Ethnography and the Historical Imagination by John Comaroff; Jean ComaroffReview by: Karen Tranberg HansenThe American Historical Review, Vol. 99, No. 1 (Feb., 1994), pp. 194-195Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2166184 .

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194 Reviews of Books

the triumph of Zionism, only two centers of Jewish life in the modern period matter: Israel and the United States.

Eisenstadt's polemical intent is further revealed by his insistence that even after emancipation in the nineteenth century, the majority of Western Euro- pean Jews continued to believe that they were living in a state of Galut, or exile, without offering a shred of evidence for this claim (p. 102). To be sure, he concedes that the integration of American Jews has been far more successful than that of their European counterparts, due to the different nature of national- ism in the United States. But he speculates that American Judaism, too, despite its vibrancy, will likely disappear as a result of assimilation. Elsewhere, Eisenstadt endorses the position that only in Israel do "Jews control their own collective destiny" (p. 274), and "only in Israel can Jews be sure to find a place of refuge" (p. 276). Finally, Eisenstadt repeatedly claims that Zionism and the creation of Israel mark the "Jewish re-entry into History" (p. 282 and pp. 52-53, 56, 175, 217). Although such metaphysical and tele- ological readings of Jewish history have been com- mon in the past, not only among Christian scholars but among nineteenth-century German Jewish histo- rians and Zionist ideologists as well, these views today have largely been relegated to theologians and ideo- logues. Eisenstadt, unfortunately, ignores this trend. As a result, his work is profoundly ahistorical and contributes little to our understanding of the actual Jewish experience.

It must also be noted, scholarship aside, that this book is poorly written and badly edited. It is filled with grammatical and typographical errors and marred by the use of words that cannot be found in the dictionary ("solariological" [p. 73]; "minoritarian" [p. 273]; "colonizatory" [p. 228]). Moreover, the text is repetitious, and the various sections are woven together in a patchwork fashion, perhaps reflecting the fact that the book grew out of a series of lectures delivered over several years. Furthermore, the sec- tions are of uneven length and depth: whereas some chapters span centuries, others cover only a few years in unnecessary detail. Finally, except for the chapters on Zionism, contemporary Israel, and American Ju- daism, the scholarship is out of date. In the end, whatever interesting information can be gleaned from this book can already be found in the author's numerous earlier works.

VICKI CARON Brown University

JOHN COMAROFF and JEAN COMAROFF. Ethnography and the Historical Imagination. (Studies in the Ethnographic Imagination.) Boulder, Colo.: Westview. 1992. Pp. xiv, 337. Cloth $55.00, paper $18.95.

This essay collection advocates a "historical and socio- logical imagination" of a neomodernist anthropol-

ogy capable of doing ethnographies of, and in, our contemporary world. Such an anthropology distin- guishes itself from postmodernism by situating ques- tions about the relationship between power and meaning in the dialectical interplay of hegemonic forms and practices. Turning anthropology's ma- ligned preoccupation with exoticism on itself, the authors invite us to examine the historical intercon- nections between the West and the rest together.

John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff examine this mutually determining encounter in two related ways. First, and this. sustains the bulk of their presentation, they investigate different aspects of the encounter between British imperialism, especially nonconform- ist missionaries, and Tswana-speaking Africans in what is now South Africa with special focus on the first half of the nineteenth century. Second, they explore the construction of consciousness, especially on the part of the colonized.

Readers not familiar with the Comaroffs' work might start with "The Long and the Short of It" for an overview of social organizational practices among Tswana-speaking peoples and their reactions to change. "Images of Empire, Contests of Conscience" is a fitting companion that investigates tensions within the colonial enterprise, especially between missionar- ies, the colonial state, and settlers. "Goodly Beasts, Beastly Goods" casts new light on longstanding an- thropological questions about the special place of cattle in some African societies. Other essays explore both the interaction between nineteenth-century medicine and the colonial project and the body as an order of signs shaped by a cultural logic specific to its bearers at a particular moment of history.

Of special note is "The Madman and the Migrant." In this particularly suggestive discussion of conscious- ness, the authors invite us to look for its expression, not at the locus of work, but in fragments of repre- sentations in everyday life, in this case the idiosyn- cratic attire of a mentally ill man and the vernacular reminiscences of a retired migrant. Symbolic activity and implicit language draw on shared messages about the tensions between setswana ("the ways of the Tswana") and sekgoa ("European ways"), lamenting a lost world of freedom from the labor market and imagining a cultural landscape where "great works" implied a meaningful world of hierarchically cooper- ating units. "The Colonization of Consciousness" ex- amines the battle between missionaries and the Tswana over the meaning of water and its control, of work and its redemptive effects, and of language, translation, and the potency of words. The hegemony of the new forms of signification was never complete. Setswana ideas of power, work, and the art of speak- ing produced a historical consciousness that offered the Tswana conceptual mastery over their changing world.

