary Europe that will surely remain for along time the reference point on these topics.

ALESSANDRO TESTAUniversity of Pardubice (Czech Republic)

McCollugh, B. Megan and Hardin A. Jessica

(eds.) 2013.Reconstructing obesity: themeaning

andmeasures and themeasure ofmeanings. New

York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. 256 pp.

Hb.: US$85.50. ISBN: 978-1782381419.

This volume tackles the interrelated develop-ments of the medicalisation of obesity and thepropagation of ideas about the moral status offatness around today’s world. Including an array

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of cases– fromsuchcountries as theUSA,Australia,Samoa, Cuba and the United Arab Emirates –

it provides a rich, empirically based set of analysesof the social categorisations and medical classifica-tions that are used not only to describe and analysestates of large human bodies, but employed tooffer value judgements and prescriptions foraction. As the contributors to the volume explain,interventions related to fatness are found in aplethora of areas, including the medical and ed-ucational sphere, commercial and business enter-prises and the health and cosmetics industries.Given the increasing medicalisation of contem-porary societies, they accompany individualsthroughout their lifetimes and in a variety of ac-tivities. Moreover, and these are probably themost important points for readers of this jour-nal, the contributors convincingly argue that anunderstanding of obesity and of large bodiesmust take into account local contexts and cul-tural constructions in order to fully appreciatethe diversity of experiences involved in suchbodies. They also explain the need to take intoaccount the lived experience of people in termsof how and why they choose what to eat, assessrisks and health, and grapple with often diverg-ing ideologies of consumption and restraint. It isthese lived experiences that can provide insightsfor behavioural medicine.

The volume is framed by an excellentIntroduction by medical anthropologistsMcCullough (Department of Veterans Affairsin New York) and Hardin (Brandeis Univer-sity) and a rather bland epilogue by McGarvey(Brown University). The main part of the bookis divided into four broad sections, comprisingfascinating expositions of the quantificationand universalising social appraisal of obesity;ethnographic depictions of fatness in Cuba andSamoa; investigations into the practices ofweight management by individuals and by wayof policy; and a systematic explanation of howthe current biomedical model is inadequate inaddressing the social causes of fatness, stigmaand backlash in the form of eating disorders.

The introduction sets out the parameters ofthe volume by defining obesity as a medical clas-sification and fatness as a political labelling of the

body with multiple meanings. It then carefullycharts out the aims of the edited collection inunpacking the equivalence between obesity andsickness and in examining how this equivalenceis internalised by individuals. In order to achievethese aims, the editors explain, the contributionsto the volume suggest moving away from seeing(along the lines ofmedical science) the individualas the basic unit, to seeing individuals as cultur-ally located and understood in context. Thusmany contributions examine bodies, food histo-ries and epidemiological change, to show howlarge bodies are conceived as normal, sick orsomething more ambiguous. Looked at thisway, the various chapters underscore howmuchobesity research is too Euro-centric and instru-mental in its orientation and as a consequencemisses the multiple meanings of being fat.

Two examples of outstanding contribu-tions may provide readers with the flavour ofthe analyses. Rosen’s chapter on adapting diabe-tes interventions in Samoa shows that thecommon global terms of behavioural medicinelike the dichotomy ‘collectivist-individualist’ tocharacterise societies or the role of ‘community’in governing eating and health practices are aliento anthropologists. They are alien since byreducing cultural and social complexity to avery small set of measurable categories, theytend to efface the differences of local contextsand understandings. The chapter byMcCullough is probably the volume’s strongestfor the way it interweaves personal experience(without devolving into navel gazing), criticalexaminations of institutional and popular as-sumptions, and drawing wider lessons aboutthe cultural and political implications of medicaltechnologies centred on obesity. She uses herown pregnancy and the various reactions to itby medical personnel and her large body toshow the blurred lines between obesity researchand popular representations of obesity.

In all, the various contributions and thevolume as a whole successfully de-naturaliseand de-universalise obesity so that it is no longera singular category and the various taken-for-granted assumptions about the stigmasattached to it are reconceived.

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EYAL BEN-ARIKinneret College on the Sea of Galilee (Israel)

Raikhel, Eugene and William Garriott (eds.)

2013. Addiction trajectories. Durham, NC:

Duke University Press. 360pp. Pb.: US$19.04.

ISBN: 978-0822353645.

