Van Wolputte, S. (2010). Review: COLLINS, S. All tomorrow&#39;s cultures. Anthropological engagement with the future. Oxford: Berghahn books, 2008. In: Social Anthropology, 18(4), 472-473.

steven van wolputte

A B S T R A C T ■ Sociological ethnography largely draws upon two epistemologically competing perspectives — grounded theory and the extended case method — with a different conceptualization of sociological case-construction and theory. We argue that the sociological case in the extended case method is foremost a form of theoretical framing: relying on theoretical narratives to delineate the boundaries of an empirical field. Grounded theory follows the tenets of Chicago School ethnography where the sociological case is elicited from ethno-narratives of actors in the field: the institutionally and interactionally delimited ways members in the field ‘case’ their action. This difference in sociological casing, in turn, is reflected in the ways theory is used. Where the extended case method uses theoretical narratives as a denouement of the case, grounded theory employs theory to construct a grammar of social life.

A number of anthropology's most emblematic innovations have caught on elsewhere. Yet anthropologists seem almost distressed by the success of concepts like " culture " and " ethnicity " and too readily dispose of them in the name of scholarly fastidiousness. Lately, " ethnographic method " has gained multidisciplinary attention. Instead of providing guidance to the limits of ethnography, we engage in a search for the catchall definition, risking abandoning the vague-but-useful for the optimal-but-unattainable. In this article, I draw on my experience as a public anthropologist to show how ethnography, in the scholarly highly unsatisfactory meaning of " good stories, " is crucial to our public engagements, which again triggers a curiosity to anthropology that the future of our discipline depends on. The Hau debate on ethnography was a thrill to attend. Finally, after three decades during which stifling self-scrutiny has been mistaken for a disciplinary virtue, we rekindle our forerunners' commitment to making a difference beyond our own intellectual shores. When this panel of distinguished anthropologists, of different backgrounds and with highly different research interests and epistemological bases, all adamantly unite behind our duty to engage a postfact age in dire need of nuances, this heralds a crucial change in orientation. In retrospect, the article that triggered the debate seems mistitled— " That's enough about introspection! " would be more fitting—and I believe many us will take Tim Ingold's primal scream for a rallying call, being just as " sick and tired of equivocation, of scholarly obscu-rantism, and of the conceit that turns the project of anthropology into the study of its own ways of working " (2014: 383). We have taken all that we need from the hodgepodge of critiques and turns, and time has come for that most social of the social sciences to recommit to its Enlightenment roots. This is the point where

Today's investment in and calls for public anthropology are one symptom of the profound rupture and reorganization of the research agendas of social/cultural anthropology as it moved away from the four-field organization of anthropology into an alignment with certain humanities-driven, energetically interdisciplinary appropriations of the concerns of the social sciences in the name of "theory." In anthropology, this story can most cogently be told by focusing on what happened to its central professional culture of method: what ethnography looks like today and the conditions of research, encompassing fieldwork, that produce it. This article is an examination of this reorganization of social/cultural anthropology, which has left the center of the discipline intellectually weak relative to the vitality of its diverse interdisciplinary and even nonacademic engagements. It asks whether this post-1980s reorganized social/cultural anthropology might rediscover and reunite with some of its historic core associations (four-field as well as topical) in the new terrains of research and partnerships on the peripheries of its old disciplinary center.

Reviews Burawoy, Michael. 2009. The extended case method: Four countries, four decades, four great transformations. Berkeley: University of California Press. xviii + 338 pp. Pb.: $21.95. ISBN: 978 0 520 25901 0. This extended case method, championed by leading anthropologists such as Max Gluckman, Victor Turner, Bill Epstein and Jaap van Velsen, has a long and very fruitful history within social and cultural anthropology. This excellent volume by Michael Burawoy, a sociology professor at the University of California, systematises, codifies and extends this method. Based on studies that he and his students carried out, and squarely founded in a nuanced Marxist analysis, Burawoy deals with the interlocking relations between ethnographic detail and the broad macro transformations that the past century has witnessed. The case method, as Burawoy explains, should not be identified with the ethnographic method since it is essentially a method for thinking about the relationship between theory and empirical work. As such it can (and Burawoy provides extended examples) be broadened to macro-historical sociology to great benefit. The volume, then, is devoted to explaining the theory and practice of this method. The text is a delight to read with the right mix of personal reflection, methodological analysis, wonderful insights and a good dose of (often self-inflicted) humour. The text that Burawoy has written follows his own academic biography spanning factories and mines in four countries: Zambia, the United States, Hungary and Russia. More importantly, he focuses on the micro-processes underlying and closely forming the expression of the four great transformations of the previous century: decolonisation, the transition to organised capitalism, the Soviet transition to socialism and the transition from socialism to capitalism. While the text is squarely based on his own experience of research, Burawoy does not devolve into self-analysis. Rather he allows us to accompany him in a gradual unfolding of ever more complex methodological development. Thus each of the four main chapters of the book (encased within a very useful introduction and conclusion) focuses on one of these great transformations and discloses distinct aspects of the extended case method. In the introduction, Burawoy describes the beginnings of the extended case method. The next chapter develops a formal framework of the method through an analysis of postcolonial Zambia. He uses this case to develop two models of social science he terms positive and reflexive. The third chapter is devoted to an ethnographic revisit at the same Chicago factory that Donald Roy studied thirty years earlier. He uses this chapter to explore what an ethnographic revisit implies for theoretical development. The fourth chapter traces the move from ethnography to comparative history by comparing the methods by which Trotsky and Skocpol analysed revolutions and showing how the two models of science are related to comparative sociology. The fifth chapter turns to the transition back from socialism to capitalism in Russia and Hungary. The conclusion takes a good hard look at the advantages and disadvantages of the method. An epilogue contains a superb exposition of the unique character of public ethnography; of the place ethnographers can take in public discussions of social trends and problems. While anthropologists may feel less apologetic about using the case method it is worthwhile for readers of this journal to follow Burawoy’s answer to the following C 2010 European Association of Social Anthropologists. Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale (2010) 18, 4 471–506. doi:10.1111/j.1469-8676.2010.00133.x 471 472 REVIEWS question: how can a single ethnographer working in a single site illuminate macro-processes such as the move from socialism to capitalism. In his complex answer Burawoy brilliantly shows that an answer to this question involves four processes: the extension of the participant-observer into the lives of those he or she studies, the extension of observations over time and space, linking micro to macro processes and finally (and most important) the extension of theory. His analysis offers a careful argument concerning the often romantic notions of anthropologists going out into the field tabula rasa. As Burawoy convincingly shows, we need to go into any field already with theories in mind but that the more reflective we are about them, the more the research will be valuable. To conclude, this is a superb volume that should be read by all anthropologists for its insights and sophistication and clear exposition of a key method that characterises our discipline. EYAL BEN-ARI The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel) Collins, Samuel. 2008. All tomorrow’s cultures. Anthropological engagement with the future. ix + 140 pp. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Hb.: $29.95/£16.50. ISBN: 978 1 84545 408 1. The point of departure of Samuel Collins’ All Tomorrow’s Cultures is that anthropology, from its early beginnings until the present, always had a particular involvement with time. Often described as the science of the Other, these Other ‘tribes’, ‘primitives’, or ‘traditions’ usually were imagined as belonging to the past: visiting remote and exotic places was (sometimes still is) travelling back in time. Yet, by focusing on the Other, anthropology was (is) basically about the Self. ‘Looking back’ in time boils down to, basically, looking ahead in the future, at least as long as one is convinced there is one particular, singular, future and a straight path from what used to be to what is becoming. At stake in this small but challenging book is the role of the future in the history of anthropology, and, in line with this, to what extent each contemporary anthropology also is an anthropology of what may be in whatever comes out of the present. To answer this question, the author follows two related tracks. A first one concerns the relationship between (implicit and explicit) visions of the future and the anthropologist’s political agenda; a second one concerns the relationship between anthropology and (science) fiction. Indeed, both anthropology and science fiction use representations of an imagined Otherness (whether Trobrianders or aliens), in which the Other is not only characterised by a distance in space, but also distant in time. In fact, such an imaginary Otherness is a founding feature of both genres: it is elementary in imagining the Self, and lays bare some of the basic assumptions (regarding, for instance, culture, humanity, the universe) that underpin monographs and novels. The future is not linear and objective, but cultural and heterogeneous. This is the main idea that is elaborated in the first two chapters and that returns throughout the book at regular intervals. From this ‘quantum thread’ (p. 22), which is a theme in many a novel, Collins draws his inspiration to scrutinise early anthropologists (such as Boas and Tylor) for their scientific and moral conception of the future. The future, however, emerges as a particular concern for the next generation of anthropologists (such as Margaret Mead), whose experience in war-torn northern America inspired their technocratic ambition to engineer a post-war society, even if they realised that ideas on the future are always embedded in present conditions. The author then moves to explore the work of Chad Oliver in Chapter 3. Oliver’s fiction was clearly inspired by his academic endeavour (and the other way around). On the one hand, Oliver’s fiction drew extensively from his work with Native Americans in Texas. Also, his protagonists take on the role of a future ethnographer. On the other hand, aliens fulfil the role of the C 2010 European Association of Social Anthropologists. REVIEWS imagined Other. Here (and in the work of other novelists explored in Chapter 4), fiction comes to the fore as cultural critique, exposing the assumptions (for instance) anthropologists share with regard to culture and development. Also, the ‘fantastic topographies’ (p. 61) of exoplanets evoke different constellations of power, opening up unexplored spaces of identity, freedom and power. Collins takes up this point in his discussion of the relationship between anthropology and futurology, in Chapter 5. Cultural alterity, in turn, may stimulate the ethnological imagination: like fieldwork, it allows for (quite literally) an alienation of the self – to make the strange and familiar interpenetrate. This interpretation is further elaborated in the final chapter and in the conclusion of All Tomorrow’s Cultures. At least partially, the ethnographer’s claim to expertise (hence authority) is no longer vested in the ‘savage slot’, but in imagining future developments. As such, however, anthropology criticises a hegemonic view on the future that portrays it as utterly familiar and predictable. Time, however, is not neutral; hence the author makes a plea not for an anthropology of the future, but an anthropology for the future, one that takes into account the many virtualities of the present. This brief overview does not do justice to the sophisticated (unfortunately, sometimes also opaque) arguments Samuel Collins builds up in All Tomorrow’s Cultures (to get a grasp, visit the author’s blog at http:// tomorrowculture.blogspot.com/). In that sense, this book suffers somewhat under its author’s ambitions. Still, All Tomorrow’s Cultures offers a complex, erudite, eclectic, and passionate discussion of the possibilities of the future in anthropology. STEVEN VAN WOLPUTTE Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium) Dilger, Hansjörg and Bernhard Hadolt (eds.). 2010. Medizin im Kontext. Krankheit und Gesundheit in einer vernetzten Welt. C 2010 European Association of Social Anthropologists. 473 Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften. 447 pp. Pb.: €65.30. ISBN: 978 3 631 57839 1. The intersection of global processes with local differences bring into focus the ways in which medical knowledge and practice is constructed, changed, and adapted for various political ends. The contributors to this edited volume examine in twenty-one chapters the complex relationship between medicine and context by focusing on how medical concepts and technologies are transferred across regional, cultural and social boundaries; how patients and medical practitioners challenge the concept of ‘closed’ medical systems through migration, flight, and medical tourism; how communities attempt to establish social security and finance healthcare; and, finally, how global, national, and communal medical resources are shifted due to the dismantling of public medical services. The ethnographic studies were carried out between 2000 and 2007 and consisted of consulting medical archives and assessing the literature available, interviewing individuals, conducting focus groups, and participant observation of medical practices in contexts as diverse as South Africa, Tanzania, Mali, Burkina Faso, India, Ecuador, Austria and Germany. Part One analyses the ways in which new medical technologies and practices such as reproductive technologies, plastic surgery, and vaccination are imagined, adapted, and transformed differently depending on the respective cultural, moral, and political contexts. For instance, Müller-Rockstroh explores the transfer of ultrasound from a manufacturing company in the Netherlands to the users in Tanzania. It becomes apparent how the different meanings attached to ultrasound are negotiated between the Dutch trainers and the various user groups in Africa based on the different perceptions of the body and conceptions of cultural and moral values in relation to pregnancy and foetuses. From another perspective, Hadolt and Hörbst compare contexts, usages and problems 474 REVIEWS related to Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART) in Mali and Austria. They illustrate that depending on the reproductive goals and family planning, ART takes on different meanings and can only be understood in the context of local law, morals, and ethics. Section Two explores questions related to the discourses and the impact of migration and mobility on health systems in various cultural contexts. The authors highlight intersubjective qualities and their contribution to shaping people’s relationship to and knowledge of human biology and medical practice. For instance, Kotte skilfully analyses how childbed experiences of Chinese migrants influence the healthcare practices of German doctors and nurses. She points out that in order to accommodate diverse cultural understandings of childbirth, practitioners should not only be trained in cultural competence, but also to understand that their own approaches to care are culturally constructed and, therefore, open to contestation. Part Three outlines the strategic application of traditional medicine and its implications for local medical practice, knowledge transfer, and identity politics in the context of globalisation. The interaction and cooperation among different medical traditions has increased since WHO’s commitment to ‘traditional medicine’. However, the authors note critically that while the initiative of WHO to respect and integrate indigenous medical knowledge and practice into the wider healthcare system is laudable, it raises questions with regard to ownership, control, standardisation, and homogenisation. Zenker illustrates this by referring to the consequences of WHO’s support of the South African ‘Traditional Health Practitioners Act’. The Act requires indigenous healers to adapt their practices to biomedical standards and freed up funding for laboratories for testing medical plants for their efficacy. Although this is propagated as ‘knowledge exchange’, most healers are aware that the state and the international community appropriate their expert knowledge without making them shareholders in it. Part Four outlines the development and the impact of mutual health organisations. In order to enable access to health insurance for the general population, community-based health insurance systems are currently established worldwide. The authors point out that the often self-organised mutual health organisations are accepted differently by the population of the respective countries. Schulze describes the concept of health insurance