194 A.II~RICANANTHROPOLOCIST 194, 19921

veloped in other neuroanthropological writ- ings.

Much of Mind, Body and Culture is written in a dense, quasi-philosophical style. I t is laden with neologisms that obscure rather than il- luminate the conceptual structure Samuel wishes to advance. The style and the language in which i t is written make the book disap- pointingly dense.

More troubling is that, in his desire to put forward a new paradigm, Samuel has ignored (or he is unaware of) the literature in anthro- pology that has sought to bridge social, cul- tural, and biological levels of analysis. Rather than critically engaging that literature Mind, Body and Culture asserts as novel some of the well-known principles of that literature. At other times it misrepresents the state of earlier efforts.

In my view, those seeking an introduction to the area will find in this book a disappoint- ingly stereotyped and highly skewed view of neuroanthropological analysis. (A more bal- anced view of the state of this field, and sug- gestions for introduction to it, can be found in the Neuroanthropology Network Newsletter, avail- able from the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Carleton University, Ottawa.) Specialists in the area will find Mind. Body and Culture flawed by its lack of contact with other theoretical work in this area and by its need- lessly difficult prose.

Reading Material Culture: Structuralism, Hermeneutics and Post-Structuralism. Christopher Tillty, ed. Social Archaeology (Ian Hodder, general ed.). Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1990. 366 pp. n.p. (cloth), $13.95. (paper).

PATRICIA GAILOWAY Mississippi Department of Archives and History

This book ofessays collects six pieces about the work of specific thinkers Claude Lkvi- Straws (by Tilley), Paul Ricoeur (H. Moore), Clifford Geertz (E . Si lverman), Roland Barthes (B. Olsen) , Jacques Derr ida ( T . Yates ) , and Michel Foucaul t (Ti l ley) . Whether the cultural critiques articulated by the three “schools” of structuralism, herme- neutics, and poststructuralism strike a mod- ern anthropologist as Gallic obfuscation or the greatest thing since sliced bread, the argu- ments discussed here bear importantly on is- sues of social reproduction and culture change and of whether and how these things a r e knowable or (especially) representable by an- thropologists and archeologists. The essayists

echo their subjects in a chorus to the effect that archeology is discourse, is text, and the point of the collection is to bring out these authors’ insights about the nature ofdiscourse, thus es- tablishing the necessity of “reading” material culture.

Most of the works treated here have not re- ceived sufficient attention from American scholars because they are couched in a lan- guage that many find impenetrable and most find off-putting, a language that doesn’t play by the rules of scholarly discourse and that doesn’t lend itself to easy understanding. This opacity is a large part of their message, a forc- ible foregrounding of the intractability of dis- course as a transparent medium for commu- nication about anything. The essayists in Til- ley’s book haven’t made access much easier, but that was not their intent. The essays grew out of a series of Cambridge seminars, and they portray their authors’ efforts to engage with this work and think through it.

A book so concerned with discourse cannot expect to escape examination as discourse, and it is interesting to observe just what the essayists have done with their textual form. Tilley infers a prescription for writing archeol- ogy taken from Foucault’s practice: “to create ‘dense’ texts: texts which the reader actively has to work at to understand” (p. 334), and the contributors to this volume seem to have followed such a dictum to the degree that their target authors did. Hence, Tilley’s essay on LCvi-Strauss and Olsen’s on Barthes are the least dense, while Moore on Ricoeur and Yates on Derrida definitely demand rather ex- cruciating work to understand-Moore’s be- cause the essay drowns in a thicket of defini- tions as explanations, Yates’s because it mir- rors competently Derrida’s own enterprise of defying any comfortable understanding at all. I t is an interesting commentary on the hege- mony of the anthropological discipline that al- though all the authors are self-consciously participating in an enterprise that calls the transparent text into question, they all to some degree make use of the kind of authoritarian discourse or “mimetic myth of realism” con- demned by Olsen (p. 193) as common to the existing conventions of archeological writing.

The concluding lines of a review are con- vent ional ly supposed t o tell t h e r e a d e r whether he or she should read, buy, or roundly ignore the work under review, thus granting the reviewer ultimate authority over the ver- sion of the book’s contents that the reader sees. Reading Material Culture grants its contributors similar autonomy over the works of the au- thors dealt with in the book; like literary schol- ars, they provide “readings” of these works,

GENERALITHEORETICAL ANTHROPOLOGY I95

not a summary of what is in them. They are interesting readings by and large, and if that is what you want, you should read this book. If you want to know what Lhi-Strauss, Ri- coeur, Geertz, Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault actually have to say, you should be prepared to engage with them yourself.

