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ian community, John Steele and Don Kanel de- scribe the workings of an agricultural ladder and find that variations result from the in- dividual’s position in the general system, that is, large landowners. small landowners and the landless experience different ladders as they age.

Lee Schlesinger offers a sensitive and i n teresting description of production and ecology in an Indian village. This work relies on sound ethnography to examine the interrelationships between values. social organization. produc- tion, and environmental constraints.

The final chapter is a rigorous processual ex- amination of the North American “agrifamily” and its dual nature as both economic institution and social unit. John Bennett, the author, is primarily interested in the adaptations farm families are making to the increasing ra- tionalization of agricultural production and how these adaptations influence their nature and vitality as social units.

Given the diversity in quality and subject matter, an overall evaluation of this volume is in- appropriate. However, that same diversity assures that every reader interested in economic or applied anthropology will find something of interest and value in it.

Icon and Conquest: A Structural Analysis of the Illustrations of de Bry’s Great Voyages. Bemndefte Bucher. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. xvii + 220 pp. $20.00 (paper).

Roger Joseph California State University, Fullerton

Bucher analyzes the engravings of de Bry’s 16th-century Great Voyages’ narratives about the New World, contending that the manner in which these illustrations are organized reveals certain contradictions inherent in the European colonialization of the Americas, and that a structural study of this iconography will reveal the elementary processes of “primitive thought” of Europeans at the moment they emerge into the modem world.

The idea that iconography reveals the values of the iconographer is hardly unique. Bucher does, however, draw attention to the fact that the images in de Bry’s illustrations were con- stituted by European classificatory models. These Eurocentric classifications portray am- biguity and disorder, placing the lndian outside

time and society, at least as Europeans understood such things. The “unconscious” logic of this classification system has, according to Bucher. a whole network of implicit mean- ings suggesting the inferiority of the Indians. and the linking of the Amerindians to idolatrous behavior. Some of the structural isomorphs sug- gested by Bucher seem to spring from a logic which is not always clear. Nevertheless she does delineate a way of accounting for the various descriptive strategies, both visual and verbal. of the discovery and colonialization of America.

There are a number of historical facts that need to be kept in mind to sort out the signi- ficance of these illustrations. As Bucher points out, a power struggle was going on in Europe in the 16th century between Catholics and Pro- testants, and the settlement of America was an important part of the struggle. As a Protestant, de Bry was involved in this contestation against Spanish Catholic hegemony in favor of Protes- tant expansion.

Bucher makes use of a number of metaphors, a central one being the sagging female breasts which stood at that time for the devil. Obviously such portrayal has more to do with European at- titudes than any ethnographic protrayal of in- digenous life styles. On the other hand, whether this is hidden from the mind of the engraver is more unlikely. Expeditions and their subse- quent description and use in propaganda were in the 16th century organized by the narrator for a special audience. The consumer was in- evitably the sponsor of the project, whether it be the King of Spain or the Queen of England. One must suppose that each detail in this pro- pagandistic effort was connected to a pragmatic purpose, and as often as not these purposes had to do with national interest.

While Bucher addresses herself to a number of structural dilemmas which may not have oc- curred to the 16th-century mind, and thus re- mained unconscious, she leaves untouched some rather obvious problems that must have oc- curred to that same mind, such as the enslave- ment of the Indians and what effects such enslavement had on the concept of natural law and on the relationship of master to commoner or slave - puzzles that had preoccupied intellec- tual thought for a number of centuries.

In a sense, Bucher falls into a dilemma facing structuralist studies. While she appears to be dealing with a historical phenomenon, 16th- century Europe, this phenomenon is dealt with synchronically, sealing it off from developments in European intellectual circles from the Middle

428 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [ 8 5 . 19831

Ages and Early Renaissance up to that time. Bucher seems to suggest that the Age of Discov- ery and the Great Voyages demarcate a new line of discourse when in fact they often continued moral and political arguments that antedate the Reformation and reveal European concern with the notion of one’s relationship with the other and with oneself. Her categories of iconography (p. 31) suggest that signifiers such as physical appearance, sociological relations, and habitat, can all be abstracted from “the flow of history.” By trying to sort out the deep structure of s a g ging breasts, food offerings, and sexual ambigui- ty, Bucher avoids the historical task of connec- ting the birth of European colonialization to a number of related issues, including the debate between Catholics and Protestants and the col- lateral argument between constitutional power and absolute monarchy.

In many ways I am sympathetic to the argu- ment in Icon and Conquest. Certainly the en- gravings are part of a larger narrative structure, and the paradoxes that are encountered in one icon are transferred to other kinds of thematic issues, all having to do with the general Euro- pean moral code of the 16th century. These icons can be read in the same sense that Rif- feterre has suggested for literary texts-as a matter of intertextuality-or in this case, in- tericonicity, in which the interpretation draws its meaning both from the concrete historical situation (p. 143) as well as the opposition of one text from another.

By attempting to discover the formative prin- ciples behind one set of icons, Bucher has demonstrated a theoretical justification for the exploration of iconography in general struc- turalist terms. Moreover, she has suggested a way of escaping the structuralist paradox of creating a method to analyze verbal communi- cation in a world in which visual communi- cation is in ascendency. If we can accept the proposition that 16th-century Europe represents the “savage mind,” then are we not warranted in imputing the same structural dimensions to contemporary cultures? One of the merits of Icon and Conquest is to remind us that the debate over structuralism has not ended.

T h e Time of the Sign: A Semiotic Interpreta- tion of Modern Culture. Dean MacCannell and Juliet Flower MacCannell. Blwmington: Indiana University Press, 1982. xiii + 208 pp. $18.50 (cloth).

Kenneth Liberman Indiana University

Modern culture is becoming almost universal- ly multicultural. but social science has not kept pace in recording these historical disruptions and their effect upon the social psyche of the world’s citizens. The MacCannells recommend an ethnography redesigned for the modern col- lective experience of cultural differentiation, and they argue that semiotics can provide this ethnography with access to the cultural and linguistic codes at play in the concrete com- munication and interpretive links between groups. They call for a “recentering of research on interpretation and communication links be- tween cultures and the emergence of a semiotic of transcultural materials” ~ :p . 80).

Their argument that the recent pace of multicultural semiosis in American society is outrunning academic understanding is well taken, and so is their recommendation that semiotics has much to contribute to such an ethnography. That semiotics has the breadth of resources to become the sole analytic paradigm in such studies is less likely.

The MacCannells suggest that phenomenol- ogy’s entanglement with “self’ places limits upon what it can accomplish, and they make a similar criticism of ethnomethodology (after in- correctly associating Berger and Luckmann with it). The MacCannells write, “Ethnometho- dology takes tw seriously the subjective point of view of the individual” (p. 84). But why “subjec- tive” here? They could just as easily, and more accurately. have spoken of the “objective” point of view of the individual; in any case, ethno- methodology has rejected either side of the same dualism. They claim that ethnomethodology suffers from a built -in limitation stemming from its intellectual dependence upon a version of phenomenology based on the Husserlian epoche, which requires that the world be held frozen in brackets, a disconnection of conscious experience from the world. But they provide no illustrations of whose ethnomethodology thry are considering.

A “Second Ethnomethodology” is proposed in which consciousness is not opposed to the world of things; rather, actors operate through a world of signs. Instead of relying upon Husserl’s epoch6 to induce originality of perspective, they propose the natural social epoch6 stemming from their ethnosemiotic studies of cultural dif- ferentiation, studies which are addressed to: ( I ) the production of culture as interpretation motivated by social differences between cul- tures; (2) reapplying to conttrmporary social life insight derived from the study of remote groups;