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Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison, edited by Ian Kershaw and Moshe LewinAuthor(s): Daniel ChirotSource: The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 104, No. 3 (November 1998), pp. 923-925Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/210102 .

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Poverty, Ethnicity, and Violent Crime. By James F. Short, Jr. Boulder,Colo.: Westview Press, 1997. Pp. xii244. $49.00 (cloth); $16.00 (paper).

Robert J. Bursik, Jr.University of Missouri, St. Louis

Few people have had as much influence on the substantive and method-ological character of contemporary criminology as James F. Short. Buthis centrality to the discipline is not solely a function of the major contri-

butions that he has made during his prolific career. Rather, he personifiesthe link between the classic Chicago schools of criminology and the mod-ern frameworks whose intellectual roots are firmly embedded in thosetraditions. Despite the important theoretical differences between the vari-ous schools, the shared hallmark of all the Chicago approaches was adeep interdisciplinary appreciation for the multiple contexts throughwhich behavior develops. Poverty, Ethnicity, and Violent Crime is anexemplar of this orientation.

The central theme that unifies the material in this book originally waspresented by Short and Albert Cohen in a chapter on juvenile delin-

quency in the first edition of Contemporary Social Problems (edited byRobert K. Merton and Robert A. Nisbet [Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,1961]) and continually has been refined by Short in a number of subse-quent publications. Succinctly stated, he argues that a full understandingof the associations among poverty, ethnicity, and violent crime only ispossible through a synthetic understanding of processes that operate atthree levels: the individual (biological and psychosocial processes), themacrosocial (characteristics of organizations, social systems, social struc-tures, and cultures), and the microsocial (the situationally specific un-folding of an interactional event between two or more parties).

The book pursues the development of this theme in four basic sections.The first (chaps. 13) not only introduces Shorts synthetic frameworkbut also provides an encapsulation of historical research on violent be-havior and an introduction to its measurement. While most of this mate-rial will be familiar to criminologists, it is essential reading for those out-side the field who desire more than a superficial understanding of violentcrime. At the least, the historical data will shatter any remaining illusionsthat some golden age of tranquillity existed in the past. In addition, thereare excellent summaries of the trends and distributions of violent crimethat have characterized various socioeconomic and ethnic groups

The substantive core of the book begins in the second section (chaps.46) where, drawing from the findings of a very comprehensive body of

Permission to reprint a book review printed in this section may be retained only fromthe author.

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the research conducted by the author and others and focusing in particu-lar on the activities of youth groups and gangs, Short addresses the degreeto which the effects of poverty and ethnic status on violent behavior aremediated by the local community contexts in which such behavior occurs.This section of the book easily could be considered to represent volume2 of his classic Groups Processes and Gang Delinquency (with Fred L.Strodtbeck [University of Chicago Press, 1965]) and represents Short athis best. In particular, his illustrations of how the convergence of pro-cesses operating at all three levels leads to complex nonrecursive relation-ships among social capital, human capital, and crime are insightful andprovocative.

The theoretical explanations for these empirical patterns are more fullyconsidered in the third section (chaps. 79). I admit to being somewhatlet down by this part of the book. There is no question that his discussionof the theoretical perspectives that have been developed at each of thethree levels draws from an astonishing range of material. However, thereis little effort to integrate these models into a logically consistent package,as he attempted with the empirical literature he reviewed in the previouschapters (Short himself notes this problem on p. 177). This failure shouldnot be judged especially harshly, for throughout the book, Short notesthat such endeavors are constrained significantly by our lack of under-standing of many aspects of violent behavior and the tentative nature

of what we think we do know. Nevertheless, I think that Short showsconvincingly in the second section that a social and human capital orien-tation provides a very promising basis for an initial integrative endeavor.This potential is reinforced in the third section in a passage entitled Ex-tending the Theoretical Implications of Capital (pp. 17275). I look for-ward to his future work, which will more intensively develop thesethemes.

The book closes with a one-chapter section on the policy implicationsof his three-tiered model. This material basically represents a call to ac-tion on the part of contemporary criminologists. In fact, in a quotation

from William J. Wilson that is used as the final sentence of the book(p. 204), it is noted that if criminologists do not get involved in policydebates, decisions will be made and policies will be formulated any-waywithout their input. The degree to which Short links moderncriminology to the ideals of the old Chicago schools may not be moreclearly illustrated than in this strong commitment to the social responsi-bilities of the academic community. I can think of few legacies that couldbe more valuable to pass on to future generations of social scientists.

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American Journal of Sociology

Violence and Childhood in the Inner City. Edited by Joan McCord. NewYork: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pp. xiii334. $59.95.

Darnell F. HawkinsUniversity of Illinois, Chicago

The boldness and self-confidence (or self-deception) that allowed earliergenerations of social scientists to tackle complex social phenomena andproclaim that their own theories and modes of empirical analysis offeredthe answer to significant research questions are now largely a thing ofthe past. As sociologists, we have come to see the value of incorporatinginto our research designs not only those diverse perspectives found withinour own discipline but also those associated with all disciplines that studyhumans and the social world. In almost every area of social inquiry, ithas become fashionable today to posit notions of multiple causes, mediat-ing and moderating factors, etiological contingencies, and proximal anddistal effects, all of which allude to the benefits to be gained from multi-disciplinary, multimethod approaches to the study of social problems.