as new mode of security for households in two villages in Mali. His results show that the composition of household networks of power and solidarity, and lifestyle influence families to either invest in health insurance or resort to family-based forms of security. On the other hand, Wlaadarsch explores the relationship of health insurance and the concept of time particular to different generations in Burkina Faso. She discovered that people discerned three types of futures, not all of which call for insurance as events appear to be more or less predictable. Part Five discusses the new opportunities for and risks to health and health care in the context of urbanisation and globalisation. For instance, Obrist discusses in detail how medical anthropology can contribute to research on vulnerability and health risks in an urban context. Drawing on examples from Abidjan, she analyses different approaches from the discourses on public-health and development which focus on the transfer of knowledge and technology, on the one hand, and social and cultural theories which emphasise the scope of action of individual actors and groups, on the other hand. The author points out that although more intervention is desirable, more attention needs to be paid to local initiatives which might be more sustainable in the long-run. The volume concludes with an outlook provided by Hauschild, who critically reflects on the successes, failures, and potential of German ethnomedicine and medical anthropology. According to him, ethnomedicine, founded as a discipline in the 1970s, was bound to fail due to the fact that scholars did not perceive themselves as part of an international whole but rather as C 2010 European Association of Social Anthropologists. REVIEWS self-reflecting free-riders who profit from developments in related fields. Not until the 1990s did medical anthropologists avail themselves of the opportunity to work as respected partners on interdisciplinary research projects and in cooperation with development organisations and, at the same time, preserve a critical lens through which inequality, poverty, hegemony, and hierarchy are examined and challenged. Emanating from these developments, Hauschild calls for an advancement in long-term interdisciplinary research in order to better understand the complex interrelations of body politics in an era of increasing globalisation. The well-researched, thoroughly analysed, and eloquently written ethnographic contributions of this book are milestones in German medical anthropology in that they bridge the gap between the old and new mandates of ethnomedicine and medical anthropology, emphasise the importance of cross-cultural and interdisciplinary collaboration, and point to opportunities for further research and critical analysis. HANNA KIENZLER McGill University (Canada) Edwards, Jeanette and Carles Salazar (eds.). 2009. European kinship in the age of biotechnology. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. 224 pp. Hb.: $90.00/£55.00. ISBN: 978 1 84545 573 6. Bamford, Sandra and James Leach (eds.). 2009. Kinship and beyond. The genealogical model reconsidered. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. 292 pp. Hb.: £45.00. ISBN: 978 1 84545 422 7. Although they are quite different, each of these books is fascinating in its own way. While European Kinship in the Age of Biotechnology explores kinship conceptions in relation to public information on genetics today, Kinship and Beyond discusses the effects the genealogical model continues to C 2010 European Association of Social Anthropologists. 475 have on thinking in anthropology and other areas. Both books are strong in theory and fieldwork and make important advances in the anthropology of kinship. European Kinship in the Age of Biotechnology is a welcome contribution to research on how people in Europe today understand what being family means and on how kinship thinking responds to advances in biotechnology. As Edwards explains in the Introduction, this research is part of the project ‘Public Understanding of Genetics’ (PUG) that seeks to understand the interactions between how people think about and ‘do’ or ‘make’ kinship and the information they receive about genetics. Edwards reviews the literature on European kinship from Schneider forward, summarises each author’s contribution, and provides thought-provoking reflections on the ‘sticking points: the points from which we (as analysts) found it difficult to dislodge ourselves’ (p. 2) that the authors encountered. One of the book’s highlights is that it is truly a collaborative effort. Not only does each article review pertinent authors and theories, describe the research carried out, and present a theory-based analysis of this research, but each article is an open dialogue with the others, enabling the authors to take their work a few steps further than each might have done individually. Certain questions permeate this work: (1) Who is kin and who is not, and why?; (2) How is kinship made or done?; and (3) How can we study kinship? The authors seek the fringes and frontiers of kinship, following the strategy that looking at the most ‘foreign’ or least mainstream examples, where kinship is, as it were, under stress, will clarify its elements. Several chapters deal with families formed in ‘alternative’ ways with respect to what Europeans have generally considered the ‘natural’ form, that is, a heterosexual couple producing their own offspring. They suggest the usefulness of studying families formed by means of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs), adoption, and fostering together – not because they are the same, but 476 REVIEWS because they are all ways of creating kinship in atypical circumstances. Bestard (Chapter 1) uses his ethnographic work in Spain to show that we can only understand the meaning people give to genetic material by looking at its position in ‘the production of social relationships’ (p. 28). Working in Lithuania, Ĉepaitienė (Chapter 2) reveals local thinking regarding the difference between (nuclear) family and kin through people’s discourse on ARTs. Catalan adoptive families’ construction of kinship based on physical resemblance is analysed by Marre and Bestard (Chapter 4). Working with homoparental families, Cadoret (Chapter 5) explains how human institutions create kinship. Norwegian laws on adoption and assisted conception, which today view the child as an ‘individual in its own right, irrespective of the relationships it embodies’ (p. 149), allow Melhuus and Howell (Chapter 9) to posit the ‘naturalization’ of ‘unnatural’ forms of procreation. Other articles discuss diverse aspects of genetics and kinship. By studying people’s reactions to genetically modified foods, Degnen (Chapter 3) offers insights into parents’ responsibility for making people by nourishing their children. Manrique (Chapter 6) uses her research on shared blood as the basis for kinship in a Spanish gypsy community to show that scientific knowledge only becomes meaningful when it is interpreted according to local values. Shared substance is also the focus of the article by Porqueres i Genés and Wilgaux (Chapter 7), who use the continuity of the ‘relational person’ (p. 115) in incest prohibitions to question any radical break with kinship in the past or between Western and non-Western kinship. Demény contrasts the identity of professional mothers in a Hungarian SOS Children’s Village with motherhood in the broader context, concluding that kinship consists of ‘a number of heterogeneous elements’ (p. 141) which can be variously combined. By analysing the reaction in Great Britain to studies on the environmental repercussions of genetically modified crops, Campbell makes his case for opening up the idea of kinship to all living beings in our world. In the concluding chapter (Chapter 11), Salazar discusses the relationship between different kinds of knowledge, analysing genetic (scientific/truth) knowledge and kinship (social/symbolic) knowledge as knowledge about human relations. He asks ‘How is scientific knowledge going to be translated into culturally meaningful knowledge?’ (p. 183), concluding that kinship structures can use genetic knowledge to make kinship, while genes find a place in kinship structures, gaining symbolic meaning. The articles collected in Kinship and Beyond address the genealogical model’s continued influence not only in the anthropology of kinship but in many other areas. As the editors explain, the different chapters ‘show in various ways how genealogical thinking permeates a range of social institutions such as property inheritance, pedagogy, ethnicity, class and politics, not to mention how we conceptualize human ecology’ (p. 13). Although the authors deal with quite diverse subjects, they show the sneaky way that the genealogical model seems to always reappear in our thinking. The articles are exciting in their ideas and . . . fun! Each is a pleasant surprise, and together they take a step forward in kinship studies. The subject of the first article by Cassidy (Chapter 1) is the pedigrees of racehorses and of their breeders. By contrasting how Bedouin and English horse breeders explain their animals’ pedigrees, the first by not writing them and the second by writing them, she shows that there is no such thing as a disinterested genealogy; because they are classifications, genealogies legitimise difference. Using documentary evidence recording the contestatory property claims of Luo people under colonial administration in Kenya, Holmes (Chapter 2) reveals colonial authorities’ use of the segmentary lineage model to construct an administratively manageable version of Luo kinship based on patrilineal consanguinity, thus delegitimising other forms of kinship that were in use. C 2010 European Association of Social Anthropologists. REVIEWS Pálsson (Chapter 3) highlights the contradictions of a double-sided Icelandic biogenetics project that uses genealogical information to study hereditary disease (and make money by developing treatments) and also makes this information available for Icelanders to research their genealogies. Both aspects raised new issues of property rights over this genealogical information. Cunningham (Chapter 4) discusses two examples of the way genes become mobile, first, in imagery used to publicise research on the human genome, and then in the aforementioned biogenetics project in Iceland, where they move from the sphere of social information to that of ‘biological commerce’ (p. 134). By considering the way people make kinship sense of news items about unusual situations resulting from the new reproductive technologies, Edwards (Chapter 5) studies how the objectification that genealogical knowledge carries out affects the way people understand kinship relationships, as well as how what people know about ‘the trickiness of everyday relationships’ (p. 152) affects this objectification. Bamford (Chapter 6) explores relatedness, based on being born from one womb and on working the land, among the Kamea in Papua-New Guinea, to show an alternative to the Euro-American conception of species as absolutely separate and kinship as a shared substance passed from generation to generation. Also using research in Papua-New Guinea regarding knowledge of a specific physical space as fundamental to kinship, Leach (Chapter 7) criticises both the genealogical model and the concept of relatedness, which fails to escape from the assumption that nature is the basis upon which culture works. The limitations of classificatory knowledge, the genealogical model, and the idea of the transportation of essences is the subject of Ingold’s article (Chapter 8), in which he proposes storied knowledge, wayfaring, and meshwork as ways to think about humans’ lives; he suggests that what actually defines us as human is our ‘ability to C 2010 European Association of Social Anthropologists. 477 weave stories from the past into the texture of present lives’ (p. 211). Astuti (Chapter 9), analysing Vezo kinship in Madagascar, gives an example of a people who clearly distinguish between biology and sociality in the transmission of characteristics to offspring but who work hard to downplay consanguineal relationships and emphasise social ones; we need, then, to reconsider the common misconception that the biology/sociality distinction is specific to Western thought, and therefore must not exist in other contexts. In the final chapter, Viveiros de Castro (Chapter 10) offers what he calls ‘Three Nano-Essays’. In the first, he explains Amazonian kinship as an issue not of how bodies are consanguineally related to each other, but of how difference creates kinship through the relationships that difference makes necessary. The second ‘nano-essay’ rejoins the study of magic and kinship, separated in the early days of anthropology, pointing out the error of assuming that the first is ‘mistaken physics’ (p. 251) and the second, mistaken biology or ‘primitive law’ (p. 251). Finally, Viveiros de Castro outlines four kinship models, combining the two dimensions of consanguinity and affinity as given or constructed; according to the author, in Amazonian kinship, affinity is the given while consanguinity is constructed. I highly recommend both books for anyone interested in kinship studies. NANCY ANNE KONVALINKA Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Madrid (Spain) Geschiere, Peter, Birgit Meyer and Peter Pels (eds.). 2008. Readings in modernity in Africa. Oxford, Pretoria and Bloomington: James Currey, Unisa Press and Indiana University Press. 226 pp. Pb.: $24.95. ISBN: 978 0 53 21996 1/978 0 85255 898 0/978 1 86888 528 2. What is at stake when we raise modernity as a theoretical and political issue? Why is 478 REVIEWS debating this matter so crucial and persistent in African studies and political debates? In this volume, Geschiere, Meyers and Pels have assembled a wide range of potential answers to these pervasive questions. The editors have brought together different styles of texts that, though eclectic in appearance, share a common ethnographic concern. Academic works, political discourses, activist manifestos, philosophical pieces, fragments of a theatre play, photographs and paintings, along with various other kinds of texts, can be understood as ethnographic insofar as they constitute a reflexive take on a modernity that, behind its juxtaposed layers, hides numerous and sometimes controversial approaches capable of enriching the debate on what Marshall Sahlins might have called the ‘Western Illusion’. Readings in Modernity in Africa owes much of its coherence to the editors’ skill in selecting and interweaving texts that dialogue directly among themselves, and that in more subtle ways leave space for the reader to reach her own conclusions. The theoretical and political harmony sought by the authors can be felt especially in the introductory chapter. In many of the short résumés introducing each section of the book, the editors call the reader’s attention to the main aspects of each published text without any wish to exhaust the emerging debate. In order to understand the transformational character of modernity and how anthropology itself has methodologically and theoretically experienced the shifts it has induced, the book is divided into two parts: Genealogies of Modernity in Africa and Ethnographies of the Modern in Africa. Modernity (as a historically constructed conceptual approach) and The Modern (as an empirical phenomenon that continually changed over the last century) form a combined critique of the Western telos of unilinear progress. The vast majority of the articles included in the book attain the relational and reflexive ideal that inspired the original project. Nation, state and democracy were built, established and came under threat during and after independence processes in almost all the countries under analysis. Although the editors do not promote an explicitly postcolonial perspective, the assembled articles primarily deal with social experiences of modernity in former colonies of the British, French and Belgian Empires. Beyond the specific issues raised in each chapter, almost all of the authors analyse the history and the role played by anthropology in what modernity and modernization have meant in countries like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, South Africa, Sierra Leone, Madagascar and Ghana. As Pels argues in his article on Luguru politics, what he calls ‘administrative ethnography’ has played a crucial role in the invention of tradition (p. 59) and the emergence of unexpected political solutions. Despite their slight divergences, various contributors, such as Ntesebeza (p. 77), Appiah (p. 89), Mbembe (p. 110) and Niehaus (p. 165), share a common perspective that links heterogeneous and usually binary conceptual perceptions of modernity to a transformation of theoretical categories over the course of a violent process of liberation and the construction of new political landscapes. Although not directly engaging with Nkrumah’s ‘philosophical consciencism’ (p. 87) or Nyerere’s ‘Ujamaa’ (p. 54), many authors move beyond polar dichotomies such as those opposing tradition to modernity, contesting these historical dualisms as an unacceptable topos, a common reduction of African socialities and their political and theoretical inventions to a mere reaction to colonialism or globalisation. Shifting beyond a master narrative on the inexorable changes brought by modernisation and the consequent destruction of an atemporal local livelihood, in the second part of the book we discover that Kinshasa, as depicted by De Boeck, or Dakar, as described by Simone, are analytically constructed neither as pasteurised urban landscapes in conflict with the rural hinterland, nor as a battlefield where alien knowledge erases an autochthonous past (p. 137 and p. 133). In the same vein, looking beyond the obvious fact that modern elegant clothing points to earlier French colonisation in the Republic of the Congo, for the Sapeur quoted by Gandoulou, C 2010 European Association of Social Anthropologists. REVIEWS his taste and predilections are a ‘way of expressing oneself’ (p. 195), a self built as a role model, like the Evolués or the Feymen described by Ndjio (p. 205). In this sense, modernity – at least in these contexts – goes beyond the colonial subjugation to foreign settlers. As Senghor long ago stated, it implies the contemporary possibility of creatively constructing oneself as ‘not only an expression of knowledge, but [as] knowledge itself’ (p. 86). In a true tour de force, the editors have achieved an impressive balance of classical arguments and contemporary debates in order to demonstrate that modernity as a theme has pervaded diverse analytic domains, historical epochs and social spaces. Despite missing some key authors (like Archie Mafeje or Mahmood Mamdani), the book is a seminal map that invites the reader to pose further questions. While the reader is initially delighted by the ‘relational understanding’ advocated by the editors and the assembled articles, other problems come to mind. Although a dimension merely insinuated by authors such as Ferme or Ferguson, the reader finishes the book eager for another volume on the less respectable side of modernity, where fear, war, and human and environmental destruction could be scrutinised. As Ferguson himself would say, shadows are constitutive parts of any global phenomena. Modernity is no exception. ANTONÁDIA BORGES University of Brasilia (Brasil) Graburn, Nelson H.H., John Ertl and R. Kenji Tierney (eds.). 