Subfloor Pits and the Archaeology of Slavery in Colonial Virginia by Patricia M. Samford

Book Reviews

Native American Life-History Narratives: Colonial andPostcolonial Navajo Ethnography. Susan Berry Brill deRamirez. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press,2007. 257 pp.

NANCY BONVILLAINBard College at Simon’s Rock

Native American Life-History Narratives: Colonial and Post-colonial Navajo Ethnography centers on a reexaminationof the now-classic Navajo “autobiography” Son of Old ManHat (1967), compiled and edited by Walter Dyk and basedon conversations with a Navajo man named Left-Handed.In this new work, Susan Berry Brill de Ramirez convincinglyargues that we should read Son of Old Man Hat not as afactual autobiography of Left-Handed’s life but, rather, asa unique Navajo narrative of “resistance to ethnographiccolonization.” Brill de Ramirez contrasts the objectifyingethnographic discourse of researchers with the conversivestrategies of oral storytelling conventions. While the formerfocuses on facts abstracted from their interactive context,the latter emphasizes the relationship between the story-teller, the audience, and the participatory community. Oral-ity in Native American communities involves communica-tive events that weave together the tellers, listeners, andcharacters in conversive encounters. Brill de Ramirez relieson the works of Native American novelists, essayists, andpoets to comment on the ways that storytelling is a complexencounter through which “tellers and listeners co-createand co-participate in the story and its telling” (p. 103).

In contrast to native traditions, Brill de Ramirezis critical of Dyk’s methodology that includes eliminat-ing episodes that Dyk considered unimportant, rear-ranging Left-Handed’s narratives into fixed chronologicalsequences, and tampering with stylistic features charac-teristic of oral storytelling such as parallelism and repe-tition. In Brill de Ramirez’s view, these procedures distortthe authentic voice of the narrator and impose coloniz-ing control on indigenous storytelling. Anthropological andlinguistic treatments of Native American narratives are cur-rently much more sensitive to the complex issues of rep-resentation that Brill de Ramirez discusses. For example,

the pioneering work of Dell Hymes, Dennis Tedlock, andBrian Swann, among others, attempt in different ways to re-main faithful to the stylistic devices and symbolic represen-tations conveyed in and through oral literature. They alsofocus on the complex issues of translation from indigenouslanguages into English. Dyk himself was not a speaker ofthe Navajo language and, therefore, worked through inter-preters. Although Brill de Ramirez comments on the loss ofmeaning that this necessarily engendered, she could havestressed more the difficulties of any ethnographic work car-ried out by a researcher who cannot converse directly withpeople in the community.

Some of the most intriguing sections of Native Amer-ican Life-History Narratives are those in which Brill deRamirez dissects episodes recounted by Left-Handed thatshe says are unlikely to be factually accurate about thelife of a Navajo man. In particular, Left-Handed narratesevents in the story of a young man who disrespects his el-ders, including elder Navajo women, has difficulty saddlinghorses, has never seen deer tracks, and lacks fundamen-tal knowledge about Navajo customs. Significantly, Left-Handed does not give his central character’s clan member-ship, the usual Navajo greeting and self identification. Takentogether, these attitudes and behaviors make reading Sonof Old Man Hat as an autobiography quite suspect. How-ever, Brill de Ramirez does not simply dismiss the book asDyk’s distortion of Left-Handed’s narrative. Instead, she in-terprets the work as a subtle form of resistance on the part ofLeft-Handed to the colonizing relationship between the re-searcher and the “informant.” In her view, the central char-acter of Son of Old Man Hat is not a Navajo man but, rather,is a character cleverly created by Left-Handed to commenton the inappropriateness of non-Navajo observers ignorantof basic Navajo mores and values. As Brill de Ramirez sum-marizes, the central character “demonstrates his incapaci-ties with the Navajo language, and . . . is repeatedly depictedas demonstrating an attitude of superiority, often assertingthat his knowledge about the Navajos is more correct thanthat of the Navajos around him. Left-Handed shows him ob-stinately refusing to be corrected by Navajo elders, whomhe judges to be wrong and foolish” (p. 119). These, then,are “coded stories” understood within the context of spe-cific storytelling encounters that use narrative devices to

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 36, No. 2, pp. 404–439, ISSN 0094-0496, online ISSN 1548-1425. C© 2009 by the American Anthropological Association.All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2009.01142.x

Book Reviews � American Ethnologist

comment on and to reconstruct relationships imposed bycolonizing powers and agents who invade and attempt tocontrol Navajo people. But Left-Handed is far from passivein these encounters. Indeed, Brill de Ramirez interprets hisnarratives as forms of resistance, played out with trickster-like finesse.

Brill de Ramirez concludes her work with a discussionof ethnographies of Navajo life that she says are “more reli-able and meaningful records of indigenous knowledge” be-cause they are developed out of “enduring interpersonalrelationships between Navajos storytellers and their an-thropologists” (p. 170). She also urges researchers to re-spect indigenous conversive storytelling practices and con-ventions in their retellings of these encounters. NativeAmerican Life-History Narratives helps readers revisit a fa-miliar classic in the field and encourages researchers to un-derstand and participate in the conversive strategies of thepeople with whom they work to uncover the people’s knowl-edge and meanings.

Reference cited

Dyk, Walter1967[1938] Son of Old Man Hat, a Navajo Autobiography. Lincoln:

University of Nebraska Press.

Mediating Knowledges: Origins of a Zuni Tribal Museum.Gwyneira Isaac. Jim Enote, foreword. Tucson: University ofArizona Press, 2007. xiv + 207 pp., photographs, appendix,notes, bibliography, index.

PATRICIA H. PARTNOWAlaska Native Heritage Center

For many Native Americans, a museum—indeed, the wordmuseum itself—is a reminder of the colonial past that dam-aged or appropriated cultural practices, knowledge, and ob-jects. According to anthropologist Gwyneira Isaac, the Zunipeople shared this attitude when, in the 1970s, they beganplanning a tribal museum.

In 1996 and 1997, Isaac, a non-Zuni, conducted in-terviews and field research into the origins of the A:shiwiA:wan Museum and Heritage Center to learn how awidespread antipathy to museums was redirected intothe resulting ecomuseum—a place-based institution sup-ported by the local community that acknowledges the peo-ple, rather than objects, as its most important asset. She haswritten a well researched and readable account of the mu-seum’s struggles to find its identity.

Isaac’s story is not about masonry and constructionbut, rather, about the concepts and values that drove themuseum’s development and still direct its programs andexhibits. Her research uncovered two issues that shapeddiscussions about the proposed museum. The first is thenature of knowledge. Isaac devotes a chapter to Zuni cos-mology and epistemology, contrasting them with Westernideology, with which the community had become well ac-quainted during decades of hosting anthropologists. Thesecond question derives from the first: how do the Zunimediate—negotiate, compromise, and adapt—to the con-tradictions that a museum, as an institution spawned byWestern ideology, imposes?

Despite their reservations about museums, the com-munity leaders had good reasons for wanting one. First,archaeological fieldwork had yielded a large collection ofartifacts that needed a home. The Smithsonian Institutionhad given the tribe an extensive collection of photographsof the pueblo taken by Bureau of American Ethnology an-thropologists. Elders worried that some youngsters werenot learning the old ways at home, so they looked to tribalinstitutions to fill the gaps. Finally, community membersfound the influx of non-Zuni tourists disruptive to their re-ligious practices, threatening to turn them into spectacles.The Zuni reasoned that a visitor center could teach culturalsensitivity while satisfying the curiosity of onlookers.

Isaac’s most intriguing discussion concerns the rela-tionship between knowledge and power. For the Zuni, thedissemination of knowledge is, ideally, controlled. Isaaccalls theirs a “need to know” system—far different fromthe way knowledge is understood and used in the Anglo-American world, where it is exemplified by the Internet,the repository of disembodied information that is alwaysavailable. In Zuni society, a child learns something whenhe or she needs to know it and exhibits an interest inlearning it. Similarly, elders determine with whom, when,what type, and how much information should be shared.An essential part of this system is the relationship be-tween the knowledge bearer and the learner. Zuni adultsunderstand the dangers of severing that relationship—forinstance, of providing information in written form so stu-dents can read it whenever they want. Not only would so-cial relationships be weakened but also the learner wouldnot be taught the responsibilities that inhere in privilegedknowledge.

Isaac makes an important distinction between the Zuniand Anglo-American attitudes toward the power of knowl-edge. According to the latter, knowledge is powerful be-cause it is restricted. The Zuni view is that knowledge is re-stricted because it is powerful. This power extends not justto ideas but to physical representations, photographs, andmodels of those ideas, rendering Western-style exhibits thatare based on such representations problematic.

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Because of Zuni restrictions on sharing information,the community determined that the museum is the ap-propriate venue for the storage and dissemination of onlya portion of cultural knowledge—the quotidian “familialknowledge” that can be easily observed by anyone and thatis not the property of a particular family or religious society.The dissemination of “privileged knowledge” is left to thesocieties.

To the Zuni, knowledge is more valuable than tangi-ble objects. It follows that the museum’s biggest value tothe community is not its physical collection, nor its storyof the past, but, rather, its potential to transmit culturalknowledge from generation to generation. The communitywants a museum that is a locus of self-exploration and thereaffirmation of Zuni cultural values. One challenge thisstance presents is to win for the museum—an essentiallyalien institution—the community’s confidence in its abilityto teach tradition in an appropriate manner.

Isaac’s discussion of the difficulties of mediation is asrich as her exploration of epistemology. Ethnographic mu-seums, she explains, arose because European scientists be-lieved that they could organize and unify knowledge intoa single system if they could gather it in one place. In dis-tinction to the Zuni imperative of controlling information,secrecy and control are anathema to the Western scientificideology (although, tellingly, Isaac found American anthro-pologists unwilling to share experiences related to her re-search, thereby hoarding professional power by practicingsecrecy).

Isaac explains that the process of mediation is un-ending: for instance, the museum either focuses inwardly,serving the community, specifically the young people, oroutwardly, welcoming tourists who bring income into thecommunity and stand to benefit from instruction on cul-tural protocol. Museum staff and boards must deal with thepotential reification and codification of culture that can de-rive from exhibits and programs that provide only a par-tial context. And the search continues for a balance be-tween public and private knowledge, older tradition bearerswith concerns about culturally appropriate means of teach-ing and younger Zuni who complain that they are excludedfrom some vital cultural traditions.

Isaac returned to the culture center in 2006 and foundit a different institution, but her description of the changesleaves much unclear. This reader wondered: has the cen-ter opened its doors to more tourists? With what results?Has the museum begun to amass a collection, in spite ofplans not to do so? Do exhibitions now deal with materialculture? What happened to the archaeological collection?Do young Zuni consider the culture center a Zuni place?In short, has the promise of the ecomuseum been realized?The field would be well served by a second edition dealingwith these questions.

The Violence of Liberation: Gender and Tibetan BuddhistRevival in Post-Mao China. Charlene M. Makley. Berkeley:University of California Press, 2007. 374 pp.

PETER K. MORANFulbright Commission in Nepal

This dense, detailed, and yet wide-ranging study is basedon fieldwork conducted during four visits, over a 15-yearspan, to the famous monastery and town of Labrang in to-day’s Qinghai province of China. It is one of the few book-length ethnographic accounts of Amdo (as much of Qing-hai was previously called by Tibetan speakers) Tibetansever written, and the first in many decades; indeed, it isone of the few recent field-based studies conducted amongany Tibetan populations of China. As such, it offers freshand complex perspectives on contemporary life in Labrangfor its Tibetan inhabitants—who make up only a part ofthe population there. But this study also makes importantreading for comparison with other parts of Tibetan China,including large swaths of Sichuan and the Tibetan Au-tonomous Region itself. Charlene Makley’s nuanced work isuseful in understanding the “Tibetan Buddhist revival” as itoccurs not only in Amdo but also throughout the plateau.It is also a highly theorized look at gender in a particu-lar Tibetan locality, accomplished through a primary con-cern with “participation frameworks,” following Goffman,as well as recent linguistic theory. Finally, this is a detailedexposition of the articulation between changing State poli-cies and local concerns in the Labrang area over the last fewdecades.

It is obvious to remark on the politics of opposition,and national–religious identity (re)construction, happeningthroughout Tibetan areas under Chinese governance. Whatmakes this work powerful is its attention to the way thathistory is quite literally struggled with by local agents. Forone example: Makley examines the Labrang Tibetan nar-ratives she hears about Apa Gongjia, “Father State”—noneother than the Chinese state anthropomorphized—in dia-logue with the work of many other recent anthropologistsof China who have drawn our attention to state–local artic-ulations. Yet she also particularizes the genius of this localrepresentation. “Father State” is a crucial figure in oppo-sition to pre-Maoist Labrang’s gendered participant net-works, which were also, although very differently, patrifil-ial. Of course the author elucidates the centrality of themonastery in the genesis and maintenance of Labrang’s so-ciopolitical (not to mention religious) “mandala.” Yet shealso describes the lay worlds organized by patrilineages andpowerful men that existed in a subordinate complementar-ity with the monastic presence, a “mandala” now in tensionwith translocal, often “Chinese,” modernities.

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Makley makes plain the relative visibility, economicindependence, and decision-making power of Labrang’sTibetan women vis-a-vis Han or Hui women before (andsometimes well after) the Maoist years. But she also re-minds readers that “relative” power is still relative and tracesthe ways in which Tibetan women’s agency and access tocurrents of power was restricted in most areas by patriar-chal structures and Buddhist monastic ideals. Her work’scentral thesis is that the changes at the heart of tradi-tional Tibetan structures and epistemologies since the ad-vent of the Chinese state have been changes in genderregimes. Much of this has been because of PRC policy—as during the Great Leap and Cultural Revolution years—that targeted citizen women as agents of “progress” and(re)production. Yet change has also come in the wake ofimportant economic campaigns, the latest of which haveopened Labrang to translocal forces including nomad set-tlers, Chinese businessmen, and of course foreign and Hantourists, too. Tibetan women’s gendered performances—their recognition as “Tibetan women”—proceed from rad-ically different pressures and pulls: to the home and to tra-dition (Buddhist, Amdo Tibetan, local practices) and to thewider world (Chinese, contemporary, capitalist).

Yet this is a study of gender and transformations—nota study of Tibetan women. Makley devotes chapters to laymasculinities and to a “third” gender, a “disciplined mas-culinity” that is (male) monastic. This is important workthat allows the author to undertake discussion of the widerdialogical processes and participant frameworks of gen-der in Labrang. For many readers in Tibetan studies, thisbook will unsettle usual understandings of Tibetan Bud-dhist social regimes. Makley consistently remarks, for ex-ample, on the “masculine prowess” at the heart of Tibetanrituals and soteriology, hence one reading of the “violenceof liberation” in the book’s subtitle. This reader does not al-ways agree with this interpretation: were the elite Tibetanboys and men recognized as the rebirths of previous Bud-dhist masters (tulku) “emasculated” by Maoist interven-tions (and later Dengist reforms) in Labrang in the eyes oflocal Tibetans? Her interpretations of tantric ritual seem id-iosyncratic at times, albeit often thought provoking, and herbrief discussion of nuns seems too particular to Labrang asa huge Gelug stronghold to hold up as a model for otherTibetan areas in the PRC. This also may be true of Makley’sinterpretations of the importance and completely off-limits(to women) nature of the protectors’ chapel of Labrang. Fora minor example, in monastic sites that I have visited in cen-tral Tibet—including the Three Seats of the Lhasa area—entry to protector chapels was variously restricted: some-times because of gender, sometimes because of perceptionsthat a person was not a Buddhist (i.e., a tourist), or becauseone was not seen as an “initiate” in that monastery’s protec-tor cult.

Because of the nature of its analysis, this is an impor-tant, provocative book for specialists in Tibetan–Chineseanthropology. It invites us to examine the particularities ofsocial worlds and their histories in Tibetan regions (andfar beyond), and underscores the complexity of the task.More broadly, the author is persuasive in reminding usthroughout this work of the centrality of gender in the cre-ation and maintenance of all social worlds, and the pro-cesses through which gender assumptions and practicesare embodied.

The Latino Threat: Constructing Immigrants, Citizens,and the Nation. Leo R. Chavez. Stanford: Stanford Univer-sity Press, 2008. ix + 256 pp., tables, figures, illustrations,notes, bibliography, index.

JONATHAN XAVIER INDAUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

On February 22, 2003, Jesica Santillan, a 17-year-old undoc-umented immigrant from Mexico, died following a botchedheart and lung transplant. Surgeons apparently noticed toolate that the donated organs were not compatible withthe young woman’s blood type. While Jesica’s death wasunquestionably tragic, just as disturbing was the mass-mediated public reaction to her misfortune. There were cer-tainly commentators who decried the incompetence of thedoctors. But there were also many voices that questionedthe legitimacy of transplanting American organs into an il-legal alien body. How could an undocumented immigrant,critics asked indignantly, receive an organ transplant in thefirst place? Shouldn’t donated American organs be reservedfor citizen bodies? Ultimately, Jesica came to be representedas a prototypical illegal alien who only comes to the UnitedStates to take things, in this case organs, which belong toproper American citizens.

Jesica’s story and similar mass-mediated spectacles ofanimosity targeting Latinos, mainly Mexican immigrantsand their offspring, are at the heart of Leo Chavez’s stimu-lating new book The Latino Threat. Chavez’s basic and com-pelling argument is that what he terms the “Latino ThreatNarrative” underpins contemporary anti-Latino politics inthe United States. Developed over the last four decades anddisseminated through the mass media, this narrative essen-tially posits that Latinos are quite unlike previous immi-grant groups, who managed to become part of the nationalbody. As Chavez puts it: “The Latino Threat Narrative char-acterizes Latinos as unable or unwilling to integrate into thesocial and cultural life of the United States. Allegedly, they

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do not learn English, and they seal themselves off from thelarger society, reproducing cultural beliefs and behaviorsantithetical to a modern life, such as pathologically high fer-tility levels that reduce the demographic presence of whiteAmericans” (p. 177). Furthermore, the narrative presumesLatinos to be criminals (“illegals”) who are undermining so-cial institutions such as education, health care, and socialservices. In the end, this group is constructed as “part of aninvading force from south of the border that is bent on re-conquering land that was formerly theirs (the U.S. South-west) and destroying the American way of life” (p. 2).

Significantly, Chavez connects the Latino threat narra-tive to the crisis in the meaning of citizenship in the UnitedStates. He argues that global processes such as immigrationhave disrupted the presumed isomorphism between citi-zenship and rights. For many people, aliens are supposedto be distinguished from citizens by the rights and priv-ileges afforded to the latter. However, immigrants in theUnited States, both legal and undocumented, have cometo be granted a number of citizenship benefits, includingthe rights to fair labor standards and practices, juridicaldue process, emergency medical care, and education. Thisgranting of rights to noncitizens has been interpreted (bysome) as a dilution and devaluation of citizenship. In thiscontext, the Latino threat narrative functions to render Lati-nos as unsuitable members of society. That is, to the extentthat Latinos are constructed in the mass media and pub-lic discourse as societal threats, they are not seen as hav-ing proper claims of belonging to the U.S. national commu-nity and the right to partake in the benefits associated withthis membership. The Santillan case is instructive here. Inthe eyes of many, Jesica’s illegality made her an illegitimatepart of U.S. society and hence an unworthy recipient of do-nated organs. This connection of the Latino threat narrativewith citizenship is also examined in relation to the politicsof Latina reproduction, immigrant rights marches, and bor-der vigilantes.

Beyond elucidating the workings of the Latino threatnarrative, Chavez also takes on the important task of in-terrogating the veracity of its claims. Drawing on empiricaldata from his research in Orange County, California, as wellas from the studies of others, he persuasively challengesthe main tenets of the narrative. Chavez argues, for exam-ple, that Latinas simply do not have pathologically high lev-els of fertility. In one of his studies, he found that, on aver-age, Latinas only give birth to 2.08 children over the courseof their lives. Such a rate contributes minimally to popula-tion growth. Furthermore, Chavez shows that as Latinos be-come generationally more removed from the immigrant ex-perience, they increasingly utilize English in daily life, havenon-Latino friends, intermarry with non-Latinos, and growprogressively more integrated in terms of levels of educa-tion, income, and political engagement. Importantly, thisshould not be taken to suggest that Latinos are free from

obstacles to social and economic mobility. In fact, Chavezargues that Latinos suffer from unequal access to educa-tion and the job market. But despite these barriers, Latinoshave managed to become meaningfully integrated into U.S.society. Chavez’s point, then, is that Latinos are not a “so-cially secluded” mass just “waiting for the day when theycan muster a Quebec-like takeover of the U.S. Southwest”(p. 68). It should also be noted that while Latinos may beintegrating into the United States, this does not mean thatthey are undergoing a linear, one-way process of assimila-tion into American culture. Rather, Chavez argues that, likeimmigrant groups before them, Latinos are making impor-tant contributions to the ever-changing nature U.S. cultureand to what it means to be American.