This excellent volume on childhood and violence in the nations innercities by Joan McCord and her colleagues rides the waves of the currentpenchant for theoretical and empirical analyses that incorporate a diver-sity of research foci and points of view. Though broad in its coverage,

the collection of essays offers a cohesive and well-conceived portrait ofcurrent thinking regarding the nature and consequences of inner-city vio-lence. The volume grew out of a series of meetings among the contribu-tors that were supported by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation,and it contains seven chapters.

The themes explored by these chapters include (1) street culture andother manifestations of subcultural differences between inner-city andmainstream youth (Elijah Anderson, also Robert Sampson and RonaldSlaby), (2) community and neighborhood disorganization and its effectson childhood and adolescent development (Robert Sampson, also Terrie

Moffitt), (3) the effects of American cultural values, urban life, and racialdiscrimination on the inner city ( Joan McCord, also Robert Sampson andElijah Anderson), (4) the neuropsychological determinants of aggressiveand violent behavior (Terrie Moffitt, also Ronald Slaby and NancyGuerra), (5) victim and bystander effects and other psychological media-tors of violence among urban youth (Ronald Slaby, also Nancy Guerra),(6) child abuse and its prevention among inner-city populations (TonyEarls and Jacqueline Barnes), and (7) factors affecting the implementa-tion of inner-city violence reduction programs (Nancy Guerra, also TonyEarls and Jacqueline Barnes).

Both as individual chapters and as a collection, this book is very im-pressive. The book contributes to and builds a strong case for the wisdomof current attempts among violence researchers to combine individual,situational, and macrostructural levels of analysis and theory. Further,each of the chapters fully succeeds in convincing the reader of the merits

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often considers traditional society. Vidal writes for an audience of histori-ans and sociologists. His central thesis, echoing structural functionalism,is that caste-specific patterns of protesta concept closely resemblingCharles Tillys repertoires of collective action (From Mobilization toRevolution [Addison-Wesley, 1978])traditionally functioned to main-tain the balance of power in Sirohi. The British colonial government sup-pressed these protests because they challenged its monopoly of violenceand thus deeply affected the social structure.

Vidal presents a vivid picture of caste-specific protest repertory. Vio-lent revolt was a standard means of protest for Rajput nobles (holdersof revenue-yielding estates) in conflict with their king. Conflicts betweenthe king and nobles primarily concerned lineages within the dominantRajput clan, but other groups in society were also involved: villagerswhose life and property were targets of attack, tribals who lent militaryassistance, and Brahmins and Charans (bards) who mediated and usedtheir own special repertory item, threats of collective suicide. Indirectly,conflicts also often affected Jains (trading and merchant castes) whosespecific way of protest was to migrate. Vidal stresses that these traditionalpatterns of protest and the values they represented were vital for regulat-ing the way society functioned (pp. 5, 55, 154, 217). In confrontationsbetween the castes, relationships were redefined, and principles onwhich the balance of society rested (p. 217) were put to the test. Without

confrontations, the caste system could not function.The system of values upon which caste society in Sirohi rested, Vidalargues, was fundamentally different from that which informed Britishlegislation. In precolonial Sirohi, violence was invariably assessed ac-cording to who committed [it] against whom (p. 15). British law crimi-nalized all violence, however, and offenders were tried in court. Conse-quently, nobles were forced into other, less effective forms of protestsuch as court casesand lost power to the king.

British values also affected the status of bards. Bards (belonging to theCharan or Bhat castes) in traditional Sirohi were specialists in genealogy,

biography, and accounts of historical events. They were an importantcaste, because through their mediation, the collective identity of the rul-ing [Rajput] clans was defined and perpetuated (p. 93). The status ofbards derived from their acknowledged competence to express truth. As-sessment of this competence, however, depended not so much on thesupposed equivalence of their narratives to actual facts, as on the sacrednature of their inspiration (p. 102). The British legal system, however,became increasingly relevant in settling conflicts in Sirohi, and it showedtotal incomprehension of the different criteria for truth in the native cul-tural tradition. Accepted truth in British institutions was based on empir-

ical facts. As a consequence, the bards lost their monopoly on truth, andtheir privileged status was undermined.

The British, Vidal concludes, promoted homogenization of the stan-dards underlying social usage (p. 219). Acts of violence were no longerlegitimate when committed by the right person but became simply

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criminal; truth no longer depended on who told it but became objectivefact. To put it short, British influence destroyed the moral and scientificrelativism on which the traditional order in Sirohi rested.

Though this is an interesting thesis, Vidal does not elaborate on itsrelevance for social science theory. He writes that studying history is thebest way to find out where we have gone wrong and what we haveoverlooked so far in the sociology of India (p. 8). Indeed, many issuesof interest to social theory are touched upon, but none of them is pursued.Vidals main thesis, for instance, echoes Max Gluckmans structuralfunctionalist analysis of ritual and social order. There is no reference tothis theme, however. Instead, Vidal names modern issues such as socialchange and essentialism but leaves unclear exactly which sociologicalmistakes he wants to correct. Flirtations with postmodern sociology (pp.46), on the one hand, suggest that his enemy is the essentialist viewof Indias caste system, contributed commonly to the influence of LouisDumont (Homo Hierarchicus [University of Chicago Press, 1970]). ButVidals account of traditional caste society, on the other hand, with itscaste-based occupation and status hierarchy of priests, warriors, andtraders, confirms rather than defeats Dumonts view.