2008. Multiculturalism in the New Japan. Crossing the Boundaries Within New York & Oxford: Berghahan Books. 257pp. Hb.: $85.00./£50.00. ISBN: 978 1 84545 226 1. Multiculturalism in the New Japan présente une palette du changement social en cours au Japon à travers une approche de l’arène de la visibilité sociale et politique des minorités. Un premier volet de communications est consacré aux dynamiques d’intégration/marginalisation C 2010 European Association of Social Anthropologists. 479 des communautés étrangères et à leur visibilité au sein des politiques nationales et des municipalités. Ainsi sont proposés la remise en question du concept de « résidents » (Takezawa, chap. I), la migration féminine indochinoise (Burgess, chap. III), la criminalisation politique des népalais (Yamanaka, chap. VIII), l’accueil scolaire des enfants étrangers (Okubo, chap. IX). Une contradiction se dessine ainsi entre la répression du travail clandestin et les stéréotypes véhiculés par l’administration et les nombreuses activités organisées en faveur des communautés étrangères avec le support des ONG et des syndicats locaux. Le deuxième volet touche à la représentation de l’altérité dans la construction de l’identité nationale : l’aliénation culturelle des Japonais-Brésiliens (Tsuda, chap. VI), le discours public sur l’identité et l’appartenance par rapport à la diaspora coréenne (Hester, chap. VII), la mémoire de la bombe atomique à Nagasaki (Nelson, chap. XI), la perception et la représentation de la peau noire et du métissage (Carter et Hunter, chap. X) et la militarisation et l’internationalisation du sumo (Tierney, chap. XII). Le troisième volet de l’ouvrage s’oriente sur les politiques d’internationalisation économique (chapitres II, IV, V, XIII). Ainsi, l’on décrit les changements de la représentation du travail et des hiérarchies en entreprise (Hamada, chap. II), les politiques du tourisme et des échanges interculturels (Ertl, chap. IV), le « marriage market » issu de la mobilité transnationale féminine (Yamashita, chap. V) et l’internationalisation des politiques culturelles (Graburn, chap. XIII). Le caléidoscope de paysages sociaux proposés dans Multiculturalism in the New Japan se structure par un fil rouge manifeste dans toutes les contributions, à savoir l’interaction et le conflit entre les politiques de reconstruction et d’intégration nationales et l’engagement citoyen « par le bas ». L’on relève, ainsi, à la fois, la gestion symbolique et administrative de la mobilité étrangère et les contradictions du concept de « l’étranger », 480 REVIEWS soumis aux aléas des frontières politiques et aux revers des parcours individuels. Un deuxième élément de relief est la variété des thèmes proposés et la myriade de trajectoires parallèles et transversales générée par les micro-cosmes des minorités et les miroirs sociaux à travers lesquels celles-ci se recomposent suivant les rapports de force des politiques nationales. Ces qualités constituent aussi les limites de l’ouvrage. Il n’est pas clair à quel public ce livre s’adresse. Si l’interlocuteur était le public japonais, l’on pourrait dire que le livre remplit sa tâche en tant qu’outil de travail aussi bien pour le gouvernement central que pour les acteurs locaux. Un public averti appréciera également un aperçu de la société contemporaine japonaise et de l’évolution des relations interculturelles USA-Japon. S’il est destiné aussi au milieu académique (ceci est, sans doute, le cas), quelques remarques s’imposent. Dans l’introduction, Graburn et Ertl esquissent l’évolution du thème du multiculturalisme dans l’anthropologie du Japon sans développer, toutefois, aucune véritable mise en contexte par rapport au débat méthodologique qui accompagne l’enquête anthropologique sur les migrations transnationales (Lachenmann 2008). Deuxièmement, l’on remarque un recours trop fréquent à l’approche autobiographique et descriptive. Dans certaines contributions, celles-ci semblent constituer les seuls centres d’intérêt des auteurs, au risque de glisser vers des affirmations aussi nombrilistes que génériques. Tel est le cas, parmi d’autres, de la contribution sur la « blackness » dans le chapitre de Mitzi Carter et Aina Hunter. Troisièmement, l’on relève une confusion entre théorisation et conceptualisation. Les développements « théoriques » annoncés par certains des auteurs en début de chapitre, ne sont, en réalité, qu’une introduction descriptive du sujet. Dans bien de cas, les textes s’aplatissent dans une boulimie de pistes prometteuses sans aboutissements analytiques. En revanche, des questions significatives telles, par exemple, les enjeux politiques des concepts de tabunka kyôsei (« plusieurs cultures vivant ensemble ») et de tabunka-shugi (« multiculturalisme »), mentionnés dans l’introduction, ne sont pas théorisées. Ces quelques remarques n’enlèvent pas l’intérêt de ce livre et son effort louable d’éclairer des contextes sociaux peu connus. Références Lachenmann, Gudrun. 2008. « Researching Translocal Gendered Spaces: Methodological Challenges » in Gudrun Lachenmann and Petra Dannecker, Negotiating Development in Muslim Societies. Gendered Spaces and Translocal Connections, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, pp. 13–34. CRISTIANA PANELLA Musée royal de l’Afrique centrale (Tervuren, Belgique) Gustafson, Bret. 2009. New languages of the state: Indigenous resurgence and the politics of knowledge in Bolivia. Durham: Duke University Press. 331 pp. Pb.: $23.95. ISBN: 978 0 8223 4546 6. This book is an important contribution to scholarly research that seeks to move beyond disciplinary boundaries, question dichotomous relationships between agency and structure, and discredit simple characterisations of neoliberalism as ‘bad’ and social movements as ‘good’. By demonstrating how the ‘bogeyman’ of neoliberalism can offer even seemingly powerless actors openings for critical engagement and reconstruction of existing power relationships (p. 150), the author challenges the overly critical approach to neoliberalism dominant in anthropology. The result of rich ethnographic fieldwork spanning over 14 years, the book reveals the intersection of Bolivian state policy and social movements by tracing the policy of Intercultural Bilingual Education (EIB in Spanish) through multiple scales and ethnographic sites. As the author recounts his C 2010 European Association of Social Anthropologists. REVIEWS work with the indigenous Guarani of Bolivia through the 1980s to more recent developments in Bolivian politics and educational policy, the interests of state elites, social movements and transnational actors are shown to converge and shift across time. These changing articulations opened up an agentive space for the indigenous Guarani to contest the colonial policies of the Bolivian state. Knowledge becomes a central resource in the struggle of the Guarani to walk among the Karai (non-Guarani mestizos, criollos and foreigners) and ‘speak without shame’ (p. 219). The book is divided into three parts, with each part corresponding loosely to different levels of analysis and periods of engagement of the Guarani with bilingual education policy. The first part, ‘Resurgent Knowledge’, moves between local Guarani communities, providing a historical context of colonial racial and economic subjugation. This section of the book recounts how the Guarani scribes and the Assembly of Guarani People (APG) organised, with the help of non-profit organisations, to use bilingual education as a knowledge resource, contesting historical exclusionary policies. The second section of the book, ‘Transnational Articulations’, moves to national and international policy levels to examine how as EIB became increasingly formalised, it concurrently became increasingly disconnected from the locally-based Guarani leadership, losing much of its transformative potential. The larger geopolitical context placed pressure on elites at the national level to embrace interculturalism and still retain epistemic authority and political control. The final section, ‘Return to Struggle’, places EIB in the context of growing contestation of neoliberal policy by both indigenous activists and teachers’ union. The book concludes with a discussion of the potential and limitations of EIB policy in the current political context. This account of the Guarani’s struggle against the Bolivian state skilfully moves between multiple levels of analysis, ranging from discussions with local Guarani leaders to C 2010 European Association of Social Anthropologists. 481 state-level decision making and international politics. The chapters of the book are interwoven with brief ‘interludes’, which trace the author’s movement from village to village and then on to the capital La Paz and back again. These interludes often offer a respite from a rich, but dense text and highlight the concern of local people as they relate to the larger context. The author is particularly careful to reveal his own biases towards neoliberal policy, describing how his initial critical reactions to EIB policy were often dismissed or contextualised by Guarani people. Many Guarani activists understood the limitations of the policy, yet responded to the strategic opening EIB presented as embedded in a larger project of neoliberal decentralisation. Although Guarani knowledge was disembodied from its context in the formal school setting, the Guarani students’ active participation in and engagement with learning in schools seemed to result in a growing confidence in Guarani children that could have important implications for the Guarani’s ability to navigate Karai society. While the book offers a nuanced perspective on how interculturalism challenges existing categories and social boundaries, it ultimately highlights the limited potential of knowledge politics. Early in the book, the author criticises Charles Hale (2002) for failing to recognise the contradictions in neoliberalism that render space for agency and contestation. Hale is explicit about the need of cultural rights movements to address the structural inequalities to avoid the pitfalls of ‘neoliberal multiculturalism’ (Hale 2002: 487). Gustafson characterises such arguments as failing to recognise how interculturalism unsettled traditional notions of elite power through epistemic transformation. Yet, the final chapter of the book qualifies much of the central argument about the transformative potential of the politics of knowledge by arguing that without addressing deep structural inequalities, knowledge politics is unlikely to fundamentally change the status quo. 482 REVIEWS Gustafson asserts that, ‘Rhetoric about education as a way out of poverty in isolation from other state interventions forms part of a market theodicy that only serves to legitimate the existing social order’ (p. 280). I appreciate the explicit return to how structural inequalities mitigate the impact of policy alignments or articulations, but ending the book on this note seems to discount much of the main argument about the way changes in the epistemic authority can have a lasting impact on power relations. The concluding chapter of the book seems to concur with Hale’s characterisation of ‘multicultural neoliberalism’, more than the author’s own characterisation of Hale’s argument would suggest. Reference Hale, Charles. 2002. ‘Does multiculturalism menace: Governance, cultural rights and the politics of identity in Guatemala’, Journal of Latin American Studies 34: 485–524. TRISH GIBSON Indiana University (USA) Gyarmati, Jànos (ed.). 2008. ‘Taking them back to my homeland. . .’. Hungarian collectors – Non-European collections of the Museum of Ethnography in a European context. Budapest: Museum of Ethnography. 381 pp. Hb.: N/A. ISBN: 978 963 954 045 3. The volume Taking Them Back to My Homeland, edited by Jànos Gyarmati, presents the results of a research project entitled ‘The Non-European Collections of the Museum of Ethnography in a European Context’, a systematic study of the history of the various non-European collections of the Museum of Ethnography in Budapest that has been going on for the last decade. It is a sequel to a first volume published in 2000 in Hungarian (Fejó´s 2000). The aim of the research has been to evaluate the Hungarian collections within a broader Western European context, examining collection strategies and musealisation in order to gain a historical perspective of the specific collections and to enable a comparative analysis. In this detailed work, the history of each major section of the museum (Africa, America, Asia-Indonesia, Oceania-Australia) is depicted, augmented by a wealth of written and pictorial documents from Hungarian archives. An outline is given of the special aspects and ‘history’ of each section and collection, and the most important collecting strategies are discussed. Additionally, famous expeditions and collectors are introduced in individual chapters, e.g. the Teleki expedition, the Oceania collections of Lajos Biró and Rudolf Festetics, Benedek Baráthosi Baloghs’ work in Japan and the Armur River region, and Lajos Boglárs’ Amazonian collections. Here, the scholarly background of the individual collectors is described as well as any international collaboration undertaken in the various expeditions. Making this volume especially valuable and a cornerstone for further international collaboration is the appendix, which contains a detailed table listing the collectors and the origin and acquisition means of the various collections, as well as a comprehensive bibliography of the respective Hungarian publications of the last century. It enables comparative research to be done not only in relation to the Budapest museum collections, but also with regard to the discipline’s history in general. The meticulous manner in which the museums’ Accession Register is depicted and evaluated for each section and collection, together with diagrams comparing the different collecting strategies as based on the various types of artefacts, makes this publication an excellent reference book for further research. The Department of Ethnography of the Hungarian National Museum was founded in 1872, before its counterparts were established in Berlin (1873) and Vienna (1876 Anthropological-Ethnographic section within the k.u.k. Naturhistorisches Hofmuseum). There were then three main periods of collection acquisition (from 1872 to 1918, from 1919 to 1959, and from 1960 to the C 2010 European Association of Social Anthropologists. REVIEWS present). The volume examines each of these periods, taking into account the specific political developments that occurred in Hungary over the years. Gyarmati defines the first period as the ‘golden age of the overseas collection’ (p. 15) and discusses the contributions made by János Xántus to establish the museum, the several Austro-Hungarian ‘joint venture’ expeditions, which were marked by a quite competitive relationship, as well as specific research strategies. The author also describes the contribution of Hungarian anthropologists, as for example Géza Róheim and Emil Torday, in developing theoretical approaches. When compared with the ethnological museums in Great Britain, Germany and Austria, Hungary had neither imperial and colonial interests, nor the objective of establishing profitable trade with the regions involved. A research paradigm that already formed in the first period and continued through the following decades was the search for and documentation of ‘kindred people’ (e.g. J. Zichy, J. Jankó, B. Balogh), which included the Finno-Ugric, the Turko-Tatar, and the Caucasian and Iranian peoples as well as their cultures and ancestral religions. This resulted, for instance, in Vilmos Diószegi founding an archive of shamanism in 1953. What makes the ‘Hungarian’ endeavour so fascinating for the history of science is this paradigm, which was marked by extensive interest in both the scholarly and public sector. The Hungarian community was not envisaged by shaping and imagining the ‘Self ’ through the construction of an ‘Other’, but by searching for common traits with people around the world. The hardships and challenges for Hungarian anthropologists during the second period as well as, to some extent, the third, are also described: they were relatively isolated, restricted in their freedom of travel, and lacked funds for new acquisitions. This section also touches on their obligation to conduct research in line with Marxist ideology. But during the third period the political situation gradually became more relaxed and fieldwork again became possible, C 2010 European Association of Social Anthropologists. 483 seen best in the contribution of Lajos Boglár (curator of the America Collection) in building up an impressive Amazonia collection. This volume is also valuable with regard to the history of ethnography in the former Austro-Hungarian monarchy, enabling a comparative analysis with developments in Austria during the first decades of the field. Unfortunately, the reader gets only a vague idea about how the various collections have been displayed over the years, or the strategies involved in choosing both permanent and temporary exhibitions. Interesting follow-ups to this volume might include a critical review of how research on ‘kindred people’ was communicated to the general public or how it shaped a national image of ‘Self’, including the conceptual shifts and ‘political realities’ as outlined by Laszlo Kürti (1996), or perhaps an analysis of the ‘thick networks of communication and exchange that took shape around the museums’, as has been presented by Glen Penny (2002) for Germany. References Fejó´s, Zoltán. 