Book Reviews 655

Hall's book offers a lucid exploration of colonial and post-colonial experiences in South Africa and the Chesapeake,using texts produced by people who dominated the major-ity of the population in these settler communities. In treat-ing both written texts and physical objects, such as housesand landscapes, as artifacts, he is able to explore the ways inwhich objects were used as statements of colonial domina-tion and patriarchy, and as ideologies of inequality. Hall isinterested in exposing how such statements were read andsubverted by subalterns; he juxtaposes seemingly diverseyet synchronic sources to articulate the multivalent natureof colonial discourses.

The transcripts Hall pieces together draw extensively onmaterial culture and examine many sorts of cultural resi-dues, though in the end Hall is not able to address in anysubstantive sense the excavated data that constitute thebulk of material with which historical archaeologists work.Perhaps it is impossible to deal in the particularities of pot-sherds and pipe stems and food remains at the global scalethat Hall employs, but Hall's approach promises more thanit delivers as far as archaeological interpretation is con-cerned. This is a bit disappointing given the care Hall takesto insure that his comparisons of two colonial situations areas highly contextualized as he can make them.

One is led to wonder if it is not so much Hall's theoreticalapproach as his selection of sources or locales for the com-parisons he draws that undermines his attempts to makefuller use of excavated data (vs. surviving texts, houses,landscapes, and so on) in his reconstruction of transcripts ofcolonial discourse. Postcolonial theory teaches us that colo-nial projects took a wide range of forms, which were alteredin the crucible of colonial contacts and interactions. It maynot be enough to compare two places simply because theywere both entangled in colonialism and its capitalist econ-omy. Anthropologists such as George Marcus have notedthat globalization can best be studied through developingsets of comparisons, or better yet, multiple sites of study,based on genuine connections that once existed, by recon-structing the networks and the nodes or points of contact.Marcus's "multisited" ethnography (1995; see also Ap-padurai 1990; Bestor 2001) offers greater potential for a fullycontextualized version of a global historical archaeologythan we find in Hall's comparative colonial transcripts—asriveting as these may be.

REFERENCES CITEDAppadurai, Arjun

1990 Disjunctive and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.Public Culture 2(2):l-24.

Bestor, Theodore C.2001 Supply-Side Sushi: Commodity, Market, and the Global

City. American Anthropologist 103(l):76-95.Marcus, George

1995 Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence ofMulti-Sited Ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology24:95-117.

The Teacup Ministry and Other Stories: Subtle Bounda-ries of Class. Rhoda H. Halperin. Austin: University ofTexas Press, 2001.134 pp.

JANE A D A M SSouthern Illinois University

In this slim volume, Rhoda Halperin ventures into an ex-perimental genre that blends fiction with ethnographic ob-servation. Like many social scientists trained in the craft ofscholarly writing, her effort only partly succeeds.

As the subtitle indicates, the dozen vignettes, brief "pro-logues" to three sections, and epilogue, trouble class rela-tions. Sophia and Solomon are relatively wealthy second-generation Brooklyn Jews whose summer home on a resortisland is the locus of most of the stories. Most of the tales aretold through the eyes of their pediatrician daughter, Lauren.As in any resort community, most of the permanent resi-dents are working class. Much like the people Halperin stud-ied in Kentucky and in Cincinnati's East End, many of thempiece together a precarious existence through seasonal serv-ice and odd jobs.

Halperin attempts to describe the unspoken but mutuallyunderstood boundaries between the wealthy Jews and thelocal working classes. Refusing to stop with documentingthe injuries to working-class dignity and elite awkwardness("Crossing Class Boundaries"), she uses Lauren's lifetimefriendship with several locals to reveal their creativity andimagination in dealing with elite snobbery and in carvingout effective livelihoods ("Class Imagination and the Crea-tivity of Class"). The final section, "Class Vulnerability,"ventures into the intimacies of three families: one in Cin-cinnati's East End, Lauren's family, and one of Lauren'spoor friends on the Island. Class marks these lives of privi-lege and deprivation, in all three cases disturbing and dis-rupting family bonds.

The analytic eye required by ethnography tends to stripthe humanity from our subjects. Halperin's attempt tobreathe life into people while simultaneously engaging inan extended meditation on a key analytic category is, there-fore, to be honored. Nonetheless, I found myself frequentlyfrustrated by the work. I wanted to know what relationshipthese stories had to actual lives: The book begins in first per-son, then quickly shifts to Lauren. Why? What is the natureof the confidentiality, if that is what it is, that the authorconfers on her subjects?

I was sometimes confused by the stories. Distilled to whatHalperin perceived as essential gestures, I often missed thesignificance. This may be a problem of cross-cultural com-munication: When Solomon dies, a family friend, Tom,dominates the gathering with egoistic tales, frequently re-peating "hard work conquers all." His talk was "tainted withprejudice," Lauren feels. Perhaps an East Coast Jew wouldunderstand the nature of the prejudice, but it was opaque tome, a half Jew from the rural upland South. The subtlety, inother words, was sometimes too subtle.