Overall, Leo Chavez has produced a superb, well-argued, and thought-provoking book. Tackling subjectssuch as the Minutemen in Arizona, immigrant marches,Latino reproduction, and organ transplants, the book notonly sheds a critical light on how, through the mass me-dia, Latinos have been constructed as illegitimate membersof society, but it also provides powerful evidence to under-mine the taken-for-granted truths marshaled to marginal-ize this population. The Latino Threat should be requiredreading for anyone wishing to gain a critical perspectiveon immigration, citizenship, and the politics of antipathy.

Excursions. Michael Jackson. Durham, NC: Duke UniversityPress, 2008. xxvii + 295 pp.

MICHAEL CARRITHERSDurham University

Excursions is a collection of essays, each of which is a skeinof thought, complete in itself, comprising particular ideas,images, people, and places that are tied together aroundsome difficult feature of human existence. I did not findit easy to read much more than one essay at a time, forthe same reason that it is hard to view many paintings, orread much philosophy, at once: for all the fluency of Jack-son’s writing, each piece needs, and deserves, concentra-tion. In their contemplative tone, these Excursions couldas well have been titled Meditations, or Essays, to echo theessays of Michel de Montaigne, with their expansive viewacross human life in its variety and vicissitudes. The “we”that emerges in the writing is sometimes the “we” of the an-thropologists’ guild, or of the intellectuals’, but often it is the“we” of the common universal human plight. Jackson’s ten-dency in each essay is to move to a summary understand-ing sub specie aeternitatis, but the distance implied in thisphrase is not cold but always mixed with human sympathy.

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Duke University Press has printed, inconspicuouslyon the back cover, the locations where the book mightbelong in their catalogue or in a bookstore: anthropol-ogy/philosophy/travel writing. And to this they might haveadded “poetry,” not because of the genre of writing but,rather, because of the genre of thought, as Jackson pointsout in his preface: “it is a way of keeping alive a sense ofwhat it means to live in the world one struggles to under-stand,” and it is “neither focused on one’s own subjectiv-ity nor on the objectivity of the world, but on what emergesin the space between” (p. xii). There is an egalitarian spiritrunning through the essays, mixing the thought of Adorno,Arendt, and Benjamin with that of Kuranko storytellers orMaori mythology, and these with Jackson’s first person nar-rative, such that each is brought to illuminate the other.Travel writing, yes, but travel writing reaching for universal-ity. Anthropology, yes, but anthropology reaching for uni-versality. To adapt a phrase from Agee and Evans’s Let UsNow Praise Famous Men: the author is trying to deal withhuman existence not as an anthropologist, a sociologist,an entertainer, a humanitarian, a priest, or an artist, butseriously.

Still, though much of the work could be read as (peren-nial) philosophy or graceful self-reflection, the emphasis,for anthropologists anyway, must be laid on Jackson’s workon the very nature of anthropology as a way of under-standing. A new fieldworker, or an old hand, could findmuch here to turn around in her mind and help her to seeher work in other perspectives. Jackson’s thought concen-trates on fertile uncertainties, aporias, rather than the sortof certainties that ordinarily put food on anthropologists’tables. The axis around which he spins these aporias hereis Arendt’s notion of “natality,” which she implicitly aimedagainst the dark side of Heidegger’s post-Catholic philoso-phy: with each birth, and each act, something new comesalive in the intersubjective world, calling for effects, reac-tions, and responses, which can never be predicted or fullyrationalized. This is an idea whose implications Jackson hasexplored elsewhere, notably in his 2005 book, ExistentialAnthropology. One corollary he sets out in Excursions is this:“because our actions follow from a need to act before theyfollow from any conception of how to act, all action is tosome extent magical, which is to say that no action can beentirely explained by reference to the models adduced injustification of it” (p. 152). Or to take this slippage betweenaction and justification from a slightly different angle: “weimagine, as we live, beyond our means” (p. 134).

On the basis of such aphorisms one can be temptedto assign Jackson to some corner of the discipline, such ashumanist, or indeed existentialist, anthropology—and, in-deed, Jackson himself can sometimes seem to do so himself.But that, I think, would be wrong. There is a larger ques-tion being addressed in such remarks: how can we (anthro-pologists) do justice both to the endurance of key themes

in one society or another and, yet, to the constant muta-bility of those themes and of the society itself on the otherhand? Some such question has lain at the heart of many so-cial scientists’ work, such as that of Foucault, or our ownMarshall Sahlins, and indeed of forebears such as Marx andWeber. For Jackson this comprehensive puzzle can best beanswered in the fine grain of social life, and in a depiction asmuch of individuals’ narratives as of the circumstances inwhich they find themselves, under the banner of “no gener-alities but in particularities.” This is radical empiricism, asWilliam James called it, a creed that agrees particularly wellnot only with Jackson’s own predilections but also with thebasic cognitive style of sociocultural anthropology. Thus, inone essay Jackson links the self-redemptive remarks of afriend in Sierra Leone to a more general, and unexpected,resilience of Sierra Leoneans to the disasters of civil war; helinks this resilience further to natality, the birth of some-thing new in the intersubjective world; and he finally setssuch natality against Bourdieu’s concept of “habitus,” “withits emphasis on engrained habits of thought and action thateffectively bind us to the past” (p. 100). Now I personallythink that Jackson, but also Bourdieu himself and many ofhis commentators, have missed out that element of impro-visation that originally made “habitus” such an importantidea. But however that may be, I still would stress that Jack-son’s arguments, although borne lightly by a filigree of closeobservation of singular experiences, are as weighty as thoseof many illustrious forebears.

The Archaeology of Race and Racialization in HistoricAmerica. Charles E. Orser Jr. Gainesville: University Press ofFlorida, 2007. 213 pp.

ELIZABETH M. SCOTTIllinois State University

It is rare that an archaeologist publishes a book that sodeepens our anthropological knowledge about Americansociety that the book should be required reading for socio-cultural anthropologists as well as archaeologists. CharlesE. Orser Jr. is such an archaeologist, and this is such a book.Drawing on all of the sources available to historical archae-ology (written records, oral histories, pictorial records, andarchaeological remains), Orser shows us America’s past andAmerica’s present, and, along the way, reveals the roots ofAmerican inequalities.

The book first provides an overview of historical ar-chaeological scholarship on racialization (the process bywhich a society constructs a racial hierarchy) in Americaand also a discussion of why archaeologists should care

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about race and racialization; most of this previous schol-arship has concerned African Americans. Orser then de-scribes his theoretical approach to the topic and providestwo detailed case studies to illustrate that approach: theIrish in New York and the Chinese in California. He setsthe task of historical archaeologists interested in racializa-tion to be one of “seeing race in things” (p. 66): “to discoverways to observe racialized differences in the material cul-ture generated during capitalism” (p. 69). However, the bookshould be read by anyone interested in the anthropologyof North America, race and racialization, U.S. immigra-tion history, and consumerism–consumption. Nonarchae-ologists will be pleased to see how deftly Orser weaves histhreads of evidence; material culture informs historical dataand both inform theoretical reflection. Readers come awaywith a much greater awareness of the nuanced ways inwhich racial hierarchies have been formed and perpetuatedin American society since its colonial beginnings.

Chapter 3, “Race, Class, and the Archaeology of theModern World,” puts forth Orser’s theoretical approach,and it is an admirable example of interdisciplinary schol-arship. Orser draws on social theorists in anthropology,sociology, geography, history, and critical race theory tobuild a theoretical framework that will later “frame” hiscase study examples. He first tackles the question of scale,viewing racism as a structural feature of our social systemrather than a cognitive construct that is part of an indi-vidual’s belief system. He next addresses the question ofclass and especially the connection between race, class,and consumerism–consumption. Orser then discusses thesix key concepts he uses to examine the historical man-ifestations of the process of racialization: “epochal struc-tures” (drawing on Donald Donham, Fernand Braudel,Carlo Ginzburg, and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva); “network rela-tions” (drawing on Alexander Lesser, Stanley Wasserman,and Katherine Faust); the “sociospatial dialectic” (draw-ing on Henri Lefebvre, Nigel Thrift, and Edward Soja); and“habitus,” “capital,” and “field” (drawing on Pierre Bour-dieu and Leslie McCall). Finally, he draws on the works ofgeographer Bobby Wilson and archaeologist Paul Mullinsto address the relationship between racial categorization,the epochal structures of racial identification, and mate-rial consumption. These are all incredibly complex theo-retical topics, but Orser renders them in lucid, accessibleprose. This chapter alone would work very well as an as-signed reading in an upper-division undergraduate or grad-uate class in anthropological theory.

The next two chapters are devoted to examples ofracialization in 19th- and early-20th-century America. Thefirst concerns the Irish who lived at the Pearl Street ten-ement in the historic Five Points area of Manhattan be-tween 1850 and 1870. The second concerns the Chinesewho lived and worked at the Channel Street laundry inStockton, California, between 1894 and 1937. Each chapter

is structured in a similar fashion, following the theoreticalframework put forth in chapter 3. Orser begins each chapterby providing a background for the particular site’s location.This is followed by a discussion of the habitus “at home”for each immigrant group in Ireland or China. Next comes adiscussion of the epochal structures of racialization the im-migrants faced in America, followed by a discussion of thelearned habitus of race in Irish America or Chinese America.He closes each chapter by providing a detailed discussion ofthe spatial and material evidence from archaeological exca-vations at the sites in New York or California. Thus, thesetwo case studies follow the multiscalar approach for whichOrser is well known; he begins with the particular immi-grant community in America, situates those individuals inthe broader culture from whence they came, situates themin the broader American culture to which they emigrated,and, in the end, comes back to the particular immigrantcommunity to show how each group was racialized in theAmerican hierarchy.

The short closing chapter ties together nicely themain points of the book and illustrates their relevance forpresent-day American society. Revealing how our societycame to be the way that it is today is one of the most im-portant contributions that historical archaeology can maketo anthropology and to the public. That responsibility is ad-mirably met in this book by one of the foremost scholars inthe field. This book is highly recommended.

Vicarious Language: Gender and Linguistic Modernity inJapan. Miyako Inoue. Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 2006. 340 pp.

AMY BOROVOYPrinceton University

No category in Japan appears to be as socially entrenchedas gender. The “culture of separate spheres,” created bypostwar corporate welfare, separated men’s and women’sworlds into mutually compatible but mutually exclusivespheres of men’s salaried labor and women’s reproductionof labor at home (or women’s separate trajectories at work)(White 1992). Women’s language, particularly its softness,politeness, and deference, came to be seen as an expressiveaspect of their world. What visitor to Japan has not heardthis distinctive form of speech in one form or another, fromthe secretary who answers the phone, to the young motherin the television advertisement, to the bubbly, high-pitchedschoolgirls giggling on the train?

Miyako Inoue’s Vicarious Language is a brilliant andextensively researched, step-by-step historical deconstruc-tion of the notion of women’s speech as emergent from

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their social roles or as expressive of inner subjectivity. Thebook shows how language itself actively constructs the gen-dered reality that it claims to be representing. The storyshe tells is rife with irony. According to Inoue, proper“women’s language” originated in what was regarded as the“vulgar,” “shallow,” and “grating” (mimizawarina) speechoverheard among Japanese schoolgirls of the late 19th cen-tury, a time of great cultural mixing owing to new initia-tives of compulsory education and upward mobility. Theschoolgirls’ own utterance endings (teyo, dawa, koto-yo, wa,chatta, and noyo) themselves originated in the seedy, lower-class neighborhoods of the pleasure quarters. When, in the1980s, the Japanese government and language specialistsmourned the deterioration of a pristine, historically con-tinuous women’s language, they were, according to Inoue,mourning a past that had never existed.

What unfolds in Vicarious Language is a remarkableand well-told story that weaves together nation, gender, so-cial class, and modernity as mutually constituted. Inouetells how the re-signification of schoolgirl speech as the spo-ken language of middle-class women “made semioticallypossible” a sense of gendered mass modernity in the early20th century (p. 111). “Domestic novels” (kateishosetsu)and popular young women’s magazines of this era gavevoice to a new, modern Japanese woman through reader-contributed stories, advertisements featuring direct quota-tions, and readers’ letters, creating an imagined communityof speakers that not only exceeded the presence of “real”women’s language but, in fact, invented an inner life for thesubject that was being spoken for—hence, “vicarious” lan-guage (p. 122). Inoue describes her own impression, grow-ing up in Japan, of women’s language as “TV language,”the language used to translate movie stars and, thus, thelanguage she used when playing with her white, “Western”dolls (pp. 7–8): “Women’s language is language not to pro-duce but only to consume, and not so much to hear asto overhear. It is inherently disembodied and vicarious asa tele-aural phenomenon, in which the copy precedes theoriginal” (p. 9).

The book is deeply motivated by the poststructural anddeconstructive projects of Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser,Judith Butler, and, perhaps most of all, Jacques Derrida.To be able to expose the constructed nature of somethingso seemingly “present” as gendered subjectivities and gen-dered voices is the book’s great innovation. The exclusivefocus on women’s language as an invention may inhibit amore shaded recounting of historical shifts and continu-ities, a limitation that is felt in the last, ethnographic portionof the book, which treats contemporary women’s languageas lived by women today.

By starting her story with the phenomenon of male in-tellectuals “overhearing” schoolgirls’ speech during the lastdecades of the 19th century, Inoue demonstrates the criti-cal importance of language to understanding modern gen-

der identity: the modern Japanese woman “came into be-ing as a culturally meaningful category in and through herimputed acoustic presence” (p. 39). Schoolgirl speech wasparticularly troubling in the context of Japan’s eager projectof modernization in the late Meiji Era (1868–1912). School-girls used Chinese and English words inflected with non-referential endings (teyo-dawa language), which evokedthe demographic qualities of the margins and “lowerclasses.” In doing so they put forward an alternative mod-ern voice that threatened the masculine modern projectof situating Japan as an equal among Western European,white, First World counterparts. The phenomenon dis-appeared as a threat in the wake of Japan’s increasingconfidence as a colonial power during the Fifteen YearsWar, and, so too, did critical commentaries on schoolgirllanguage.

The language resurfaced, though, in a different guise, inthe context of mass capitalism and the growing circulationof print media such as magazines and newspapers in theearly 20th century. The calls to modernize the Japanese lan-guage (the genbun’itchi movement’s call to “write-as-you-speak”) created new colloquial forms of written Japanesethat drew on the schoolgirl utterance endings to invokequalities of the human voice or the social attributes of par-ticipants. The new written style attempted to delete thecontext of the author-reader relationship (e.g., by replacingformal verb endings with the generic, plain utterance end-ing, da), allowing for language to be imagined as a directreflection of the real world, an expression of authenticity.The schoolgirl speech was used to capture this sense of re-alism in various media, including translated European nov-els, kateishosetsu (domestic novels) that documented theemergence of a new urban bourgeoisie, and ultimately inthe serialized novels, advertisements, and diaries that ap-peared in young women’s magazines, which used school-girl speech to channel the voice of girls’ and women’s char-acters through first-person narratives, giving voice to their“inner thoughts.” Inoue does a compelling job of analyz-ing the use of language in a number of entertaining early20th-century print ads for women’s products, revealing theways in which commodity capitalism, together with thenew realism in written language, brought to life the newwoman through first-person narratives and “slice of life”conversations that hailed the readers as modern, genderedconsumers (p. 145). In short, “women’s language” had littleto do with most women’s experience when it was inventedin late Meiji, particularly for women outside urban areas(p. 103); in Inoue’s words, there was “no original or authen-tic speaking body that uttered women’s language. It is noone’s language” (p. 105).

When the book arrives at its final, ethnographic sectionanalyzing contemporary women’s language at a Japaneseforeign-affiliated firm in Tokyo between 1991 and 1993,one feels that perhaps a stronger bridge between historical

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production and contemporary experience could have beencreated to allow us to understand these women’s predica-ment. Nonetheless, Inoue’s analysis here, too, is powerfuland persuasive. We meet Yoshida Kiwako, a savvy, inter-nal manager who negotiates the issue of gender discrim-ination by using the polite—but not honorific—forms ofall verbs (desu, masu). “Staying in the middle,” as Yoshidarefers to her strategy, allows her to remain within the con-fines of proper women’s speech but also to avoid locat-ing herself in a hierarchy that would diminish her status(by subordinating herself to male inferiors) or awkwardlyimposing her seniority over male (or female) colleagues.Even today, as many women seek broader social integra-tion, language continues to be an emblem of inequalityand barrier to the achievement of professionalism. Howshall we integrate Inoue’s persuasive story of inventionwith the lived experiences of these women? What aspectsof women’s language (which has been present in someform in Japan for many centuries) have historical under-pinnings, and which are more recent inventions or appro-priations? Inoue’s story focuses intensely on the moment of“invention” in late Meiji and the appropriation of school-girl language, and, perhaps because of its predominant con-cern with utterance endings, readers have less sense ofthe historical shifts and continuities that shaped those el-ements that one associates with women’s language today:honorifics, pitch, self-address forms, intonation, and pro-noun choice—all elements that make women’s languageperceived as more refined, euphemistic, and indirect thanmen’s.

With Inoue’s Vicarious Language, we have come along way from the fetishization of women’s languageas a window into Japanese women’s differentness andsubordination—the long held assumption that Janet S.Shibamoto once described as “female speaker equalspowerless social role equals feminine speech forms”(Shibamoto 1985:4). Vicarious Language is a major accom-plishment that will no doubt change the landscape of con-versations about both gender and language in Japan. It isaccessible and could be used not only in graduate coursesbut also in undergraduate courses on gender and nationformation in modern Japan, as well as courses on languagein society, mass culture, and gender and capitalism.

References cited

Shibamoto, Janet S.1985 Japanese Women’s Language. New York: Academic Press.

White, Merry1992 Home Truths: Women and Social Change in Japan.

Daedalus (fall): 61–82.

Subfloor Pits and the Archaeology of Slavery in ColonialVirginia. Patricia M. Samford. Tuscaloosa: University of Al-abama Press, 2007. 232 pp.

JACK GARYThomas Jefferson’s Poplar Forest

Archaeological features referred to as subfloor pits have be-come one of the most recognized indicators of slave hous-ing in mid-Atlantic North America. These often square orrectangular holes dug into the dirt floors or the soil under-lying the wooden floors of cabins are frequently the onlyphysical remains of the impermanent structures once in-habited by enslaved laborers. The fill soils of these fea-tures most often contain a wealth of artifacts, and faunaland botanical remains that give archaeologists considerableinsight into many undocumented aspects of slaves’ lives.While it has almost become de facto that subfloor pits areassociated with slave dwellings, archaeologists continue tospeculate about the actual uses and origins of these fea-tures. Suggestions for their functions have included borrowpits for clay chinking, food storage, holes to hide stolen andvaluable objects, personal storage spaces, and West Africanspiritual shrines.

Patricia Samford systematically studies 103 subfloorpits from slave quarters excavated at three 18th-century Vir-ginia Tidewater plantations to address these possible uses.Through a combination of archaeological, ethnographic,and historical analyses, Samford suggests that subfloor pitsfound in the Virginia Chesapeake functioned in ways thatdrew on retained and creolized West African traditions, aswell as the practical need for storage, as slaves attempted toexert some control over their lives within socially marginal-ized contexts. Samford proposes that subfloor pits in Vir-ginia served three functions, including storage of root crops,use as personal storage space, and use as shrines. To cometo these conclusions, Samford undertook careful analysis ofthe artifacts and morphology of the pits in her study group,developing patterns that were compared to West Africanand Igbo ethnohistorical data.

Samford rightfully stresses the need for archaeolo-gists studying slavery to reference the unique African cul-tures from which individuals were uprooted and brought toNorth America. In the case of Virginia, the largest importa-tions of slaves in the 18th century consisted of individualsfrom a specific region of West Africa referred to as Igboland.Understanding the lives of Virginia’s enslaved laborers re-quires understanding aspects of Igbo culture that survivedthe Middle Passage, such as notions of spirituality, identity,and gender roles. However, these cultural traditions werenot directly replicated on North American plantations, andthe physical manifestations of traditional African culturalpractices were modified through interactions with “new

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environments, different social groups, and altered powerstructures” (p. 16), as well as new material culture in theform of European produced objects. Samford argues thatrecognizing these manifestations, specifically through anexamination of subfloor pits, requires a framework thatexamines West African and Igbo cultural practices in thecontext of colonialism, European material culture, and thepower struggles inherent in plantation settings.