Vidal also raises the question as to why Gandhis nonviolent protestpattern was so successful. From the analysis of Sirohi politics, he sug-gests, it follows that we should explain the success of nonviolence as an

unintended result of British law and not, as some authors do, as a tradi-tional Indian protest pattern. British law imposed a nonviolent protestpattern upon society; Gandhi made that backfire. The reader is led tothink that this explanation represents Vidals broader theoretical inten-tions, but next he is told that migration (another protest pattern) is linkedto the scriptural Hindu value of withdrawal, a fundamental culturalfactor in India, pervading its entire social logic (pp. 21718).

To some who are familiar with current debates on caste in India, find-ing these two explanations in one book is refreshingly eclectic. However,one wishes the author would have taken more trouble to make a point

of that. The many interesting data he presents deserve clearer theory.

Racism in a Racial Democracy: The Maintenance of White Supremacyin Brazil. By France Winddance Twine. New Brunswick, N.J.: RutgersUniversity Press, 1998. Pp. xiii175. $49.00 (cloth); $17.00 (paper).

Evandro CamaraEmporia State University

France Winddance Twines recent ethnographic study of Brazilian racerelations is a welcome addition to the literature. It is a clearly written,forceful, and thought-provoking work that should stimulate the ongoing,often volatile, debate on comparative race and ethnicity. I was especiallyintrigued by the authors attention to ideological and discursive patterns,

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which are presented as sustaining mechanisms of racism in Brazilian so-cial life. Unfortunately, for all of its merits, this work displays the familiarsins of the revisionist scholarship on comparative race and ethnicity. Thissignificantly compromises its value.

We may begin with the title, which, in the spirit of revelation, callsattention to the existence of white supremacy in Brazil. This mainly re-states the generality of a problem whose persistence worldwide as thelegacy of centuries of Western European colonialism has long been recog-nized. It also expresses the analytical homogenization of racism, whichassumes the universal validity of race as the cornerstone of social organi-zation, and of a conceptual and analytical lingua franca, applicable toall kinds of interethnic situations. As a former European colony, Brazil,notwithstanding its romanticized popular and scholarly depictions as aracial paradise, expectedly displays this general aspect of ethnic inequal-ity. But, the analysis should go on to identify and dissect the particularityof the problem so useful cross-national comparisons can be made.

The homogenizing tendency has rendered this work ethnocentric, atbest, and at worst, a regular case of cultural colonization. The premisesand language of biracialism operate here as a kind of Archimedean pointwherefrom various aspects of race and ethnicity in Brazil are evaluated.The population is treated dualistically as consisting of white and non-white segments, a practice that negates the pattern of ethnic and racial

structuration in Brazilclearly a case of forcing square pegs into roundholes.Twine relies on the UNESCO data (a large body of ethnographic re-

search done on race and ethnicity in Brazil in the early 1950s) to bolsterher claim that racial prejudice creates significant social distance betweenwhites and blacks. But she treats this material too briefly to benefitfrom its incisive examination of the complexities of race and class in thatcountry. For instance, she appeals to Marvin Harriss account of the dif-ficulties of social assimilation of a Negro councilman in a small North-eastern town, but she fails to consider his observation that this individual

was not handicapped solely because of his skin color but mainly becausehe was not rich enough or educated enough to overcome being a Negro(Harris 1952, p. 69; my emphasis). This situation is paradigmatic andunderscores the fact that the whitening of race process, despite its asso-ciations with the overvaluation of aesthetic ideals and traits pertaining toEuropean ancestry and with material privilege (as Twine correctly notes;p. 109), cannot be separated in Brazil from the assumption of trans-formability of racial status and universal social inclusion. Hence, the flu-idity of racial condition (vs. its quasi-metaphysical fixedness in biracialsocial systems), which has inhibited the crystallization of ethnic minori-

ties. The point is that, although the legacy of sociostructural disenfran-chisement left by slavery still haunts Afro-Brazilians, it is countered bythe possibility of changing racial status, of transforming group differenceinto nondifference.

Racial essentialism underlies the authors discomfort with the national

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ethos of embranquecimento (whitening) of the population and concomi-tant practice of mesticagem (intermixture). She states that in Brazil theone-drop rule works in reverse (p. 113) in that any amount of white-ness leads to the absorption of the black into the white population,eventually erasing the former. This is supposedly detrimental becauseit prevents the people of color from having a separate existence andidentity. One is led to wonder how the social inclusion of a group canpossibly imply its marginalization. Moreover, is there not an assumptionof ontological domination here, that is, of an essential negritude that isbeing denied, through the whitening process, to all but members of thewhite elites? If allowed to flourish, this condition would permanentlysustain a black community, as in the castelike separatism of biracialsystems. I scarcely think this to be a desirable outcome for ethnic minori-ties anywhere.

I do not wish to deconstruct the idea of race entirely. Where operativeas the key regulative principle of social relations, race fulfills importantbureaucratic and psychosocial functions. Still, I want to relativize it cross-nationally so as to neutralize its worst reifications.

The imposition of a biracialist armamentarium in this book has rid-den roughshod over historical and cultural particularity and the factthat race and ethnicity must be addressed in the context of the social sys-tem. Aspects related to the dominant-minority cultural relationship,

which are crucial for differentiating between interethnic models, werebasically neglected. The Brazil that emerges from this analysis there-fore is simply another United Statesonly an inferior, less progressiveversion.

Nationalizing Blackness: Afrocubanismo and Artistic Revolution inHavana, 19201940. By Robin D. Moore. Pitt Latin American Series.Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997. Pp. xii320. $45.00(cloth); $19.95 (paper).