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I wondered, too, at the implication that class was the mostimportant social boundary between the people Halperinwrites about. The stable, largely working-class population ofthe island was apparently Chiistian Euro-American fromseveral ancestries; it was unclear whether the wealthy Jewswere the only ethno-religious group to build summer homeson the island. I read many of the interactions as laced withreligious and ethnic distinctions, in which class played a sig-nificant but perhaps not determinative role. The initiator ofthe "teacup ministry," for which the book is named, drewon fundamentalist Christian roots—a Christianity thatLauren, a secular, intellectual Jew, translated as "spiritual."

Despite its stylistic problems, Halperin has created an in-triguing and courageous work. Perhaps as more anthropolo-gists turn to alternative modes of representation, new can-ons will emerge that enable writers more effectively tomerge ethnographic observation with fictional writing.

Aside from interesting reading for themselves, these sto-ries might work well in a classroom, where students couldbe challenged to discern the class (and other) distinctionsHalperin writes about.

Llamas, Weavings, and Organic Chocolate: Multicultu-ral Grassroots Development in the Andes and Amazonof Bolivia. Kevin Healy. Notre Dame, IN: University ofNotre Dame Press, 2001. 482 pp.

KATHLEEN B. LOWREYUniversity of Chicago

Kevin Healy's book is an important corrective to recent de-velopment debates. It is ironic that across the 1990s, as BigDevelopment was dying in a leaner, meaner, post-ColdWar, no-more-hearts-and-minds, globalized world, progres-sive anthropologists took to whacking away at it. Sophisti-cated deconstructions of development discourse and its too-often shoddy, disingenuous on-the-ground manifestationsin the "third" or "developing" world came along just in timeto prick a deflating balloon.

What might this mean for anthropologists just beginningto set their academic- and public-intellectual agendas at theturn of the millennium? As the fortunate heirs of a scholarlygeneration that refused to be taken in by anything, we havethe happy task of rediscovering the importance of being ear-nest. Carrying on the project of criticism, of flailing away atmaster narratives, of spotting-the-hegemony, is not our pri-mary challenge. Ours is to figure out exactly what kind ofhopeful enthusiasts the world most desperately needs rightnow, and to become them.

Luckily, in this undertaking we enter a fray that has neverquite been ceded. Healy, for example, has been fighting thatwell-meaning fight since he was a Peace Corps volunteer inPeru in the late 1960s. From there, he went on to write animportant doctoral thesis in development sociology aboutthe social and economic relationships shaping agriculturein lowland Bolivia and then took a position at a United

States government agency, the Inter-American Foundation(IAF). He has now worked at IAF for over 20 years, reviewingfunding proposals and following the progress of develop-ment projects in Bolivia. This book describes several he con-siders exemplary.

The concept of development, when applied to human so-cieties and cultures, is deeply flawed—a problem that theuse of scare quotes will not solve. As an arena of funding andemployment, it is too often the first and preferred refuge ofscoundrels from the developed and developing world alike.However, at its best, it dwells in possibility and allows goodthings to flourish. It is difficult to imagine how any of theinitiatives Healy documents could have succeeded withoutoutside financial support. One of the tragedies of the post-Cold War world is that there is little political will to engagein any (let alone radical) redistribution at all. If develop-ment is sometimes antipolitical, it does not therefore followthat the critique of development (or "development") consti-tutes a worthy political program on its own. Llamas, Weav-ings, and Organic Chocolate is an inspired celebration of theconstructive (as opposed to the presumptively more laud-able critical) spirit.

Healy's text will, of course, appeal to Bolivianists. The firstchapter is a standard colonial history, while the next two of-fer a clear and accessible overview of 20th-century Bolivianhistory, with particular attention to the Cold War era and itsattendant effects on the "development of development" inBolivia. Chapters 4 and 5 track the rise of "indigenous mod-els of development" (or "ethnodevelopment") in Boliviasince the 1980s. Latin American studies and history teachersat the college and graduate levels will be particularly appre-ciative of these introductory chapters, as will younger An-glophone scholars contemplating research in Bolivia.

One of the great strengths of the book is its cogent, engag-ing style. Because of this readability, non-Bolivianists will bewell-served by consulting the individual case studies, eachcovered in a single chapter. Many of the successes and pit-falls of the projects he describes will resonate with readerswho have worked in development elsewhere in the world.These chapters will appeal to a diverse audience, and, indi-vidually or combined, would make excellent reading assign-ments for courses devoted to applied anthropology, devel-opment and policy studies, food and agriculture, ruralsociology, gender studies, or new social movements. Di-vided into four thematic sections (agro-exports, education,artisanry, and the environment), they cover initiatives as di-verse as cooperative organic farming for the export market(of chocolate); alternative food production (of the Andean"supergrain," quinoa); traditional livestock rearing (of lla-mas and alpacas in Andean communities); poor women'spopular education, empowerment, and consciousness rais-ing; urban education combined with cultural revitalization;a women's textile cooperative; a rural artisans' cooperative;revival of traditional methods of potato farming; and pan-indigenous revitalization, organization, and struggle for ter-ritorial rights in the lowlands.