Unlike previous researchers of addiction, thecontributors to this volume ‘move away fromemploying substance categories (alcohol, illicitdrugs, pharmaceuticals) as the organizing rubricfor research’ (p. 6). The focus of their attentionis addiction and all the different meanings withwhich scientists and lay people flesh out thisnotion in various cultural and historical contextssince late 19th century. The overarching idea of thevolume is that of directed movement, trajectory.Addiction, as well as the individual experiences,relations, knowledges and technologies it pro-duces, are analysed through the prism of threetypes of trajectories along which addiction movesthrough time and space: epistemic, therapeuticand experiential.

The individual contributions bring intolight different epistemic framings of addiction.One frame, addressed by Summerson Carr,Angela Garcia, Nancy D. Campbell, Jamie SarisandHelenaHansen, links addiction to the prob-lem of personal choice or will, a cultural under-standing of addiction that stems from theprevailing American Twelve Step model ofrecovery, as well as punitive approach to addic-tion (pp. 44–5). This view draws a sharp linebetween people who ‘can’t stop’, ‘broken’addicts, and those who are able to exercise self-control, commit an intentional, voluntary act(a vivid illustration of this view is presented inCampbell’s analysis of an episode from TheOprah Winfrey Show, p. 247).

Another epistemic model puts addiction inthe realm of chronic diseases (Garcia). This socio-cultural idea initially emerged in response to thehigh incidence of repeated relapse seen amongaddicts in the US publicly funded treatmentprogrammes, which conflicts with the moral,

will-based interpretation of addiction. On theone hand, this model relieves addicts of themoralresponsibility for their returning to drug use. Onthe other hand, as Garcia shows, by giving thefeeling of an everlasting affection, chronicitymay provoke ‘a deep sense of hopelessness’(p. 56) in addicted people, who have to live withthis interiorised cultural idea.

Tightly related to the chronicity model isthe modern biomedical understanding of addic-tion (Campbell, Garriott, Hansen), which isbased on the latest neurobiological research anddevelopment of neuroimaging technologies inthe USA and Europe. This model defines addic-tion as ‘a dysfunction of normal brain systemsinvolved in reward, motivation, learning andchoice’ (p. 6). This approach makes room fortreating addiction exclusively with pharmaceuticalmeans, and for challenging ‘stigmatizing andmoralizing interpretations of addiction’ (p. 16) byrevealing the uncontrolled, ‘subcortical’ part ofrelapse mechanisms.

The second type of trajectories explored inthis volume is ‘therapeutic trajectories’, whichdifferent anti-addiction regimens as well as addictedindividuals take within the respective chapters.Thanks to the critical eye of researchers, we witnesshow the lines between licit and illicit drugs, anddrugs and treatment regimens based onpharmaceu-ticals (like methadone and buprenorphine – seeLovell andMeyers’ contributions) and psychother-apy (Shüll, Raikhel) become very thin and in somecases completely disappear. The geographicalbreadth of individual trajectories collected byeditors is impressive: from narcology clinics inSaint Petersburg through suburbs of Marseille,down to the poor neighbourhoods of NewMexico, and up to the drug rehabilitationcentres in Baltimore and mid-western USA. Asone of the contributors states, these milieuxcontribute to the ‘materialization’ of ‘experien-tial trajectories’ and allow us to connect themto different national regimens of drug manage-ment (p. 129). In this way, for example, we canfollowPavel’s trajectory, aUkrainian ‘toxicomane’who travelled to Marseille and used free FrenchNGOs’ methadone programmes to gain accessto local healthcare services. Having been exposed

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to both Ukrainian and French treatment modali-ties, Pavel’s toxicomania shows how differentsocial bodies, institutions and nations relate toaddiction: in Ukraine he was considered ‘a crimi-nal’ doomed for prison,while in France he becamepart of the French ‘Republicanmodel of solidarity’and enjoyed the generous aid of NGOs trying toentitle drug addicts to the same rights and servicesas ordinary citizens (Lovell).

Revealing the intricate details of addicts’worldviews and life trajectories, the authors bringthese people closer to the reader and shed newlight on the complexity of addiction as epistemic,therapeutic and subjective experience.

ALEXANDRA SERGEEVNAKURLENKOVAN.N. Miklukho-Maklai Institute of Ethnologyand Anthropology, Moscow (Russia)

Rice, Tom. 2013. Hearing and the hospital:sound, listening, knowledge and experience.Wantage (UK): Sean Kingston Publishing.214pp.Hb.: US$95.48. ISBN: 978-1907774249.