2000. A Néprajzi Múzeum gyjteményei [Collections of the Museum of Ethnography]. Budapest: Néprajzi Múzeum. Kürti, Laszlo. 1996. ‘Homecoming: Affairs of anthropologists in and of Eastern Europe’, Anthropology Today 12: 11–15. Penny, H. Glenn. 2002. Objects of culture. Ethnology and ethnographic museums in Imperial Germany. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. MARIA SIX-HOHENBALKEN Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna (Austria) Haram, Liv and C. Bawa Yamba (eds.). 2009. Dealing with uncertainty in contemporary African lives. Uppsala: Nordika Afrikainstitutet. 226 pp. Pb.: $22.95. ISBN: 978 91 7106 6497. With increasing frequency, anthropological writings on social distress and suffering in 484 REVIEWS contemporary African social lives test the concept of human agency in terms of its multiple, and, often very vague valences. This volume’s central theoretical concern in this vein is the lived relationships between uncertainty – as an open-ended catch all for the contingency of social relations – and the insecurities conditioned by modern subjectivity and its social and cultural stressors. Apart from a single chapter dealing with Zimbabwe, this volume develops its analytic tensions around the emotive and affective dimensions of suffering in several eastern African localities (the notable exception being that no case studies pertain to Kenya) and delivers sometimes heart-felt ethnography on the relationality of misfortune and its social fallout. For readers not familiar with eastern Africa, the volume can contribute valuable comparative notes on the tensions between tradition and modernity, on the one hand, and newly emergent concerns for the everyday force of insecurity in areas thought, otherwise, to be spared the violence of warfare. Ezra Chitando’s ethnography of Harare’s ‘born-again’ Christians places affliction along a scale that includes, but does not terminate with the hopelessness of Zimbabwe’s economic and political prospects. Here, as elsewhere in Africa, Pentecostal-charismatic churches offer hope in the certainty of faith gospel and its attendant health and wealth doctrines, a glimmer of potentiality amid crushing constraint that leads adherents to dream of leaving Zimbabwe, together with newly blessed and sanctified passports that promise deliverance from suffering, not in heaven, but in neighbouring countries. Echoing this crusade for certainty in Uganda, Catrine Christiansen’s chapter on Busia district’s savedees shows that the search for divine certainties often begins with individual concerns to heal relationships, such as rocky marriages, through personal relationships to God, before adherents turn to heal other malefactory relations with the demonic. Both chapters highlight how uncertainties – and fantasies of certitude – are manifest in relations with others, despite the stress on personal salvation in charismatic churches. The three chapters on witchcraft deal with uncertainty in terms of ‘fragile relations’, following Knut Christian Myhre’s insightful contribution. Eschewing descriptions of contemporary Chagga witchcraft as an epiphenomenon of colonial transformations or millennial capitalism, Myhre’s detailed case study examines how commensality, neighbourliness, and disease are linked together in witchcraft narratives by the uncertainty brought about through disrupted or undermined social relations. In Todd Sanders’ contribution, the anthropological thesis of witchcraft and capitalist accumulation is challenged through a case study of Ihanzu critiques of the ‘transparency’ of capitalist markets and goods. Among the Ihanzu, Sanders argues, the destruction or appropriation of traditional goods and wealth through witchcraft, while not directly observed, can be ‘seen’ through the work of local diviners. What causes concern among Ihanzu is where witchcraft narratives speak to ‘modern’ wealth accumulation, where diviners cannot ‘see’ the logic of witchcraft at work, its ‘invisibility’ the opaque source of apprehension and anxiety. For Simeon Mesaki, the prevalent murders of elderly women, accused of being witches, brings an altogether more tragic uncertainty of ageing in contemporary Sukuma society and empirically adds to the theme of gender violence developed elsewhere in the volume. Mental distress and female suicide in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, are the themes uniting the chapters by Mary Ann Mhina and Noah Ndosi, respectively. These contributors explore the ways in which biomedical interventions and ‘traditional’ therapeutics are interpellated in a wide critique of the social stigma of mental illnesses in Africa, particularly in terms of gender and family relations. Both chapters contribute initial research findings on topics that are still underdeveloped in anthropology and African studies, urging further work on this significant question of uncertainty and bioethics. C 2010 European Association of Social Anthropologists. REVIEWS Adding to the now voluminous literature on HIV/AIDS, the last two chapters sensitively address the questioning of life and death in the face of killer diseases. Hanne Mogensen’s ethnography of the discovery of anti-retroviral treatment by a recently diagnosed HIV-positive woman in Uganda demonstrates the pressures and potentialities of knowing a person’s HIV status within the context of extended families. Taking on board the public optimism about biomedical and pharmaceutical ways of coping with HIV infection, Mogensen shows how life can continue when HIV/AIDS is no longer considered a death sentence. In Liv Haram’s final chapter, readers are exposed to the violent politicisation of female sexuality in the Kilimanjaro region, Tanzania, through detailed ethnography of ideologies claiming how and why the spread of AIDS is associated with the predatory sexuality of women exploiting the wealthy and healthy bodies of men. Focusing on how locals map out sexual networks, Haram adds considerably to understanding the kinds of gendered etiological work usually overlooked in public discourses about prevention (and cure), thereby enhancing the hegemony of male sexual dominance. This volume speaks to uncertainty in contemporary eastern African lives with empathy and each contribution adds more than can be expressed in this review. Opting for an ‘open’ conceptualisation of uncertainty, however, may be an approach its authors might wish to reconsider in future work in this direction, focusing more intently on the relationality of lives unbalanced. MARK LAMONT Goldsmiths, University of London (UK) Kapferer, Judith (ed.). 2008. The state and the arts. Articulating power and subversion. Oxford: Berghahn. 180 pp. Pb.: $27.95/£15.00. ISBN: 978 1 84545 578 1. As the ruins of antique cities still tell us, if there is any realm where the State has a say C 2010 European Association of Social Anthropologists. 485 about the arts, it is the public one, even if in a more intimate way, the State insinuates its policies into private lives. Kapferer starts her introduction with a puzzling assertion that links the beginning of State interventions in the arts with the Italian Renaissance and its court society. Her choice for this case among other ones that she seems to dismiss leads us to understand her cosmogony to be linked with a specific acceptance of the State which would be identical to its ideological discourse. Fortunately, as she invites the reader to consider also ‘other creative production’, Kapferer sketches a Foucauldian and Certeausian tonality for this study of ‘the relation of the arts of living to institutions of order and control’ (p. 5) that includes transnational order, globalisation, and the power of NGOs in the debate. As Beunders has it, in multicultural societies, arrogance has given way to persuasion, while freedom of expression makes difficult encounters with human rights, the democratisation of politics, and the mediatisation of all events. Freedom of expression and censorship are ‘grey areas’ shifting with politics. Globalisation, as Chong demonstrates with the case of Singapore, can induce local policies aiming at the creation of (‘false’) specificities for the sake of marketing a location, and induce trends through the attribution of grants. Art can then be part of strategies of resistance, as Fokidis demonstrates after citing Broothaers in a quotation reminiscent of Althusser’s ‘Ideology and the State Ideological Apparatus’, showing how a collective art project facilitates the expression of repressed memories of displacement in South Eastern Europe. Another way of ‘engaging with history’ is through the performing of ‘traditions’: as Henry demonstrates, Australian festivals are more than a folklorisation of the past as, to the performers, they are the only way to re-appropriate and transmit their traditions. How much do we, in places such as Central London, master our urban experiences? This is the question Kapferer addresses while wondering about public and private partnerships in challenging the State. Showing how streets and 486 REVIEWS monuments mark physical trajectories in the city, she aptly reminds us that cities are not made only of social fabric and individual connectivity, as some anthropologists are prone to see them. The politics of monuments (addressed by many authors in post-apartheid South Africa, not mentioned in this book) is examined from the standpoint of the ‘Self and the City’ by Kipphoff, who analyses the Berlin Memorial for the Jews, and some other sites in Romania. Very interestingly, investigating the ‘Symbolic Economies and Critical Practices’ in ‘The Culture Industries’, Miles describes how the arts, while being valued as such, are also social and economic instruments, and examines how UK (and other) policies use art, places and trends. Sassatelli, at the European Community level, scrutinises policies meant to foster European cohesion and identity through the seemingly paradoxical promotion of local flexibility in the interpretation of general policies. In his chapter, Valentine analyses responses to government actions at the level of production and distribution under the neo-liberal paradigm. A trend he underlines is the need to be ‘auditable’ in a context marred by an ‘absence of trust in, and knowledge of, organizations’ (p. 131), well in tune with ‘the post-modern mishmash’ and resulting in an impossibility of long-term planning (this could be applied to the academic field as well). Valentine’s institutional analysis points to the need to connect art as production and the art of life. The last chapter by Oye is a case study of the social impact of the gentrification of Schwerin, the capital city of Mecklemburg-Vorpommern (former East Germany). Making the red thread behind the collection and arrangement of chapters more explicit would have helped the reader’s trajectory. The introduction, unfortunately, interweaves rather general considerations of various aspects of the topic with sketchy examples and often lapidary affirmations. Yet, the themes tackled are of high importance and the literature background to the collection of chapters is much to the point of this original endeavour. A goal this book achieves is in opening a theoretically well-grounded debate on the relation between two aspects of culture: culture as production and culture as social praxis. The field of politics and economics of art as articulated by States and by global non-governmental institutions and appropriated by communities is illustrated through various case studies. Such a book is most welcome as an eye-opener on the pervasive ‘auditable’ mishmash into which cultural productions (either as art or as art of life) are currently processed and squeezed. DANIELLE DE LAME Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren (Belgium) Liempt, Ilse van and Veronika Bilger (eds.). 2009. The Ethics of Migration Research Methodology, Dealing with Vulnerable Immigrants. Brighton and Portland: Sussex Academic Press. vii+171pp. Hb.: £47.50. ISBN: 978 1 854519 331 7. Dans cet ouvrage collectif, les auteurs nous présentent leurs réflexions autour des thèmes, aussi délicats que complexes, de l’éthique et de la méthodologie de recherche sur des migrants en situations précaires. Ces contributions s’intègrent aux débats autour du terme problématique ‘vulnérable’ résultant de l’augmentation des nouvelles configurations migratoires irrégulières qui ouvrent de nouvelles perspectives et de nouveaux terrains à l’étude des migrations. A priori, le phénomène en soi, de par son accentuation et ses aspects divers, rend évident le besoin de vigilance extrême lors des recherches et impose, donc, un certain pluralisme méthodologique afin de ne pas obtenir des résultats partiaux ou déformés par subjectivité, empathie ou négligence. Dans l’introduction, les rédactrices, Ilse van Liempt et Veronika Bilger, expliquent avoir voulu recueillir des contributions sur les défis et les difficultés susceptibles de surgir lors de recherches auprès de groupes composés de personnes qui se sentent C 2010 European Association of Social Anthropologists. REVIEWS marginalisées et vulnérables. Le but de ce livre est de partager des questionnements éthiques et méthodologiques, de contribuer, ainsi, à la bibliographie restreinte sur le sujet et de promouvoir les approches à perspectives multiples. L’ouvrage se divise en trois parties : la première portant sur les méthodes et les problématiques de nature éthique dans des contextes institutionnels à travers deux études de cas dans des prisons. Robert F. Barsky et Christin Achermann évoquent les spécificités d’une telle recherche, les prisons constituant des espaces où naissent plusieurs contraintes et difficultés et, par conséquent, méritant des approches multiples par respect pour tous les acteurs sociaux impliqués. La seconde partie propose de réfléchir sur les principales méthodes de recherche en sciences sociales et traite les questions posées par les chercheurs et les stratégies suivies pour accéder et préserver les contacts au sein de groupes généralement difficiles à rapprocher, tels que des ‘sans-papiers’, des demandeurs d’asile, des migrants travailleurs du sexe et des immigrés clandestins. Les contributions de Richard Staring, Janine Dahinden et Denise Efionayi-Maader, Veronika Bilger et Ilse van Liempt respectivement, constituent un espace de réflexion autour des choix des méthodes pour la mise en rapport avec les informateurs, du traitement des informations recueillies et de l’usage des résultats au profit de l’objectivité et de la production du savoir scientifique. La troisième partie est issue de l’effort à définir le rôle du chercheur et sa position face à ses informateurs : l’asymétrie dans cette relation étant inévitable. A travers des cas de ‘sans papiers’ et de mineurs non-accompagnés, Eugenia Markova et Nuria Empez se mettent à examiner les rôles contradictoires du chercheur vis-à-vis de son statut parfois double et de son niveau d’engagement dans les groupes étudiés. Cet ouvrage composé de contributions de haut niveau académique se propose de débattre sur la méthodologie et sur l’éthique autour de la structuration et du déroulement C 2010 European Association of Social Anthropologists. 487 de la recherche, sans pour autant soutenir telle ou telle approche. Au contraire, tous les chercheurs adoptent un œil critique sur les qualités et les défauts de leurs choix et invitent à une réflexion encore plus profonde autour de ce sujet, étant donné que la bibliographie existante se focalise surtout sur les politiques concernant le phénomène et non pas sur les enjeux de la recherche de terrain. Tous les auteurs prennent en compte les contextes politiques et juridiques dans lesquels émergent les cas étudiés et font la synthèse de leurs résultats sous une approche critique des possibilités et des délimitations des méthodes et des stratégies suivies. Expliquant clairement le parcours suivi pour chaque cas, toutes les contributions permettent de saisir les problématiques posées au préalable, durant et après la recherche de terrain, lors du traitement des résultats. Les auteurs, très minutieux avec les données de leurs recherches, refusent de donner des réponses immédiates aux questions éthiques qu’ils ont du confronter. L’ouvrage réussit ainsi à élargir le champ de réflexion non seulement autour de la recherche auprès des migrants, les propositions présentées ici pouvant s’appliquer aux cas de tout groupe considéré comme ‘vulnérable’. Les contributions honnêtes, privées de fausses prétentions et douées de clarté scientifique servent d’exemples d’épreuves à surmonter et présentent aussi des fautes méthodologiques potentielles, les auteurs n’hésitant pas à conseiller aussi des changements (par exemple Achermann, pp. 72–73). Bien que l’approche multi-perspective soutenue puisse s’appliquer à des travaux groupés et non individuels, tout lecteur attentif s’appuyant sur les sciences sociales peut en tirer profit. Toutes ces qualités permettent d’excuser quelques fautes pourtant présentes dans l’édition (par exemple un site non-valide; p. 22, une énumération erronée des notes, p. 96; des citations qui ne figurent pas dans la bibliographie, p. 100) et à conseiller cette lecture comme étant indispensable pour toute 488 REVIEWS personne ou organisation s’occupant des groupes marginalisés et vulnérables. ELENI BOLIERAKI EHESS (Paris, France) Loftsdóttir, Kristı́n. 2008. The bush is sweet. Identity, power and development among WoDaaBe Fulani in Niger. Uppsala: Nordiska Afrika. 