322 American Anthropologist [71, 19691

do so, Don Juan may have identified himself with the (under certain circumstances) pres- tigious label of Yaqui.

Insofar as the reader is informed by this book, the teachings of Don Juan exist in a cultural limbo. Within the bounds of this se- rious limitation, it is nevertheless an excel- lent piece of work. One hopes that Cas- taneda will cultivate his exceptional gift for writing expressive prose and continue to em- ploy it in his further contributions to an- thropology.

A Study of Slum Culture: Backgrounds for LA VIDA. OSCAR LEWIS. With the as- sistance of Douglas Butterworth. New York: Random House, 1968. xiv + 240 pp., 50 tables, appendix, selected bibli- ography, index. $7.00 (cloth).

Reviewed by MORRIS FREILICH Northeastern University

For many years now Professor Lewis has been active in research and writings that have made a difference; they have added new dimensions to anthropological method- ology, increased our stock of concepts- such as the culture of poverty-through which we can better understand given cul- tural complexes, and presented important additions to the ethnographic record, partic- ularly with respect to India, Mexico, and Puerto Rico. A Study of Slum Culture gives a very clear indication of the type of re- search that has formed the basis for Profes- sor Lewis’ works and has made his valuable contributions possible.

The design of this research and its goals are described as follows:

The research design of this project called for a comparative analysis of one hundred low income Puerto Rican families in New York City. The major objectives of the study were to contribute to our understandings of urban slum life in San Juan; to examine the prob- lems of adjustment and the changes in the family life of immigrants to New York; to develop a comparative literature on intensive family case studies; to devise new field methods and new ways of organizing and presenting family data; and finally to test and refine the concept of a culture of poverty by a comparison of my Mexican and Puerto Rican data [p. 31. Like his book Village Life in Northern

India (with 47 illustrations and 32 tables),

A Study of Slum Culture provides ample de- scriptive statistics (50 tables). The data cover housing characteristics (size of house- holds, household composition), educational achievement (school years completed, school attendance, etc.) , occupations, and family income of low-income Puerto Rican families from San Juan slums and their relatives in New York. Also included are data on pat- terns of migration and the process of adjust- ment in New York.

Taken by itself, the book makes rather dull reading, particularly if one approaches it with anticipations based on the author’s earlier writings: Life in a Mexican Village: Tepoztlan Restudied and Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Pov- erty. However, the book is meant, as its sub- title clearly indicates, as a companion reader to La Wdu, whose five households formed part of this sample of 150 families. A Study of Slum Culture adequately meets the lim- ited goals that its author set for this work.

Die Aharaibu-Zndiuner in Nordwest-Brasi- lien. FRANZ KNOBLOCH. Foreword by Wil- helm Saake. Collectanea Instituti Anthro- pos. 1 St. Augustin bei Bonn: Anthropos Instituts, n.d. 189 pp., 10 figures, 12 photographs, 3 maps, 1 foldout genealogy, 14 word lists. DM38 (paper).

Reviewed by TERENCE TURNER University of Chicago

This volume is the first of a new series to be published under the auspices of the An- thropos Institute, the purpose of which is to preserve and disseminate ethnographic data gathered by anthropologically untrained ob- servers such as missionaries, travelers, and administrative officials. The author of the present volume is a Salesian missionary, rather vaguely described in the foreword as having spent “many years” among the Aha- raibu and as having had “an opportunity to learn the language and culture of the Aha- raibu like that of few researchers” (whether Fr. Knobloch actually possesses a working knowledge of the language remains un- stated, although his book gives clear evi- dence of extensive linguistic knowledge).

The Aharaibu are a group of four com- munities of the Waica or Yanomamo linguis- tic stock located in the extreme southwest corner of the territory of this group on the

Book Reviews 323

Venezuelan-Brazilian border in the area of the Rio Cauaboris. Most of the data on which the book is based were collected in one of the four communities, a village with a population of 125, where the mission was founded in 1953.

The book consists of a comprehensive ethnographic inventory of Aharaibu culture. There is a useful introductory chapter on tribal names and history, an apparently ex- haustive chapter on material culture, and a chapter on “spiritual culture” that contains accounts of magical and medical practices, religious concepts, songs, and a variety of “linguistic usages” such as naming practices, color categories, numeration, and forms of interpersonal address and behavior. There is a separate chapter on myths, consisting of 35 stories or accounts of mythical beings. Many of these appear to be abbreviated summaries, and no vernacular texts are given. The final chapter, entitled “Word Lists,” gives some syntactic information, such as conjugational paradigms and per- sonal pronouns, as well as very extensive lists of terms for plants, animals, astronomi- cal and meteorological phenomena, diseases, and so forth.

The chapter on social organization, “Family and Sib,” includes material of the greatest interest, but there are numerous in- stances of confusing presentation or outright misinterpretation of data. Fr. Knobloch gives brief accounts of kinship, marriage and family structure, village composition and political organization, division of labor by sex and age, child rearing, economy and property, the girls’ initiation ceremony, and death practices. His material on village com- position and kinship is admirably detailed but, to a considerable degree. is rendered useless by faulty presentation. He gives a list of thc names of all the inhabitants of the mission village with literal translations of their meaning in Yanomamo, a house-by- house census, a village plan with the names of the inhabitants of each house indicated, and a partial genealogy. The genealogy is laid out so as to show the descendants of a single deceased individual, and the relation- ships of the spouses of the descendants are not indicated. The sex of the offspring (some already married) of the first genera- tion desccndants is also not indicated on the