Lauren DerbyUniversity of Chicago

This is a meticulously researched and finely textured analysis of theblackness vogue that swept Cuba in the 1920s and 1930s and how itredefined the Cuban nation as inclusive of its mixed-race heritage. Writ-ten by an ethnomusicologist, the text focuses on music but pays closeattention to popular theater and the fine arts as well. Indeed, such a mul-tidirectional methodology is necessary since the Afrocubanophile frenzy

Moore describes swept salon and dance music, poetry, painting, folklore,and ethnography alike. The book consists of a theoretical introductionand conclusion and six thematic chapters on popular theater, bourgeoisand street carnival traditions, the origins of salsa music, the rumba craze,cultural nationalism, the folklorization of black culture, and the avant-

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garde modernist literary canon. It presents the first thorough cultural his-tory in English of a period of extraordinary creativity in the fine artsin Cuba, yet one that also gained momentum from Josephine Bakersprimitivist Parisian revues, the popularity of jazz, and the Harlem Re-naissance. By excavating many of the lesser-known artists, musicians,and writers of the period, Moore demonstrates that attention to Cubanliterati greats such as Nicolas Guillen and Alejo Carpentier has causedscholars to overlook the variety of views among their rank and file follow-ers. Moore is a master craftsman when it comes to documenting the mul-tiple strands of debate within each movement, and he inspires with hisattention to nuance and specificity of detail.

The organizing question of the study is how and why, given the preva-lence of racism, Afrocuban themes came to dominate Cuban music, the-ater, and painting during this period, eventually coming to symbolize Cu-ban national identity itself. The author traces how cultural practicesassociated with blackness changed in meaning as they passed from thehands of rural musicians playing son guitar music in the 1890s, to theglobal audience of the rumba vogue of the 1920s, to the elite avant-gardemodernist movement that paralleled the 1933 Cuban Revolution. Moorebreaks new ground in his exhaustive stylistic documentation of previ-ously unexplored themes such as Cuban minstrelsy and blackface, as wellas the street music, comparsa, characteristic of popular carnival proces-

sion in turn-of-the-century Cuba. In charting the changing contours ofAfrocuban artistic genres over time, Moore rejects the African survivalsapproach pioneered by Melville Herskovits in favor of a dynamic modelin which the combined effect of new audiences, folklorization, and staterepression dramatically altered the meanings of Afrocuban cultural formsand practices over time.

Moore describes how the 1920s global vogue for things Afrocuban per-plexed and dismayed certain Cuban elites who wanted their nation to berepresented overseas as civilized rather than primitive. Just as Brazil-ian actress Carmen Miranda, much to her chagrin, was rejected by Rio

high society upon her return from Hollywood stardom due to her type-casting as a sensual mulatta, the Cuban upper classes were mystified bythe thirst for Afrocuban music in the United States and Europe since itchallenged their positivist view of black culture as atavistic and of cultureas a sign of civilization and progress. While recent Cuban scholarshiphas focused on tensions surrounding Afrocuban political participation inthe postemancipation period, this is the first study to chart how racialambivalence resulting from a contradictory desire to include Afrocubanswithin the nation while excluding them from effective political participa-tion was expressed in the sphere of cultural production. However, Moore

goes far beyond considering just how political struggles are simply re-flected in the sphere of culture. He demonstrates how whites developeda mimetic desire to impersonate Afrocuban personae in song and the-aterto actually become the black cornerstore peanut vendor in a min-strel show or the Santera priestat the very moment when on the streets

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of Havana police were raiding Santera shrines and confiscating ritualobjects.

Given Moores rich documentation of how racial meanings have beentransformed through processes of cultural appropriation, the actual soci-ology of race relations, including those who fall outside of a racially di-chotomous black/white framework, could have been highlighted more inhis account. A bit more attention to the ways in which race and classintersected during this period, for example, might help explain some oth-erwise curious phenomena, such as the fact that middle-class Afrocubanswere some of the most vocal critics of Afrocuban culture in the early 20thcentury, at times stridently calling for legislation banning black musicalgenres in public. One possible explanation might be that these Afrocu-bans were seeking to claim an elite status position by censoring phenom-ena associated with poverty in a context in which idioms of race andclass were deeply intertwined. Moreover, how did the contours of whowas defined (and defined themselves) as black change from emancipationonward? For example, whites during this period gradually came to pene-trate Afrocuban cultural domains such as Santera houses, becomingpractitioners, high priests, and even establishing their own cabildos orritual houses, a process that created a gap between the ascribed race ofcertain social spaces and the participants themselves (Peter Wade, Black-ness and Race Mixture: The Dynamics of Racial Identity in Colom-

bia [ Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993, p. 272]). Moreover, the per-spective of the mixed-race population is given short shrift in thisaccount.