Samford uses this framework to greatest effect whenidentifying pits that may have been used as shrines withWest African antecedents. Samford identifies four likelyshrines and three possible shrines from her study group.Through quantitative analysis of artifact size and complete-ness, she isolated pits containing deposits believed to beintact from the time of their original deposition. Samfordthen examined the physical characteristics and placementof the artifacts within the subfloor pits to compare withethnohistorical and ethnographic data on Igbo shrines andspiritual practices. One pit contained an assemblage of fos-silized scallop shells, cow bones, and white kaolin tobaccopipes placed on a raised platform in the base of the pit. Sam-ford connects these objects to Igbo spiritual symbolism andtraditions, such as the association of water with the dead,burying spiritual leaders with tobacco pipes, and consider-ing bulls to be sacred animals. Pollen analysis from this fea-ture also revealed a concentration of grape pollen within thefill, possibly suggesting wine poured as a libation, a prac-tice documented in the colonial southeast as part of AfricanAmerican conjuration practices. Samford also connects thecharacteristics of this assemblage specifically to Idemili, anIgbo deity associated with water and the color white. Otherpossible shrines contained everyday European-producedobjects that were placed within pits in anomalous ways,such as a copper frying pan filled with an intact wine bottle,a cowry shell, animal bones, and tobacco pipes—a configu-ration that Samford connects to Igbo ancestral shrines.

While Samford makes the argument that other types ofsubfloor pits were used for storage, it is through the discus-sion of shrines that Samford best addresses the ways Africanand African American individuals coped with enslavementthrough identity formation, resistance, the reliance on fam-ilies, and the supplication of ancestors and deities. Bycontinuing Igbo spiritual traditions, albeit altered to usepredominantly non-African materials and spaces, Samfordsuggests that individuals tapped into “a cultural precedentthat allowed enslaved Igbos and their descendents in Vir-ginia the knowledge that they were not completely pow-erless in the face of the stronger forces confronting them”(p. 187).

Identity, ethnicity, and individual agency have been as-pects of particular focus for historical archeologists in thelast decade, and Samford does an excellent job of address-ing these topics within the context of colonial Virginia.However, identifying the physical manifestations of these

issues remains one of the biggest challenges for archaeolo-gists. This requires extremely careful and intensive excava-tion techniques to identify deposits that can be connectedto individual or personal practices. Although Samford ac-knowledges this fact and expends considerable effort on thecareful study of artifact sizes and excavation notes, she alsocontradicts herself by using two sites that were excavatedwithout screening for artifacts, one site with missing exca-vation notes and another site with excavation notes thatlacked enough detail to be helpful. This does not negateSamford’s approach, however, and her framework of con-textual analysis that examines features and artifacts withreference to traditional Igbo practices should be applied toother sites with more rigorously excavated subfloor pits.

Samford’s book deserves considerable praise for beingthe first to approach subfloor pits in a systematic way thatdraws heavily on ethnographic data. This contextual ap-proach created much richer interpretations than has beenpresented in the past and should spur other historical ar-chaeologists to take similar approaches to their data whileimplementing rigorous excavation and sampling practicesfor sites associated with enslaved individuals. As Samfordsuggests, the next step for the study of these important fea-tures should be a broader geographical approach that ex-amines subfloor pits found outside of the Virginia Tidewa-ter region.

We Are Now a Nation: Croats between “Home” and“Homeland.” Daphne N. Winland. Toronto: University ofToronto Press, 2007. 224 pp.

VICTORIA BERNALUniversity of California, Irvine

The book is a study of diaspora focused on the Croat-ian diaspora in Canada. It explores the ways that what itmeans to be Croatian is defined locally among Croatiansin Toronto, transnationally through ties that connect thediaspora to Croatians in Croatia, and nationally by Croa-tians who remained in Croatia and who define returneesfrom the diaspora as outsiders who can never fully belong.The exploration of diaspora and national belonging pre-sented here charts the complexities and variation arisingfrom differences in the perspectives of different generationsof Croats in diaspora, and from the shifting relations be-tween the diaspora and the nation in different historicalmoments. This temporally shifting and multifaceted per-spective on diaspora, belonging, and national identities re-veals the power and durability of diaspora identity and na-tional loyalty to define people’s lives and shape the course

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of their actions even as what it means to be Croatian isshown to be contested and elusive. Daphne Winland’s sub-title “Croats between ‘Home’ and ‘Homeland’ ” is apt. Homeand homeland, as indicated by the quotation marks, refernot so much to actual places as to relationships to places.What Winland is attempting to study in many ways is the“between”; the unresolved position of the diaspora. Shewrites that “ ‘home’ and ‘homeland’ are conceptual or dis-cursive spaces of identification” (p. 9). Working largelythrough archival research and interviews with Croats inToronto and in Croatia, Winland explores the relationshipof a diaspora to the nation and those who remained behind.

In the process, Winland offers valuable insights aboutthe ways Croats in diaspora understand themselves thatare clearly relevant to the analysis of identity and nationalloyalty more generally. Winland makes clear that Croat-ian diaspora identity does not consist of allegiance to afixed identity but, rather, is best understood as a quest todefine and claim an identity. This sheds light on how intra-group tension and conflict can so easily coexist with pow-erful group loyalties and communal animosity toward ri-val ethnic–national groups. Throughout the book, one findsinteresting perspectives expressed in memorable phrases.For example, Winland states that the war resonated “deeplyfor many Croats, regardless of their proximity to Croatiageographically, temporally, or experientially” (p. 22). And“Diaspora is not simply a signifier of transnationality andmovement, but of settlement, dwelling, and the strugglesto define the local” (p. 33). She writes that the political isreflected in the everyday in the “personal and the private,the nostalgic and emotional, the commemorative and con-sumerist” (p. 44). These are poetic, vivid, and illuminatingstatements. One wishes, though, that they were more fullyfleshed out with ethnographic reality. Winland’s insightsinto the condition of diaspora are convincing, but becausethey are not sufficiently grounded in observations of socialbehavior, they remain for the most part abstract generaliza-tions. Some of the limitations of the ethnographic materialpresented here stem from the wide scope the author usesto explore diaspora across space and time and her care-ful attention to variation and diversity. At times, however,the presentation of the historical, regional, linguistic, gen-erational, and other divisions among Croats becomes tooencyclopedic.

The book is held together by coherent themes that re-late to the paradoxes of global connections and parochialloyalties. One wishes, however, that the central argumentsof the book unfolded progressively through the book frombeginning to end, deepening with each chapter. Althoughthe first few chapters might be expected to lay out a vast ter-rain and draw our attention to key features of its contours,in subsequent chapters one wants the analysis to move incloser to bring into focus people’s everyday lives and theways that cultural understandings are produced and expe-rienced. But the scope of the author’s focus and the level

of analysis remain consistently broad from one chapter tothe next. This may be in part because most of the book waspublished previously as articles, so that each chapter canstand more or less on its own. The text becomes repetitiveat times because points of information and analysis, ratherthan being established as a basis on which to present fur-ther insights in later chapters, are repeated.

The book points up the fact that researching transna-tionalism and diaspora present methodological problemsfor ethnography because they are not located in a clearlydemarcated space or even easily reconciled with multisitedethnographic methods. Certain spaces, however, do seemto be particularly important to the Croatian diaspora, suchas churches, and if the author had grounded the ethnog-raphy more in some such communal space it would havebeen enriched. This would have provided a crucial middleground between the great swaths of history and territoryWinland covers and the quotes from individual interviewsshe uses to illustrate some of the issues she addresses. Ifwe understand that identity is produced and performed so-cially, and is not a feature of individuals, but relational (aperspective her study supports), then something is lost inthe method used here.

Another issue raised by this research is the problem ofpolitics. Winland describes a highly charged political fieldof Croat relations, and she states that she is attempting toproduce a “balanced picture.” That statement may reflectthe kinds of pressures scholars face in highly politicized en-vironments where the people we study are keenly awareof the politics of knowledge production. On such intellec-tual terrain it can be difficult to make a strong argumentwithout alienating or offending some people. In Winland’scase she is perhaps too cautious, carefully qualifying her as-sertions and including the exceptions to whatever general-ization she might make. In chapter 4 she states, “A centralfinding of this book is that tension and ambivalence con-tinue to characterize relations not only among and betweenToronto Croats but also between Toronto and homelandCroats” (p. 108). This ambivalence and complexity comesacross in the book, but is ambivalence really a finding? Isn’tit an existential given?

I was drawn to the book as someone engaged in re-search on transnationalism, nationalism, and diaspora, butwith little knowledge of Croatia. A reader with concerns re-lated to the region would certainly find other things hereto like and to critique. From my reading, I think Winlandsucceeds in complicating our understanding of diasporaand national belonging through her focus on ambiva-lence and tension. Diasporas arise from conditions of con-flict, and even when a particular conflict ends, the conditionof diaspora remains fraught and unresolved, positioned asWinland writes “Between ‘Home’ and ‘Homeland.’ ” Thisstudy is thought provoking and clearly written and could beused in interdisciplinary courses on transnationalism, mi-gration, ethnicity, and diaspora.

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Transborder Lives: Indigenous Oaxacans in Mexico, Cali-fornia, and Oregon. Lynn Stephen. Durham, NC: Duke Uni-versity Press, 2007. 375 pp.

PAUL ALLATSONUniversity of Technology Sydney

The latest study by Lynn Stephen joins her previous work,Women and Social Movements in Latin America: Power fromBelow (1997), Zapata Lives! Histories and Cultural Politics inSouthern Mexico (2002), and the revised edition of ZapotecWomen: Gender, Class, and Ethnicity in Globalized Oaxaca(2005), as well as a number of edited books that have deep-ened our understanding of indigenous Mexican lived expe-riences, material aspirations, and collective imaginations,in what many observers call a transnational epoch. In fact,there is a direct lineage between one of these studies andTransborder Lives. This publication extends from the ethno-graphic insights about Oaxacan indigenous women’s in-volvement in weaving cooperatives presented in the earlierZapotec Women. Stephens reframes those insights here inthe light of new ethnographic findings about two indige-nous communities, Mixtecs from the town of San AgustınAtenango and Zapotecs from Teotitlan del Valle, and theirdifferential migratory experiences in Mexico and in the U.S.states of Oregon and California.

Transborder Lives confirms Stephen’s reputation asa leading contributor to North American transnationaland migration studies. Stephen’s nuanced, empathetic—and, I would add, physically and temporally demanding—ethnographic work undergirds the study’s elegantly nar-rated exploration of how indigenous Oaxacans articulateand understand their own individual and collective experi-ences of daily routines characterized by “the ability to con-struct space, time, and social relations in more than oneplace simultaneously” (p. 5). Stephen argues that indige-nous Mexican migrants, and the communities they repre-sent, do not emerge into meaningful view simply by cross-ing national borders. Nor do these migrants regard suchborders as the definitional key to their sense of individualand collective place. Rather, they are involved in crossing,and adapting to, a veritable matrix of regional, ethnic, racial,class, colonial, cultural, and linguistic limits, and, thus, arange of hierarchized power systems, in and between twostates. Stephen proposes that the term transborder, and nottransnational, best designates these realities.

Transborder is an important contribution to currentethnographic critical vocabulary. As Stephen’s Mixtec andZapotec respondents iterate throughout her study, theirlived experiences and aspirations are reconfigured con-stantly by routines of travel, shifting residency and evolv-ing communal connections involving numerous states andregions in Mexico and the United States. The innovativeuse of “transborder” to describe those complexities liber-

ates Stephen from regarding the U.S.–Mexico border as themost meaningful line of demarcation and differentiationwith which indigenous immigrants must contend. Indige-nous migrants inevitably move through distinct, and oftencontradictory, Mexican, Mexican diasporic, and U.S. racial-ized immigration regimes. In turn, mobile and multisitu-ated Oaxacans are confronted by the discursive influenceof those regimes on policies directed at indigenous com-munities in Mexico and the United States. Hierarchies ofracialized reception, in home and host countries, define thetransborder labor those communities represent, the socioe-conomic influence and visibility they have, and the citizen-ship options available to them. U.S. and Mexican borderpolicing generates further pressures of negotiation for in-digenous communities, as do the gendered labor demandsof the low-wage and often seasonal U.S. domestic, service,landscaping, and agricultural sectors in which many Oaxa-cans are employed.

Yet those largely unfavorable and exploitative transbor-der forces do not in themselves overdetermine the expe-riences of Stephen’s respondents; creative and pragmaticmodes of communal affiliation and adaptation are also evi-dent in the transborder lives that she discusses. Digital tech-nologies enable communal connections and networkedcommunications between dispersed individuals, families,and kinship groups. Oaxacans found hometown associa-tions and other organizations—the four Stephen details area farm working union in Oregon, a women’s organization,the Organization of Oaxacan Indigenous Migrant Com-munities, and the San Agustın Transborder Public WorksCommittee—to improve work conditions, raise awarenessof migrant worker and gender issues, and provide a meansfor dispersed community members to contribute to pub-lic works and have a say in local government in the Mexi-can and diasporic communities alike. New leadership, ac-tivist, and education opportunities for women also openwith transborder migration.

Stephen’s transborder focus enables her to move be-yond orthodox explanations of transnational Mexican com-munity formation, which have tended to regard suchformations as conforming to a relatively recent dialecticalprocess of de- and reterritorialization as defined by resi-dency on either side of the U.S.–Mexico divide. A notablefeature of Stephen’s approach is her plotting of indigenousMexican transborder community constructions in a longercolonial and postcolonial history of local and regional de-mographic movements, and treatments of indigenous Mex-icans, that can be traced back to the 16th century. Indige-nous Oaxacan mobility is not a new phenomenon. Thus,Stephen cautions, ethnographers have an obligation to his-toricize their fieldwork and narratives to better explain whylongstanding processes of community dispersal and spatialconnectedness have accelerated and intensified over thelast few decades (p. 313).

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Perhaps the most productive, and it is to be hoped, in-fluential proposal for ethnographic practice in this studyis Stephen’s elaboration in her epilogue of what she calls“collaborative activist ethnography.” By this she meansquestioning “the politics of location, which implies not onlyan interrogation of the location of the anthropologist, butalso of collaborating institutions and actors” (p. 322). AsStephen notes, the complex quotidian norm by which manyindigenous Mexicans live “in multiple localities and dis-continuous social, economic and cultural spaces” (p. 9)presents formidable challenges to the anthropologist. Howdoes one develop an ethnography adequate and flexibleenough for conveying the multivalent and multispatial real-ities of indigenous Mexican communities, given that trans-border lives are neither reducible nor explicable in linearrelation to a single geographical point of origin, let alonea traditional idea of home? And how might ethnographicpractice make a viable contribution to the specific sociopo-litical aspirations of the actors who occupy its investigativecenter? A collaborative activist ethnography responds tothese questions in a number of ways. It heeds how conflict,disagreement, divergent interests, and power differentialscharacterize the production of the ethnographic project,and incorporates those disjunctions into its findings andoutputs. It acknowledges that the actors involved in theethnographic project are deeply interested contributors tothe knowledge published about them, which thus behoovesthe anthropologist to resist merely speaking for, and ben-efiting from, her respondents’ lives and aspirations. Anda collaborative activist ethnography presents its findingsnot simply in accepted academic venues, but in new formsthat are “useful to those they [anthropologists] work with”(p. 325), for instance by influencing policy change and pub-lic opinion alike.

References cited

Stephen, Lynn1997 Women and Social Movements in Latin America: Power

from Below. Austin: University of Texas Press.2002 Zapata Lives! Histories and Cultural Politics in Southern

Mexico. Berkeley: University of California Press.2005 Zapotec Women: Gender, Class, and Ethnicity in Globalized

Oaxaca. 2nd edition. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

In Search of Providence: Transnational Mayan Identities.Patricia Foxen. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2007.358 pp.

TRACY DUVALLGeorgia Gwinnett College

The title puns on one of Foxen’s field sites—Providence,Rhode Island. In the late 1990s, the author studied how

migration between a municipality that she calls “Xinxuc”and Providence related, above all, to Guatemala’s historyof violent subjugation of Mayan peoples. Foxen ably con-nects her research to the sizable ethnographic literatureon the K’iche’ to show how individuals’ participation inthe war and migration sprang in part from historically de-veloped patterns of expectations and practices. She neatlypoints out that many K’iche’ had long migrated withinGuatemala for mostly economic reasons. Such travels hadhelped them to maintain their milpas (cornfields) and, forsome, provided the foundation for participation in localfestivities and hierarchical organizations. Traveling to theUnited States has built on this pattern, and migrants inProvidence dream of returning to Xinxuc to realize their im-proved status and to live with a reunited family. But legal ob-stacles, distance, and diverse forms of entrenchment makereturn much less likely.

The particular character of the war in the 1980s and1990s continued to shape this migration after the fightinghad mostly ended. For example, all sorts of people have mi-grated to Providence, including Ladinos (non-Indians). TheK’iche’ migrants include former rebels and individuals who,often to save their own lives, joined the government effortsto eradicate them. Almost everyone in Xinxuc and Provi-dence had experienced horror, and many had inflicted it.Each had to live with these traumas and, in the face of suchruptured relations and expectations, to interact with andeven depend on those others. In contrast to the documen-tary efforts of international groups, many K’iche’ preferredto avoid both reference to the war and efforts to affix judg-ment publicly.

The major strength of Foxen’s work is its explica-tion of the complex production and experience of thismigration. Diversity abounds: because of Xinxuc’s par-ticular history, its inhabitants have less sense of localtradition and cohesion compared to nearby municipal-ities; the larger towns in each municipality experienceless devastation than did the outlying hamlets during thewar; Ladinos and K’iche’ face different pressures and op-portunities; and K’iche’ families and individuals likewiseforge unique lives, for example in their religious prac-tices and attitudes toward pan-Mayan ideologies. Inter-views help to demonstrate these complex and conflictinginfluences.

Unfortunately, the analysis is considerably thicker thanthe description. Perhaps it is Foxen’s holistic approach thatkeeps her from fully exploiting the unique advantages ofhaving done fieldwork. But the text would be much moreinvolving and the analysis clearer with more examples ofmundane interactions, whether in Guatemala or Provi-dence, even if this were to entail forcing aside some discus-sions of the secondary literature, such as the Menchu–Stolldebate. In short, the work is holistic in a way that makes itdifficult to discern the whole.

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Nonetheless, this volume should prove useful to re-searchers with interest in a sophisticated case study oftransnational migration. Likewise, it makes a significantcontribution to the literature on Guatemala since the 1996peace agreement. However, its focus is tightly on Guatemalaand, especially, Mayan speakers; Latin Americanists or oth-ers will, for the most part, have to draw their own compar-isons. Also, this work’s academic concerns and prose—nofigures—will curtail its appeal to general readers. Still, it isworth noting that this account has nicely complicated myunderstanding, or lack thereof, of the many migrants I en-counter daily.

Our Wealth Is Loving Each Other: Self and Society in Fiji.Karen J. Brison. New York: Lexington, 2007. xix + 151 pp.

ANDREW ARNOUniversity of Hawai’i at Manoa

Karen J. Brison’s sharply focused study of Fijian ideolo-gies of culture and the techniques and strategies of iden-tity formation among villagers in Rakiraki, Ra Province,Fiji, is a valuable contribution to Fiji ethnography, theanthropology of women’s lives, and anthropological the-ory. Through engaging ethnographic accounts, she ex-plores the dynamic, contestable boundary between selfand community as it is constructed in language, ritual,religion, and in increasingly globalized praxis. Brison’s con-cise and stimulating discussion, in the preface and open-ing chapter, of the sociocentric self concept in anthro-pology and the social sciences provides a strong logicalstructure for the sequence of ethnographic chapters thatfollows.

