Book Reviews 87

equally naive, for this is to deny the physical and neu-rological bases of cognition and perception entirely" (p.60). Obeyesekere doubts that Hawaiians could havemistaken European ships for Lono's canoe and that theycould have perceived someone who did not speak theirlanguage as one of their gods. The dirty, hungry sailorsfrom "Britanee" could hardly have appeared to be thegod Lono's companions. Furthermore, Hawaiians cor-rectly perceived that Cook's crew introduced venerealdisease to the islands, whereas Lono was the god offertility.

To believe that the Hawaiians perceived Cook as theirgod Lono, despite all the evidence to the contrary, is tobelieve that they were incapable of "practical rational-ity" (a term Obeyesekere borrows from Weber). Obeye-sekere observes that the culture-bound native is aEuropean invention. He states that, "the fact that myuniverse is a culturally constituted behavioral environ-ment does not mean I am bound to it in a way thatrenders discrimination impossible" (p. 21). Sri Lankans,Hawaiians, and other Others are quite capable of per-ceiving and responding practically to a changing world.Given unequal power relations, they have had nochoice but to attend to European ways. Rather, it isanthropologists who are likely to see the world accord-ing to the rules of "stereotypic reproduction" (p. 58). AsObeyesekere observes, "if Kamehameha were an an-thropologist, he would continue to practice human sac-rifices" (p. 20).

This book is an example of postcolonial (versus post-modern) anthropology. It follows Said's Orientalism inexposing the colonial contexts in which the Europeandiscourse of the Other operates. Like the work of TrinhT. Minh-Ha and Arjun Appadurai, it critiques and trans-gresses anthropological boundaries—in this case, theboundary posed between the scientific and the savagemind. Also, Obeyesekere, like Gayatri Spivak and otherpostcolonial critics, consistently reflects on the politicalcontext of his own scholarly production. To be sure,these are some of the very same characteristics that aresupposed to mark postmodern anthropology. The dif-ference, however, lies precisely in the "practical ration-ality" that imbues postcolonial, not postmodern,discourse.

There is an elegant parallel between Obeyesekere'stheories and his methods. His theory of Hawaiian"practical rationality" is doubled in the "practical ra-tionality" of his methodology. Like the ancient Hawai-ians of his analysis, Obeyesekere is no slave topreexisting categories, but proves himself unusuallyadept at "assessing] the implications of a problem interms of practical criteria" (p. 19). In contrast to Sahlins,who is faulted for deliberately distorting quoted mate-rial, for letting structuralist theory supplant the criticalevaluation of the sources, and for achieving narrative

closure at the expense of responsible scholarship (inother words, of engaging in "immaculate conception"in the scholarly sense), Obeyesekere avoids buying intoany master narrative. He repeatedly calls attention tothe evidence (and lack thereof), which makes even hisown interpretations problematic.

Ethnography, History, andImagination

John and Jean Comaroff. Ethnography and the HistoricalImagination. Westview Studies in the EthnographicImagination. Boulder: Westview Press, 1992.337 pp. $55(cloth); $18.95 (paper).

E. PAUL DURRENBERGER

Department of AnthropologyUniversity of IowaIowa City, IA 52242

The prestige of the Tswana of southern Africa wasbased on the independence of the men; that is, on men'scontinual maneuvering in city and chief-centered hier-archies of agnatic kinsmen so as to gain support bymaking others dependent by loans of cattle. Cattle con-stituted a surer form of wealth than the dispersed andseasonal arid-zone agriculture of the women, whichwas organized around egalitarian matrilineal connec-tions of solidarity. When a man ceased to controlenough wealth to be independent, he became a client tohis benefactor who could command his labor. To en-hance prestige, men married their father's brother'sdaughters, blurred the lines between matrilineal andpatrilineal, rendered kinship an inoperable rhetoric,and left everything open to negotiation. When theheads of households were unambiguously ranked, ma-trilineal connections were emphasized; when they weremore equal, contesting for status, agnatic dimensionswere salient.

These dynamics worked themselves out in variousways in different locales at different times. Sometimescities flourished with emphasis on agnatic relationshipsof competition and hierarchy, and sometimes they lan-guished with the emphasis on matrilineal egalitarianrelations of mutual support.