In addition, one wonders what roles the United States might have hadin shaping racial meanings in Cuba during this period of both repeatedintervention and direct rule. The U.S. government in Haiti, for example,paved the way for the eventual noirist backlash lead by Francois Duva-lier by establishing Jim Crow segregation and buttressing the mulattoelites political position. At the very least, the early Americanization ofthe Cuban elitewho by the late 19th century were staging their debu-

tante parties in Miamimay have encouraged Cubans to see their nationthrough the prism of a U.S. racial lens, even if a substantial populationof mulattos made it a quite different reality. Of course, one difficulty intreating Cuba during this tumultuous period is that the story of race isdifficult to isolate from other contextual factors. For example, when thestudent union took over government with support from communists andrural labor in 1933, public life was regulated on many fronts as a fragileregime sought to reestablish civil order. Thus, this context of active civilstrife causes one to question whether indeed municipal efforts to regulatecomparsas or black carnival street parades were primarily or only second-

arily about repressing a sign of blackness.Moore does an outstanding job at finding a vocabulary for talking

about race in a context in which it has a curious way of slipping in andout of focus. In stressing the extent of racial prejudice in Cuba duringthis period, however, at times he may be displaying a normative bias

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toward a civil rights model of racial ideology that does not always fit thecontext. This is most evident in the conclusion in which he stresses thecommon ground between racial ideology in the United States and Cuba.Unlike the United States, Cuban national identity was implicitly per-ceived as ethnically homogenous, which explains why, as in Ecuador orColombia or the Dominican Republic, to define oneself as black is toeffectively abdicate membership in the nation (Ronald Stutzman, ElMestizaje: An All-Inclusive Ideology of Exclusion, pp. 4593 in CulturalTransformation and Ethnicity in Modern Ecuador, Norman E. Whitten,Jr., ed. [University of Illinois Press, 1981]). The fact that even Afrocubanartists performed in blackface in Cuba in the 1920s indicates just howmuch more complex are the multiple and contradictory meanings of racein Cuba than the models of plural societies assumed (Michael G. Smith,The Plural Society in the West Indies [University of California Press,1966]). This is a fascinating study that makes a major contribution to thecultural history of race and national identity in the Caribbean, while atthe same time establishing the highest of standards for Latin Americancultural history, at the level of both rigorous documentation and theoreti-cal breadth.

Inside the Revolution: Everyday Life in Socialist Cuba. By Mona Rosen-

dahl. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997. Pp. x

197. $37.50(cloth); $14.95 (paper).

Sheryl L. LutjensNorthern Arizona University

Inside the Revolution: Everyday Life in Socialist Cuba makes a welcomecontribution to the literature on Cuba. Empirical research has long beendifficult for foreign scholars, and Swedish anthropologist Mona Rosen-dahls 18 months of fieldwork (198890) in a municipality she calls Pal-

mera provide an unusually good basis for analyzing Cuban socialism.Keen on studying the everyday meaning of a strong, unified, and hege-monic ideology (p. 3), Rosendahl began with questions about the deliveryand reception of ideology, including the interaction of socialist ideology,existing beliefs, and sociodemographic characteristics. The ethnographicanalysis of her experiences living in the capital of Palmera informs anintelligent, sometimes comparative, and ultimately provocative localreading of crucial political issues of Cuban socialism. The epilogue basedon short visits (1993 and 1995) during the crisis conditions of Cubas Spe-cial Period is vital to Rosendahls assessment of what the Revolution

and its ideologyhas meant to ordinary people.Rosendahl frames her study with three approaches that, together, are

to uncover the dynamics of ideology (defined as a set of ideals that dealswith social and social relations, with explanatory, normative, and practi-cal content; p. 3): official ideology based in Marxism-Leninism, ideology

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in daily life as it is re-defined by collective memories and individual expe-riences, and the interface of official ideology with other complexes ofideas (pp. 34). It is with two such complexesreciprocity and genderrelationsthat Rosendahl introduces her readers to the realities of social-ist ideology and institutions in Palmera. Reciprocity is not new in Cuba,she notes, though the meaning of loans, barters, and gift giving is ex-plained with reference to the socialist planned economy and the informalrealities of consumption. Similarly contextualized with reference to his-tory and a foundational machismo, gender relations are a second complexof ideas in which practices and shared beliefs in Palmeraranging frommarriage and motherhood to eroticismfall short of official ideologyscall for equality between men and women.

The analytical description of daily life is the pivot for subsequent ex-amination of the Cuban Comunist Party, official discourse, and the revo-lutionary act. The Leninist tension between centralization and participa-tion is key. Rosendahl describes total centralism ensured by anideology-creating party with ultimate power concerning all societal ac-tivities (p. 81); revolutionary rhetoric is situational and criticism difficult;and being a good revolutionary means active participation and sacrifice.Observations of meetings of mass organizations and local government(Cubas representative institutions), public speeches and rituals, and ordi-nary peoples participation including voluntary labor, lead Rosendahl to

some general conclusions. All Cubans are affected by hegemonic socialistideology, though acceptance of itand support for the Revolutionisconditioned by personal experience, position in the social hierarchy, andrace; party membership signals the most noticeable differences in atti-tudes, and age, education, and gender the least. Rosendahl further con-cludes that Cuban socialism has been sustained for four reasons: im-provement in material conditions; collective memories of making theRevolution and ongoing participation; ideologys stress on the benefits ofthe Revolution; and the convergence of a male gender ideal with thatof the good revolutionary (p. 166). Indeed, Rosendahl suspects that the

economic crisis of the 1990s might test the real and symbolic male leader-ship of the Revolution.