As in villages and towns throughout Fiji, the people ofRakiraki frequently perform rituals of the pan-Fijian grandtradition such as the isevusevu, in which a presentation ofkava celebrates in ceremonial speech and gesture a senseof the power of enduring custom that sustains a sacredland–polity, the Fijian vanua. In an analysis of ceremonialrhetoric as a resource for articulating and sanctioning nu-anced variations of the relationship between individual andgroup, Brison shows how Rakiraki villagers use details suchas dialect choice and topical references within the ritual toindex a gradient of inside–outside relations that evoke mod-ulated definitions of the Fijian self in relation, for exam-ple, to foreign tourists; Indo Fijian fellow citizens; and Fi-jians from other communities, urban and rural, within thecomplex regional politics of the nation. Brison also looksat church ideologies and personal religious narratives thatoffer differences among the available options—from the

de facto national denomination, Wesleyan, to a number ofmore recently arrived Christian evangelical churches—inthe way social and psychological conflicts created by ten-sions between individual and group interests are spoken ofand managed.

These analytical arguments are brought to life ina number of life histories in which Fijians—especiallywomen, who have not been heard from adequately in theethnographic literature—talk about the complex ways theyparse and recombine elements of the orthodox grand tradi-tion, itovo vakavanua, theological doctrines, and pragmaticrealities of modern life to understand and justify their indi-vidual and group identities. A methodological aspect of thestudy is also of interest. Brison and Stephen Leavitt, her hus-band, who was also engaged in anthropological researchin Rakiraki, supervised students in a field research studyabroad program, and as a result Brison can draw on datafrom interviews and participant observation carried out indistinct, somewhat closed subcommunities—men, women,and youths. Brison also studied children in Rakiraki, ex-ploring topics such as gender, language ideology, and lan-guage use in the way children constructed and managedtheir identities in the context of play.

Fijian and foreign anthropologists have consistentlyrepresented Fijian culture as a culture with a very strongsense of itself. That is, Fijian culture includes a well-developed ideology of culture, a positively expressed for-mulation of the power and importance of culture itself,itovo, or ivakarau vakavanua. As Brison emphasizes in hertitle, Fijians characteristically express pride in their cultureand say that it makes them the equal of, or superior to,peoples who have more money, such as foreign touristsand, according to the prevalent stereotype, the Indo Fijiancommunity. This sentiment is reinforced by the fact thattourists generally feel and express a romantic admirationfor the warm communalism and precise formal etiquettepresented by village Fiji. Central elements of the ideal Fi-jian culture emphasize the practical efficacy of humility,submission to social hierarchy, and the subordination of in-dividual interests to the good of the group. As such, thisrepresentation of Fijian culture reinforces one of the mostpowerful but most abused concepts in cross-cultural com-parison, that of the sociocentric self. Ironically, the gen-uine power of the concept in articulating key differences be-tween Euro-American societies and many others lends itselfto oversimplification and use as an essentialized variablein mechanical, trait-based versions of intercultural analy-sis. As Brison’s own research and discussion of the litera-ture demonstrate, however, anthropologists have exploredthe complexities of the sociocentric self with considerablesubtlety and theoretical nuance. Brison’s book, because it iswell written and focused on human stories that will appealto students, general readers, and researchers from othermethodological traditions, has the potential to counter the

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too easy dichotomy of the “individualist” versus the “collec-tivist” societies in development and intercultural relationsdiscourse.

In her concluding chapter Brison addresses the polit-ical and economic development importance of self–groupidentity boundaries in what some have called a postculturalworld. There is a long history in Fiji, in colonial and post-colonial government policy as well as in everyday villagetalk around the kava bowl, of debating the strengths andweaknesses of indigenous communalism in the context ofcontemporary political and economic realities. What Bri-son demonstrates is that in Rakiraki the cultural ideology ofthe sacred vanua has not been displaced by globalism andremains a powerful constraint on the individual’s identityformation options. Rather than being erased by globalism,the indigenous Fijian sacred vanua might in some sensebe energized by new interpretations inspired by new formsof experience to accommodate a wider range of culturalcreativity.

Salt in the Sand: Memory, Violence, and the Nation-Statein Chile, 1890 to the Present. Lessie Jo Frazier. Durham, NC:Duke University Press, 2007. 388 pp.

BRIAN LOVEMANSan Diego State University

Salt in the Sand melds ethnographic research with histor-ical inquiry to investigate the trajectory of elite and sub-altern contestation over historical “memory” in Chile and“to forge a historical ethnography of nation-state forma-tion and cultural transformation” from 1890 to 2007 (pp. 4–5). Lessie Jo Frazier argues that nation-states are in con-tinuous, ongoing formation, and that “memory work—by which temporal demarcation is effected within a his-torical narrative to ground the idea of the nation stateas a processually emerging, autochthonous and coherententity is a crucial component of nation-state formation”(p. 6).

Frazier’s work focuses on Tarapaca, Chile’s northern-most region. It relies on participant-observation, inter-views, documentary sources, well-known Chilean poetryand literature, and also on popular culture—songs, poetry,theater, testimonials, and much more. The interview ma-terial is fascinating; Frazier emotively details microhistory,the “fragmented history of a single place,” such as Pisagua,a site of prisoner camps in 1948 and 1973, and where a massgrave of executed prisoners uncovered in 1990 became em-blematic of the horrors of military dictatorship after 1973.

Frazier is at her best in relating the ethnographic materials;she has become a part of Chile as much as Chile has becomea part of her life. She tells the reader that this book has beena 17-year project.

To frame the history of memory and state formation af-ter 1890, Frazier proposes three modes of memory: cathar-tic, empathetic, and sympathetic, and then a post-1990dynamic of “melancholy-nostalgia” (p. 191). Frazier’s defi-nitions of these modes of memory, even with the benefit ofnumerous illustrations—protest songs, poetry, dance, the-ater, and so on—are not, for me, easily intelligible or clearlydistinctive. Very roughly, they correspond to denunciationof repression and creation of “heroic” remembrances as“shared remembrances with past struggles” (p. 188); orga-nization of the nonelites in cross-class alliances to mobi-lize and discipline the subalterns within the national polit-ical system, where the past injustice is recalled to mobilizefor present objectives; and a “call to discursive witnessing”and to solidarity through truth-telling and reconciliation—which allow for a rupture with the past. According to Frazier,these modes of memory correspond to Chilean history from1890–1930, 1930–90 (pp. 58–80), and then to the years after1990.

I make no claim to expertise on modes of memory ormemory work, but these concepts do not help me betterunderstand the history of struggles against state violenceand injustice in 19th-century Chile, or what happened from1890 to 2007. To the extent that these three “modes of mem-ory” are useful as analytic concepts (and not as psychiatricor psychological metaphors that evoke personal modes ofmemory rather than help explain collective social phenom-ena), I find examples of each in historical accounts and lit-erature treating resistance to state violence and authori-tarian practices in Chile from 1814–17 (the reconquista) tothe present. Chilean “memory battles” did not begin withTarapaca; and the modes of memory, if these ambiguousconcepts are to overlay Chilean history, always operated si-multaneously and even reciprocally from independence in1818. Yet, for the pre-1890 period, Frazier falls back, mostlyuncritically, on conventional interpretations of Chilean ex-ceptionalism and elite consensus (p. 33)—notwithstandingthree civil wars between 1828 and 1859, and governmentunder state of siege or other regime of exception for almosthalf the years from 1831–61. This consensus on Chilean ex-ceptionalism and the “Chilean national family” is the stuffof elite mythology—and it is not consistent with Frazier’sown more critical and innovative analysis of ongoing stateformation in Chile after 1890.

Of course, Salt in the Sand is defined thematically,spatially, and temporally as a treatment of memory, vio-lence, and nation-state in Tarapaca from 1890 to the present(2007). That decision is entirely legitimate; it would notbe consequential except for Frazier’s own insistence on

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the centrality of “longer-range processes as fundamental tonation-state building” (p. 10). Thus, while Frazier convinc-ingly reminds the reader that the 1973 coup was not a blip orhistorical aberration in the history of state violence in Chile,the text elides seven decades of state violence and state for-mation before the struggles of the nitrate workers becamea piece, albeit a crucial one, of a much bigger story. I donot mean by this that Frazier should have written a differ-ent book—that it need “begin” in 1818. Rather, if I under-stand properly Frazier’s argument (“Subjectivities, in turn,are always highly located, situated both metaphorically, asintersecting vectors of possible subject positions, and moreliterally in time and space,” p. 256), then such “subjectiv-ities” require taking more seriously revisionist history onpre-1890 Chile and also on the period from 1890 to 1964.

In the end, Frazier decides not to resolve two tensionsthat the book honestly and directly confronts: whether toprivilege the theoretical over the political (or vice versa);and whether to privilege the interview material and ethno-graphic richness of the research or the very complicated“elusive and emergent dialectical relation between the the-oretical and the empirical known as praxis” (p. 366, n. 2).Moreover, the ragged suture of Tarapaca to Chile, bothin Chilean history and in Frazier’s account, neglects thedeep history of what becomes the politicocultural targetof Frazier’s criticism: the post-military dictatorship projectof “national reconciliation” (pp. 195–197; 202–214). WhatFrazier calls the “homogenizing project of national recon-ciliation” (p. 81) was nothing new, nor was it post-1990“melancholy-nostalgia.” After civil wars and political vi-olence from 1818 to 1964, virtually identical reconcilia-tion projects and discourse (including amnesties and resis-tance to them) characterized the ongoing process of stateformation in Chile that is a central focus of Salt in theSand.

Thus, Frazier’s creative insight into memory battles inTarapaca sometimes loses sight of the political violence andpolitics of reconciliation that repeatedly shaped the ongo-ing “tugs and pulls” of hegemony (pp. 254–255) and themultiple subjectivities that come into play when trying toanswer the question of who makes, who owns, and whosilences a nation’s history (p. 257). In seeking to reconfig-ure Chile’s political life after 1990, the “political class” drewon a well-practiced and stylized repertoire of political rec-onciliation policies and discourse. What made the post-1990 episode different were both the multiple types andvoices of resistance to impunity for human rights viola-tions within Chile and the overlay of the international hu-man rights movement that adopted Chile as an emblem-atic case—making impunity no longer entirely negotiableby the local political elites who had always “turned the pageon the past” in the name of “social peace” and “reunifi-cation of the Chilean national family” after past conflicts.

Communities of the Converted: Ukrainians and GlobalEvangelism. Catherine Wanner. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univer-sity Press, 2007. 305 pp.

STEPHEN OFFUTTBoston University

Catherine Wanner writes about Ukraine, a state that is un-dergoing an intense cultural, political, and economic tran-sition. The high barriers to foreign cultural influence main-tained during the Soviet era have given way to significantinflows of cultural radiation, much of which emanates fromthe United States. It is thus not surprising that a Pente-costal evangelicalism is a driving force behind the country’schanging cultural landscape. Wanner is quick to point out,however, that Ukraine is still Ukraine, and it has adjusted“foreign” religion to its own context and its own needs.

The Ukrainian case is well suited for Wanner’s principalthemes, which include moral order and agency, the currentspread of global Christianity, and secularization. Morality,Wanner argues, hinges on high levels of commitment toparticular practices and beliefs. Religious communities arethe places in which those practices and beliefs are oftenselected. One such community is global Christianity, theUkrainian manifestation of which has been shaped by thetwin processes of evangelization and displacement throughmigration.

The research strategies Wanner uses to explore thesethemes are among the most innovative aspects of theproject. She immersed herself in denominational and con-gregational archives to understand Ukrainian evangelicalhistory while also pursuing ethnographic and interviewdata in Ukraine and the United States. The intensive, mul-tipronged, and multisite strategy allows her to speak to em-pirical and theoretical questions with authority.

Wanner engages secularization theory by first sketch-ing the history of the Ukrainian evangelical community be-fore 1989. Evangelicals, like many other groups that weremarginalized in tsarist Russia, rejoiced when the commu-nist revolution succeeded in 1917. In the early years, evan-gelicals benefited from the Bolshevik preoccupation withthe more powerful Orthodox Church as well as from somesurprising points of agreement with the Bolsheviks. Life inthe years after the revolution was so positive that the Bap-tists opened their 1927 conference by commemorating tenyears of freedom in the Soviet Union.

The 1929 Law of Religious Associations brought an endto this religious opening and began the first serious cycleof evangelical oppression. The new law led to the closureof prayer houses and the incarceration of evangelical lead-ers. Persecution resulted in a rapid decrease of the evangel-ical population in the 1930s, but their numbers bounced

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back when Germany attacked the Soviet Union in 1941and oppressive religious policies were relaxed. However,Khrushchev launched a new antireligion campaign from1959–64, which ended the evangelical resurgence. Subse-quent state regulation and oppression lasted into the 1980s.

Wanner argues that within this context the SovietUnion was able to weaken religious institutions and removemuch of religion from the public sphere. It also had somesuccess in “breaking the memory chain” of religion by hin-dering religious educational efforts. However, Soviet ideol-ogy was not able to address the subjective needs of citizensin the midst of unsettling periods of social upheaval, andindividuals restored meaning to their lives through privatereligious traditions and identities.

Evangelicals, for their part, engaged in what Wannercalls “defiant compliance.” Within this rubric, evangelicalsaccepted much of the Soviet moral code and obeyed So-viet law where it did not conflict with their faith. Wherethey felt contradictions existed, evangelicals quietly cir-cumvented government policies. Often their subtle resis-tance was merely grumbled at or overlooked by govern-ment, but at other times evangelicals landed in prisoncamps because of their faith. The situation was made fa-mous by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s work, which Wanner uti-lizes as she explains the religious symbolic resources evan-gelicalism made available to its adherents. Wanner arguesthat evangelicals in these situations turned suffering intojoy and, in many cases, achieved martyrdom rather thansenseless death.

Since the end of the Cold War, emigration has helpedto reshape the Ukrainian identity. Wanner engages thetransnationalism literature to show how these trends havehastened social change, both for migrants and for thosestill in Ukraine. The lifestyle evangelicals developed underSoviet oppression was highly separatist, and immigrantsbrought those cultural strategies to the United States. Butsecond-generation immigrants are changing the nature oftheir transnational faith communities by assimilating intomainstream America and by sharing their new experienceswith coreligionists back home. Their message is reinforcedby a remarkable inflow of U.S. (often Southern Baptist) mis-sionaries and financial resources. By utilizing these transna-tional resources to respond to a fast changing politicaleconomy, Wanner argues that evangelical congregations inUkraine have become major sites of cultural innovation.

Not all evangelical congregations look the same, andWanner captures the relevant differences by investigatingfive Ukrainian evangelical congregations. Although weak-ened by emigration and the passage of time, Soviet-styleevangelical churches still exist. Wanner contrasts two suchcongregations with their larger daughter churches, whoseattire, forms of worship, and outreach strategies are allmuch better suited to today’s Ukraine than the fading cul-tural ethos in the mother churches.

Wanner also provides a case study of Ukraine’s mostimportant Pentecostal evangelical church. Founded in1994, the Embassy of God is already the largest churchin Europe. Whereas Soviet-era evangelical congregationsserved as a refuge from the world, the Embassy of Godseeks to reshape Ukraine and the world in its own image.New evangelical political engagement was evidenced by theprominent place of the Embassy of God in the 2004 OrangeRevolution, and social engagement includes ministries toHIV/AIDS victims and drug and alcohol abusers. Evangel-icals are also trying to reform Ukrainian business practices,but in this area they have experienced limited success.

In the end, Communities of the Converted is a surpris-ingly sympathetic account of the evangelical movement.One is left with the impression that Soviet-era evangeli-cals never deviated from their cultural scripts. It is not un-til we are introduced to present-day evangelicals that wesee any kind of delinking between beliefs and practices.This, of course, could reflect tighter adherence to rules bya persecuted community, but, even so, the point is over-stated. Still, Wanner deepens our understanding of globalChristianity’s intersection with morality. She is able to showthrough her innovative research agenda the way this reli-gious community affects moral change, especially in transi-tioning economies and states.

Fracturing Resemblances: Identity and Mimetic Conflictin Melanesia and the West. Simon Harrison. Herndon, VA:Berghahn, 2005. 182 pp.

ALEX GOLUBUniversity of Hawai’i at Manoa

In Fracturing Resemblances, Simon Harrison has given usone of the most fascinating and sophisticated works of an-thropology to appear in recent years. Ethnographically de-tailed, comparative in scope, solidly conceptualized, clearlywritten, and economical in size, it deserves a wide reader-ship amongst anthropologists in many subfields.

In this volume Harrison takes issue with the traditionalsocial scientific commonplace that solidarity and sharedidentity are the building blocks out of which societies arebuilt. In opposition to this “Durkheimian” tradition (as hecalls it), Harrison draws from the work of Simmel, Bate-son, and Girard to argue that similarity is a source of con-flict, rather than solidarity, between social units. Althoughhe is not explicit on this point, it is also clear that Harrisondraws on the work of Marilyn Strathern as well. Both Strath-ern’s critique of Durkheim, as well as this alternate tradi-tion, become a starting point for Harrison’s exploration ofthe idea of “ ‘mimetic conflict’ ”—the opposition betweentwo groups that both aspire to the same identity.

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The idea that contrast or opposition must be groundedin a deeper more embracing similarity is an old one, andthe strength of Harrison’s volume is his ability to elaborateand contextualize this theme. At first blush, Fracturing Re-semblances seems like a work of political anthropology be-cause it examines topics such as nationalism and ethnic-ity, but the real power of Harrison’s viewpoint can be seenin the way that he connects political anthropology and thenotion of mimetic conflict to other more seemingly remoteareas. Legal anthropology and theories of intellectual prop-erty quickly become central to Harrison’s argument, as doesthe literature of taboo and pollution. In Harrison’s handsthese three seemingly disparate fields are synthesized andput in the service of a larger project that seeks to understandhow identities (whether in trademark law or ethnic conflict)are used to create boundaries that both define and connectgroups through differentiating them.

The book, less than 200 pages overall, is broken downinto a series of ten short chapters, each of which developsthe theme of mimetic conflict in a different way. Harrison’sethnography is thus brief, comparative, and illustrativerather than an exhaustive and detailed study of a particu-lar case. While it is true that Harrison is firmly groundedin the ethnography of Melanesia, his area of specialty, andmany Melanesianists will be impressed by his mastery ofthis material, the book also strays broadly across space andtime to make its case, touching on the politics of religiousconflict in Northern Ireland, Sikh identity in India, and thesocial organization of ancient Rome. Despite these wide-ranging excursions, Harrison avoids the trap of glib gener-alization, and his focus on Melanesia never reads as exces-sively pedantic or narrowly specialized.

In sum, Harrison has written a superb and thought-provoking volume that opens new intellectual horizons inthe best anthropological fashion: by developing a wide-spread theme in the literature and contextualizing it ethno-graphically. This slim volume deserves a wider readershipand will be relevant for scholars in a wide variety of subdis-ciplines, ranging from ethnic studies and political anthro-pology to the legal anthropology of intellectual property.

The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia:Refugees, Boundaries, Histories. Vazira Fazila-YacoobaliZamindar. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.288 pp.

OSKAR VERKAAIKUniversity of Amsterdam

What we usually call an unprecedented example of massmigration following the independence of India and Pakistan

in August 1947 was, in fact, the sum of millions of dis-rupted personal lives of people traveling to and fro bothsides of the new border in incredibly messy, unplanned,and unpredictable flows of individuals and families fol-lowing decisions based on expectations and rumors thatwould leave many families divided and many individu-als stateless. Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, in a well-researched historical account of what she calls “the longpartition,” highlights the efforts of both the new Indian andPakistani state to control this hectic travel and to estab-lish who was and who was not entitled to citizenship. Fo-cusing on the period between 1947 and 1953, she showsthe impact of regulating devices as permits and passportson the lives of men and women who suddenly found thatdecisions based on impulses—to visit family members, tofind refuge, to see what the other side looked like—had irre-vocable repercussions. From the various individual storiesZamindar presents emerges a picture of new states discov-ering their power while dealing with these millions of peo-ple crossing the border in search of a postpartition life andlogic.

The study focuses on two cities—Karachi and Delhi—that in a tragic sense can be called twin cities. It is wellknown that Karachi virtually became a city of Muhajirs ormigrants from India, many of them from Delhi, whereasHindus had made up almost half of its population. ButDelhi, too, experienced a large exchange of its population,accommodating many displaced Sikhs and Hindus fromthe Punjab in property owned by Muslims. Zamindar di-vides this history in three phases: the first year when travelwas largely unregulated; the period between the summer of1948 and 1952 when both states introduced travel permits;and the time after 1952 when both governments began toissue passports. Each shift made it more difficult to travel,pinpointed people to the place where they happened to beat the time of introducing the new device, and sharpenedthe boundaries of citizenship.