264 pp. Pb.: SEK20.00. ISBN: 978 91 7106 6176. The book under review is based on the author’s two-year field research in Niger between 1996 and 1998. This included the author living with different nomadic families of the WoDaaBe clan in a pastoral area, as well as with members of the same clan in the urban environment in Niamey, the capital of Niger, and in a border town with Nigeria. This approach enables the author to get a thorough insight into the reasons for WoDaaBe migrations to towns, and challenges to their identity, that leads her to a paradoxical conclusion: although in town one can not fulfil the ideal of wodaabe-ness that is interwoven with pastoral nomadic way of life, by using globalised images of WoDaaBe in selling identity-related products (handicrafts and dances), this diversification enables other family members to stay in the bush. Throughout the book the author successfully combines her personal observations, exchanges and understanding of experiences of individual WoDaaBe with scholarly analysis. In order to understand a complex situation of WoDaaBe in the contemporary world, she needs to enter into several fields: identity and development, migrations to town, ethnicity, production of indigenousness, global power relations, and inner diversity of power positions and gender. In the first part, Loftsdóttir acquaints us with globalised discourses produced in contexts of power that create WoDaaBe subjects, and influence their living conditions. The chapter on development is based on archival work and a review of the literature, showing how development subject as pastoral producer serves the interests of the state for exports, rather than improving life conditions for existing nomads. Different, but also produced on the stronger part of power relations, is the subject of WoDaaBe as eco-indigenous people, commercialised to serve the Western longing to project them as innocent Others. Those subject positions, imposed frozen in time, from two different discourses, are reintroduced in concluding chapters, in order to show how WoDaaBe perceive and use them to their own benefits, in their individual relations with Westerners. Loftsdóttir also presents WoDaaBe ethnography, leading us through seasons in the pastoral nomadic annual cycle, the pleasures and difficulties of living in the bush, initiating the reader in relations between humans and animals, the logic of nomadic movements – crucial concepts of WoDaaBe identity – as well as inner inequalities, most evident in age relations, and even more in gender relations. The reader then follows the author and WoDaaBe into the city, understanding migrations as a consequence of diminishing space and resources for a nomadic way of life, getting to know the continuity of diversification of nomads’ activities, the aim of workers to buy the cows that rarely succeeds, emergence of new desires, nostalgic relations to the bush, and new meanings of ethnicity facing other ethnic groups and the state. Particularly important is the commercialisation of identity-related products, crafts and dances, where the latter multiply their meanings in an urban context. Although Kristı́n Loftsdóttir comes from Iceland, she is still categorised as any other ‘white’, anasara, by WoDaaBe, meaning that they consider her as having access to riches, resources and ‘development’, tightly included in their perception of this category. The author exposes her ambiguous position in the field (which is the more general position of any anthropologist), where she is like a child learning proper behaviour, and dealing with longing for belonging. She chooses a particular ethnographic genre, influenced by intersubjectivity, as discussed by Lila C 2010 European Association of Social Anthropologists. REVIEWS Abu-Lughod, including anthropologist first-person narrative, in order to present the way her insights – in particular concepts of WoDaaBe identity, in the meaning of their practices, and in their everyday and survival preoccupations – were achieved. She succeeds in not overshadowing her subjects of research by the presence of an anthropologist in the text, giving emphasis to individual WoDaaBe experiences, and using the author as the identifier point in her dynamic relations with WoDaaBe individuals. She includes the difficult role of interpreter, or ‘assistant’, as a crucial intermediary between an anthropologist and a group he/she belongs to. The Bush is Sweet is an excellent ethnography of contemporary WoDaaBe preoccupations, the globalised context of their representations, their very real effects and, most important, the agency of individual WoDaaBe. It is a highly readable book, interesting not only to professional anthropologists, but also for a wider audience. It is a welcome reading for development workers, and undoubtedly helpful in influencing young anthropologists who wish to do research in changing ‘Fourth world’ societies. SARAH LUNAČEK University of Ljubljana (Slovenia) Lubkeman, Stephen C. 2008. Culture in chaos. An anthropology of the social condition in war. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. x + 401 pp. Pb.: $25.00/£13.00. ISBN: 0 226 49642 2. Hb.: $63.00/£33.00. ISBN: 0 226 49641 4. This volume is based on more than ten years of multi-sited ethnographic research on the experience of war, displacement and mobility of ‘Machazians’ from Machaze province in Mozambique. Nevertheless, the geographical referent is absent from the title. This makes sense, since the ambition of Lubkeman is to use his monograph to develop a theoretical C 2010 European Association of Social Anthropologists. 489 argument in regard to the social condition in war. Thus, the experience of Machazians becomes a strategic research site for exploring relations of structure and agency under conditions of limited predictability. War is widely perceived as an event in which violence determines subjectivity, agency and social processes due to its capacity for destruction or destabilisation of life, meaning and social relations. Against this perception, which he calls the ‘violent ordering of things’ (p. 9), Lubkeman argues that the inhabitants of war-scapes are engaged primarily in imagining, plotting out and enacting their lives in relation to ‘micropolitical’ social struggles of, for example, gender and generation, rather than the ‘macropolitical’, national dimensions of the conflict (p. 14). This is not to say that violence does not have an impact on people’s ‘life-scapes’ – and indeed Machaze was one of the provinces most affected by displacement during Mozambique’s protracted war – but in most cases the influence is indirect in the sense that violence reconfigures and complicates the conditions under which people pursue their strategies and engage in particular social struggles. The book has an introduction plus ten chapters, organised in four sections. It sets out with an ethnohistorical exploration of Machazean migration and social transformations before the war, and proceeds to analyse how these social relations conditioned the political projects of the war both at the local level and in terms of state–citizens relations. The third section looks at the social condition in war, primarily the different ways in which mobility and immobility were played out among people from Machaze. As one of the main points of the book, Lubkeman suggests that displacement is not the same as forced migration. Rather ‘displacement occurs when lifescapes are transformed in a way that introduces and accentuates extreme forms of structural violence’ (p. 213). Thus, he talks about ‘forcibly immobilized’ women who stayed in the villages or in refugee camps, while many men engaged in, or continued, 490 REVIEWS forms of migration to South Africa that can hardly be defined as displacement. As Lubkeman heard the reasoning behind migration-related decisions, people were attentive to the longer-term implications of their choices rather than just being dominated by the most pressing tactical concerns. The question is to what degree such decisions have been rationalised after the fact. The last section analyses how the war became a socially transformative condition, continuing to work for a long time after hostilities officially ended. The focus is on migration, the reluctance to return to Mozambique after the war, and in particular the importance and complexities of a Machazean moral economy in the wake of the social novelty of ‘transnational polygyny’, which developed under the conditions of war. Confirming findings of other studies of post-war transformations, Lubkeman shows how women tend to become disempowered as a consequence of these transformations. Importantly, however, this section demonstrates that cultural models of the past were not irrelevant to the imagination of the future. Rather, people continued throughout and after the war to deal with ideas of Machazean identity and moral universe in order not to upset ancestors and to produce socially acceptable discourses and practices despite the changing social conditions. In the last chapter, my favourite one, Lubkeman engages very explicitly in theoretical debate as he tries to figure out how and why the propositions and practices of some agents – some of them rather surprising and very innovative – gain social traction and become included in Machazean social imagination, while those of others remain marginalised. Lubkeman is not alone with his argument and approach. In a way his intellectual trajectory from the mid 1990s to the second half of the naughties follows a certain current of studies of violence and displacement within anthropology that engages critically with mainstream perceptions of these issues. But Lubkeman’s version is extremely solid, well documented, theoretically consistent and well argued, and the different sections will fit very well into thematic reading lists for courses on war, violence, migration and displacement. FINN STEPPUTAT Danish Institute for International Studies, Copenhagen (Denmark) McCourt, Christine (ed.). 2009. Childbirth, Midwifery, and Concepts of Time. Oxford : Berghahn. xviii + 260pp. Hb.: £55.00. ISBN: 978 1 84545 5866. Les travaux d’anthropologues et de sages-femmes rassemblés ici portent sur les implications du temps, et plus particulièrement de la manière dont celui-ci est géré culturellement, sur les femmes impliquées dans le processus de la naissance. Appliquée au phénomène de la naissance de manière générale, il apparaı̂t que cette gestion temporelle s’impose indépendamment des souhaits personnels propres à chaque femme. Elle englobe par ailleurs tous les acteurs qui participent d’une manière ou d’une autre au processus de la naissance et leur vécu de cette expérience ainsi que leur rôle au sein de ce dernier: membres de la famille proche, partenaire, professionnels ou jugés comme tels. Privilégiant la méthode ethnographique, l’attention de chaque contribution se porte sur les usages et les pratiques, les discours des acteurs, les techniques et les idéologies qui sous-tendent la « nature temporelle de la naissance et de tous ceux impliqués dans ce processus » (p. XV). La majorité des études présentées dans cet ouvrage a été menée dans des contextes biomédicaux occidentaux (principalement en Europe et en Amérique du Nord. Les auteurs sont particulièrement attentifs à l’émergence de pratiques alternatives à celles encouragées (pour ne pas dire imposées) par le système biomédical, particulièrement en ce qui concerne la gestion du temps dans la naissance. Le chapitre 1 retrace l’évolution socio-historique de la conceptualisation du temps dans le contexte européen pré-moderne, moderne et contemporain. Selon les auteures, ce contexte a donné naissance à la biomédecine en tant que C 2010 European Association of Social Anthropologists. REVIEWS système de santé, puis aux tendances à la globalisation qui ont peu à peu conduit ce système, ainsi que celui de mesure et de marquage du temps, qui lui est associé, à être étendu à d’autres pays. Elles abordent ainsi les changements socio-économiques qui ont contribué à la transformation de la conception du temps ainsi que la propagation et la domination de la biomédecine comme savoir autoritaire et pratique. Le chapitre 2 propose un état des lieux des études menées en anthropologie et en sociologie en lien avec la question du temps et met en valeur de leur pertinence dans la remise en question du discours biomédical, grâce au regard critique qu’elles offrent. Les travaux de Marx, Foucault, Durkheim et Bourdieu sont abordés et complétés par des ethnographies centrées sur les questions du temps et de la naissance. Les chapitres 3 et 4 se concentrent sur l’analyse des théories et des pratiques autour de la gestion du temps au moment de l’accouchement, notamment à travers une analyse des travaux de Friedman et de sa technique de gestion active de l’accouchement (ch. 3), et en présentant des formes alternatives de gestion de l’accouchement, que les auteurs qualifient de plus « traditionnelles » et qui consistent à « être avec » la femme en couches (ch. 4). Les chapitres 5 à 7 approfondissent la question des modèles alternatifs de gestion de la naissance, et leurs impacts sur le rapport au temps des sages-femmes dans leurs pratiques quotidiennes (ch. 5). Le chapitre 6, avec l’exemple des « centres de naissance », illustre la tendance à valoriser de plus en plus les pratiques d’accompagnement dites « traditionnelles » dans les pays riches, tout en continuant parallèlement à imposer aux pays « en développement » le modèle technocratique de la naissance occidental. Le chapitre 7 explore les concepts Aborigènes du temps et leurs impacts sur la gestion de la naissance dans divers contextes obstétricaux du nord du Canada. Les chapitres 8 et 9 se concentrent sur l’intérêt des approches narratives dans la C 2010 European Association of Social Anthropologists. 491 recherche sur les questions de santé. Cette approche, qui serait mieux à même de rendre compte de la nature de l’expérience de la naissance, est présentée dans le chapitre 8. Le chapitre 9 en illustre les arguments au travers de récits de femmes, de leur expérience du temps lors de leur accouchement en milieu hospitalier anglais, et de leur sentiment de décalage entre ce qu’elles ressentaient et ce qui leur était imposé (against the clock). Le chapitre 10 aborde les paradoxes et les conflits liés à l’imposition de « l’alimentation sur demande » dans les maternités anglaises, tandis que le chapitre 11 analyse les réponses des femmes japonaises face à l’ « incertitude » de la maternité. Ce riche ouvrage est destiné à tous les chercheurs en sciences sociales préoccupés par la problématique de la naissance, comme aux praticiens qui souhaitent adopter un autre regard sur les pratiques actuelles autour de la naissance. LINE ROCHAT Université de Lausanne (Suisse) Metcalf, Peter. 2010. The life of the longhouse. An archeology of ethnicity. New York: Cambridge University Press. xi + 345 pp. Hb.: €50.00/US$85.00. ISBN: 9780521110983. Amidst the dense and sparsely populated rain forests of central Borneo impressively large longhouses became the centres of communities accommodating up to several hundred members. Why do people live in such longhouses? How did they come into existence? And how did they construct their identities? These are the central questions that Peter Metcalf addresses in his book The Life of the Long house. An Archaeology of Ethnicity. The approach chosen by the author is both anthropological and historical. Due to the combination of empirical data collected over a period of 27 months and the critical 492 REVIEWS analysis of historical sources, Metcalf’s work is relevant not only for Borneo specialists but also for those in the wider field of Southeast Asian studies. His account adds a widely missing historiography of marginalised inland/upland groups and as a result contributes to a better understanding of present social realities in Borneo and beyond. Metcalf opens his rich ethnography with a detailed description of longhouses. Once located in the immediate vicinity of rivers, they were embedded in a flourishing network of pre-modern trade. Since the 16th century, when the influence of Brunei was at its height after the ruling elite had converted to Islam, trade relations flourished until the 1940s. Exotic forest products found their way downstream and were traded via Brunei towards China in exchange for exquisite manufactured goods that were traded upriver. Trading was therefore the precondition and main reason for the rise of longhouse communities. What the author means by a longhouse community, however, goes far beyond the common understanding of the term. For Metcalf, the longhouse community is like a self-supporting organism with the longhouse being its political, religious and cultural centre. ‘There was, however, one thing that almost all houses embodied: the sense of being a metropolis, the cultural center of what I can only call a nation’ (p. 61). Metcalf shows how ethnicity is constituted by a longhouse ‘nation’ in order to differentiate themselves from others living outside the community, whatever their ethnic label. People from different places became united in a longhouse and then the place name of that longhouse evolved into an ethnonym. ‘The process of place names becoming ethnonyms demonstrates the character of longhouse communities as sites of production of ethnic differentiation’ (p. 68). What constituted the people’s sense of who they are was much more the knowledge of a shared history and place of living than any assumed form of tribalism. The specific community Metcalf describes throughout his book was called Long Batan, headed by Aban Jau, an outstanding leader in the 19th century, whose genius lay in mobilising people. Longhouse communities like Long Batan assembled people who had previously lived at different places, collectively referred to as Orang Ulu (Upriver People). Long Batan, a geographical term, at first not more than a map reference, became the name of the community in the course of time and consequently turned into an ethnonym. This is what Metcalf describes as the making of ethnicity. Another significant aspect of life in the longhouse lies in the religious sphere, which is given priority in the chapter entitled ‘The Long houses and Ritual’. In Metcalf’s opinion, the study of religion in anthropology is essentially the study of ritual. The fundamental principle observed within the longhouse community reads: ‘When in Rome, do what Romans do’ (p. 214). According to Metcalf, the significance of religion was about what needed to be done and not what needed to be believed. In this respect ritual consensus and not necessarily a consensus of belief constituted the broad basis for a balanced and harmonious religious life. Some readers, however, may criticise Metcalf for being too idealistic in his view of the historic longhouse communities and, indeed, more emphasis on internal power struggles and conflicts would have been desirable. With his archaeology of ethnicity Metcalf portrays the rise and fall of the Long Batan longhouse community. After departing from the heyday of a pre-modern trade nation and passing two colonial regimes he finally arrives in the present. Today the former inhabitants of this rainforest nation are stranded in coastal cities, being part of the urban proletariat. Metcalf states that for them modernity has caused cultural and economic impoverishment, rather than liberation from an oppressive tradition. The work of Metcalf certainly demonstrates anthropology’s ability to deconstruct ethnicity and nationalism. By showing the making of ethnicity, a process he C 2010 European Association of Social Anthropologists. REVIEWS calls ethnification, stereotypes of ‘tribal’ societies fade into irrelevance. CHRISTIAN WARTA Institute for Social Anthropology, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna (Austria) Moberg, Mark. 2008. Slipping away. Banana politics and fair trade in the Eastern Caribbean. Oxford and New York: Berghahn. 