Hearing and the hospital brings to bear thesignificance, complexity and intrigue of theethnographer’s ear. Using wards in two UKhospitals as field sites, Tom Rice’s ethnographyof sound in hospital environments focuses onthe real-time practice of listening. Through eightrobust chapters, Rice shows the acoustic-socialspace of these wards and the people who inhabitthem. The study is couched firmly at the cross-roads of sensory anthropology and medicalanthropology, intersecting with sound studiesand science and technology studies, therebygiving ethnographic context to auditory knowl-edge. Rice’s direction carries momentum fromthose anthropologists who have studied soundin non-Western contexts (e.g. Feld, Gell andWeiner) and bridges this path to an ‘urban,Western, institutional setting’ (p. 11). In thissense Hearing and the hospital expands theremit of the ethnographic method and writingfor an ‘anthropology “in” sound’ (p. 173).

Rice introduces us to two forms of profes-sional, clinical listening: monitory and diagnostic.The latter addresses if there is a problem, the

former addresses what is the problem. Within ahospital environment, these modes of listeningcorrespond to professional hierarchies, knowledgeand experience, from nurse to student to doctor.At the same time, Rice also analyses patients’‘lay-listening’ within hospital wards and how thisaffects the experience of hospitalisation and adop-tion of ‘ill’ identities. Chapters 1 and 2 reveal thehospital ward as a ‘communal diagnostic anddiscursive space’ (p. 52) by examining nurses’monitory listening and patients’ listening andsound production in the ward soundscape. Theacoustic distribution of sonic information, suchas amplified diagnostic monitoring of body pro-cesses, challenges how we understand our bodiesto occupy space and the borders of privacy.

Such an ‘ears on’ approach (p. 17) serves asan entrance point for another portion of Rice’sfieldwork: learning diagnostic listening practices ofcardiac auscultation with senior doctor-teachers.Auscultation and the stethoscope are thus primarytools Rice uses to draw together learning, soundand clinical knowledge. Learning diagnostic listen-ing is distinctly informed through a ‘communityof practice’ approach while renovating the conceptwith a sensory-based, situated, emplaced learningperspective. Rice shows the transmission of auditoryknowledge from doctor to student and the effects oflearningauscultation forperforming ‘doctorly’dispo-sitions. Chapter 4 addresses both how the stetho-scope affords a medical habitus (allowing themedical student to perform gestures, dispositionsandknowledge) andhowthestethoscope isdeployedconspicuously by senior doctors to articulate theirdiagnostic authority. Rice traces this knowledgeproduction in medical history by addressing thetransformationof thebody as listenable objectwithinmodern medicine in chapter 3. In particular, thestethoscope became key to unlocking the inner spaceof body sounds. Stethoscopic listening practices areshown in chapter 5’s focus on the heart’s ‘lub-dub’rhythm and the situated learning process of identify-ing different murmurs and sounds. Chapter 6concerns how this objectification of sound shapesinterpersonal relationships on the ward floor.

Chapter 7 introduces auto-auscultation as pa-tients listen to themselves and explores the effectof this kind of listening on the experience of illness.

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Namely, how hearing one’s body can often be anunknown, disturbing, anxiety-filled process thatinduces an unwell experience. Such an experienceintersects with multiple sonic-clinical readings ofthe body, its objectification, its amplification andpresence in space, and a patient’s understanding ofthose sounds. Thus in Rice’s terms, disease is both‘sounded and enacted’ (p. 52).

While auscultation and the stethoscope areclearly shown as powerful tools that mediaterelationships, being used to display and learnknowledge within the ward, chapter 8 bringsforth questions of the death of the stethoscope.This is a potentially undermining notion, as itreveals how technology, users and practicesfunction within an institution and the differentclaims to power that they afford. For example,ultrasound imaging technology, such as echocar-diography, may render the stethoscope obsolete,thus setting the stage for a ‘sensory politics’(pp. 153–4) of visual diagnosis versus listeningdiagnosis, and bringing about a repositioning ofthe value of expertise in each of these techniques.

Hearing and the hospital presents a diverseseries of interrogations of auditory culture andlistening attention that has emerged from rigor-ous ethnographic fieldwork. Rice accomplishesthis task by shedding light on the fascinatingcomplexity of sound in social life through nu-merous dimensions of sound, experience andknowledge in hospital environments. The re-search lays a cornerstone in providing a modelfor a grounded ethnographic practice of listening.