In the first phase, both governments found themselvescaught between two conflicting responsibilities. There wasthe duty to protect the property of its existing populationand the fear to be flooded by more and more refugees.However, one also felt responsible to the large numbers ofrefugees already arriving in its capital cities. Who, in otherwords, did the new states consider “their own people” first:the religious minorities living on its territory or the arriv-ing refugees demanding compensation on the basis of re-ligious and national solidarity? Both governments optedfor the latter, in effect nationalizing individual property ofreligious minorities to house the refugees. In both citiesthere was strong pressure on religious minorities, increas-ingly labeled as “evacuees,” to leave, although in Karachimatters were complicated by the fact that the municipalgovernment included many Sindhi politicians who fearedthe influx of many non-Sindhis into its main city. This,

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however, did not stop the exodus of almost all Hindus fromKarachi.

In 1948 the Indian state introduced travel permits,partly to stop the growing numbers of Muslims comingfrom Karachi “to go home.” Some felt disappointed aboutthe lukewarm reception in Karachi; others had only tem-porarily settled in Pakistan as refugees during a time ofviolence and uncertainty. In India, however, they were sus-pected to be spies for the Pakistani government. If they re-ceived a permit at all, this was mostly on a temporary basis,meaning that their citizenship remained dubious. With theintroduction of passports in 1952, the citizenship status ofreligious minorities became questioned even more. If onefamily member had left India to go to Pakistan, for instance,the rest of the family was often considered “intended evac-uees,” too. Years after partition, people became “internallydisplaced” as a result of the increasingly rigid categories thenew states developed.

Zamindar vividly shows how the border separatingboth states came to be seen and treated as an internationalborder only over time. The two-nation theory, arguing thatMuslims and Hindus formed different nations, did not in it-self stop people from crossing the border, just like, for thatmatter, the border separating Pakistan and Afghanistan ishardly recognized by the people living in the border region(a comparison Zamindar does not make). Only with the in-troduction of relatively new devices like permits and pass-ports did the border become a fixed line separating twostates and two nations.

This is an important study on how two new statessought to establish their sovereignty over an ill-definedpopulation. The only reservation I have is that it does notrealize all of its promises. The second part of the title—“theMaking of Modern South Asia”—seems to give too muchimportance to the first years of independence. True, reli-gious nationalism continues to be powerful in both Indiaand Pakistan, as the author makes clear in the conclusion,but religious nationalism has a longer history than the yearsbetween 1947 and 1953. What this study does show, how-ever, is how religious nationalism was institutionalized innew sovereign nation-states and how a nonterritorial ideol-ogy gained a territorial logic.

To what extent this book can be called a historical–ethnographic study, I am not sure. The addition of the wordethnographic suggests an emphasis on nonofficial sourcesand agency. Although the study does draw on oral history,the most convincing parts are based on court cases dug upfrom official archives. Zamindar is at her best describingan emerging state logic, citing from letters and memos, butshe provides limited information on popular perceptions ofmigration, displacement, and increasingly regulated travel.Given her analytical talents and absorbing style of writing,we can only hope that she is planning a new book that in-cludes the subaltern voice.

Performing Kinship: Narrative, Gender, and the Intima-cies of Power in the Andes. Krista E. Van Vleet. Austin: Uni-versity of Texas Press, 2008. xiv + 273 pp.

JESSACA B. LEINAWEAVERBrown University

In the last two decades, scholars have taken up kinship, thatold anthropological totem, dusting it off and reenergizing itwith a series of promising, in-depth ethnographies. If earlierscholars of kinship have been accused of concentrating nar-rowly on cataloging kin terms, or charting genealogical con-nections, this new body of work focuses more properly onthe myriad of ways people make meaning of, and meaning-ful, connections to one another. Considering the processesthrough which this occurs, such as the structured narrationof past experiences, and intersecting social fields, such asgender, sexuality, race, or class, these scholars are breathingnew life into a topic critically important for understandingthe shifts and continuities of contemporary life.

In Performing Kinship, Krista Van Vleet contributes abeautifully written and solidly theorized ethnography tothis kinship renaissance. Reporting on long-term fieldworkin a Bolivian highland town, she teases out the significanceof being a brother, a daughter, a mother-in-law, or a hus-band by reflecting on the ways that people narrate theirlives. Her analysis also incorporates the relationships thatshe formed with the participants in her research; their eval-uations of her ambiguous kinship status provided a furthersource of material on which to ground an understanding ofrelatedness. Her interpretation of gender is worked carefullyinto the text so that it is inextricable from her analysis ofkinship, a move that only emphasizes the power of the “newkinship turn” in anthropology. For example, women’s livesare revealed to be deeply shaped by patrilocal practices—when they relocate to their husband’s communities on mar-riage, women are newly alone and unconnected, only de-veloping relatedness and status there over time. Because ofthese social implications of marriage for women, Van Vleetshows, it is understandable that as some of them narrate theevents that led to marriage, they deliberately downplay theirown agency in the process and depict themselves as havingbeen “carried” or even “stolen” away. This finding highlightsthe results made possible by Van Vleet’s close attention tohow people themselves narrate their lives and past experi-ences: it is through talking about people, and telling stories,that relatedness is produced.

Throughout this study Van Vleet has uncovered whatone might call a “native kinship theory”—an understand-ing of how her interlocutors themselves understand so-cial connections to be produced, accessed through theirtalk but also through long-term participant-observation.This, she argues, is intimately connected to the Andean

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keyword ayni, a Quechua term referring to reciprocal ex-change within a pair of relative equals. Ayni can refer to nu-merous kinds of social obligations, but it is often explainedin terms of agricultural labor—for example, a farmer worksfor a day in another’s fields, and expects the effort to be re-turned in kind. Although such relationships are typically an-alyzed using a framework of economic rationality, Van Vleetsuggests that the conceptual toolkit of kinship theory ismore apt for describing the way that this routine exchangeof labor also produces and actualizes a social relationship.

A second crucial component of this local kinship the-ory is the act of feeding, and its counterpart, receiving food.On one hand, feeding is how the Andeans Van Vleet workedwith understood relatedness to be established. Feeding achild is an important part of the process of becoming kinto that child, and because siblings do not regularly feedone another they do not feel the same kind of closenessand may be more prone to tensions and conflicts as adults.On the other hand, through regular feeding, hierarchy isestablished—but so too are deeply felt sensations of depen-dence and connection. A feeling of debt is crucial to bothkinds of interactions—owing someone a day’s worth of la-bor or feeling grateful to a parent for having always providedfood are both positions that imply social integration. Be-cause of the significance of debt, glossed here both as ayniand as hierarchy, we cannot understand local interactionswithout considering the broader network in which a pair ofsiblings, or a married couple, is embedded.

One of the most striking ethnographic findings of thebook has to do with domestic violence. First, Van Vleetproblematizes common assumptions about domestic vi-olence by showing that it is not always an issue of mendominating women. Her research shows that the relation-ship of affinity—in other words, the set of relationships cre-ated by marriage, including both spouses and in-laws—ismore crucial an axis than is gender alone to understand-ing the origin of violent acts. Second, she complicates thestereotype (common throughout the Andes) of Indian menas drunk abusers and Indian women as willing victims,showing that while alcohol consumption is important inthese instances of violence, so too are discourses of cus-tom and evaluations of affines’ behavior. Finally, locatingher examination of domestic violence at the end of thebook, following other related analyses—such as an evalua-tion of the discourses surrounding marriage, which includethose offered in formal Catholic marriage courses and theideas circulating along with marriage gifts and exchangesin local weddings—means that it can be considered notin a sensationalistic way but, rather, as one (highly politi-cized and contentious) aspect of affinity in the BolivianAndes.

The theoretical framework that Van Vleet develops foranalyzing her interlocutors’ stories is ambitious and sweep-ing, drawing from the new kinship studies, feminist an-

thropology, and—perhaps most directly—theories of lan-guage as social action. And although the book’s theoreticallanguage and conceptual sophistication may present chal-lenges to some undergraduate readers, I have found thatVan Vleet’s work has stimulated provocative classroom dis-cussions on domestic violence, gender, and cultural impe-rialism. Overall, I believe that this book would fit very wellinto courses on gender, kinship, or Latin America, in addi-tion to making a valuable addition to the bookshelf of schol-ars interested in these areas.

Getting By in Postsocialist Romania: Labor, the Body, andWorking-Class Culture. David A. Kideckel. Bloomington:Indiana University Press, 2008. 266 pp.

KAREN KAPUSTA-POFAHLWashburn University

Since the dissolution of socialist regimes in Central andEastern Europe, heavy industry laborers have suffered amassive reversal of fortune. From their place as exemplarybuilders of socialism, workers have been shunted to themargins of postsocialist political priorities, with disastrousresults. Through stirring narratives and vivid ethnographicdescription, David A. Kideckel “fleshes out” the lives of Ro-manian Jiu Valley coal miners and Fagaras chemical work-ers. Throughout the text, Kideckel deftly weaves an analy-sis of social, economic, and political upheaval with workers’personal narratives to create a compelling set of argumentsabout the ways in which “postsocialism hurts” (p. 6). Hiscentral concern is with the ways in which workers expresstheir understandings of themselves and their positions inpostsocialist Romania through narratives of deterioratingphysical and mental health.

In chapters 2 and 3, Kideckel details the means bywhich workers have lost their “symbolic capital” (p. 57),and the ramifications of this loss, in the wake of socialism’sdemise. He argues that mine and factory closures and la-bor contract buyouts, coupled with postsocialist media im-ages of the new European as an individual consumer ratherthan a collectivized producer, have operated in tandem topropel the image of the heavy industry laborer as a mem-ber of a problem population into the imaginations of thenational media, policymakers, and nonworker communi-ties. Whereas once workers were able to mobilize collec-tively to assert their needs, they no longer have the sym-bolic, agential, or, in fact, material resources to do so. Asa result, Kideckel writes, “In a little over a decade’s time,Romania’s once secure and even proud workers have beenreduced to a marginal mass whose conditions barely figure

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in the plans of the state and in the minds of its increas-ingly distant political and business leaders” (p. 63). In post-socialist times miners and factory workers have becomecasualties of anti-Communist sentiment. Workers have be-come identified with “the time of Ceausescu” (p. 57) and,thus, marginalized from postsocialist political discourses.Workers themselves have begun to view the socialist erawith rose-colored glasses and look to the future with dread.These processes are at the heart of this ethnography—whatare the consequences of such an emphatic and pervasivereversal of fortune?

Kideckel employs the concept of “embodiment” togreat effect in describing the relationships between work-ers’ descriptions of their physical and mental states andtheir marginalized political status. He discusses the waysin which workers view their deteriorated relationship to thestate in terms of bodies both as material beings and as po-litical collectivities (ch. 4), and how they understand theupending of established gender regimes in physical terms(ch. 6). Through a relentless attention to actual workers’stresses, illnesses, and challenges, Kideckel prevents thereader from escaping into abstraction. For instance, afterreading a passage in which the author describes from first-hand experience how miners often work naked to copewith searing temperatures in the underground, it is impos-sible for the reader to dismiss laborers as relics of a bygoneera.

Running parallel to workers’ narratives of bodily de-cline are stories of the loss of meaningful community bothwithin and outside of the workplace. Kideckel is particu-larly attentive to the ways in which these spheres of “work”and “home” are not uniformly considered to be exclusiveor binary arenas in the various worker communities (chs.5, 6). For instance, Jiu Valley miners worked in largely sex-segregated domains, where the norm was that men workedin the mines and women managed the domestic sphere ofhome and family life. In this region, miners lament the lossof camaraderie in the mines and in the pubs. State decisionsto downsize heavy industry has resulted in fewer workersworking longer shifts, increased suspicion about the mo-tives of their coworkers and bosses, and less money avail-able to buy rounds of drinks for friends after work. Simulta-neously, Jiu Valley women began to feel pressure to searchfor employment, often on the black market, to supplementwhat was once considered to be a breadwinner income.Among chemical workers, downsizing directly affected theirpreviously integrated work and domestic relationships: “Inthe Fagaras region before the revolution, husbands andwives, brothers and sisters, friends and neighbors wereappointed to work together as a matter of policy” (p. 88).However, as workers lost their jobs or accepted contractbuyouts, they became increasingly estranged from thesenetworks of social connectivity. In both regions, people can

no longer afford to participate in the community rituals thathad provided a crucial sense of belonging that extendedbeyond the workplace. In response, Kideckel finds, somedecide to emigrate and send home remittances, others at-tempt to become entrepreneurs, and still others find them-selves alone in their homes worrying about their healthand their family’s futures. Throughout the text, Kideckeldemonstrates how these and other factors have contributedto increased feelings of isolation, both physically andsocially.

Kideckel’s discussion of embodiment is not solelyone of relationships to politics or community. He pro-vides a stirring account of workers’ physical and men-tal ailments, as well as the declining quality of their liv-ing conditions (chs. 5, 7). In the final chapter (ch. 8),Kideckel calls on policymakers, nongovernmental organi-zations, and the European Union to resist enacting superfi-cial remedies. Romanian heavy industry workers have beenisolated from one another and marginalized from politicsand society, and are thus bearing the brunt of postsocialistupheavals.

Perhaps because the states of embodiment he de-scribes are so all-encompassing, Kideckel refers to postso-cialism in the singular and does not delve into a theoreti-cal consideration of its nuanced or contradictory facets. Re-gardless, however, the text is wholly evocative, compellinglywritten, and clearly organized. Getting By in PostsocialistRomania should appeal to a wide range of audiences, in-cluding scholars of postsocialist studies, those interestedin issues of economic policy and development, health, andgender studies, and to students at all levels.

Gossip, Markets, and Gender: How Dialogue ConstructsMoral Value in Post-Socialist Kilimanjaro. Tuulikki Pietila.Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007. i–xii + 241 pp.

ANNE S. LEWINSONBerry College

Tuulikki Pietila has written a highly readable and thought-provoking ethnographic analysis of economic activities,gender, and Chagga people’s commentaries on others’ con-duct in the Kilimanjaro region of Tanzania. While the titleand initial chapters of her book focus on the market set-ting and discourses about its women vendors, the analyticalreach goes beyond that specific domain. The ethnography’slatter section explores the evaluation of men as business-men, lineage members, and community participants andthereby provides space for considering the moral con-notations of and deliberations over cash-based economic

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activities in general. Pietila analyzes commentaries on bothmen’s and women’s economic ventures, providing a well-rounded picture of how gendered personhood is sociallyand communally constructed in the Moshi Rural region onMount Kilimanjaro.

The ethnography gives a vivid sense of how residentsof a village in Vunjo area constituted the social stand-ing of themselves, others, and economic activities at thetime when economic liberalization was consolidating inTanzania (the mid-1990s). While the local specifics havedoubtlessly changed as the implications of liberalizationhave ramified in the decade since then, Pietila’s book of-fers deep insight into enduring social processes. Part of itsstrength derives from the wide range of data derived fromclose-hand observations, informal interviews, casual con-versations, and life histories. Given that gossip is a ubiq-uitous activity and concern in Tanzanian society, Pietilachose well to use this verbal form as a source of culturalinsight. Interestingly, most conversations seem to have oc-curred in the national language of Kiswahili (based onthe prevalence of Swahili in the quotations), even thoughone might expect the settings (rural markets, bars, lifenarrations, feasts, and villagers’ gossip sessions) to evokeuse of a local language. This pattern of using a linguafranca, the language of interaction with non-Chagga speak-ers, demonstrates the semipublic forum in which indi-viduals’ standing is socially constituted. The speakers as-sume a heterogeneous audience (even if only because ofthe presence of the researcher). This fact resonates partic-ularly well with the topic of how wider economic patternsare integrated into a local setting through very specific cul-tural processes, such as segments of a community evalu-ating people’s inner qualities as revealed in good or badactions.

Pietila’s theoretical approach blends discourse analy-sis with the dynamics of gender power formations and cul-tural processes, yielding a rich exploration of the fluidity in1990s Chagga society. The first two chapters incorporate aclear, insightful discussion of how anthropological theorieshave analyzed the social implications of economic trans-actions, as well as indicating those frameworks’ limits; byemphasizing the linguistic processes, she seeks to move be-yond those somewhat static, homogenous frameworks to amore fluid perspective. She largely succeeds, demonstrat-ing that, indeed, “moral economy is a set of ideas, values,and practices that members of a given culture use and rec-ognize as ways of forming and maintaining social relation-ships” (p. 61). By documenting processes that range fromnegotiating a sale in the market to semipublic evaluations ofan urban-residing man’s father’s funeral, Pietila shows thatobjects and events do not have fixed significances (at leastnot for the social standing of the individuals linked withthem); rather, these “things” and actions surrounding themare integrated into communal negotiations about individ-

uals’ status and the contextually based appropriateness oftheir actions.

Yet these strengths of Pietila’s monograph (the vivid-ness of directly reported speech, salient topics revealed indiscourse, presence of interlocutors in the text, and cre-ative combination of linguistic with social analysis) bringalong a potential methodological limitation: a portrayal oflife on Kilimanjaro that skews toward the unusual or ex-traordinary. People seldom comment on mundane aspectsof life, the everyday matters that comprise daily existence;those activities and patterns require no discussion. Onlyconduct and events falling out of the ordinary are likelyto draw attention and debate (gossip) from onlookers. Ananalysis based primarily on verbal narratives therefore canobscure the unspoken, unremarkable cultural practices anddaily actions. For example, when Pietila analyzes narra-tives of the now-defunct practice of wife capture (ch. 4),this reader had to question how representative were theseevents (what percent of marriages involved capture?) and,therefore, whether we could gain much understanding ofMoshi Rural marriage processes based on her analysis. Howwas character assessed for women who married through the“typical” process of negotiations and rituals, or for men whodo dominate in their domestic relations? The discussed ex-amples illuminate the prevailing cultural categories of re-spected conduct by women and men; however, they mightnot explain ordinary life as well.

Similarly, Pietila discusses how urban-based menmaneuver to retain active participation or enhance theirstanding in their home communities (ch. 5), as well as thegossip-based explanations for businessmen’s rapid rever-sals of fortune (ch. 6). These analyses rest almost solely onnegative evaluations, leaving one to wonder what types ofmen are evaluated as “good” (successful and properly be-haved community members)? Are there any “good” busi-nessmen or urban sons? Indeed, the extraordinary providesa useful foil for defining moral categories and revealing theirdynamic transformations, as Pietila tracks a chronologicalshift in reasons given for the evil-doing businessmen’s ini-tial successes and ultimate downfalls. The challenge, how-ever, remains to fill in the dialogically invisible context—orat least to consider the limits of questions that can be an-swered by this type of data.

These concerns do not detract from the overall qualityof Pietila’s monograph. This book highlights the importanceof gossip as a process through which members of a commu-nity evaluate each other’s conduct and create an ever-fluidsocial standing. It also augments theoretical understandingof how economic activities intersect with systems of sociallyconstituted morality and gender, as well as how macroleveleconomic changes are refracted into local contexts. Pietilahas written an ethnography with many valuable insights forAfricanists, economic anthropologists, sociolinguists, andgender scholars.

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Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Mod-ern America. Mae M. Ngai. Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 2004. 377 pp.

SUSAN BIBLER COUTINUniversity of California, Irvine

In Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making ofModern America, Mae M. Ngai traces the history throughwhich illegal immigration and the illegal alien came tobe the central immigration problem in the 20th, and, per-haps, the 21st, centuries. Her focus is the period 1924–65,when the national origins quota system was in effect. Thissystem restricted immigration according to quotas basedon the national origins of the U.S. population in 1790 and,thus, ensured that “desirable” Northern Europeans wouldbe able to immigrate at rates that exceeded those of othergroups. In examining this history, Ngai pays particularattention to the ways that numerical restrictions andhierarchies of racial and national desirability redefinedterritory and made illegal immigrants the alien otheragainst which citizens were constituted. These foci resultin a fascinating and theoretically nuanced account of themutually constitutive relationship between illegality andlaw, immigration and the nation, and citizenship and itserasure. By identifying these relationships and examininghow they were produced historically, Ngai succeeds in de-naturalizing the very terms in which illegal immigration isconstrued.