272 pp. Hb.: $90.00/£55.00. ISBN: 978 1 84545 1455. This study takes on a central topic in Caribbean studies – the banana trade – refracting through it issues of local politics and global ideological and economic change. The book examines the way small producers on the island of St Lucia were affected by, and then creatively responded to, 1990s trade disputes that ended in a rejection of preferential status for Caribbean growers. But as much as this is a story about the ravages of neoliberal globalisation – which puts small farming St Lucians in competition with huge mainland producers – it is also an examination of the specifics of how Santa Lucians farm and market their products, how they relate with each other, how they make meaning in their lives, and especially how they do politics. St Lucia, and particularly its banana-rich Mabouya Valley, is literally and figuratively an island enveloped both (1) in the context of its neighbours and (2) in a temporal trajectory of colonial settlement and exploitation, regional and global migration, and dynamic global trade. The main arc of the book traces the colonial-era creation of a ‘stable peasantry’, and the ways in which politicians mobilised rural voters in subsequent generations, making them dependent on protected markets for their crops. But in the 1990s, St Lucia’s political economy of banana production was shaken from the outside, by global neoliberal practices focused exclusively on price without accounting for human and environmental welfare in the way local politics necessarily did. C 2010 European Association of Social Anthropologists. 493 To illuminate these dynamics and communicate a fascinating history, Moberg combines several perspectives and methods. Broadly, the book is both historical and ethnographic. It is also both multi-sited and multi-layered, incorporating data from the region as well as the global market, and examining ‘agents’ not only in the fields, but also in the realm of political vote-getting, in competing markets, and at the level of global industry and trade. As needed, the book draws not only on ethnographic, historical and interview data, but also quantitative economic data, a local survey and very effective authorial accounts. Using whatever sources are needed enables Moberg to write accurately about everything from the somewhat veiled agenda of big companies to the sub-rosa realities of the local smuggling economy. The book is so beautifully written that it makes this complex story exceedingly clear. As the text telescopes through space and weaves the history of colonial domination into present-day explanation, for the most part the author avoids analytical oversimplification. At the same time, what holds the book together and makes it a joy to read is a narrative consistency only possible from a writer who knows the case intimately. The rich local feel and personal quality of the writing, which includes detailed description of both place and social interactions, would make this text an excellent starting point for classroom discussion about the human dimensions and global sweep of neoliberal change. It is likely to engage not only experts but also students from beginning to end. Yet there are places in the text where Moberg offers a kind of discussion that seems to address somewhat naı̈ve student readers by anthropomorphising state-level actors and treating neoliberalism as a cogent policy rather than an assemblage of contingent practices. Here is an example of such writing, which trades Moberg’s critical empirical stance for a politicised, anthropomorphic shorthand: ‘[W]hile the US government zealously supported Chiquita’s effort to take 494 REVIEWS over the 2 percent of the world’s banana market reserved for Windward Islands producers, it appeared wholly indifferent to the tens of thousands of islanders whose livelihood relied on the market’ (p. 157). While such discussion turns the reader’s mind to the human dimensions of global trade, it also departs from the author’s analytical framework of an ‘agency’ theory of the state. The strength of critical theory of any variety is its ability to undermine the taken-for-grantedness of prevailing rationales, to shore up the matrices of power and domination that rationalise social relationships such as those of the neoliberal era. Thus it is important to notice when one’s own ideology becomes naturalised or takes on an abstract life of its own. Nevertheless, on an empirical level Moberg’s inspired, extensive work does furnish the reader with a critical understanding of this case. The author concludes, fittingly, with a meditation on the dark sides, perverse incentives and pervasive ironies of even progressive politics and trade relationships. ANGELA JAMISON University of California, Los Angeles (USA) Montgomery, Heather. 2009. An Introduction to Childhood: Anthropological Perspectives on Children’s Lives. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. 281 pp. Pb.: € 23.00. ISBN: 978 1 4051 2590 1. Jusqu’à récemment, peu d’anthropologues se sont intéressés explicitement à la vie sociale, et aux pensées et paroles des enfants. Dans son livre sur l’anthropologie de l’enfance, Heather Montgomery, professeur de Childhood Studies à la Open University (Royaume-Uni), présente la richesse et la pertinence de cette spécialisation relativement nouvelle. Dans huit chapitres organisés de façon thématique, Montgomery fait la synthèse des travaux de recherche récents centrés sur les enfants ; d’autre part, elle propose une relecture d’ethnographies plus anciennes traitant de la condition des enfants en regard d’autres problématiques : le genre ou les rites d’initiation par exemple. Le premier chapitre dresse un tableau historique des différentes approches anthropologiques de l’enfance et les parallèles entre ontogénie et phylogénie, et donc entre mentalités des enfants et celles des peuples « primitifs », établis au 19e siècle (Edward Tylor), passant par Boas, Mead, Whiting, Le Vine et d’autres, jusqu’aux nouvelles approches qui valorisent les enfants comme acteurs sociaux au lieu de s’intéresser aux processus de « socialisation » à travers le regard des parents. Heather Montgomery consacre le deuxième chapitre aux différentes définitions de l’enfant. En 1960, l’historien Philippe Ariès avait formulé l’hypothèse que l’enfance était une catégorie inventée en Europe au 15e siècle, thèse depuis réfutée, mais dont le postulat fondamental est largement accepté : il ne peut y avoir de définition universellement valide d’un enfant. Par exemple, les avis sur le moment auquel la vie d’un enfant débute sous une forme ou une autre sont très divergents (chapitre 3) ; l’auteure mentionne les débats autour de la légalité de l’avortement aux États-Unis, mais aussi les croyances associées aux esprits d’enfants avortés au Japon et à Taı̈wan. En Australie et en Afrique de l’Ouest, l’idée qu’une existence spirituelle précède l’incarnation de l’enfant est répandue; dans ces sociétés aux taux de mortalité enfantine élevés, certains enfants-esprits sont compris comme étant constamment attirés par l’ « autre monde » auquel ils retournent dès qu’ils peuvent. Dans de nombreuses sociétés, certains enfants sont classifiés comme inhumains, selon des critères très variables : ceux nés dans une position inhabituelle, ceux dont les dents supérieurs percent d’abord, les jumeaux. . . Le chapitre suivant est consacré à l’entourage social des enfants : famille, amis et membres de la même classe d’âge. Des anthropologues ont aussi enquêté auprès d’enfants qui vivent en dehors d’une famille, par exemple dans la rue ou dans des C 2010 European Association of Social Anthropologists. REVIEWS orphelinats. Au chapitre 5, nous rencontrons les enfants comme acteurs sociaux. Ils apprennent à parler ; encore une fois, les pratiques d’enseignement varient énormément, mais partout des valeurs sociales sont acquises à travers cet apprentissage. Les enfants jouent, ce que des folkloristes ont étudié depuis longtemps ; les anthropologues interprètent maintenant les jeux comme bien plus qu’une simple imitation de la vie des adultes : ils constituent un commentaire sur la société, avec un aspect créatif, voire subversif. Enfin, les enfants travaillent ; les frontières entre jeu, socialisation et travail ne sont pas toujours faciles à établir, mais la contribution économique des enfants est désormais mieux reconnue par les chercheurs. Depuis l’émergence des droits de l’enfant (Convention des Nations Unies en 1989), des punitions auparavant considérées comme banales ont été relevées dans les ethnographies comme dans les débats des sociétés européennes (chapitre 6). Il y a peu de recherches sur les mauvais traitements des enfants ; de tels abus mettent le relativisme culturel des enquêteurs à rude épreuve. À noter que nombre d’adultes infligent aussi des douleurs aux enfants sans que cela ne soit conçu comme une punition : circoncision, rites d’initiation, exorcisme. . . Le septième chapitre traite de la sexualité des enfants. L’idée que chaque enfant est sexuellement « innocent » prévaut surtout dans les sociétés occidentales et n’est d’ailleurs pas universellement partagée dans celles-ci (cf. Freud et ses disciples). Les comportements sexuels sont difficiles à observer ou à évoquer pour les anthropologues, et cela d’autant plus quand il s’agit d’interviewer des enfants. Le peu d’ethnographies existantes soulignent le fait que l’acte sexuel n’a pas le même sens dans toutes les sociétés. Certains aspects sont bien documentés dans la littérature anthropologique : le tabou de l’inceste, par exemple, ou l’homosexualité ritualisée en Papouasie-Nouvelle Guinée. Heather Montgomery a elle-même enquêté sur les enfants prostitués en Thaı̈lande, qui ressentent le devoir moral de se sacrifier pour le bien-être économique de la famille. Enfants et parents C 2010 European Association of Social Anthropologists. 495 font une distinction entre le corps et l’esprit ; le dernier ne serait pas touché par les activités sexuelles. Sous la pression du gouvernement et des ONG, dans un contexte de propagation du Sida, un changement des mentalités est pourtant sensible, rapporte l’auteur. Le dernier chapitre est consacré à l’adolescence et l’initiation. Il n’y a pas toujours une phase de transition à l’âge adulte caractérisé par un conflit entre les générations. Dans le sillon de van Gennep, la littérature sur les rites d’initiation est vaste, mais elle fait peu de place aux paroles des enfants. Au cours des trente dernières années, une nouvelle anthropologie centrée sur les enfants a ainsi vu le jour, avec de nouvelles questions et méthodes d’enquête. Le corpus de la recherche était devenu suffisamment large pour justifier la publication d’une synthèse de ces travaux. Heather Montgomery est allée encore plus loin en soulignant l’intérêt des ethnographies antérieures, dont les résultats peuvent être utilisés de façon créative et productive par les anthropologues contemporains. Son ouvrage est parsemé de citations judicieusement choisies et doté d’une bibliographie particulièrement riche. ANNE FRIEDERIKE DELOUIS Université d’Orléans (France) Niels Barmeyer. 2009. Developing Zapatista Autonomy. Conflict and NGO Involvement in Rebel Chiapas. Albuquerque: The University of New Mexico Press. 282pp. Pb.: $29.95. ISBN: 978 0 8263 4584 4. L’ouvrage de Niels Barmeyer fait une sorte d’économie politique à l’ère de la globalisation en abordant l’Etat du Chiapas depuis la société civile qui participe au mouvement anticapitaliste depuis le milieu des années 1990 aux côtés de l’organisation zapatiste. Perspective originale car encore peu étudiée que celle de l’auteur qui tente de mesurer l’impact de la présence des ONG dans le processus d’autonomie des communautés autonomes zapatistes. 496 REVIEWS L’auteur reconstruit d’abord l’histoire de San Emiliano et La Gardenia dans la région de Las Cañadas, deux des villages où arriva l’EZLN dès les années 1980, mais sorties aujourd’hui de la résistance. Puis il conte l’histoire de Cipriano, son ami indigène engagé dans le même projet d’installation de systèmes d’eau que lui, converti en informateur pour l’étude, et « excommunié » de sa propre communauté, selon lui, pour s’être trop rapproché des « étrangers ». Enfin, il décrit ses différentes expériences dans d’autres communautés divisées entre zapatistes et non-zapatistes, démontrant que les ONG se sont érigées en substituts de l’Etat pour promouvoir les services de base aux communautés, comme les systèmes d’eau, et montre les difficiles négociations que ces pratiques de solidarité nationale et internationale impliquent à un niveau local. Selon l’auteur, les impératifs économiques supplantent l’idéologie dans les choix des affiliations politiques des communautés, mues uniquement par les nécessités pragmatiques. Tel fut le cas dans un premier temps des adhésions franches et massives à l’EZLN dans les années 1980, en promesse de jours meilleurs et surtout de terres. Mais le manque d’alternative économique offerte par l’EZLN au fil des années a accru les tensions entre les membres et provoqué la sortie de la résistance de la plupart d’entre eux au tournant du millénaire. Comme le lui dit une ancienne zapatiste de San Emiliano, bien qu’elle approuvait ce que le Sous-Commandant Marcos avait fait et continuait à faire, l’EZLN n’a pas répondu aux nécessités de la communauté, à l’inverse du gouvernement qui, « même s’il donne peu, donne au moins quelque chose ». J’ai apprécié les parties descriptives et détaillées sur l’ethnohistoire des communautés, les récits des débats en assemblées ou entre habitants, ainsi que les intuitions et les pistes de réflexion qu’il ouvre, à commencer par le sujet central de l’ouvrage autour de l’économie de la résistance zapatiste, l’effort de comparaison entre les régions de la Selva et de Los Altos, et le travail réflexif autour de ses expériences personnelles au sein de l’ONG pour tenter une réflexion sur la présence de ladite société civile au Chiapas. Les parties historiques sont longues et bien documentées. Elles s’arrêtent néanmoins à 2003 et le processus entamé avec la création des Caracoles est à peine évoqué, manquant sur ce point une importante restructuration, notamment du rôle des ONG au Chiapas ou celui des femmes au sein de l’organisation zapatiste. Si le début de l’ouvrage développe les processus d’organisation et l’action collective, bien vite, il se concentre pleinement sur la fragmentation et l’atomisation interne des communautés. Le texte s’attarde longuement sur les ambigüités, contradictions et divisions internes entre zapatistes, entre ceux-ci et les non-zapatistes, partisans politiques locaux ou membres internationaux des ONG. On ressent un certain désenchantement entre les lignes de l’ouvrage, ce qui explique peut-être les analyses versant souvent dans l’interprétation instrumentaliste de conflits d’intérêt entre habitants, EZLN, gouvernement et ONG, ce qui, pour ma part, a empêché une adhésion franche à la thèse de Barmeyer. Car s’il relève à juste titre les difficultés économiques de l’autonomie zapatiste qui a entraı̂né avec elle des déviances de ses membres des principes zapatistes, on reste avec l’envie de comprendre plus en profondeur pour quelles raisons l’EZLN perd le contrôle sur certaines bases et pas sur d’autres, quel est le rôle des leaders locaux dans ces « luttes pour l’hégémonie », et le coût que les divisions pour motif économique ont engendré à un niveau organisationnel et structurel dans les communautés, comme par exemple les migrations vers le nord. J’aurais également apprécié que l’ouvrage consacre une plus grande analyse du rapport entre idéologie et économie, pour comprendre mieux la « flexibilité » des populations indiennes dans leurs affiliations politiques, ainsi que l’articulation entre la rigueur des instructions et sanctions zapatistes qu’il évoque à maintes reprises et, à l’inverse, le « manque d’autoritarisme » qu’il dit être le motif principal de la perte de contrôle de l’EZLN sur sa population. C 2010 European Association of Social Anthropologists. REVIEWS L’ouvrage reste néanmoins stimulant et constitue une contribution intéressante pour comprendre le Chiapas contemporain. SABRINA MELENOTTE EHESS-LAIOS/IAP-CEMCA (France/Mexique) Poissonnier, Nicole. 2009. Das Erbe der ‘Helden’. Grabkult der Konso und kulturverwandter Ethnien in Süd-Äthiopien. Göttinger Beiträge zur Ethnologie Band 3. Universitätsverlag Göttingen. 290 pp. Pb.: €38.00. ISBN: 978 3 941875 03 6. In 1931 French archaeologists Azaı̈s and Chambard, with impressive photographs, drew the attention of Africanists to groups of anthropomorphic wooden figures called waakaa in Konso. A short time later, A. E. Jensen (Im Lande des Gada, 1936) explicitly documented these monuments erected in memory of outstanding male persons. Since then every scholar writing about Konso has mentioned them, but now Nicole Poissonnier’s book offers a nearly complete documentation of these sculptures. The basis for her enterprise was a joint Ethiopian-French project in the 1990s, when Poissonnier was a member of a team that prepared an inventory of the Konso waakaa. It was an urgent programme since thieves started to steal the figures and sell them to art collectors and tourists. After the end of the project Poissonnier did ethnographic fieldwork to deepen her knowledge of these stelae and their meaning. The book is divided into seven chapters and an appendix with an English summary and a glossary. Many informative photographs illustrate the reports. In the first chapter the author presents her interview partners and gives a short ethnographic outline of the different ethnic groups referred to in Southern Ethiopia. Since most of the waakaa are erected for ‘Heldentöter’ as she calls them (‘hero-killers’ in her English summary), this chapter is followed by a discussion of the C 2010 European Association of Social Anthropologists. 