TREVER HAGENUniversity of Exeter (UK)

Underberg, NatalieM. and Elayne Zorn. 2013.Digital ethnography: anthropology, narrative, andnewmedia. Austin, TX: University of TexasPress.x + 117 pp. Hb.:€33.50. ISBN:978-0-292-74433-2.

In light of the current proliferation of anthropo-logical literature on ethnographic practice in virtualenvironments, Underberg and Zorn explore ‘digi-tal ethnography’ in ways that attend to specificaspects of how anthropologists can make use of

digital tools. In their book, which is dedicated tothe memory of Elayne Zorn, who passed awaybefore the volume went into print, they definedigital ethnography as ‘a method for representingreal-life cultures through combining the character-istic features of digital media with the elements ofstory’ (p. 10). This definition reflects their particu-lar concern with ethnographic storytelling andwith the ways new media can transform this tech-nique of representation by following the principlesof a ‘multisensory multimedia ethnography’ suchas immersion, interaction and virtual embodi-ment that enable non-linear presentation andthe involvement of multiple voices. In line withtheir emphasis on hypertextuality, the book itselfextends into the virtual realm by frequently refer-ring to web-based material, the links to which arelisted as an appendix together with a useful glossaryintroducing the vocabulary of digital environments.When following these links into virtual realms thereaderwill realise that the volumeoffersmuchmorethan one can find in its actual 117 printed pages.

In the first chapter, the authors give an in-troduction to digital ethnographic storytellingand collaborative new media design illustratedby intriguing examples of oral history projectsand cultural representations of indigenous com-munities in which activist anthropologists canbe involved. The short discussion of these examplesprepares the reader well for the second chapter, inwhich the authors analyse in detail twoprojects thatenabled them to experiment with ethnographicrepresentation. The first one is a website dedicatedto Andean cultural expressions that introduces theuser not only to particular artefacts or practicesbut also to Andean cosmology at large. Thesecond one, a joint effort of the Pontifical CatholicUniversity of Peru-Lima and the Digital Ethnog-raphy Lab of the University of Central Florida,is the PeruDigital project concernedwith Peruvianfestivals and folklore. The website was developedthrough ‘participatory design’ involving multidis-ciplinary scholars, students and community mem-bers. It offers different views on Peruvian festivals,as users can adopt the role of an ethnographer,sponsor or performer. In the virtual ethnogra-pher’s office users can, for example, read fieldnotes on particular cultural performances.

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In chapter 3 the authors further examine thepotential of digital tools. They are concerned withways to document, organise and examine data, andconsider social networking software as a way toconstruct participatory environments, especiallyin regard to cultural heritage projects, advocating‘multivocality in decentering the knowledge andauthority of the scholar’ (p. 45). The subsequentchapter, which is written by Underberg andcomputer scientist Rudy McDaniel, presents in-sights into the use of extensible mark-up language(XML) as a tool to follow multiple paths throughdocuments or narratives. They do so by referringto three rather diverse examples: the coding ofvocation storiesUnderberg collected amongBene-dictine sisters in Peru, the creation of computergames for cultural heritage educational purposesand the employmentofXMLinawebsite concernedwith the Puerto Rican diaspora in Central Florida.

In the last two chapters the authors focus onwhat they call ‘cultural learning’, i.e. on the designof digital environments for educational purposessuch as video games where users learn bymovingthrough virtual space. For this they present in de-tail a computer game that is based on a Spanishfolktale recorded in the 1930s in Ybor City, Flor-ida, a town once known for its cigar productionby Cuban immigrants. Based on a research pro-ject by Underberg, the game is designed for mid-dle and high school students and structured infivelessons teaching the students about social, culturaland economic aspects of Ybor City’s history.

One could debate the extent to which the no-tion of digital ethnography is appropriate for cul-tural representations in computer games, despitethe fact that these games are at least partly basedon ethnographic knowledge. Moreover, one couldalso question the authors’ definition of the conceptper se, as too narrowly focused on representationand narration, i.e. on the products of ethnographicresearch rather than on the process of conductingit. Thus, readerswho associate ‘digital ethnography’with conducting online fieldwork in social mediaand virtual worlds will miss this aspect in thevolume. However, those who seek a detailedaccount of the employment of digital tools fororganising data, developing websites and com-puter games will find the book a useful and

inspiring contribution to the emerging sub-fieldof digital anthropology.