Each chapter in Impossible Subjects takes up a key mo-ment in the development, implementation, and revision ofthe quota system. Chapter 1 presents a fascinating discus-sion of the controversies over how to calculate the nationalorigins of the U.S. population. Interestingly, even thoughthe calculations were acknowledged to be inaccurate, theybecame law and acquired an aura of factuality. Chapter 2 fo-cuses on the ways that numerical restrictions made depor-tation and border enforcement new priorities, as well as onadministrative devices that permitted longtime Europeanimmigrants who were convicted of crimes to avoid deporta-tion even as Mexican immigrants whose only crime was ille-gal entry were removed. Chapter 3 examines how U.S. terri-tories acquired from Spain through the Spanish–Americanwar were defined as something other than colonies and howFilipino migrants were ambiguously positioned as U.S. na-tionals and therefore neither citizen nor alien. Chapter 4 an-alyzes the “imported colonialism” (p. 129) that was estab-lished through immigration from Mexico. Chapter 5 takesup the WWII internment of Japanese Americans to considerhow war time nationalism infused notions of citizenshipand alienage. Chapter 6 considers the “confession” pro-gram through which Chinese immigrants were encouragedto admit to fraudulent kinship relations in exchange for le-

gal status. Chapter 7 challenges depictions of the 1965 im-migration act, which eliminated national origins as a ba-sis for quotas, as primarily progressive and, instead, arguesthat this law’s continued reliance on numerical restric-tions on immigration may have “only hardened the dis-tinction between citizens and aliens” (p. 229). The bookconcludes with a useful epilogue that takes up post-1965events.

Ngai’s nuanced account provides numerous insightsinto the thinking of those who formulated immigrationpolicies. She demonstrates that at times, such individualswere explicitly racist. For instance, she quotes former at-torney general U. S. Webb as stating that the U.S. govern-ment was meant to be “of and for the white race” (p. 117).She also presents a detailed discussion of the relationshipbetween science, immigration policies, and the limits ofliberalism. Reports written by demographers, historians,and other scholars circulated among policy makers andinfluenced calculations of quotas, assumptions about as-similation, and so forth. Legal realism, which was both ascholarly and legal movement, contributed to the use of dis-cretion within deportation policies, but only in relation toEuropean immigrants. Ngai’s discussion of the relationshipbetween scholarship and policy makes this book useful toscholars who are interested in the sociology and politics ofscience.

Impossible Subjects also presents countless examplesof lawmakers’ and administrators’ manipulations of law.For instance, even before numerical quotas were appliedto the Western hemisphere, administrative methods wereused to limit legal migration from Mexico; the category of“unincorporated territory” was invented to make the Philip-pines a U.S. possession that was nonetheless consideredexternal to the United States; and some European illegalimmigrants were sent to Canada and then permitted toreenter the United States legally. Ngai shows that law isflexible in that it can authorize such inventions, but thatlaw also must follow a certain logic: for example, the Eu-ropean illegal immigrants actually had to leave and reen-ter the United States to effect the legal magic of a changein status. The chapter on the Chinese confession programpresents a fascinating account of the ways that a paper trailwas elicited and authenticated by law. Because courts ac-cepted uncontested oral testimony regarding family rela-tionships, legal decisions in Chinese exclusion cases actu-ally produced the documentation that became the basisfor subsequent entries. Through accounts of this and otherevents, Ngai demonstrates that state control of immigrationpolicy is contested and incomplete. Not only is the stateitself fractured but, in addition, migrants themselves exertagency. Ngai points out that Mexican bracero workers re-sisted exploitation by quitting their jobs, Japanese Amer-ican internees may well have had loyalties to both Japanand the United States, and Chinese family associations

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challenged U.S. investigations of immigration fraud. Suchattention to the complexity of individual actions, whetheron the part of policy makers or immigrants themselves, isinvaluable.

Finally, Impossible Subjects suggests ways that historymay, in fact, repeat itself. As in the past, cities and stateshave attempted to bar illegal immigrants from obtaininglicenses, immigrants are being made deportable for crimesthat were not deportable offenses when they occurred,and the prisons are becoming a source of deportees. Ngaipoints out that in the formulation of immigration policies,“historians were not dispassionate interpreters of the past;rather, they intervened in the pressing politics of their day”(p. 263). Ngai’s own ethical project is to demonstrate that“sovereignty’s content and relationship to other legal andmoral norms are contingent—and, therefore, also subjectto change” (p. 12). By attending to the disjuncture betweenthe social reality of illegal immigration and its legal impos-sibility, Ngai succeeds in demonstrating that the problemof illegal immigration may itself be constitutive of globalrealities.

Empathy and Healing: Essays in Medical and NarrativeAnthropology. Vieda Skultans. New York: Berghahn, 2007.282 pp.

ANN APPLETONUniversity Malaysia Sarawak

In this wonderfully insightful collection of essays, Skul-tans draws on long-term ethnographic studies in threelocations—South Wales, Maharashtra, and post-SovietLatvia, exploring the diverse relationships between suffer-ing, empathy, and healing in each locale to argue for thequintessentially social nature of these phenomena. In theprocess she demonstrates that social, cultural, and histor-ical factors not only make a difference, they also makea defining difference to the experience of suffering, tothe meanings (including the medical diagnoses) attachedto suffering, and to the empathy-generating opportunitiesavailable for healing. We see how multiple realities shape avariety of suffering and how the latter can become a meansof understanding the former.

But beyond this the 15 chapters in Empathy and Heal-ing, crafted over a time span of more than 30 years, are also acommentary on the “changing face” of anthropology. Field-work at home—Skultans’s earliest studies were undertakenin South Wales—was unusual in the mid-1960s. The au-thor’s avowed “interest in individuals” (p. 1) was also at vari-ance with the anthropological project of this period when

self-reflexivity was discouraged and the agency of individ-ual informants was deliberately eclipsed from ethnographicaccounts in the interests of structural–functionalist analy-ses. The early chapters in the collection reflect these influ-ences although individual personalities are never entirelyobscured.

In the later chapters, issues to do with subjectivity,narrative, and emotion play a pivotal role in the theoret-ical analyses, as much an indication of the paradigmaticchanges that anthropology has undergone in the past gen-eration as a reflection of the background and interests of theauthor.

Of the 15 chapters that make up the collection, 14 havebeen previously published; a useful guide at the front of thebook lists the date and site of the original publications. Anadditional introductory chapter presents a synopsis of thecollection, viewed through the lens of Skultans’s own devel-oping theoretical focus within the discipline.

It is difficult to do justice to the scope of this collec-tion in a brief review. Immensely rich in data as well as the-oretically, historically, and culturally wide ranging, it takesthe reader on an intellectual as well as an ethnographicjourney, imparting new insights and drawing attention tonew connections, an exemplification of Skultans’s own ca-pacity for creating empathy with her readers. For example,her innovative use of the term sociosomatic illness (ratherthan psychosomatic) to describe “illness which does nothave a basis in real pathology” (p. 16), which she introducesin the essay about spiritualist ritual in South Wales, haswidespread application for indigenous systems of healingin non-Western contexts in which such conditions are oftenfirmly located (and ritually reconciled) within the context ofsocial relations.

Some classic themes in medical anthropology areraised in the course of these essays, including gender, trancestates, medicalization, and religion. But central to Skultans’sanalyses is the connection between empathy and issues ofrepresentation. That issues of representation are simultane-ously issues of power is a recurring theme, but most appar-ent in the chapters that draw on her ethnographic fieldworkin Latvia.

Concerns with research ethics have intensified overthe years as anthropologists have become increasinglyaware of the influence of their own subjectivity on theresearch process, particularly when working with vulner-able groups. The relationship between psychiatry andanthropology sits uneasily in the context of these issues.The ideological entanglements and moral dilemmas thiscreates for anthropologists whose research involves work-ing in a psychiatric environment are especially acute. Howdoes the anthropologist reconcile her mixed allegiancesin such situations without compromising anthropology’sethical boundaries or the desire for transparency? In suchcircumstances, “Does this mean that anthropological

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fieldwork necessarily involves betrayal, and if so, how can itbe justified?” (p. 262). Skultans’s focus on these tensions inthe final chapter is timely and thought provoking. The wayout of these dilemmas, she suggests: “is not to separate theethnographic voice from the personal and emotional voice”in an attempt to be neutral, nor to stake a moral claim onethics (p. 263). Rather, it is to write from a perspective“which includes the voices of both patients and psychia-trists and is both personal and critical” (p. 263). To do so isto locate a basis for empathy between all the actors in thisencounter—psychiatrist, patient, and anthropologist—in ashared experience of vulnerability.

It is a pity this book was not more carefully proof-read and edited. The title of chapter 5, for instance, con-tains a misspelling that does not appear in the original 1991publication. (The same word is misspelled—in yet anothervariation—on the contents page.) I was also distracted bytypos in a number of places, including incomplete sen-tences on page 247, resulting in the author of a quote goingunidentified.

Preparing a collection of essays for publication, writtenover different time periods and locations, requires particu-lar attention to aspects of continuity and the editorial for-matting sometimes works against this. For example, the es-say on “Women and Affliction in Maharashtra” opens with aparagraph that more resembles an abstract and coming af-ter a chapter concerned with fieldwork in South Wales it isnot clear whether the author is speaking generally or specif-ically until the final sentence. I wonder about the purpose ofthis paragraph because the chapter is properly introducedby the author in the section that follows.

These criticisms aside, I am delighted that the authorhas chosen to republish these essays in a single volume, notleast because in the region of the world where I live andwork, some of them would be difficult to access in the orig-inal. Of more importance, combining these essays in a sin-gle volume brings them into a temporal relationship that al-lows a valuable additional perspective to be brought to theanalysis—definitely a case of the whole being greater thanthe sum of its parts.

Medical anthropologists will certainly find thiscollection valuable, both for the issues raised as well asthe questions posed. The essays would also provide anideal teaching resource because most of them offer a usefulcombination of ethnography and theory.

I feel the book deserves a wider readership. Researchersand academics with an interest in narrative theory and thepolitics of identity will find much of interest here, as willthose working in fields such as social psychiatry. In the 21stcentury, disciplinary boundaries are no longer absolute andmany of these essays demonstrate the fertility and creativ-ity that can be derived from hanging out in the borderlandsamong and between different genres.

Debility and the Moral Imagination in Botswana. Julie Liv-ingston. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2005. 310pp.

JOHN M. JANZENUniversity of Kansas

With a focus on the changing concepts and practices sur-rounding “debility,” “disability,” “able-bodiedness,” “per-sonhood,” and the “moral imagination” of a caring soci-ety, Julie Livingston has created a sensitive, thorough, andoriginal history of Tswana health and related social struc-tures. The book contributes to African studies, history, andanthropology, but it especially makes a mark on the fieldof comparative studies of how societies deal with those intheir midst who require long-term care for chronic afflic-tions, how such conditions are given meaning, and how theresources of society and the “moral imagination” are gen-erated to be a society that takes care of such individualsin changing circumstances. Debility is a broader term thandisability; it is used to understand multiple kinds of “frail-ties associated with chronic illness and aging and the im-pairments underlying the word disability” (p. 6). The latterterm is more related to the social challenges or inabilities toperform socially expected tasks.

Livingston’s work is general enough to provide arich history of Tswana society—precolonial, colonial, andpostcolonial—as a backdrop for the more specializedagenda of health, medicine, and care for the disabled.This makes the book useful both for the uninitiated gen-eral student or scholar interested in southern African so-ciety as well as the specialist interested in comparativestudy of debility and how personhood and society un-fold in a dynamic history. This is particularly importantin grasping the tremendous impact of labor migration tothe mines of South Africa on early colonial history, andthe growing presence in all Tswana communities of thosereturned miners who had been injured on the job and,thus, no longer qualify for this arduous work nor carryon productive lives at home. They were instead destinedto lead the lives of home-bound invalids. The new cate-gory of the disabled (bogole, in Setswana) became the fo-cus for an entire system of meaning-making and chang-ing care structures. Over time it expanded to include otherkinds of individuals, morphing in the postcolonial pe-riod into the disability framework promoted by the WorldHealth Organization and the Botswana National Ministry ofHealth.

The unfolding history of transformations in the Tswanamedical culture is another highly commendable feature ofLivingston’s work. The somewhat overlapping systems ofknowledge and practice are identified as “public health,”

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“bongaka” (Tswana medicine), “biomedicine,” and “laynursing care.” Public health, the first of these systems, be-gins in the precolonial era as a complex set of institutionsand practices through which chiefs and ritual experts in-cluding healers and rainmakers reinforced public moralityand a right relationship to the environment and the an-cestors. This traditional system of public health was largelyundermined by colonial intrusions to chiefly roles and byChristian missions that provided a substitute moral or-der. Postcolonial government and Western public healthinitiatives provided a rather different public health system.Tswana medicine also lost some of its crucial features, ashealers were deprived of some of their public roles suchas rainmaking. However, many moved toward a more com-moditized and individualized medicine and continued toprovide divination services as a way of understanding plen-tiful misfortunes that befell people. Biomedicine of coursebecame the dominant colonial medicine, as well as themedicine of the industrial world of mining. Anyone whowished to find employment in the mines needed to mea-sure up to the pervasive health examinations that accom-panied recruitment. Biomedicine came to be endorsed bypostcolonial government and played an increasingly impor-tant role in people’s lives, including Botswana’s recent sup-port of antiretroviral medications for all HIV/AIDS patients.Livingston’s final medical system, lay nursing, became thenetwork of care for the growing number of disabled and el-derly. Each of these medical systems or domains has un-dergone significant change in the 20th century. Livingston’shistorian’s touch provides nuanced reading of the sourcesof change and the consequences on individuals andcommunities.

The structure of the work unfolds deftly in five substan-tial chapters, between an introduction and a conclusion.Chapter 1, “Family Matters and Money Matters,” introducesthe reader to the three villages near the national capitalGaborone where fieldwork was carried out. The householdand family setting of debility is graphically introduced, asare some case studies that accompany the reader through-out the work. Chapter 2, “Public Health and DevelopingPersons,” provides a history of public health and how thefar-reaching Tswana public domain was articulated in thehands of precolonial chiefs and ritual experts. Althoughmany of the particular institutions such as rainmaking wereabandoned, the moral framework survived in the way dis-abled individuals remain part of the community and areworthy of care. The notion of personhood in ablebodied-ness and in debility is important for Tswana society and Liv-ingston’s analysis of care. Chapter 3, “Male Migration andthe Pluralization of Medicine,” outlines the far-reaching im-pact of labor migration and the mining economy of SouthAfrica on Tswana society. Chapter 4, “Increasing Autonomy,Entangled Therapeutics, and Hidden Wombs,” is to this re-

viewer the most interesting chapter of the book. It detailsa number of particular cases and categories of cases thatillustrate the “entanglements” of these different domains.Chapter 5, “Postcolonial Development and ConstrainedCare,” describes the current state of affairs with regard todebility and care giving in Botswana. Tswana people seekto continue to frame health issues not just in empirical andindividual medical terms, but within broader questions of alarger moral framework provided by Tswana medicine andthe public order, although a certain moral ambiguity nowaccompanies many of life’s dilemmas and negotiations formany.

Julie Livingston’s excellently written and carefully rea-soned Debility and the Moral Imagination in Botswana of-fers one of the best recent examples of historical stud-ies of health and medicine in Africanist scholarship. Itdemonstrates the application of rigorous standards in thehistorian’s challenge of tracing categories of conscious-ness, related words, and behaviors back in time througha rich combination of methodologies that include pro-longed fieldwork, archival research, and analytical reason-ing through personal subjectivities.

Grassroots Struggles for Sustainability in Central Amer-ica. Lynn R. Horton. Boulder: University Press of Colorado,2007. xvii + 215 pp.

EVA KALNYUniversity of Vienna

How are rural communities in the global South dealing withthe expansion of capitalism, what is their perception of sus-tainable development, and how can they make use of itfor their survival?—Sociologist Lynn Horton tries to answerthese questions by analyzing three communities in CentralAmerica and their efforts to survive under current neolib-eral economic conditions.

On the theoretical level, the author focuses on con-tested visions on sustainability and parts from the ideathat development discourses are the product of powerrelations, but also influence relations and distributionsof social, political and discursive power. In this context,the concept of sustainable development holds very differ-ent meanings for Central American peasants and WorldBank (WB) officials. By focusing in her empirical workon grassroots perspective and contextualized local histo-ries, Lynn Horton’s book facilitates a better understand-ing of the possibilities and the limitations of grassrootsagency.

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Discourses on sustainable development are builtaround the three key components: economic growth, so-cial equity, and environmental conservation. For achiev-ing sustainable development, all of the three should bemaintained or improved over medium- or long-term peri-ods. Strings of discourses on sustainable development dif-fer in how they conceptualize the relationships of thesegoals, and are embedded within broader relations of power.The World Bank and other international financial institu-tions as well as USAID and mainstream NGOs not onlydefine the dominant, market-focused discourse but alsoalign their development policies and practices accordingly.Dating from the time before the current economic crisis,this dominant discourse was optimistic and insisted that,if a packet of neoliberal reforms was correctly and consis-tently applied, economic growth would follow, and its ef-fects would trickle through to the poor.

In contrast, livelihood or people-centered discourses ofsustainable development stress issues of social justice andempowerment of local communities. These positions havetraditionally been advanced by activists in the South as wellas grassroots organizations and NGOs. In the 1980s alsothe World Bank started to apply a similar terminology andacknowledged the high levels of inequality in Latin Amer-ica as having negative impact on poverty reduction in theregion. The WB decided to promote “empowerment” and“propoor” growth, and to stress education and health as keyfactors for improving the investment climate but has con-tinued to exclude topics related to highly necessary land re-forms, state subsidies, collective land management, or debtrelief.

The third bundle of sustainable development dis-courses Horton identifies are ecocentric or deep ecolog-ical discourses: for their representatives who are mainlysituated in the United States and in Europe, the greatestvalue is the natural world. Nature is not considered as so-cially constructed, but rather as having an intrinsic valuein and of itself. The WB has shifted to a “light green”discourse, pointing out a mutual, potentially positive re-lationship between economic growth and environmentalconservation.

The author herself is inspired by the livelihood modelof sustainable development and considers empowermentas an intrinsically valuable process, understood as “path-ways that reinforce the power, meaning and integrity of lo-cal settings” (p. 15). Based on 18 months of fieldwork in2000 and 2001 and follow-up visits until 2006, she exam-ines the conditions under which communities act as em-powered agents of sustainability in Nicaragua, Panama, andCosta Rica. The selected communities are located in geo-graphically isolated regions on the border of environmen-tally fragile zones and have a trajectory of resistance andmobilization.

Many of Nicaraguan Miraflores members have partic-ipated in land invasions and suffered political persecutionunder dictator Somoza. The former revolutionaries nowstruggle with the impact of the fall of cotton prices and en-gage in the production of nontraditional export like shrimp.Transnational and national companies dominate the pro-duction, processing, and sale of shrimp, and they controlterritories earlier accessible to the local population. Formany, illegal firewood extraction becomes the only possi-ble option for making a living. While NGO projects exist inMiraflores, the collected data suggests that the poorest fam-ilies as well as most vulnerable groups of the population canhardly afford to participate in them.

Panamanian Ipetı is located in the semiautonomousindigenous territory Madungandi, and the Kuna authori-ties and activists consider the struggle for the recognitionof Kuna land rights as the most important issue for thecommunity. Road construction, migration of nonindige-nous peoples into the territory as well as the flooding of80 percent of Kuna territory in the context of the construc-tion of the Bayano Hydroelectric Dam project in the 1970shave affected Kuna economy and social structure pro-foundly. After having been dispossessed of their most pro-ductive agricultural lands, the Kuna now engage in loggingactivities.

Costa Rica’s Puerto Jimenez is situated at the borderof the Corcovado National Park, and exposed to projects ofecotourism as well as side-effects like land speculation andincreasing drug use and prostitution. Neoliberal reformshave led to an increase of environmentally damaging activi-ties like gold mining and logging in the protected areas, andeven in the case of the Osa Peninsula, where ecotourism isnot under the control of transnational cooperations, eco-tourism has increased social stratification in the concernedcommunities.

In this detailed analysis, the author shows how “devel-opment” has been a disruptive process, perpetuating in-equality in the concerned communities. Nevertheless, lo-cal residents are not necessarily anticapitalist but seek amore favorable inclusion in the neoliberal market econ-omy. The example of the Kuna community Ipetı also showsthat under certain conditions, collective groups can chooseto limit economic growth in favor of other socioculturalpriorities.

The book is recommended for everyone interestedin economic and social processes at the grassroots levelin rural communities affected by neoliberal reforms,as well as the possibilities and limitations of agency ofcommunity members. The theoretical framing gives awell-structured overview of sustainable developmentdiscourses, while the recollected data illustrate how com-munity members and other actors can still differ in theirpositions.