497 ‘meritorious complex’ which, according to German cultural historians, included killing humans. Subsequent chapters deal with the social status of a killer, killing as an element of constructing masculinity, the honouring of hero-killers during their lifetimes, their insignia and their funeral ceremonies. In Chapter 6 Poissonnier presents a detailed classification of the different waakaa, using stylistic, functional and socio-religious criteria as well as regional variations. Three categories are characteristic: Groups of figures comprise the main body of waakaa. They are placed on a pathway, with the man who killed an enemy or a large felid (lion or leopard) in the centre amidst his wives and those he killed. Other figure types represent clan heads and outstanding men. Only in some regions do statues serve as grave markers. In the final chapter the question of the assumed interrelation of killing and procreation is discussed critically. This book is a first attempt to present these monuments of Konso culture in such a comprehensive manner. In this respect, Poissonnier’s book will be of lasting value. Before referring to her theses and interpretations, some general critical remarks seem appropriate. As to the scientific presentation of Poissonnier material, I cannot but find fault with her sometimes casual dealing with the relevant literature. A more careful use of the available sources could have helped her in avoiding some misjudgements. While in Chapter 5.4 she writes correctly of the ancestors, elsewhere (e.g. pp. 91 and 162) her phrasing is very unclear. Sometimes her (ancestral) spirits give the impression of ghosts. The consideration of Konso conceptions of the soul may have helped her to a subtler definition. Unfortunately, she overlooked that the chapter numbers in the table of contents differ from those in the text and the references. A bit more carefulness would have given more weight to her sometimes-knowing arguments. Poissonnier puts her interpretation of the memorial figures for heroic killers on a broad basis of comparison, taking into account the phenomenon of killer ideology. In addition, 498 REVIEWS she quotes numerous statements of South Ethiopian heroic killers. She observes that to become a killer is the norm for a man, while not to be a killer is the exception (pp. 138, 276). Discussing the rules that have to be adhered to in order to become a killer, the author enlarges upon Helmut Straube’s idea of a rite of passage (p. 115). There are many regulations and ceremonies before and after killing. The time of the hunt itself, when the killer is outside the cultivated homeland, she interprets as a phase of limination (following van Gennep and Turner), and the feasts in honour of a returning killer as a ritual reintegration into society. This leads us to the question why killing is so important in these societies. Since the late 19th century most scholars have accepted the idea of an interrelation of killing and procreation. According to this concept, it is the duty of a man to kill enemies or wild beasts, guarantee child-birth, and enrich the fertility of his group. Poissonnier does not totally deny this spiritual connection, but she favours the idea of a ‘principle of vitality’ (p. 261) thought of as a flowing of energy which is more than just biological fertility and is manifested in good luck and a healthy and wealthy life. To enforce this flow of energy the hero has to live an exemplary life. Then his energy can be transferred to the land, to livestock and to his people. Killing in Ethiopia must therefore be considered in the context of its social setting. In this context, Poissonnier’s remarks on the role of women in connection with male killing are of importance. Even though she – much to her regret – could not discuss this topic with women (she was working with male interpreters), she was able to gain interesting insights into the mindscape of women concerning male killing. In several examples she demonstrates how women urge men to become a killer. She also notes that in Konso the central motive of the interviewed killers to become a killer was the honour shown by the woman toward them (p. 139). The killer’s lustre falls upon his wife, his family, and his lineage, an effect that is extended beyond death as is manifested by the waakaa. The strength of this book is the extensive documentation of the waakaa. The author was also able to clarify some anthropological ideas existing about ritual killing. Adding the women’s view to the context, she opened a new field of discussion. Ethnologists, art historians and scholars of comparative religion will gain valuable information from this book. HERMANN AMBORN University of Munich (Germany) Robben, Antonius C.G.M. (ed.). 2009. Iraq at a distance. What anthropologists can teach us about the war. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 216 pp. Hb.: $39.95. ISBN: 978 0 8122 4203 4. Ethnographic research might be considered a rite of passage that every anthropologist has to go through in order to gain credibility and the respect of his or her fellows. Long-term studies, fluency in languages, face-to-face interviews and, last but not least, participant observation are the major tools used in ethnographic research and are a key source for theories. But what can one do when such research is not feasible? What is to be done if doing such work puts the researcher into life-threatening situations? Or if anthropologists are suspected of being spies? Antonius Robben takes up these questions in the chapter entitled ‘Ethnographic Imagination at a Distance’, which forms the introduction to the volume on Iraq under review here, highlighting the new challenges being faced in ethnographic field research in our world today. But he also shows that these challenges are not as new as we might assume. All five contributors to Iraq at a Distance demonstrate that with various approaches, distance can be overcome. Due to their rich experience and their comparative and historical methods, they are able to expound on the current situation in Iraq, although most of them have not spent any time in Iraq C 2010 European Association of Social Anthropologists. REVIEWS since the US invaded the country in 2003. Each describes the war zone in Iraq from a different angle – and of course from a distance – but their descriptions are detailed and full of anthropological insights. Whereas Alexander Laban Hinton, Julie Peteet, Jeffrey A. Sluka and Antonius Robben focus on historical and comparative methods to explain the major characteristics of the war being conducted in Iraq, Nadje Al-Ali shows that the women of the Iraqi Diaspora can be a reliable source of anthropological knowledge about the country. She points out that the plight of Iraqi women has not been adequately documented, although women’s rights issues are being taken into consideration in the ‘larger international processes of imperialism and global capitalism’ (p. 57). Al-Ali’s in-depth examination of the difficulties being experienced by Iraqi women goes far beyond an analysis of the justifying rhetoric used in the so-called War on Terror. In contrast, Alexander Laban Hinton discusses the power of the narratives used by the US government to create a new Manichaean order – a world split up into good and evil – and its consequences in Iraq. Taking into account scholarly investigations he undertook in Cambodia, he recognises that when violence is ideologically framed, similar phenomena occur. He describes the anthropological potential of revealing counter narratives to show a Manichaean worldview in global war narratives. While Hinton focuses on the importance of counter narratives, Jeffrey A. Sluka rather shows how hearts and minds are lost in wartime due to the ‘classical errors of counterinsurgency warfare’ (p. 127). He stresses that counterinsurgency is not a new form of war, but was a common British tactic in North Ireland during the 1980s. Such counterinsurgency is strongly connected to political aims of a war. The more support insurgents gain within the general population, the more difficult it is to maintain that population’s support of the government. Drawing on his knowledge of such errors, Sluka’s chronology of losing hearts and minds in Iraq is a clear picture of this phenomenon. Julie Peteet examines possible connections C 2010 European Association of Social Anthropologists. 499 between Palestine and Iraq. However, from the start she stresses that although a comparison is possible, the differences, which are significant, must be taken into account. For Peteet, the ‘strength has rested on our exploring how global processes are interpreted and reinscribed locally and the way local events can reverberate globally’ (p. 84). Her awareness of the global dualist situation combined with her local experiences in Palestine are the two major cornerstones of her comparative approach, and they allow for a number of new insights to be made about Iraqi realities. Robben relies on field research he did in Argentina that examined trauma and political violence. Although aware of the difficulties involved in comparing Argentina’s Dirty War with the War on Terror in Iraq, Robben examines military strategies and tactics in the two wars and shows possible points of comparison. The epilogue by Ibrahim Al-Marashi emphasises the similarities between the contributions and highly praises their ability to examine Iraq from a distance. Contributors to the volume show that a fundamental change has occurred, not only in the circumstances under which research is done, but also in the field of anthropology as a whole. Based on anthropological analysis, it has become possible to give ethnographic imagination a new form. Robben writes that: ‘Ethnographic imagination transcends empiricist realities, and anthropological interpretations at a distance should not be withheld because of methodological standards that can never be met in war zones’ (p. 3). Iraq at a Distance gives anthropology the possibility of breaking new ground, as it reveals a new potential for the field. This volume provides significant insights, both methodological and ethnographical ones, into current events in Iraq, and will be an important source for scholars doing work on Iraq or the Anthropology of War. IRENE KUCERA Institute for Social Anthropology, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna (Austria) 500 REVIEWS Stasch, Rupert. 2009. Society of others. Kinship and mourning in a West Papuan place. Berkeley: University of California Press. xv + 317 pp. Pb.: $24.95. ISBN: 978 0 520 25866. Having previously read various articles on the Korowai by Stasch, I had been struck by the way he presented classical anthropological topics such as joking relationships and mother-in-law avoidance in a highly original way. These Korowai customs did not only differ significantly from what one would expect on the basis of comparative evidence, but Stasch was also able to make clear why this should be so. Society of Others has the same qualities but is much wider in its scope and more explicit about its theoretical approach. There are approximately 4000 Korowai who live in the south-eastern part of Indonesian New Guinea. About 30 years ago some Dutch Protestant missionaries, together with their Papuan auxiliaries, settled at the margins of their territory, followed by its largely nominal incorporation into the Indonesian state. Partly because of their spectacular tree-top dwellings Korowai (and the neighbouring Kombai) attracted the attention of high circulation magazines and television broadcasters and they were included in the programmes of tour operators. Yet compared with other Papuan communities, external influences on their way of life have been relatively modest. In any case, for the focus of the present book these are of marginal importance. In other publications more detailed attention has been given to this issue and the author promises to give us a full-length treatment in the future. Stasch starts with a consideration of the relation between clanship and territory: All the land is divided among numerous patriclans allowing a fair distribution of natural resources such as sago groves, hunting grounds, streams for fishing, and, most importantly, keeping strangers at a proper distance. Dispersed residence is both ideal and practice. After a more general consideration of the way Korowai use dyadic relationships to identify and define persons, the subsequent chapters deal with kinship and aspects of the life cycle: conception, birth and childhood, marriage, death and mourning. Like many Melanesians, Korowai do not conceptualise social relationships as consisting of bonds between individuals who exist as separate entities apart from their mutual engagement. However, Korowai appear to be very special in the way they emphasise that people thus paired are profoundly different even to such an extent that Stasch characterises them as forming a ‘society of others’. He contrasts his approach with a theoretical tradition that sees social bonds based on pure identification as an integral part of social life and especially characteristic of pre-modern societies. Although such insights may still inform stereotyped ‘Western’ folk ideas about ‘primitive’ societies, I cannot imagine that today professional anthropologists would still subscribe to such simplifications. Yet even if this is merely an Aunt Sally needed for the sake of argument, it makes Korowai look perhaps more ‘other’ than necessary. The strength of Stasch’s interpretation is that it is not based on subjective understandings arising from the anthropologist’s empathy, implied by the method of participant observation, but on a systematic analysis of the signification of concrete actions through which relationships take on a material form. He concentrates on the meanings that arise from the use of signs (technically known as pragmatics). Although language is obviously very important for communication, material objects and all kinds of purposeful behaviour are also part of such a semiotics. Especially important media are spatial relations, as ‘having a place’ is a basic attribute of all acting beings (including the dead who become demons), and the temporal dimension marking creation and disruption of social bonds. Because of the profound ambiguity of social bonds, linking pairing and avoidance, Korowai are constantly monitoring their own and other people’s actions, that are for the same reason experienced as highly contingent. For Korowai reflexivity appears to constitute C 2010 European Association of Social Anthropologists. REVIEWS social life rather than being its reflection. Once derided as causing ‘epistemic hypochondria’ (Geertz) among anthropologists, here it has become a most valuable ethnographic tool. Theory, method and evidence are strongly interwoven in this closely argued study. Its dense texture presents a convincing picture of how Korowai experience social relations. However, Stasch does not give a systematic account of how to investigate (indigenous) reflexivity and its (ideological) limitations. Patriarchal bias remains unexplained. Nor is it clear why the disapprobation of outsiders could have caused the recent demise of infanticide, which was considered to be a normal reaction when for some reason it was felt that a new-born baby was an unacceptable stranger. I would also have appreciated it if Stasch had related the implications of his own findings more explicitly to the often highly involved theoretical linguistic notions of Michael Silverstein, whose influence he gratefully acknowledges. JAN DE WOLF Utrecht University (The Netherlands) Turino, Thomas. 2008. Music as social life: the politics of participation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. xviii + 258 pp. Pb. with a CD: $22.00. ISBN: 978 0 226 81698 2. Turino begins this introductory text in ethnomusicology by explicitly stating his aim to establish clear analytical tools for thinking about music in a social context. His main intended audience is the undergraduate student and also those, like myself, who are newcomers to the field. The book is concise but offers a commendably broad take on the subject that cuts across genres and cultures and provides a systematic approach to developing a greater understanding of both making and listening to any kind of music in C 2010 European Association of Social Anthropologists. 501 almost any setting. The theoretical approach is explicitly semiotic, drawing on Peirce in particular but also on Bateson’s frame analysis and Csikzentmihalyi’s notion of flow. Turino argues that music draws together inner life, reasoning and emotion in ways that rational thought cannot, emphasising the particularly prominent role of indexical and iconic signs which form ‘the basis for feeling direct empathic connection’ (p. 16, emphasis in original). His subsequent analyses thus draw out the iconic and indexical elements of music and music-making and the layers of meaning they elicit. A central argument is that, despite its common iconic and indexical capacities, music is really a number of diverse phenomena that one needs to understand as operating very differently within social contexts. His four-part typology contrasts live and recorded music on the one hand before breaking each field down into two. Live music is thus divided into participatory and presentational modes, classified on the basis of whether a contrast is drawn between audience and musicians. A coherent case is made for the repetitive, noisy and buzzing qualities of participatory music that render it more inclusive. The recorded field is divided into hi-fidelity, which is iconic of live presentation, and studio audio art: a sound object created in a studio. Whilst the last is used to point out the possible scope of recorded music, it is not discussed in detail as a social process, perhaps because it is too specialised and recent a phenomenon that, even in the West, is not always obvious as ‘music’. Turino draws on this typology to explore the role of music in identity and selfhood, attending to the ways in which musical styles emerge in conjunction with cultural cohorts and formations. These themes are explored in three subsequent chapters in which the role of music in social life is examined in more depth. Turino draws on his own research in Zimbabwe and on his participation in the revivalist old-time music scene in the USA. Finally he compares the significance of music in the emergence of Nazism in Germany and 502 REVIEWS the civil rights movement in America. This last chapter, though it makes strong points about the similar ways in which group cohesion and shared beliefs are facilitated by music, is less effective because it dwells too much on the broader social and political context of these movements and not enough on the nitty-gritty of music and its social effects. It seems churlish to criticise such a wide-ranging book for what it does not cover, but Turino’s focus is clearly much more on participatory and presentational forms of music than recordings. The social possibilities opened up by recording, and in particular its articulation with the media, is not extensively developed, perhaps because Turino’s own research is less concerned with this. One such possibility is for music to be a peripheral presence in social life rather than a focal point of activity. Turino’s emphasis, reasonably enough, is on circumstances in which music is vital and central. Recording has allowed music to become a ubiquitous but seemingly vapid element of marketing, entertainment and daily life, but the experience and social significance of this is seldom explored. Turino also neglects the relationship between language and music, rarely discussing the lyrical contents of songs, their relation to sound and, in turn, social life. This implies a sharp, but I think contestable, distinction between language and music that perhaps many would not recognise. These minor criticisms aside, this is a stimulating and important book that provides a useful gateway towards understanding the complex ways in which music and sociality are intertwined. Turino writes with authority and admirable clarity of word and argument and this book should be essential to anyone embarking on ethnographic studies of music. It also has wider relevance to researchers interested in art and social life and the social significance of sound. I certainly found it helpful for reconsidering my own research on the importance of bird sounds to people, for example. Turino is clearly a strong advocate for the social power of music and for the need to analyse music not in isolation but within the contexts in which it arises and becomes meaningful. This book is an articulate testimony to this approach. ANDREW WHITEHOUSE University of Aberdeen (UK) Vidal, Laurent. 