The last essay, "Homemade Hegemony," pulls many strands of the previous arguments together.

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW FEBRUARY 1994

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General 195

Focusing on domesticity, a class and time-bound Western concept, and missionary attempts to instill it among the Tswana, this discussion contrasts two differently constructed notions of domesticity and suggests that colonialism, especially colonial evange- lism, played a vital part in the formulation of modern domesticity both in Britain and overseas. Drawing out the implication of this, the Comaroffs bring their discussion full circle, returning the challenge to us to interrogate the encounter with non-Europeans and the development of Western modernity together.

This book is arduous to read but good to think with. American historians of Native American, Afri- can-American, and European interactions will find much to challenge their thinking about colonial situ- ations, metropolitan power, and the various forms their interrelationships take. The differences that exist in such relationships prompt questions about the extent to which the Comaroffs' perspective is embed- ded in the nineteenth-century peculiarities of the South African situation. Historians of precapitalist and early colonial South Africa will want to qualify their characterization of "the Tswana world." Schol- ars of colonial culture will question the centrality that the authors attribute to the Protestant missionary factor in the colonial encounter. They might have hinted at situations where colonizers confronted dif- ferent hegemonic ideas, such as in many North and West African Islamic societies, or referred to differ- ently organized colonial polities, such as the French or the Portuguese, or even considered colonialisms outside of Africa, such as North America, and brought the implications of such considerations to bear on exploring the many faces of power colonial encounters present.

These qualifications do not diminish the usefulness of this book or its importance. Its efficacy lies in the challenge the Comaroffs pose. Their rich suggestions will engage anthropologists and other social scientists in teasing out dynamics in colonial and postcolonial encounters only alluded to here, or which explore supporting or contending strands of the argument in space-time terms that extend beyond this work. Their compelling argument for a historical and sociological imagination lies in their ability, first, to make us grapple with their preoccupation with the early nine- teenth-century encounter between British noncon- formist missionaries and Tswana speakers in South Africa and, second, to bring these insights to bear imaginatively on raising questions about the construc- tion of culture and history elsewhere. The Comaroffs' advocacy for a neomodernist anthropology will enter debates that are influencing the terms on which a critical anthropology of our contemporary world is being constituted. Social scientists will have to reckon with their suggestive interpretations of the grand questions of sociological inquiry: the nature of cul- ture, consciousness, and power, and the ways in

which the construction of such relations represent history.

KAREN TRANBERG HANSEN

Northwestern University

JAMES C. SCOTT. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. Paperback edition. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1992. Pp. xviii, 251. $14.00.

James C. Scott is a political scientist whose anthropo- logical field studies have won him the admiration of historians. In this book, he seeks to construct a general model of "the arts of resistance" of subordi- nate groups. He draws on the works of sociologists, novelists, psychologists, and political scientists and takes inspiration from postmodernist literary critics, but the bulk of his material is historical.

Scott's premise is that "Every subordinate group creates, out of its ordeal, a 'hidden transcript' that represents a critique of power spoken behind the back of the dominant" (p. x) and contests the "public transcript" of power relations. The two transcripts mirror one another, inasmuch as "the terrain of dominant discourse is the only plausible arena of struggle" (p. 103), which ensures "that the hidden and public transcripts remain mutually intelligible" (p. 135). Scott's insistence that subordinates are not capable of autonomous discourse is at odds with his earlier finding that peasants are relatively free of the hegemony of the elite and with his attempt to acquit subordinates of the charge of false consciousness (pp. 70 and following); he maintains that the face of the peasant or slave does not grow to fit the mask of submission. It is also at odds with the experience of those societies, including most of Europe until mod- ern times, where the dominant and the subordinate did not have a common language or culture.

At the outset, Scott asserts that "to the degree structures of domination can be demonstrated to operate in comparable ways, they will ... elicit reac- tions and patterns of resistance that are also broadly comparable." He goes on to warn the reader that in delineating "broad patterns" he "deliberately over- look[s] the great particularity of each and every form of subordination" (p. xi). Neglect of the particular, however, makes it difficult to demonstrate the com- parability of the subordinate groups that appear, sometimes fleetingly, in his text.

Scott's loci classici of subordination are "studies of slavery [primarily in the United States], serfdom [primarily in Russia], and caste subordination ... on the premise that the relationship of discourse to power would be most sharply etched where the divergence between ... the public transcript and the hidden transcript was greatest" (p. x). When the spirit moves him, however, he invokes, the experience of industrial workers, subjects of authoritarian regimes, students, women, and, from time to time, Tamil laborers in the Caribbean, Lollards, Norwegian pris-

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW FEBRUARY 1994

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