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Juki Girls, Good Girls: Gender and Cultural Politics in SriLanka’s Global Garment Industry. Caitrin Lynch. Ithaca,NY: Cornell University Press, 2007. xiii + 281 pp.

JEANNE MARECEKSwarthmore College

By now, stories of women and girls who work in global fac-tories are familiar. Whether in South Asia, the Caribbean,Mexico, or China, the “global assembly line” constitutes amix of oppressions and opportunities. On offer to interna-tional entrepreneurs are the (purported) nimble fingers anddocile temperaments of women from low-income coun-tries. On offer to the women are wages better than theycan otherwise earn and work in dead-end, menial jobs inworkplaces where health and safety standards are minimal.However, the notion of a “global assembly line” conceals thediversity of conditions of work and social relations acrosslocales and factories. It also pays little heed to the nationalpolitics and cultural struggles that precede and follow fromthese emerging industries. Caitrin Lynch’s fascinating andpersuasive account of Sri Lanka’s garment industry duringthe 1980s and 1990s takes up both sets of issues. The open-ing chapters situate the proliferation of garment factoriesagainst the background of the country’s tumultuous Post-Independence politics and virulent ethnic nationalism. Thesecond set of chapters take readers onto the shop floor andinto workers’ lives.

Lynch opens her account by sketching the culturalstruggles set in motion by the abrupt realignment of SriLanka’s economy when the government changed in 1977.As neoliberal economic policies swung open the door to for-eign investment and export-oriented industries, the popu-lace grappled with questions of how to reconcile this newversion of “development” with cultural preservation. More-over, escalating interethnic strife fostered a rising tide ofSinhala nationalism. Lynch argues that popular nation-alisms, idealized fictions of authentic village traditions, andanxieties about shifting gender arrangements were har-nessed to promote the government’s agenda of economicliberalization and to consolidate its popular support. Thefocal point of concern was the thousands of young womenwho had migrated from their villages to work in urban gar-ment factories. These Juki girls (a derogatory name drawnfrom the Japanese-made sewing machines they used) werewidely viewed as risking their sexual purity and respectabil-ity because they lived away from parental control andvigilant village eyes. Responding to these cross-cutting con-cerns, the government inaugurated its “200 Garment Fac-tories Programme” (GFP) in 1992, an initiative designed topreserve unmarried girls’ morality (and further develop thelucrative industry) by instituting a network of rural garment

factories. The 200 GFP in effect created two classes of gar-ment workers: morally dubious Juki girls and “good” girlswho worked in factories close to home. The latter are thesubjects of the fieldwork reported in the second half of thebook.

Lynch’s fieldwork takes readers to the shop floor, bushalts, kades (small shops), and neighborhoods where girls,their parents, and neighbors congregated. As her intimateaccount of the workers’ lives shows, the presence of a multi-national factory amidst paddy fields did far more than pro-vide pay packets to supplement dwindling farm incomes.Workers adopted new consumption practices and newforms of dress, hygiene, and comportment, which served tomark them as members of a modern workforce. Their so-cial horizons widened, even if economic opportunities re-mained stubbornly limited. Workers nonetheless exercisedconstant care to stay on the right side of the line separatingrespectable girls from disrespectable ones. Can a girl whosews sexy underwear and scanty tank tops for white womenremain virtuous? Innocence, modesty, reticence, and, aboveall, virginity remained the crucial markers of femalerespectability.

Lynch is careful to accord agency to the workers at thesame time that she documents constraints. Her text is punc-tuated by brief essays written by the workers; thus we hearin their own words how they perceive and respond to theconundrums and Catch-22s in their lives. Lynch also ex-plores instances of identity work through which workersresist their devaluation by dominant groups. This identitywork positions them somewhere between stay-at-home vil-lage girls and the tainted Juki girls. But these “Good girlsof modernity” (the label that Lynch has given them), donot overthrow restrictive gender expectations. Indeed, bycomparing themselves favorably to Juki girls, they shoreup restrictive expectations. Further, as the final chapter ofthe book documents, the entailments of being “Good girls”sometimes set workers within a factory against one another.More importantly, those same entailments sometimes de-railed collective actions that could lead to better treatmentand improved working conditions.

Caitrin Lynch draws widely from scholarship in laborhistory, sociology of work, feminist studies, and anthropol-ogy to theorize the work processes in the factory and thesocial relations of garment girls, bosses, and families. Thisenables her to point out parallels to women workers’ ex-periences in other times and places. For example, echo-ing feminist scholars Aiwa Ong and Carla Freeman, Lynchoffers a sympathetic reading of workers’ use of cosmet-ics, fashions, and hairstyles to signal their newly acquired“modern” identities. Moreover, she notes that charges ofsexual immorality are regularly leveled against the womenwho break through gender barriers in the workplace orelsewhere.

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Juki Girls is written in an engaging and accessible style.Peopled with vividly drawn characters, the narrative in-cludes memorable and telling anecdotes from everyday lifeon the shop floor. Lynch does not presume that readershave prior knowledge of Sri Lanka. Although it is based on adoctoral dissertation, Juki Girls bears few of the deadeningstylistic features so common to that genre. Geared for anundergraduate readership, the text has little jargon; whentheoretical terms appear, they are succinctly defined.

A happy confluence of global factors enabled the SriLanka’s garment industry to flourish for three decades. Now,however, the global environment is changing and businessanalysts predict that many factories will not survive into thenext decade. But even if the outlying factories disappear, thesignificance of Juki Girls will not be diminished. Its manylessons about the local take-up of globalization, genderedpower relations, and dilemmas of development reach farbeyond rural Sri Lanka.

Little India: Diaspora, Time, and Ethnolinguistic Belong-ing in Hindu Mauritius. Patrick Eisenlohr. Berkeley: Uni-versity of California Press, 2006. xv + 328 pp., photographs,map, notes, references, index.

CHAISE LADOUSAHamilton College

How do languages play (or fail to play) a part in the medi-ation of group and nation such that a diaspora can be ex-plored ethnographically? How do language practices serveto demonstrate the ideological processes necessary for un-derstanding such mediation? Patrick Eisenlohr considersthe case of Mauritius, where Hindi has come to serve as aparticularly salient vehicle for the construction of ties be-tween Mauritian Hindus and India. While Hindu Mauritianshardly agree about the significance of such ties as well as therelationship between Hindi and other language varieties,they have underpinning their linguistic practices a possibil-ity that others lack: the minimization of a gap between thepresent and an ancestral past.

Eisenlohr’s introduction presents his understanding ofhow two coherent and contrasting constructions of theMauritian nation can be identified within Mauritius’s so-cial and sociolinguistic complexity. Eisenlohr identifies thetwo constructions via the notion of language ideology, anestablished but still developing realm of inquiry especiallyimportant for its ability to illuminate relationships betweenlinguistic practice and processes of sociocultural formation.Drawing on the work of Michael Silverstein, Eisenlohr in-

vokes the notion of language ideology as metapragmaticsand offers his own definition: “frames that organize the in-dexicality of microlevel interaction in such a way that in-dexical relationships . . . are recognizable as socially mean-ingful events and enable the reading of performative acts asindicative of particular socially locatable identities” (p. 18).Out of the organizing work of such frames emerge whatEisenlohr calls “Little India” and “Creole Island.” “LittleIndia,” the focus of much of the book, is a name for thepossibility that certain signifying practices collapse Indo-Mauritian descent with Hindu concerns and make possi-ble the embodiment of an ancestral past within life in con-temporary Mauritius. Metapragmatic effects are involvedsuch as the understanding of Hindi as an ancestral languagewhen the vast majority of those people who came to Mauri-tius from India were Bhojpuri speakers, a language not gen-erally thought of as ancestral. “Creole island,” in contrast, isa name for signifying practices that do not invoke and re-inforce ancestral origins elsewhere and establishes Mauri-tius as the outer limit of political as well as ancestral affilia-tion. Whereas “Creole Island” has been a fleeting and largelyunsuccessful basis for political formation and cultural cre-ation, the signs of “Little India” can be found in abundance,and increasingly so.

Eisenlohr explores the metapragmatics of “Little India”ethnographically and historically within several realms in-cluding recorded conversations, changing state policies oneducation, television broadcasting, and an annual pilgrim-age in worship of the Hindu god Shiva. Especially rich areEisenlohr’s analyses of talk, whether recorded by him oraccessed through mass media. Through his analyses, hedemonstrates that the label for previous understandings ofinteraction on Mauritius, “Creole–Bhojpuri bilingualism,”fails to include the importance of other varieties and reg-isters and their salience in discursive interaction. For exam-ple, Creole fransise should be considered a register whereinphonological, morphological, and lexical elements can beconstrued as French. Eisenlohr shows that the use of theregister can index the education of the speaker while avoid-ing the disruption of interactional solidarity that a whole-sale switch to French might introduce.

Such metapragmatic effects cannot be entirely pre-supposed, however. Eisenlohr is particularly careful totrace the relationships between variety and register distinc-tions, their invocation within discursive interaction, and themetapragmatic effects that seem to be at issue. For example,he shows that a shift from Creole to Bhojpuri in discursiveinteraction between an Indo-Mauritian speaker and ad-dressee does not necessarily index solidarity. Such a switch,Eisenlohr demonstrates, can emerge in discursive interac-tion as an index of especially firm refusal. At the same time,the peppering of speech with Hindi phonological, morpho-logical, and lexical items is complemented in broadcasting

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media with an avoidance of lexical items of both Creole andPerso-Arabic origin. Such discursive shifts within the me-dia have contributed significantly to a register of Bhojpurithat is associated with Hindu religious contexts, on the onehand, and an ancestral past rooted in Hinduism in India,on the other hand. They are also indicative of what Eisen-lohr terms a “new ethnicization of Bhojpuri” that is rejectedby non-Hindu speakers of the variety (p. 220). The growthin salience of the register through broadcast media, Eisen-lohr explains, has the ironic consequence of a growth inlanguage shift from Bhojpuri to Creole among non-Hinduspeakers because they increasingly perceive Bhojpuri to berepresentative of someone else’s concerns.

A fascinating insight that emerges from Eisenlohr’s dis-cussion of hypercorrection among Bhojpuri–Creole bilin-guals illustrates the care with which the author consid-ers the relationship between sociolinguistic variation andlanguage ideology. However, there is the contrast thatMauritian speakers of Creole see between French and Cre-ole, the first valued as sophisticated in relation to the sec-ond valued as simple. Mauritian speakers of Creole seea parallel distinction between Creole fransise for whichthe presence of an alveo-palatal fricative (s) can serveas an index, and vernacular Creole for which the pres-ence of alveolar fricatives (s) can serve as an index. Eisen-lohr reports that many people explained to him that the“ ‘pointing,’ or slight fronting and tightening . . . of thelips” involved in the production of the alveo-palatal frica-tive “enables one to speak with more clarity and precision”(p. 137). In turn, the same contrast in sound is salient tothe distinction between standard Hindi and Bhojpuri, thefirst appreciated as sophisticated, and the second, in con-trast to the first, considered unrefined. Because the samesound distinction is salient to both pairs, Eisenlohr ar-gues that for Bhojpuri–Creole bilinguals, the sound con-trast is especially significant. In an effort to draw on thevalue indexed by an alveo-palatal fricative, speakers hy-percorrect. Eisenlohr notes, “Frequent examples of thesehypercorrections are: en fas instead of en fas (‘opposite’;French: en face), serf for serf (‘deer’; French: cerf ), appresiefor appresie (‘appreciate’; French: apprecier), sirtu insteadof sirtu (‘above all’; French: surtout), and even morisyeninstead of morisyen (‘Mauritian’; French: mauricien)”(p. 138).

In sum, Little India has much to provide readers in-terested in a number of cultural processes including theformation of diasporic politics; the complex emergenceof group, language ideology, and indexicality; and, morebroadly, the relevance of spatial and temporal dynamicsof constructions of state and nation. The ethnographic de-tails and illustrations of changing policy are rich, and bothare treated consistently with analytic precision. The book iswell worth the effort.

Breast Cancer Genes and the Gendering of Knowledge:Science and Citizenship in the Cultural Context of the“New” Genetics. Sahra Gibbon. Hampshire, UK: PalgraveMacMillan, 2007. 221 pp.

BARBARA L. LEYUniversity of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

Breast Cancer Genes and the Gendering of Knowledge: Sci-ence and Citizenship in the Cultural Context of the “New”Genetics brings together two of the most culturally and po-litically significant health issues of the past two decades—the new genetics and breast cancer. In this book, Sahra Gib-bon examines the cultural production of knowledge sur-rounding the so-called breast cancer genes, BRCA1 andBRCA2. Women with one or both of these genes have an in-creased risk of developing breast cancer at some point intheir lifetime. As part of her research, Gibbon conductedethnography in laboratory, clinical, and advocacy settings.She also interviewed professionals in these fields, as wellas women receiving genetic counseling because of theirpersonal or familial history with breast cancer. These re-search strategies enabled Gibbon to observe the complexentanglements among science, biomedicine, activism, andpatients’ lived experiences that shape the making of ge-netic knowledge and practices. Moreover, the fact that Gib-bon conducted her research in the United Kingdom con-tributes an important perspective to the scholarly literatureon breast cancer culture, which tends to focus on the UnitedStates.

One of the book’s central arguments relates to the co-production of social and scientific realms, especially withregard to the relationship between genetic research andbreast cancer advocacy. Like other recent accounts of breastcancer activism, Gibbon complicates conventional top-down understandings of scientific knowledge productionand dissemination. While many of these accounts empha-size the ways in which breast cancer activists and othercitizens influence treatment policy and research funding,Gibbon’s study also explores scientists’ engagements withadvocacy groups. Particularly interesting is her discussionabout the ways in which scientists feel pressure from breastcancer charities to construct themselves, their researchpractices, and their workspaces in particular ways to meetthe scientific expectations of these organizations and sub-sequently receive research funds from them.

Similarly, Gibbon also argues that gendered values andnorms are embedded within the scientific knowledge andbiomedical practices surrounding the breast cancer genes.That is, the production of such knowledge and practicesgoes hand in hand with the (re)production of normativeconceptions of femininity and womanhood. A particularly

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dominant set of gendered norms that play out in con-texts such as genetic testing protocols, research ethics andpractices, activists’ research fundraising campaigns, andwomen’s personal dealings with genetic counseling relateto female nurturing and maternal caring for future gen-erations. In other words, many scientists, clinicians, advo-cates, and patients construct the value of genetic research,testing, and knowledge not only in terms of protecting thehealth of adult women who carry or may carry the gene butalso in terms of the future daughters and granddaughterswho may be at risk of inheriting their mothers’—and evengrandmothers’—risky genetic legacy.

An especially compelling facet of Breast Cancer Genesand the Gendering of Knowledge is Gibbon’s use of “antici-patory patienthood” as a framework for understanding thesubjectivity of women who carry the breast cancer gene(or who may be at risk for carrying the gene) but do nothave breast cancer and may never develop it. This frame-work highlights how such women are constructed as pa-tients or potential patients, sometimes by the health careprofession and sometimes by themselves. It allows Gibbonto examine how these patients and clinicians grapple withnotions of health, illness, and risk. It also enables her to ex-plore the ethical and practical complexities with regard topredictive medicine, scientific research, and health advo-cacy when knowledge about breast cancer genes is still inthe making and fraught with uncertainties.

Several facets of the book, however, warrant further de-velopment. For example, Gibbon partly situates the grow-ing focus on breast cancer genes in the United Kingdomthrough the lens of contemporary health awareness cam-paigns emphasizing breast cancer prevention. Yet it is notalways clear what she means by prevention. At some points,she seems to uses the term breast cancer prevention to meanthe identification and elimination of the causes of disease(primary prevention). At other times, she uses the term torefer to early detection (secondary prevention). This blur-ring obscures not only some of the public heath and po-litical debates over what constitutes the best approach foraddressing the breast cancer problem but also some of thepolitical and ethical aspects of the growing focus on genet-ics as an organizing principle for breast cancer research andcare. Additionally, Gibbon presents a number of fascinatingexamples of the ways in which women grapple with the de-cision whether to be tested for the breast cancer genes—adecision that has potential physical health, psychological,interpersonal, and ethical implications. A more extensivediscussion of women’s decision-making processes, how-ever, would be quite interesting. Such a discussion wouldadd another perspective on how differently situated indi-viduals make sense of and negotiate genetic testing andknowledge in various ways. It would also provide deeper in-sight into the lived experiences of women with breast can-cer and women at risk (or potentially at risk) for the disease.

Breast Cancer Genes and the Gendering of Knowledgemakes an important contribution to the growing body of lit-eratures relating to the cultural dimensions of breast cancerand to the new genetics. It will be of interest to anthropol-ogists and other researchers interested in these particulartopics, as well as in the cultural and gendered aspects of sci-ence and biomedicine more generally.

The Singing of the New World: Indigenous Voice in the Eraof European Contact. Gary Tomlinson. Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 2007. 200 pp.

STEPHEN HOUSTONBrown University

For an archaeologist, finding a Pre-Columbian whistle car-ries its own special thrill. Go ahead: clean the chamber,unclog the mouthpiece, blow, and presto!, out comes apiercing sound not heard for a thousand years. With fin-ger holes, there is a further chance of scales or two-notetrills, sounding as long as the breath lasts. The experienceleads to reflections as to how this or that note links to oth-ers in melodic sequence or polyphonic texture, or how suchsounds interweave with other instruments. Yet, for Tomlin-son, author of The Singing of the New World, musings ofthis sort are neither interesting nor productive. “Performa-tive reconstruction” is an impossibility given the loss of evi-dence, and “organological analyses” of ancient instrumentswill prove limited at best or dully “materialist [and] archaeo-logical” (p. 7). Instead, Tomlinson urges attention to the “su-perperformative” features of “songwork,” its cushioning insocietal circumstance and its perceived efficacy and mean-ing. Song—the heightened voice, sometimes accompaniedby other instruments—is his special focus, along with thedistinct period, lasting decades, when Europeans encoun-tered New World song, and when that vocalization was re-ciprocally churned, molded, and channeled by Europeanthought and convention.

The book opens by addressing some of Jean-JacquesRousseau’s quainter notions. These include the view thatsong, a primordial cry of passion, predated speech (anidea since resuscitated by neo-Darwinists, contra StevenPinker), along with the related claim that early languageswere figurative rather than literal. Of course, by definition,song concurrent with speech cannot be the same as vo-calization prior to the existence of language. Vast shifts incognitive organization clearly occurred between these twostates. Jacques Derrida—not, perhaps, the most lucid ofwriters—is then enlisted to comment on the vexed relationbetween speech, writing, and self. To Tomlinson, Derrida

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did not go far enough, failing to see the role of song as atandem, potentially wordless counterpart to speech and itsembodiment in writing. In dashing riposte, Tomlinson aimsto “rescue . . . singing in general from the logocentric prison-house guarded over by speech” (p. 11).

The chapter with greatest substance addresses thecantares, or sung performances, in Nahuatl, all recorded al-phabetically in the 16th century. As others have pointed outbefore Tomlinson, metaphor does not fully describe the richand allusive language of the texts. Instead, the cantares re-veal the overlap and sharing of tangible essence—a processbest labeled “consubstantiation,” with apologies to Mar-tin Luther. Sharing or fusion exists between certain things,of which good examples might be song and flowers, thefirst being materialized in the second. Tomlinson pays dueattention to the speech scrolls in Mexican imagery. Longknown to scholarship, scrolls offer physical substance tospeech, yet Tomlinson does not delve into preexisting lit-erature on the subject (e.g., Houston and Taube 2000) oraccept the possibility that such features are simply adjecti-val descriptions of certain kinds of speech and song. Thislast point has been made over the years with respect toMixtec writing and its “flinty,” warlike speech scrolls or vir-gules. His insistence that the cantares and many books inindigenous script are colonial productions is doubtless true.By another light, however, their linkage to Pre-Columbianpractice is likely to be stronger than an overstated insistenceon detachment from earlier periods. The very difficulty ofdating some of the Mexican screenfold “books” underscoresthe problem, as their colonial date remains subject to de-bate. The presence of vocables, non- or semilexical utter-ances described as “phonic crudescence[s]” in this book, ismore persuasively identified as a feature marking the endsof strophes.