The treatment of power that centers the argument in Inside the Revo-lution is both prescient and problematic, as is the strong feminist critiquethat emerges. Rosendahl locates herself openly within the study, re-counting expectations of repression, censorship, and more. If some fearswere dispelled by the much more open society she discovered, otherexpectations are sustained in specific conclusions about the actualities ofpolitics and power. Rosendahl owns the difficulties of knowing whatpeople really think (p. 5) and explains that over time she was able to

move beyond a perception that most everyone was a good revolutionaryto see below the surface (p. 21). What she sees there are indifferenceand varieties of nonparticipation that are all called resistance, protest, oropposition. She also finds invisible power (of social control) and under-stands powers capriciousness personally (through problems with offi-

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to parlay this interesting local history of struggles over salt into a newinterpretation of the Communist Revolution. The Communists, he claims,ultimately won over the rural people by upholding their rights to pro-duce homemade products for retail trade (p. 258), and the revolutionwas, to a significant extent, a broad popular struggle to preserve the mar-ket against . . . modern state making (p. 319). His own data are notconvincing. The salt struggles occurred in the early 1930s, which was notthe period of Communist success in this area. Communist growth camelater, during the Japanese occupation in 193745, but by then, salt wasfreely traded and no longer much at issue (the Japanese were shippingto Japan most of the government sea salt, produced around Tianjin, andhad little interest or ability to stop village production or marketing).Thaxtons account seems more to confirm the standard explanation thatvillagers were drawn to the Communists by Japanese brutality and Com-munist fair, progressive taxation. Communist success continued in the194648 civil war, a period when the Nationalists had no ability to en-force their salt monopoly in the countryside, and Thaxtons informantsindicate it was due largely to land reform and the destructive Nationalistcounterattack of 1947 (though he says a few spoke of fearing the returnof the Kuomintang salt police).

Contraband salt was obviously not an ordinary commodity, and itstretches credulity to equate business in it with marketing in general,

calling government efforts against salt smugglers Kuomintang antimar-ket attacks and wartime Communist tolerance of salt business defense,and even promotion, of the market (p. 339). Seeing Nationalist revenueefforts as modern state building appears more reasonable, but one wishesThaxton showed more awareness of the fact that the salt gabelle goesback two millennia in China and that conflicts between government reve-nue agents and local smugglers have been going on for centuries.

The book is also marred by sloppy and turgid writing, cliches, mean-ingless modifiers, mixed metaphors, invented words, and cumbersomeconstructions. Puyangs Kuomintang power holders prudently cautioned

of the potential incrimination from harmful interference in the celebra-tion (p. 132). Simple ideas are obfuscated by ponderous verbiage, whichmakes the book tedious and overlong. Surely anti-Japanese patriotic ap-peals and rural socioeconomic reforms framed by the CCP weighed im-portantly in the development of Communist power during the war, but inmuch of the Hebei-Shandong-Henan border area the laurel of the CCPsinvolvement with the collective protest of the peasant saltmakers pro-vides a major key to understanding the success of Communist-led resis-tance (p. 199). He writes several times land owned by X lineage (seep. 169) when he seems to mean land owned by individual families in X

lineage, not corporately owned by the lineage, an important distinction.Tables give no sources; one of Peasant Earth Salt Proceeds in MonetaryUnits (p. 298) has no monetary units and appears to be based on theauthors imagination. The surnames of two well-known scholars, HsiaoKung-chuan and Chen Yung-fa, are embarrassingly taken for given

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names in the bibliography and index, and so on. Still and all, this at-times-irritating work adds much new and important detail to our knowl-edge of the Revolution in north China.

Movement Genesis: Social Movement Theory and the 1980s West GermanPeace Movement. By Steve Breyman. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press,1997. Pp. xvi236. $59.00.

David S. MeyerCUNY/City College

In 1982, more than 400,000 people assembled in Bonn, the capital of theFederal Republic of Germany, to protest against the nuclear arms racein general and against NATOs deployment of Pershing II and ground-launched cruise missiles in particular. The demonstration, in a large park,was emblematic of modern social movements, with multiple platforms,numerous speakers, musicians, and people milling around, drifting fromcasual conversations to speech to song. Staged by a very broad coalitionof groups, participants included moderate Social Democrats, fundamen-talist environmentalist Greens, conventional Communists, pacifists, reli-gious activists, conscientious objectors, and young people who wanted to

be a part of the largest movement of their lives. It was an exciting time.The FRGs chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, had asked NATO to prepareto deploy the so-called Euromissiles five years earlier as part of a strategyto link Europe more closely to the United States. In response to thesemissiles, seen as symptoms of new bellicosity, volatility, and danger inthe arms race, peace movements grew up across Western Europe and theUnited States, perhaps nowhere more dramatically and powerfully thanin West Germany. Within a year of the Bonn demonstration, the move-ment had precipitated a split in the governing coalition, leading to Chan-cellor Schmidts resignation, the fall of the Social Democratic coalition

government, and the beginning of the very long reign of Chancellor Hel-mut Kohl and the Christian Democrats. Still, Euromissiles were neverdeployed in Germany; under pressure from the peace movements, theUnited States and NATO adopted a new arms control posture that ulti-mately allowed the Soviet Union to take a new tack in its foreign anddomestic policies. The Cold War ended, Germany unified, and the nu-clear arms race will never be the same again.

The sketch above suggests how complicated and important this move-ment was. After the Cold War, the same movement offers a critical caseto use in understanding the relationship of movements to the policy pro-

cess, to more established and conventional means of political participa-tion, and to the broader social and cultural trends from which theyemerge. Steve Breyman, openly sympathetic to the West German activ-ists, is less interested in providing a comprehensive narrative of the move-ment (for such an account, see Alice Holmes Cooper, Paradoxes of Peace:

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German Peace Movements since 1945 [University of Michigan Press,1995]) than in using the case to interrogate, criticize, and extend the theo-retical literature on the etiology of social movements (p. 1). Breyman isecumenical in his theory, reviewing and making use of an impressivearray of texts and approaches, examining the premises of six conflictingexplanations identified as party failure, fear of war, collective behav-ior, resource mobilization, political process, and new social move-ment theory. He is committed to making use of all applicable insights,rather than accepting or rejecting any approach wholesale.