MARTIN SLAMAInstitute for Social Anthropology, AustrianAcademy of Sciences (Austria)

Weiss, Erica. 2014. Conscientious objectorsin Israel: citizenship, sacrifice, trials of fealty.Philadelphia, PA: University of PennsylvaniaPress. 216 pp. Hb.: US$49.95. ISBN: 978-0812245929.

Israel is a highly militarised society. At the heartof Israel’s armed forces lies the system of con-scription: men are typically drafted for threeyears of service, women for two years. As thispowerful ethnography reveals, refusing to jointhe ranks of the military often results in severesocial sanctions. ‘What I am really afraid of after-wards is the career’, says a young Israeli contem-plating conscientious objection. ‘If am asked atjob interviews what I did in the army, whatwill I say?’ (p. 99). Conscientious objection, hebelieves, will destroy the prospect of a career inpolitics. Another young man wants to train as amusician, but he has heard that musicians who re-fuse military service are systematically boycotted.A young woman worries about a proposed lawto deny driver’s licences to people suspected ofshirking their military duties. Yet another believesit is impossible to become a medical doctor orpsychologist without enlistment.

The conscientious objectors resist the hege-mony of hawks in Israeli society. Though theymay bemarginal andmaligned in public discourse,they are troubled by decades of occupation. Theyseem to realise that all revolutions begin withrevulsion, and that precisely because ‘the stateneeds bodies that can absorb bullets, kill, and diea principled death’ (p. 95), state authority is fragileand contestable. Over the course of three years,Weiss competently tracks and traces the trajecto-ries of two activist groups: Combatants for Peace,consisting largely of older, war-weary Israeli andPalestinian ex-combatants, and New Profile, ayouthful feminist organisation made up mainlyof pacifists and women. While the Combatants

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for Peace are able to reach a mainstream audiencein stylised public ‘confessions’ because they areendowed with prestige and symbolic authorityderived from the state, the New Profile objectorsare consigned to an underground existence,attracting leftist, anti-establishment youths withintellectual proclivities, enamoured by veganismand rebellious rock music – and therefore deridedby conventional society.

Both groups share a rejection of the sacrificialeconomy, the central analytic construct in Weiss’work, capturing the ‘ways that sacrifice can be ex-changed for honor and authority in society’ (p. 20).Israel’s sacrificial economy generates a series ofdualising distinctions, placing Jews over Arabs,(European) Ashkenazi Jews over (Middle Eastern)Mizrahi Jews, men over women, the strong overthe weak, the wealthy over the poor (p. 166). Themilitary at once absorbs and reinforces hierarchies:Arabs are not required to serve in the military,thereby strengthening the ethnonational bifurca-tion of Israeli society. Women serve a lesseramount of time, andwhen they refuse they are lesslikely to be jailed than men. Orthodox Jews oftendo not serve at all, on grounds of religious exemp-tion. Middle-class citizens are better equipped tonegotiate the bureaucracy of pacifism in theOrwellian-sounding Conscience Committee,which grants exemptions largely to those whoare able to frame their objection in terms of a path-ological, visceral aversion to violence rather than asystemic repudiation of state authority.

For their refusal to serve, Israeli conscientiousobjectors often end up paying a high price andthey are faced with an array of punitive sanctions:jail sentences, dismissal from the military and arenunciation of the symbolic profits available tothose that serve. They face ostracism by the com-munity, ‘rejections by loved ones and strangersalike who could not accept what they had done’(p. 30). Since the armed forces are a hallowed insti-tution, steeped in grandiose national myths aboutthe ‘need for an aggressive posture of self-defense’(p. 41), refusal entails sacrificing the profits of sac-rifice. Israeli conscription is too closely entwinedin the Biblical tale of Abraham’s offering of Isaacto God, or the story of Jewish mass suicide inthe face of a Roman attack during the Siege of

Masada, or the fear of encirclement in anassumedly hostile region – in short, too tied upin national ideals of sacrifice and strength – to berejected without repercussion.

The book is at its strongestwhenWeiss offersan almost journalistic rendering of scenes and situ-ations. The work could have been edited moreclosely. Theoretical disquisitions could have beencut in places to make room for more descriptivedetail. Still, Weiss has written an evocative, incisiveand brave ethnography that brings home the trialsand tribulations of resisting the state.One can onlyhope that Weiss will continue to provide readerswith outstanding scholarship on those sparsevoices that may yet carry the best chance ofyielding a lasting peace.

VICTOR LUND SHAMMASUniversity of Oslo (Norway)

Winter, Trish and Simon Keegan-Phipps. 2013.