Ritual Criticism: Case Studies in Its Prac- tice, Essays on Its Theory. Ronald L. Grimes. Studies in Comparative Religion (Frederick M . Denny, series ed.). Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990. 286 pp. $34.95 (cloth).

BARBARA W. LEX Haruard University

This collection focuses on criticism as a mode of discourse to analyze rituals. Its ten annotated chapters originally appeared in journals or as conference papers. Interpretive strategies are drawn from theater perfor- mance, cultural anthropology, theology, and philosophy, to name a few disciplines invoked.

Intellectual debts are owed to Richard Shechner, Victor Turner, Clifford Geertz, and Erving Goffman, among numerous other so- cial scientists. Ri tua l cr i t ic ism is the label Grimes gives to his endeavors. It is defined as “interpretation of the rite or ritual system with a view to implicating its practice.” This pro- cess recontextualizes rites in various dimen- sions. Ritual criticism is reflexive and cannot be dissociated from its political context, but “is neither ethnography nor literary criticism”

Chapter 1, “The Practical and Cultural Context of Ritual Criticism,” attempts to es- tablish a foundation for ritual criticism. In- text definitions abound: of ritual studies, religiouc studies, ritology, and liturgiology; of rite, ritual, and ritualization; and of ritualists and theologians, as well as fieldworkers, participants, and perfom- ers. A glossary would have been helpful.

Four case studies address central issues. One examines liturgical revisions as man- dated and expressed by members of a major religious denomination. Unfortunately, it fal- ters, giving scant attention to power relation- ships contemporaneous with that revision. Another chapter discusses politics of archeo- logical field excavations, museum displays, and ritual performances within a museum grounded in its uniquely Canadian context. However, greater focus is upon the dominant culture. Discussion of nuances of “ownership” and disposition of sacred artifacts is informed and sensitive, but discussion of emergent in- digenous reburial rites, a highly pertinent is- sue, could have completed the essay. Two fol-

(P. 3).

lowing chapters, focused on performance of medieval “Mystery Plays” at the University of Toronto and highly syncretistic contrivance of rites in New Age experiential workshops and college classrooms, admit Grimes’s conserva- tive biases. Then follows discussion of West- ern biomedicine and dimensions of meaning in disease and illness.

Next, three chapters examine narrative- and performance-based interpretations of rit- uals as shaped by linguistics. Victor Turner’s model of social drama that was used to ana- lyze the downfall of Thomas Becket is con- trasted with T. S. Eliot’s Murder in t h Cathe- dral. Analysis holds the reader’s interest, es- pecially since comparisons appear in a re- source table.

Anthropologists may be most comfortable with chapter 9, “Infelicitous Performances and Ritual Criticism.” Broken rules teach im- plicit meaning and codes of conduct. Exam- ples are from the Old Testament and ethno- graphic studies. Here Grimes honestly asserts: “Of the many varieties of human behavior, ritual is probably the most difficult to evalu- ate” (p. 193).

The book concludes with chapter 10, “The Scholarly Contexts and Practices of Ritual Criticism.” Grimes confesses that he has no grand theory of ritual, and no models to offer. Since much of this work rests within a post- modern framework, critical anthropology, or more precisely, critical ethnography, seems to articulate best with his summary.

This volume is best read as a companion piece to Grimes’s earlier work, Beginningx in Ritual Studies (University Press of America, 1982). Anthropologists will notice much that is familiar, but the more classically trained among us may find the elusive concepts and definitions frustrating. Moreover, there is no discussion of temporal frames of ritual. Dis- cussions largely take a synchronic view, which seems at variance with the goal of ritual criti- cism as process. When does a ritual begin? When does it end? When its previous occur- rence ends, or before that, when self-critical performers, participants, or spectators com- pare ideal forms with what “actually” oc- curred? No doubt ritual criticism is as ancient a s human ri tuals. Perhaps what made Grimes’s task so cumbersome is that much of ritual criticism, as exercised within cultural contexts, is ineffable.

Status Inequality: The Self in Culture. George A . D e Vos and Marcel0 Suirez-OroZco. Cross-Cultural Research and Methodology Series, Vol. 15. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Pub- lications, 1990. 312 pp. n.p. (cloth).

ROBERT LAWLESS University of Florida