The book weakens in the following chapter, shifting tosong and vocalizations among the Tupinamba of Brazil atthe time of contact. Famously cannibalistic, as exemplifiedin the gruesome, 17th-century paintings of Albert Eckhout,the Tupinamba practiced acts of valor by both captor andcaptive. Such deeds culminated at times in the consump-tion of human flesh. For Tomlinson, this provides an op-portunity, not to dig into the full setting of those acts but,rather, to invoke Marcel Mauss and, later, structuralist inter-pretation. He posits a “sung economy” that cycles song andhuman flesh, a “gift” of one resulting, by the freighted, re-ciprocal terms of Mauss, in the “gift” of another (pp. 98–99).Marshall Sahlins, quoted here, correctly recognized that allcannibalism is symbolic, being meshed in systems of mean-ing (what human act is not?). Tomlinson still seems averseto a more basic view: that such song serviced a notionalregime of masculine valor, involving defiance rather thanreciprocity, and that cannibalism may have been a literaland figurative incorporation of a despised enemy (cf. Hous-ton 2001; Houston et al. 2006).

The following chapter, on the Inka, is less an advocatefor a particular theory than a diffuse exploration of song inan imperial context. The Inka songs work as repositories ofimperial memory and exhortations to continuance of con-quest. True: the record of these, in situations of acute stress,Spaniards nearby, must be understood as conditioned bythat setting. But it is too subtle to suggest that the mere actof recording in alphabetic script or early imagery was bothhybridizing and inalterably compromising. What may be aminor matter of hermeneutics or practice is elevated to aposition beyond its weight. For Tomlinson, contact and col-lision led to irreconciliation, a “yawning gap” of peoples andmeanings that could only result, as among the Franciscans,in a sense of mutual betrayal.

If there is one description for this book, it is that theprose is “lush” or, less charitably, “overwritten.” Other termsapply, too: “ornate” or “bravura,” with strings of paragraphsthat seem either to make a finely honed point or to repeatthemselves in slightly variant if clever ways. There is a dis-tinct preference for francophone theory and thought, someforce-fit to the subject at hand. Thus, in temporal order:Montaigne, Rousseau, Derrida, Mauss, de Certeau, Lacan(why not Charles Cooley?), Deleuze and Guattari, Gruzinski,and Desan, leavened by some figures of more transparentrelevance, such as Bierhorst, Cummins, and Zuidema. Du-bious works, as by Joyce Marcus, are said in worrying man-ner to warrant “consummate interest” (p. 9, fn. 1; cf. Coe1993). In fairness, there is commendable ambition through-out, as well as clear evidence that Tomlinson, a creative andcelebrated student of Renaissance music and early opera,has grappled with difficult sources, including several in anindigenous language, classical Nahuatl of central Mexico.Yet a survey that examines songwork among the colonialdescendants of the Aztec, the Tupinamba (Tupi) of earlycontact Brazil, the Inka, and the Sioux, is likely to be gen-eral, only fitfully deep in its penetration of sources, andlashed to summary works, such as Clendinnen, Lockhart,and Soustelle on the Aztec.

A question to pose is, what audience is intended for thisvolume? One composed of specialists, or those, like Tom-linson, with a broader, questing interest in song? The an-swer is firmly the latter, with the proviso that the author hasdrawn valid attention to the broader setting and meaning ofsong. Through a provocative and, in sections, tendentiousvolume, he has awakened a lively sense of what is lost, whatis unknowable, and what specialized scholarship still hopesto reveal.

References cited

Coe, Michael D.1993 Rewriting History: Review of Mesoamerican Writing Sys-

tems: Propaganda, Myth, and History in Four Ancient Civiliza-tions, by Joyce Marcus. Nature 362:705–706.

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Houston, Stephen2001 Decorous Bodies and Disordered Passions: Representa-

tions of Emotion among the Classic Maya. World Archaeology33(2):206–219.

Houston, Stephen, and Karl Taube2000 An Archaeology of the Senses: Perception and Cultural Ex-

pression in Ancient Mesoamerica. Cambridge ArchaeologicalJournal 10(2):261–294.

Houston, Stephen, David Stuart, and Karl Taube2006 The Memory of Bones: Body, Being, and Experience among

the Classic Maya. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Shiv Sena Women: Violence and Communalism in a Bom-bay Slum. Atreyee Sen. Bloomington: Indiana UniversityPress, 2007. 220 pp.

DEEPA S. REDDYUniversity of Houston, Clear Lake

Atreyee Sen’s Shiv Sena Women takes on the critical taskof assessing women’s participation in right-wing Hindu re-gional politics in Mumbai. While many other scholars havewritten copiously on the place of women and gender within“Hindutva” imageries, the emphasis of this body of work hasgenerally been on discursive constructions. The task of en-gaging actual women participants in a sometimes violentand religiously oriented politics, by contrast, has perhapsbeen set aside as a far too uncomfortable prospect for gen-erally secular, left-leaning academics. Sen does not, how-ever, shy away from the challenge that her chosen subjectmatter poses. Although her narrative pauses at many mo-ments of discomfort and, indeed, outright fear of her infor-mants and the powers they wield, she follows intimately thelives of women in the Mahila Aghadi (women’s wing) of theShiv Sena. She rents an apartment close to those of her in-formants; she adapts not only her attire but also her socialhabits to her new circumstances, and in the end she pro-duces an account of Aghadi life that reflects this closenessby being sensitive to its multiple dimensions. Her study isavowedly not a critique of “women’s involvement in vio-lence from a secular or feminist point of view” (p. 9), noreven a “now I loved them, now I hated them” (p. 16) ac-counting of this involvement but, instead, an honest at-tempt to document an Other’s worldview, “the everyday re-alities, the circumstances and the violence in the lives ofSena slum women” (p. 18).

To this end, Sen explores first the processes and shiftsthat brought women into urban areas, into slums, and intothe Shiv Sena’s Mahila Aghadi. The “moral economy of anurban slum” (p. 23), she shows, is first a response to the dis-placements, uncertainties, and anxieties brought on by ur-banization. Violence in this context is not merely or only the

violence enacted by Aghadi women but also the quotidianviolence and abuse to which they are routinely subjected—by employers, husbands, neighbors, and others—as dis-placed and disenfranchised “permanent slum dwellers”and workers (p. 29). The very routinization of violence inthe lives of poor women produces a propensity for “ag-gressive retaliatory or collective violence” (p. 48). Sen is notmoralizing in her analysis of Sena women’s actions; rather,she is keenly aware that her informants sometimes have afairly sophisticated analysis of the conditions of their ownvulnerability (as women, as workers, as members of fam-ilies turned nuclear by migrancy, even as children–sonsin families wracked by violence and separation), of struc-tural violence in the slum, and therefore of what sort of“brute” justice (p. 99) a retaliatory political activism couldwell achieve. One gets a sense of the range of the termviolence in Sen’s writing, and if an ultimately clear defi-nition remains missing, the uses of violence in its manyforms are fully explored: violence forges strategic ties, cre-ates an “umbrella under which personal, familial, commer-cial, and other local scores were settled” (p. 71), for betteror for worse, and provides a means by which to deal force-fully with the exigencies of gendered vulnerability in slumlife. Sen’s association with the Aghadi itself serves to pro-tect her from sexual harassment, so the use of violence to“readjust the mechanisms of power” that frame daily life ishardly without its benefits, even to her as researcher (p. 76).And, yet, the bullying, shaming, and other coercive tac-tics that come packaged with violent behavior frequentlyleave Sen aghast, squirming, and, inevitably, also fearful. Al-though she presents the worldview of Sena women sym-pathetically, her position as outsider—both because theAghadi sends a detective after her and because her ownsensibilities differ from those of her informants—is alwaysclear.

If violence represents a sort of pragmatics for theMahila Aghadi, then much the same is true of “Hindutva.”The anxieties and vulnerabilities of migrant life make as-sociation with the Shiv Sena at first a practical matter; theaffinities with emergent Hindutva rhetorics that are com-parably antioutsider develop later. The Shiv Sena’s “Hin-duness” is known to be far more practically oriented thanthat of other similar organizations (such as the RashtriyaSwayamsevak Sangh [RSS]), and the women’s use of reli-gious ideologies and symbolisms further exemplifies this.Although popular accounts tend to characterize the ShivSena as a baldly Hindu extremist organization, Sen suggeststhat its brand of Hindutva is in fact rather adaptable, evenif somewhat arbitrarily so—a fact that its women cadresclearly find appealing. Sen tells us that women’s stake inviolent communal politics is “in fact born of consciouschoices designed to achieve certain ends exclusively forwomen” (p. 108). So it is not merely Hinduism that is ren-dered instrumental to their politics, but also, interestingly,

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their very affiliation to the Shiv Sena. The Aghadi’s goal isnot to realize a Hindu utopianism but, rather, to perpetuatea struggle that per force creates spaces for the expressionand exercise, however problematic, of gender autonomy.The Aghadi’s politics is therefore at its core a pragmaticsfundamentally concerned with making a strategic “bid forcultural hegemony” (p. 108).

The emphasis on pragmatics, however, although in-valuable, comes at an analytical price: religious convictionsare inevitably undergirded by the somehow more real prac-tical considerations that rewrite power dynamics in theslums. Sen’s representation of the “others” who are her in-terlocutors is astute in its descriptions of them as workers,women, and as cadres, but it shies away from consideringthem as believers. In fact, the problem of how one goesabout studying groups who are not just different but whotrouble our sensibilities is not systematically addressed inthe text, the existence of a fairly extensive ethnographic lit-erature that wrestles with similar issues notwithstanding.Theoretical insights, too, are interspersed through the text,elucidating Sen’s narrative point by point, to be sure, butthe rather-too-frequent recurrence of the phrase “Accordingto [author]” ultimately has the unfortunate effect of cast-ing Sen’s own work as an explication of existing knowledgerather than a theoretical contribution in its own right. ShivSena Women could have been bolder about its own valueand could have done much more to situate itself as anethnography, at the very least to make it a more effectiveteaching text. Even so, the volume is a welcome addition tothe corpus of writing on Hindu–Indian politics and on therole women play in shaping an inherited politics to meettheir given ends.

Gullah Culture in America. Wilbur Cross. Santa Barbara,CA: Prager, 2007. 288 pp.

FRANKLIN O. SMITHThe Richard Stockton College of New Jersey

Like a thoughtful menu, Gullah Culture in America servesthe appetites of different readers. For lay readers or tourists,there are discussions of festivals and celebrations, historicalsites, and of arts and crafts to be found within the GullahCorridor, which stretches along the coastline from north-east Florida to Wilmington, North Carolina. This work alsosupports the interests of African diaspora enthusiasts, par-ticularly those focused on North America. Gullah Culture inAmerica provides historical and theoretical frameworks forGullah studies, which should be useful to undergraduate aswell as graduate readers.

There is some redundancy in repeat referencing of theiconic role of the Penn Center in the life and history of theGullah people; but the practice is not so obtrusive as to marthe work’s sweet flavors and contributions. Offered like a 12-course meal with each chapter starting with a taster or sum-mary page, Gullah Culture in America has a concise fore-word by Dr. Emory Campbell, the former CEO of the PennCenter. Among other factors, he outlines the uniqueness oflanguage, customs, food, crafts, artifacts, religiosity, and theworldview of the Gullah people; in doing so, he joins readersto their strengths and struggles.

Using a measured, warm, and conversational writingstyle, Cross takes us inside Gullah society for a rare, in-timate, and voyeuristic experience. Chapter 1, “WelcomeHome,” introduces the connection between the Gullah andSierra Leone, and the subsequent voyage of a Gullah del-egation to this West African nation. This improbable re-union was the work product of American historian JosephOpala, who used historical records to establish a direct link-age between Gullah and Sierra Leone families. In 1989, aPenn Center delegation arrived in Freetown, Sierra Leone.They were greeted with a frenzied chorus of “Wi gladi fohsi un” (“We glad to see you”) and “Tun roun ya le mi seewho yo da” (“Turn around and let me see who you are”) thatsounded like back in Gullah land. The closeness betweenlanguages—the Krio spoken in Sierra Leone and Gullah—was common to the ear, the people’s manner and aestheticscommon to the eye, and, later, the “hoppin’ John” servedwas common to the palate.

Chapter 2, “Catching the Learning,” traces the estab-lishment of the Penn School to educate the newly freed in1862. Told primarily through the eyes of its founders LauraM. Towne and Ellen Murray, the Penn School served a piv-otal role during the turbulences of the Civil War in support-ing the newly freed peoples’ impulse to freedom and self-reliance.

In “A Quantum Leap,” chapter 3, as well as in chap-ter 4, “Gullah Culture in America,” the effects and the con-tinuing impact of the loss of the isolation that served toenable cultural retention and homogeneity among Sea Is-landers are explored. Chapter 5, “Hallelujah,” is a jour-ney into Gullah religiosity, looking at old plantation praisehouses, churches, the use of shouts, music, and song, andrenewal rituals that fortify and ground the Gullah in the be-lief that “Yes, Lord, we able.”

Chapter 6, “Healing and Folk Medicine,” offers thaton arrival the Africans possessed extensive knowledge ofholistic healing and the practice of medicine, and that ge-ographic isolation and topography allowed the practice tolive. “The Mellifluous Gullah Tongue,” chapter 7, surveysGullah metaphysical orientations and wit through folktales,parables, proverbs, poetry, and short stories—from Aesop’sFables to Uncle Remus to Bre’er Rabbit. “Geography,” chap-ter 8, takes the reader through the Gullah corridor visiting

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locations both luxurious and rustic, of historical impor-tance and provincial, where echoes of the past haunt thepresent, where the names of places sing on the tongue likeWadmalaw and Edisto, or Coosaw, Dataw, and Daufuskie.“Feasting the Stomach,” chapter 9, looks at Gullah foodcrafts; therein, the rich vibrant history of Gullah food cul-ture and dishes are offered so vividly that one can almosttaste the words.

Chapter 10, “Festivals and Celebrations,” reviews thegrowth of and role played by the Penn Center in the ex-pansion of festivals, celebrations, seminars, heritage events,and related entrepreneurial ventures highlighting fine art,artifacts, and crafts within the Gullah corridor. Chapter 11,“Music, Song and Dance,” runs deep among the Gullah,a tradition brought from Africa and alive today, a tradi-tion sometimes found in the evening under an old oak treewhere folks gather to eat a piece of fish on a plate of riceand okra, with music and singing in the air and the youngones dancing by, a revitalization ritual that got many a soulto the next day. Chapter 12, “Roots,” chronicles the journeysof “Gullah delegations” to Sierra Leone in 1989, 1997, and2005. Building on the seminal research of Lorenzo Turnerand others, Joseph Opala’s work magnifies the historical re-lationship between Sierra Leone and the Gullah. It is a longrelationship running in two directions, a relationship thatblushes with promise.

Gullah Culture in America is a wonderful reading ex-perience offering sufficient historical references and theo-retical frames to be of value to the serious student of cul-tural studies without sacrificing its utility to the lay reader ofmore secular interests. The work is a highly referenced his-torical contribution that also enables the Gullah to tell theirown stories in their own voices. Gullah Culture in Americashould be a mainstay in many cultural studies collectionsand a prized artifact on many a family’s coffee table.

The Debated Lands: British and American Representationof the Balkans. Andrew Hammond. Cardiff: University ofWales Press, 2007. 328 pp.

KRISTEN GHODSEEBowdoin College

Andrew Hammond’s The Debated Lands is a rich textualanalysis of over 250 years of British and American travelwriting on the Balkan Peninsula. It begins with Victorianimaginings of South European savagery in the early 19thcentury and ends with modern Western travelogues datingas recently as 2006. Hammond’s substantial work followsin the footsteps of Maria Todorova’s 1997 book, Imagining

the Balkans, in which the Bulgarian historian identifies theWestern tendency to what she calls “Balkanism,” follow-ing Edward Said’s paradigmatic concept of “Orientalism.”Hammond himself claims that his book is a corrective toTodorova’s, and he hopes to show that “despite dominanttendencies, the region has entered the Western imaginationas a far more unstable and mutable concept (as a series of“Balkanisms,” as it were), with British writings in particu-lar expressing an ambivalence to the continental other thatdoes much to undermine the [Balkanist] discourse’s claimto authority” (p. 8).

Hammond’s thesis is that both British and Americantravel writing on the Balkans ultimately reflect the foreignpolicy objectives of the imperialist Western powers. Draw-ing heavily on Foucault’s concept of “power–knowledge”and Derridean “deconstruction,” Hammond posits that dif-ferent instantiations of the discourse of Balkanism all ul-timately served to justify foreign meddling in the region.“Through evoking in foreign cultures the spirit of radi-cal otherness, of chaos, backwardness and poverty, west-ern travel texts produce justification for the economic andpolitical mores—democracy, capitalism and liberalism—which underlie western society, entrenching the form ofpower in currency in that society and valorizing its politicaldominance in the international arena” (p. 12). This particu-lar imagining of the Balkans became a tool not only for jus-tifying British and American imperialism, but it was also animportant social lever through which local domestic pop-ulations wearying of Enlightenment rationality and hyper-industrialization could be kept in check. “The Balkans were. . . on the very ground of Europe, but formed a Europe gonehorribly wrong, a realm where travelers found such a starkcombination of similarity and difference that it was as if thereverse side of their enlightened rationality had risen up tohaunt them. And in this lay their intrinsic value to westernpower” (p. 14).

The book is divided into three parts, consisting of threechapters each. The first section deals with the period be-tween 1850 and 1914, wherein the dominant imagery ofthe Balkans in British travelogues was that of poverty, bar-barism, ruthlessness, drunkenness, lust, and fierce ethnicallegiances. The first two chapters of this section consist ofdetailed textual analysis of a wide variety of travel writingsby British subjects, which ultimately legitimate the machi-nations of their homeland on the Balkans. The third chap-ter examines the autobiographical aspect of the narratives,and how constructions of the rational and orderly Britishself were contrasted to the wild and untamed peoples of theSoutheast.

The second section of the book is where there is themost distinct break with Todorova’s work on Balkanism.Here, Hammond cleverly illustrates an interesting about-face in the subtext of new British works and the Americantravel writing that was also circulating widely in Britain at

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the time. In this new vision of the Balkans, one precipitatedby the Balkan wars of independence and the British alliancewith the Serbs during World War I, the region suddenly be-came a fantasy world of untrammeled natural landscapes,home to noble peasants and soldiers. Hammond explains:

Weary of western modernity, travelers were now find-ing in this previously depraved corner of Europe . . . apeace, harmony, vivacity and pastoral beauty in utmostcontrast to the perceived barrenness of the West, re-ceiving benefits that ranged from personal rejuvena-tion to outright revelation. According to this alternativebalkanism, violence had disappeared from the Balkans,savagery had been tamed, and the extreme backward-ness that was once the gauge of deficiency had be-come the measure by which the region was extolled.[p. 110]

The author does a painstakingly thorough job of closelyreading an extensive number of texts in this period (ac-cording to Hammond, more travelogues were producedbetween 1915 and 1939 than in the preceding threecenturies).

This new imagining of the Balkans was so pervasivethat it influenced Western perceptions of the region wellinto the Cold War. The final chapter of this second sectionreflects on the changing worldviews of the travel writersthemselves. Hammond demonstrates how the growing per-sonal disaffection with modernity in the West fed into thisnew construction of the Balkans as an idyllic refuge from themadness of civilization: “the upheavals of war, urbaniza-tion, industrialization and technological innovation, com-bined with the growth of psychoanalysis, had dislocated the

individual’s relation to the world, casting doubt on that sta-ble, coherent model of selfhood expressed in much Victo-rian realism” (pp. 170–171).

The final section, and, perhaps, the most compellingfrom an ethnographic perspective, is Hammond’s examina-tion of the period between 1939 and 2006. The first chapterin this section deals specifically with the Cold War discourseon the Balkans, which was still relatively positive comparedto the earlier Victorian and Edwardian periods. In the sec-ond chapter, “The Return to Denigration,” Hammond pro-vides an intricate analysis of a plethora of new British andAmerican travelogues. These once again constructed theBalkans as a cesspool of intransigent ethnic hatreds andirrationalities that easily boiled over into the premodernmadness of warfare, mass rape, and genocide. The finalchapter is another reflection on the writers themselves, thistime a troupe of jaded postmodernists, disdainful of bothhome and abroad.

The material presented in the book is quite compre-hensive with the largest number of pages dedicated to theclose readings of the selected texts. The book is thus idealfor advanced graduate seminars in cultural studies, south-eastern European studies, literature courses dealing withthe travelogue genre or, more broadly, any anthropology orethnographic methods course interested in the problem of“writing culture.”

Reference cited

Todorova, Maria1997 Imagining the Balkans. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Documents

Subfloor Pits and the Archaeology of Slavery in Colonial Virginia by Patricia M. Samford