Performing Englishness: identity and politics

in a contemporary folk resurgence (New

Ethnographies).Manchester:ManchesterUniversity

Press. 224 pp. Hb.: US$81.37/£60. ISBN:

978-0719085390.

I was a morris-dancing anthropologist. And so itwas with a pang for my own English fieldworkthat I saw the cover of Trish Winter and SimonKeegan-Phipps’ contribution toManchester Uni-versity Press’ burgeoning series of new Britishethnographies. The cover shows a white-shirteddancer, complete with crossed baldrics and jollyfloral crown. It’s a familiar image: in town squareand comedy sketch, the garden variety morrisdancer is easy to spot in the English wild.

From morris to melody, English folk musicand dance is observably amidst a contemporaryresurgence (a word that Winter and Keegan-Phipps choose carefully). This clearly written andneatly organised book delves into the increasinglylively folk scene. Over the past decade folk hasgained popularity and prominence, and the book’sfirst, most substantive part charts this progression.Two chapters then illumine professional(-ising)performance, and explore folk’s growing, hybrid

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connection with both the musical mainstream andaesthetic culture.

The matter of what makes folk folk is fraughtand fascinating – and amply debated elsewhere.The animating question here is instead: what makesEnglish folk English? The close analysis of anEnglish folk tune’s musical characteristics in chapter3 leads into the book’s secondpart,where the thorn-ier matter of English identity is directly explored.

Englishness is a very ‘now’ topic, particularly asScotland ponders independence. If the English havetended to think of themselves firstly or interchange-ably as British, how does the ebb-tide of the union’snortherly space rework that identity? Identity issuesshadow Westminster’s legislative halls and slither,too, through the far-right politics of the EnglishDefence League. By working through these issueschapter provides a concise introduction to thecontemporary landscape of Englishness.

The English landscape itself appears inchapter 6. Folk has often skipped hand-in-handwith idyllic imaginings of ‘traditional,’ typicallyrural, England. Nostalgia for place and paststitches still within what Winter and Keegan-Phipps identify as a national ‘patchwork’ ofrural localism, urban change and cosmopolitanmingling. Chapter 7, simply titled ‘Englishness’,picks up the tangling theme and is a highlight ofthe book. In bringing together the folkiness offolk with the Englishness of England, this chap-ter offers a fascinating glimpse at the dance ofconstruction and contestation. The chapter pre-sents a diverse cast: the British National Party’spro-folk proclamations meet Folk AgainstFascism’s campaigning backlash meet TheImagined Village’s performative amalgam offiddle, folktune, sitar and social commentary.Readers and authors surely share the question:whose Englishness is it anyway?

The complexities of Englishness that arechapter 7’s strength are equally the book’s weak-ness. It is a difficult task to inspect identity tangleswithout becoming knotted up, too. The tricky

twining of Englishness and Britishness com-pounds the difficulty, pushing the authors to limnEnglishness; however, the authors’ justification forsomething being an English expression isawkwardly often only their say-so. Sometimesthe analysis of Englishness grows tangentiallyspecialised: I felt frustratingly waylaid by descrip-tions of the arrangement of buttons on a melodeonand discussions of diatonicism versus pentatonicism.This may fascinate the musicologically literate, butis likely todouse thebook’s appeal toundergraduateswithout such knowledge. Meanwhile, the notableEnglish North–South divide is largely left aside(and strangely so, given its loud, long nationalsignificance).

I began this review by situating myself as amorris-dancing anthropologist because this per-spective flavoured my perception of the book. If Ihad hoped to revisit my dancing days in thickdescription, I was disappointed. Despite the seriestitle, this is not what I – stickler anthropologist –would call ethnography. From film studies andethnomusicology respectively, Winter and Keegan-Phipps have worked diligently to analyse musicand interview performers. Yet their data, thoughtextured, says little of the people who dance, singand listen to folk. Voices in the book belong to piv-otal performers – but how is the garden-varietymorris dancer engaging with Englishness?

There are few ready answers here – butperhaps knotty identity questions are ultimatelyunanswerable. And, as Englishness attractsmore scholarly attention, it is the sketchypreliminaries and intriguing, unexpected sug-gestions that will prove most engaging. Anthro-pologists might particularly respond to theconceptual experiment with indigeneity thatdrives Winter and Keegan-Phipps’ conclusion,a fittingly provocative end.

BRYONNY GOODWIN-HAWKINSSchool of Social and Political Sciences, The Uni-versity of Melbourne (Australia)

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