2010. Faire de l’anthropologie. Santé, science et développement. Paris: La Découverte. 292 pp. Pb.: € 26.00. ISBN: 978 2 7071 5885 7. In this book, Laurent Vidal unveils a new way of practising anthropology, exemplified by four research projects concerning health in Africa (tuberculosis, AIDS, maternal health and malaria). He shows that once anthropologists conduct their research on ‘applied’ objects such as health, within the framework of multidisciplinary problem-solving or policy-oriented research projects, they are no longer in the traditional position of the solitary anthropologist. While concepts and tools of the discipline remain the same, the process of formulating research questions, building research projects and conducting them change fundamentally. Anthropologists have to constantly manage their relationship with other researchers, other disciplines, and also with the practitioners whose practices they study; practitioners who have requested the research or who are the objects of it, for instance, health centres’ staff, people in charge of sanitary policies. Researchers can no longer carry out their research independently. They have to negotiate it, place it within a set of issues or within a framework of analysis that is not only theirs. They need to adjust to the events and to adapt their strategy. They need to work on how to present their results, so that they can be understood and accepted by these diverse stakeholders. They sometimes play a more direct part in making practices evolve and improve. Not only are they investigators and observers, they also have to be able to act as coordinators or mediators. Laurent Vidal believes that this way of practising anthropology is not a weakening of C 2010 European Association of Social Anthropologists. REVIEWS the discipline, linked to the constraints of invitations to tender or of cooperation with medical sciences. On the contrary, it is a new way of practising anthropology, coherent with today’s world, and more particularly, coherent with the ethical demands of social usefulness and of making research results available and useful for the people involved in it. Going back over the history and the unfolding of these four research projects, Laurent Vidal invites us to witness research in the making, from the negotiation of the project to the dissemination of the results, illustrating in great detail the often-overlooked dimensions of research in partnership. Specifically, he examines the place of anthropology within enlarged networks of scholars from other disciplines and practitioners and its implication for anthropologists and their work: the legitimacy of the discipline, its scientific specificity, are not so straightforward when faced with health agents and researchers used to reasoning based on statistics; those behind health policies, the health centres’ directors, the nursing staff are both actors who request or accept the research, actors who are observed and interviewed, and actors who examine – and sometime question – the anthropologist’s results. A particularly rich chapter depicts the issues involved in presenting findings to the actors who are directly involved. The author sees such presentations both as an ethical and methodological requirement, and as an opportunity for research. They require a form of ‘simplification of the content from the moment one does not address a colleague of the same discipline: a simplification which should not, however, weaken the analysis’ (p. 93). This stage is all the more critical given the fact that the anthropologist’s pointing out malfunctioning within the health system can be perceived as systematic challenges or criticism. It is necessary to be particularly vigilant about the way the results are conveyed, so that the pointing out triggers debate and action, and not rejection. The C 2010 European Association of Social Anthropologists. 503 various stages of interaction, negotiation, and presentation/dissemination thus offer rare opportunities for understanding of some new aspects of the issues under study. From this point of view they are also part of the ‘field’, and contribute to the research process. Here the author defends and illustrates in a clear and convincing way the ambition of an anthropology which comes to terms with its participation in complex projects and its involvement within the network of diversified actors, which exchanges with other disciplines as with practitioners, and makes of this very involvement an object of epistemological and methodological thinking, as well as a source of information for research. In such a perspective, there is no strong delimitation between a ‘fundamental’ and ‘critical’ anthropology and a more ‘applied’ anthropology, because such an ‘applied’ anthropological research within enlarged networks focuses on fundamental issues and keeps its critical perspective, while cultivating reflexivity on itself and on its own position. PHILIPPE LAVIGNE DELVILLE Gret/IRD/Lasdel (France/Niger) Vokes, Richard. 2009. Ghosts of Kanungu: fertility, secrecy and exchange in the Great Lakes of East Africa. Woodbridge: James Currey & Kampala: Fountain Publishers. xv + 240 pp. Hb.: £55.00. ISBN: 9781847010094. People died in their hundreds in the Kanungu inferno in South Western Uganda in March 2000. Hundreds of bodies were exhumed from different other sites, including in the Makindye division of Uganda’s capital, Kampala. Investigations, which prompted the Head of State’s commissioning an inquiry, led to a revelation that the deceased belonged to a religious group – The Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God (MRTC). About ten years later, this Commission of Inquiry has not officially 504 REVIEWS released its report – partly due to the complexity of the issue at hand. Many questions remain unanswered regarding this tragic incident which made headlines worldwide. From an eight-year ethnographic study, a book Ghosts of Kanungu: Fertility, Secrecy & Exchange in the Great Lakes of East Africa has been written for scholars and the general public who would like to know why and how MRTC grew in the early 1990s, how it came to profoundly influence people and why many people left the mainstream Catholic Church for this sect. Answers to these questions have been compiled in seven chapters that many will find well-written and accessible. The author covers, among other themes, fertility and misfortune, the many lives of Nyabingi spirit, the process of building the network, religion in times of HIV/AIDS in Uganda, the history of an African-initiated church and the last days of MRTC. The main findings – which are methodologically well-grounded and linked to historical and religious practices in Uganda – suggest that the MRTC operated in secrecy under the leadership of Joseph Kibwetere and Ceredonia Mwerinde. Members of this religious group lived in various parts of Uganda but mainly in Kanungu, its headquarters. The MRTC was compelling because its key messages were centred on the visions of a local visionary – Ceredonia Mwerinde – and that her visions were so persuasive because of the Nyabugoto connection, a cave for Nyabingi worship. Whereas people joined MTRC because of the daily violence in their homes, HIV/AIDS, infertility, domestic violence and poverty, it was mostly women who joined this sect because the misfortunes it promised to address mainly affected women in rural areas. It is argued in this book that the largest proportion of MRTC membership were women who were motivated by the messages of hope, healing, and the provision of a refuge from their backgrounds, which were characterised by violence and misery. However, how and why the inferno on 17 March 2000 led to the loss of thousands of lives is still only partially answered. Different schools of thought propose different ideas including mass murder, mass suicide and, in this book, mass poisoning in the dining hall by key leaders and the subsequent ignition of a fire on unconscious diners in the building after their meal. While the book provides new insights about the Kanungu massacre, I found it difficult to understand the author’s argument that the MRTC was founded and linked to Nyabingi worship. This is because in the chapters following (i.e. from Chapter 4, addressing the Genesis of the Network) he provides overwhelming evidence that the MRTC could have been a break-away sect from the Catholic Church. He states for example ‘. . . the movement – both before and after its expulsion from the mainstream [Catholic] church – stemmed from an attempt by its leaders to further promote the key symbol of the Virgin Mary’ (p. 101). And if it was this cult’s objective to restore the Ten Commandments, I doubt whether any member in this group would agree with the author’s attempts to link their practice with Nyabingi worship. In fact, on p. 137 there is a contradiction when the author writes that ‘Ceredonia’s vision attacks those women who in the event of infertility, turn to traditional healers (abafumu) for help. At one point the vision condemns traditional healers as being in company with the devil’. My question then is: if MRTC messages condemned association with evil, and one of the Ten Commandments is ‘Thou shall not have any other God beside me’, how then, could they have been promoting Nyabingi worship? Throughout the book, there is a tendency to verify ethnographic data from Uganda with viewpoints from key informants living in New Zealand who only based their judgements on photographs taken from the different sites of the massacre. My belief is that such data greatly influenced the interpretation of information in this book. I would have loved to read this book with analyses based on viewpoints of people who C 2010 European Association of Social Anthropologists. REVIEWS were physically present at the scene and had experience in MRTC activities. GRACE AKELLO Gulu University (Uganda) Wilson, Tamar Diana. 2009. Women’s migration networks in Mexico and beyond. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. 232 pp. Pb.: $29.95. ISBN: 978 0 8263 4720 6. Tamar Wilson’s research on Mexican women and their migration experiences is one of the books that has filled the gap in this literature in the last two decades. Since then, the number of research studies on women’s migration has increased sharply, as has the use of narrative research methods. The turning point came with the thematic issue of the International Migration Review in 1984 that was dedicated to women’s migration and to an appeal for researchers to study migration as a gender-marked phenomenon. Twenty years later we can say that many responded to the call. We can see today how numerous, extensive and multidisciplinary the studies of women’s migration have become. The biographic and narrative approach proved indispensable to understanding the social structure of migration phenomena. With the help of auto/biographical and other narrative methods, our knowledge of migrations has been enriched with a number of studies of the different roles, experiences, positions and treatment of men and women within the migration context in the past and today. This book about Mexican women migrants is an excellent example of a fruitful combination of gender perspective and narrative method, which vividly and emphatically reveals the lives of women on the move. Women’s migrations patterns emerged through the complicated structures of family decisions, intimate considerations and the densely knit personal and kinship ties of both sexes. They are seen as much more than mere consequences of socio-economic C 2010 European Association of Social Anthropologists. 505 and legislative circumstances that pull and push people around the world or inside one country. If the migration flows of the last couple of decades have become a women’s phenomenon, it is important to understand that this phenomenon is extremely heterogeneous and structured by ethnic, racial, religious, class, identity and cultural differences. Within the heterogeneity of women’s migration waves, the only common denominator seems to be that we can no longer consider women to be only passive ‘victims’ or ‘objects’ of circumstances. Women can be seen, rather, as active decision makers regarding the change of their own, and to a great extent, their families’ lives. Tamar Wilson’s book is rich in such examples. Although there are still circumstances in which we cannot see any positive changes of the position of women, there are situations in which women migrants gain power, influence, importance, and work and income autonomy. This is a key characteristic that the researchers of migration processes as gender-marked processes have found – that migrations reshape gender social roles, reorganise and restructure them. In the centre of the research of the female migrant experience is an experience of lost, reshaped, transformed, and re-assembled personal, ethnic, work and sexual identities. Tamar Wilson’s book shows this experience in a persuasive way. Women’s Migration Networks in Mexico and Beyond is based on women’s stories of migration and the ways in which women with few economic resources (we could even say proletarian women) try to survive and raise their children. The main topics of the personal migration histories that the author collected and analysed are the principles and dynamics of the networks, her own included. This is not only a book about Mexican women on the move to find work, shelter and provision for their children, and it is not only about key concepts such as network mediation, social capital formation and transnational migration. It is also a book about the author herself and about friendship. In fact, it is a story about the research history itself. 506 REVIEWS The narratives, the life stories, are lives in different and changing contexts. These contexts are defined by social, economic, historic, religious, and educational circumstances; and the migrants’ decisions are subject to the influences of family, community, and social institutions. These decisions, however, also depend on intimate actions, independent decisions and their consequences. Of course, Tamar Wilson knows very well how important it is that we take into consideration the ideological, political and social standpoints of the ‘knowledge producers’: of those researchers-listeners who then abridge these stories, shorten or adapt them and fit them into frames, theories, and concepts and finally interpretatively place them into their own contexts. The book is thus about the contexts of people who narrate, and also the contexts of those who produce knowledge and authority from these narratives. In addition to the thorough and precise chapters on the wider contexts of Mexican migration and the concepts in the studies of migration and gender, Tamar Wilson dedicated her book to the stories. She has not reduced the stories to short quotes and illustrations of her interpretations. She included them in the book as an integral part so that we can actually read them at length and follow the described complex curves of the ‘work histories’ as Wilson calls them. The foundation story is the story of Doña Consuelo and it is no surprise that it is also a story of friendship between two women, two migrants, two workers, two caregivers – a researcher and a story teller in exchangeable roles. The auto/biographical method by itself does not enable the voices of ‘ordinary’ people to be heard. Their voices, interpretations, experiences can only be heard if the decision of the researcher makes that possible. For this reason, the methodology of auto/biographical research is constantly subject to ethical and moral considerations. There is no doubt that Tamar Wilson is totally aware of them, which makes her book indispensable not only for understanding the women’s migration experiences in Mexico ‘and beyond’, but also to understand the need for an ethical research approach and responsible analysis. MIRJAM M. HLADNIK Slovenian Migration Institute, Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Ljubljana (Slovenia) C 2010 European Association of Social Anthropologists.

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Van Wolputte, S. (2010). Review: COLLINS, S. All tomorrow's cultures. Anthropological engagement with the future. Oxford: Berghahn books, 2008. In: Social Anthropology, 18(4), 472-473.

Van Wolputte, S. (2010). Review: COLLINS, S. All tomorrow's cultures. Anthropological engagement with the future. Oxford: Berghahn books, 2008. In: Social Anthropology, 18(4), 472-473.

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