genealogy. The village plan indicates the sex of every individual, but over one-fourth of the names on the plan are different from those in the house census and the genealogi- cal table, often because Portuguese or Teu- tonic sobriquets have been substituted (e.g., a woman named Monarima figures in the village plan as “Hermelinda”) . Since sex and genealogical relations are not indicated in the house census or name list, it is often impossible to cross-check the names, and the potential usefulness of the data presented is thereby diminished. The point is important because a close analysis of the genealogical and census data has a direct bearing on sev- eral rather surprising claims made by Kno- bloch that conflict with those of other recent students of Waica-Yanomamo groups. For example, Knobloch asserts that the Aha- raibu are “matrilocal” in terms of village res- idence (p. 77), even though six of the eight married males indicated on his genealogy are still living in the village of their de- ceased father. His discussion of local group exogamy (p. 78) is impossibly confused, but in this case the difficulties mentioned pre- vent the use of the census data to clarify the issue. He notes with surprise the striking dis- proportion of males to females (130 to 90, respectively), but attributes it solely to “the greater resistance of boys” to disease (p. 88). Female infanticide has been reported by Chagnon (“Effects of War on Social Structure,” p. 139 in War: The Anthropol- ogy of Armed Conflict and Aggression, Harris, Fried, and Murphy, eds., Natural History Press, New York 1968) as a fre- quent practice among the Yanomamo groups he studied, and it seems overwhelmingly probable that Knobloch simply failed to dis- cover it among the Aharaibu (an indication that the Aharaibu may have been equally successful in concealing other aspects of their social life that they assumed would be offensive to a missionary). , This is an extremely useful ethnographic document, and its value is greatly enhanced by the large number of anecdotes and case histories with which Knobloch illustrates his points. I have pointed out certain deficien- cies in the presentation of the sociological data more as an indication to the editors of the series than as a criticism of Fr. Kno- bloch. Dr. Wilhelm Saake, the director of the

324 American Anthropologist [71, 19691

Anthropos Institute, apologizes in the fore- word for deficiencies in the published manu- script, citing, among other things, the illegi- bility of the manuscript and “bad postal conditions” that inhibited communication with Knobloch‘s remote mission outpost.

I would submit that the editors of a series such as the projected Anthropos collection of ethnographic documents have a special responsibility for supplying the critical and analytical acumen their untrained authors presumably lack, in order to insure that the documents they publish will be maximally useful to the scholarly public. The delays caused by the Venezuelan postal service would have been far outweighed, in the present case, by the improvements that might have been made by a more patient and critical job of editing.

Die Erde in Vorstellungswelt und Kultprak- tiken der sudanischen Volker. JURGEN ZWERNEMANN. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 1968. ix + 545 pp., foldout map, tables, 2 appendices, orthographical notes, bibliography, index. DM80

Reviewed by THOMAS 0. BEIDELMAN New York University

This dissertation from Tubingen Univer- sity surveys the concept of earth and its re- lated customs and beliefs over a large area of Africa termed “the Sudan”; it contains an immense amount of information drawn from about a thousand papers and mono- graphs. Unfortunately, the results are not commensurate with the labor. There is no attempt to advance any analytical theories or to explain the data. The author cites none of the classic French works that have been the foundation for our understanding of belief systems in preliterate societies (Durk- heim, Mauss, Hertz, L6vy-Bruhl, Hubert, van Gennep, Granet), nor any of the theo- retical works that have so profoundly influ- enced contemporary anthropological thought in this field (e.g., Lkvi-Strauss, Leach, Doug- las, Turner, etc.). He writes much in the manner of a Victorian armchair anthropolo- gist; to be sure his data are infinitely richer, but his approach remains essentially descrip- tive and unsociological.

This presentation seriously limits any use a scholar may make of the many facts pro-

(paper).

vided. In his attempt to cover about half of sub-Saharan Africa, the author fails to con- sult extensively all of the sources for any one of the societies he reports, so that none of his appraisals may be considered defini- tive for a specific society. Even more basic flaws impair this work, however; the geo- graphical area for study, labeled “the Sudan,” is never explained in terms of any set of defining criteria or a theoretical prob- lem. As he uses the term, it includes all of the area south of the Sahara and north of Bantu-speaking societies, from Senegal to Ethiopia. This includes such widely diverse societies as the Senufo, Talensi, Mossi, Dogon, Bambara, Kono, Mende, Ashanti, Baule, GB, Ewe, Yoruba, Ibo, Tiv, Jukun, Madi, Lugbara, Azande, Nuba, Nuer, Acho- li, Masai, the pagan Galla, the Cameroon grassland peoples, the Nigerian plateau peo- ples, etc. The area spans societies of vastly different social organizations, language stocks, history, physical environments, and economies. It is extremely difficult to see any possible theoretical point served by this categorization. Furthermore, the author pre- sents his material both by topic and by geo- graphical area. Chapters are devoted to such themes as “Earthchiefs and Earthpriests,” “Rules and Prohibitions Regarding the Earth,” “Ancestors and the Earth,” etc. Each of these chapters is in turn subdivided into regional sections, so that the author scans the data within each topic, moving eastward from Senegal through Nigeria to southwestern Ethiopia and northern Kenya, society by society. Each society usually re- ceives little more than a few sentences, though a few of the richly reported societies such as the Dogon, Nuer, and Bambara, may sometimes receive several pages. At the end of each chapter the author tries to ab- stract and summarize these ethnographic features. But his conclusions amount to little more than digests of the facts which have preceded; for example, in his conclusion to his chapter on the earth in cosmology and myth, he notes that earth myths are asso- ciated with incest among some groups but provides no further comment. He never mentions Middleton, Leach, or Uvi-Strauss’ analyses of mythical incest and its relation to notions of space and time and to a possi- ble resolution, intellectually, of certain ideo-