Into this picture of the South Africa of the 1920sshould be added marauding bands of displaced warri-ors in the wake of Shaka Zulu's conquests, a Britishcolonial regime on the coast striving to expand indirectrule, Boer settlers on their great trek to reestablish slav-ery and British missionaries. From the understandingsand misunderstandings, negotiations and renegotia-

88 Anthropology and Humanism Volume 18, Number 2

tions, guns and plowshares, was fashioned some kindof history not only for the Southern Tswana people butalso for the British.

In Britain, the lower orders of clergy provided exitpositions for artisans or peasants who were climbing toambiguous if not gentry stature in the developing capi-talist class system. They saw themselves as exemplarsof a category of free individuals bettering themselvesby hard work and engaging in gainful production for amarket ruled by a king in an empire of God. For them,enlightened self-interest in a free market informed byreason, method, science, and technology was identifiedwith personal and universal progress and enlighten-ment. They were committed to an image of a preindus-trial life from a memory of green valleys before theblackening of industry—an image of yeoman economyand domesticity, of independence, productivity, andwholesomeness. And they thought they could reestab-lish their enlightened capitalism under God in pristineAfrica. Thither they went, and entered the Tswanaworld to introduce writing, plows, irrigation, money,wage labor, clothing, square houses, and "proper andnatural" gender relations; and they produced not Edenbut colonial, and then postcolonial, South Africa.

Money began to replace cattle as the medium ofpower. With plows hitched to bovines, men becameinvolved in agriculture; water came from wells withoutthe aid of rainmaking chieftains; crops flourished, andpeople with access to land and cattle, chiefly families,began to work more land with more water. The Tswanaexperimented with various dimensions of the mission-ary offerings, combining and recombining them in dif-ferent ways.

With the discovery of diamonds in 1867, the Britishreasserted their claim to the interior territory that theBoer settlers had dominated. Here, the Tswana hadalready been pushed into the logic of wage labor by acattle epidemic and a drought. To secure wage labor, thestate imposed taxes so that the people needed cash. Thevision of yeomen degenerated into a reality of povertyas a rurally based proletariat living on insufficientmeans struggled to conceive of itself in terms of whatpeople might learn via the cultural schemes available tothem.

The authors suggest that anthropologists who havestressed the implicit and categorical have ignored proc-ess, while those who have emphasized the materialhave neglected meaning and expression. They arguethat people develop analyses of realities (class, for one)in terms of systems of meaning and argumentation thatthey have learned (that is, cultures), that they act onthem, and, in the process, change the realities and theircultures in a never-ending cycle. The authors want toshow people as agents. The authors also retain the ideas

of culture and context, attend to changes, and indicaterelations to material processes.

There is altogether too much repetition, since thework is a collection of nine previously published paperswith the addition of a newly written preface; the argu-ments are not linked into a coherent whole. The writingis adequate for a series of papers, although turgid,convoluted, and breathy. However, it is unsuited to thebook form.

Eschewing the postmodern retreat, the authors termtheir stance "neo-modernism," but it is a continuationof the arguments and conclusions of classical anthropol-ogy. It is good to read a work that takes advantage ofanthropology's comparative method and cites classicalanthropology. This is a welcome contribution to thecontinuing debate and to the engagement of anthropol-ogy with history.

The Art of Memory in CulturalPerspective

Suzanne Kuchler and Walter Melion, eds. Images ofMemory: On Remembering and Representation. Washing-ton, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991. 265 pp.$35.00 (cloth).

TAMARA HAMLISHDepartment of AnthropologyBeloit CollegeBebit,WI 53511

Images of Memory is comprised of eight essays that ex-plore the problematic relationship between visual im-age and memory. Each of the articles provides a richand detailed account of diverse cultural and historicalmaterials presented from a variety of theoretical andmethodological perspectives. But it is the collection ofthese essays in a single volume that fosters the book'sultimate aim: "to reconcile two categories of artifact, theethnographic and the artistic" (p. 1).

The terms of this reconciliation are explicitly laid outin the first five pages of the introductory essay byeditors Kuchler and Melion. Questions surrounding thetransmission of images, the subject of inquiry of bothart historians and anthropologists, are framed in termsof memory. Memory is, in turn, conceptualized as anactive process "correlative to and coincident with imageproduction" (p. 3). Memory, cognition, perception, andimage production are brought together in an interpre-tative schema that seeks to bridge, rather than simplyredefine, what James Clifford has called the "aesthetic-anthropological debate."