After providing sketches of each of the major theories he identifies,along with thumbnail critiques and criticisms, Breyman devotes the cen-tral portion of the book to substantive elements of the West Germanpeace movement, addressing specifically the origins, organizations, goals,strategies, tactics, and mobilization of the movement. Relying mostly onpublished accounts in English and German, including some movementdocuments, Breyman identifies significant issues under each topic, andin doing so, sketches a profile of the movement. Recognizing the diversityof interests represented by the movement, he devotes a great deal of at-tention to the formal representation of groups within coalitions that coor-dinated movement activities, borrowing and offering theoretical under-pinning to activists ideas about movement spectrums.

Breymans choice of a thematic rather than a narrative approach may

be hard for readers not already familiar with the issues and events of thepeace movements of the 1980s. The authors concerns here are, however,to apply the diverse theories of movements to the case, focusing particu-larly on the movements origins. For those who know the basic outlinesof the movements trajectory, the books chief strength is its openness tocompeting theoretical paradigms; this openness, however, also presentsa challenge to the reader.

In his conclusion, Breyman uses his empirical material to examine par-ticular aspects of each of the six theories he examined. Unsurprisingly,he finds that each of the theories has strengths and weaknesses in ex-

plaining this case. In the final few pages of the book, he tries to drawfrom this amalgam of insights to offer an empirically-based theoreticalaccount of the movement . . . that addresses the sources of social action:individual, organizational, communal, societal, transnational, global(p. 197). It is impossible not to admire the theoretical ambitions of thiswork, but such a synthetic theory needs more than the allotted few para-graphs to be developed. Movement Genesis ends with what could be abeginning.

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The Social Psychology of Protest. By Bert Klandermans. Oxford: Black-well Publishers, 1997. Pp. ix257. $21.95 (paper).

James M. JasperNew York City

Bert Klandermans has probably done more than anyone else to bridgeAmerican and European traditions of research on social movements. Headdresses both approaches in his work, in which he has gone out andmeasured all sorts of things that no one else has. As important are thepersonal networks he has built through regular visits to the United Statesfrom his base in Amsterdam. As a sign of his influence here, he last yearheaded the American Sociological Association section on collective be-havior and social movements.

As the title of his new book suggests, Klandermans also aspires to inte-grate the fields of social psychology and social movements by applyingthe former to the latter. In the first of two parts, he examines what drawsindividuals into participation, as well as the less studied issue of whatcauses them to end their participation. Drawing heavily but gracefullyon his own (numerous) previously published articles, he integrates well-studied concepts such as the generation of collective action frames andthe use of personal networks in recruitment with more rationalistic con-

cepts such as costs and benefits and expectations of success. Klander-manss empirical cases deftly alternate with conceptual discussions. Inpart 2, concerning the organizational and political contexts of participa-tion, the balance tilts toward reviewing the existing literature. Socialmovement organizations have been well studied (so much that they havetheir own acronym, SMOs), but less attention has been given to the fieldsof conflict within which they maneuver and seek out opportunities foraction.

A thorough outline of the social psychology of protest would be a goodidea and indeed Klandermanss title leads us to believe he will supply

this. After all, the field of social movements has moved rapidly towarda social psychological perspective, usually under the strikingly similarbanner of culture. Although these developments are directly relevant tomost of his concerns, Klandermans takes little note of them, let aloneintegrate them into his models. He does not deliver on the promise of histitle. For instance, in the first part of his book, Klandermans says he isexamining individuals, but we meet only one individual protester, de-scribed in a brief paragraph taken from an obscure, unpublished workby another scholar. Instead we have aggregates of opinion polls, hardlythe way I would go about getting at the social psychology of individual

protesters. We have no in-depth interviews or life histories, no small-group dynamics, experimental evidence, psychological or emotional fac-tors, cognitive biases in decision making, no moral sensibilities or princi-ples. Assertions that individuals weigh costs and benefits are a way ofavoiding social psychology, which offers the means to investigate why,

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for complex cultural and psychological reasons, individuals value thecosts and the benefits of protest as they do. Surveys are not the best meansfor getting at this. Klandermans cites a few classics of social psychologyon information processing and communications reception, but otherwiseuncovers little that would suggest that interesting processes are going oninside peoples heads.

The Social Psychology of Protest, along with a recent book by SidneyTarrow (Power in Movement [Cambridge University Press, 1994]), andan edited volume by Doug McAdam, John McCarthy, and Mayer Zald(Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements [Cambridge UniversityPress, 1996]), feel like the summary chapters of a paradigm: the delimita-tion of a small and finite set of concepts for understanding the world, adisjuncture between the empirical evidence and the theoretical state-ments made about it, and theoretical works that are more literaturereview than creative theorizing. For 30 years, a relatively structural andorganizational paradigmonce called the resource mobilization ap-proach and more recently the political process approachhas inspiredvast quantities of normal science by excluding a number of difficult phe-nomena. Many of these are knocking at the gate: cultural construc-tionism, cultural meanings and social psychology, individual biographiesand psychologies, affective loyalties and emotional reactions, the psychol-ogy of strategic choice, the tactical, cultural, and organizational creativity

of protesters, and much more. They have only occasionally been admit-ted, as in the use of frame alignment as a recruitment strategy. The oldparadigm has too many important insights to vanish altogether, but itsouter walls may be ready to come tumbling down. Bert Klandermanshas written a fine scholarly book, which goes as far toward accommodat-ing social psychology as one can go within the essentially structural rootmetaphor of an organizational paradigm. But it feels more like an endthan a beginning.

Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison. Edited by Ian Ker-shaw and Moshe Lewin. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.Pp. xii369. $54.95 (cloth); $18.95 (paper).

Daniel ChirotUniversity of Washington

We all have opinions about Hitler and Stalin. Along with a handful ofothers, including Mao Zedong, they are the major examples of individualswhose influence may have transcended the social forces that produced

them to permanently transform our world. Had Hitlers mixture of racialparanoia and arrogance been less extreme, would Germany have set outto exterminate all Jews? Would it have attacked the Soviet Union in 1941and provoked the two-front war every German military leader had beentaught to fear? Had Stalin not been so paranoid, would so many millions

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were unlikely to be gentle social democrats. Furthermore, one of the greatappeals of Communism was that it promised to transform backward, pre-viously dependent nations into powerful modern ones. But this meanteither engaging in or preparing for war at all times. Communist societieswere highly militarized. So, whatever revolutionary logic drove Nazismto its evil excesses was present in Communism, too, even if the theorywas partly different. Stalin was not the only mass murderer and jailerof vast numbers of his compatriots among Communist leaders. Kim IlSung, Enver Hoxha, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Haile Mengistu Meriam, andSekou Toure may have been the worst of the others, but even such be-nign Communists as Tito (who killed tens of thousands before becominga reformer) or Nicolae Ceausescu (who ruined and terrorized his countrybut killed rather few people) showed many of the same tendencies.

In the end, this book is a very useful, carefully done, sound, and pro-vocative addition to the debates about the nature of revolutionary, ideo-logical dictatorship, but it avoids some crucial questions that remain to beexplored. Here, comparative historical sociology can make a significantcontribution as long as it is willing to take ideology seriously as an inde-pendent variable and accepts as essential data the immense amounts ofresearch already produced by the many historians working in this field.

The Policing of Politics in the Twentieth Century: Historical Perspec-tives. Edited by Mark Mazower. Providence, R.I.: Berghahn Books, 1997.Pp. vi262. $49.95.

Laura KalmanowieckiYale University

State monopoly over the means of legitimate violence lies at the heart ofthe process of state formation. Professional policing is a creation of themodern state. The 19th century brought in Europe the civilianization of

domestic politics: the police were entrusted with the maintenance of inter-nal order, whereas the military were directed against foreign forces. Con-trary to the myth of a consensual heyday for policing, scholars haveshown that its origins should be explained as a response more to pressingpolitical and social challenges than to long-standing problems of dailycriminality. The threatreal or imaginedthat successive governmentsconfronted had a major impact on the style of policing adopted.

Rather than assumingas Hsi-Huey Liang suggests (The Rise of theModern Police and the European State System [Cambridge UniversityPress, 1992])the creation of police systems as a natural part of the mod-

ernization process, Mark Mazower has successfully located police systemsat the heart of the organization of societies and state power. The Policingof Politics in the Twentieth Century constitutes an important contribu-tion to the theoretization and systematization of the sociology of policing,which has come to age in the 1970s and 1980s. Some of its authors, such

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as Cyrille Fijnaut, Clive Emsley, and Herbert Reinke, have previouslycollaborated at Les Cahiers de la Securite Interieure, where they viewedthe character of the police as a historical construct, centered around thestate, and in relationship with politics, the legal system, and the demandsof the policed.

In this volume, Mazower has emphasized the crucial importance of therise of the modern state, acquiring an ever-increasing range of compe-tences through the 20th century. It deals with the links between Europeand the rest of the world, and it illustrates the way different types ofpolitical regimes have come to terms with the need to establish devicesto monitor subjects and civilians. Policing changed as a result of chal-lenges to the existing distribution of power in society. Threats to estab-lished states and the fear of Communism after the Bolshevik Revolutionled to the expansion of political policing, both in democratic and authori-tarian regimes. The victory of Communism provided a permanent justi-fication for the expansion of political policing. If counterespionage wasat the center of much pre-1914 police activities, the fear of Communismprompted secret police to monitor subversives. In Mazowers words,The old nineteenth century distinction between opposition to govern-ment policies and treason crumbled, and with it an important defenceprotecting the individuals against the state (p. 247).

As Emsley demonstrates, political policing in Europe constituted an

instrument for states to provide information about different threats andhelped to suppress them. Maintaining secrecy was justified as a func-tional need, and secrecy became the signature of secret police forces. Afterall, they were allegedly collecting renseignements for the commongood. A distinction was drawn between the British, more preventivestyle of policing and the more reactive one dominant in continental Eu-rope. However, the benign nature of political policing did not prevail inIreland or in the British colonies. As David Killingway shows, colonialrule could only be coercive since the aim of British colonial police officerswas to maintain the pax Britannica (p. 169). Colonial policing was more

concerned with internal security than with crime prevention. Further-more, the compelling need to secure public order amid resistance, por-trayed by Keith Jeffrey in Ireland, raises questions about the distinctionbetween the police forces and the military for internal order maintenance.It could be argued that the functional distinction becomes blurred whentheir tasks overlap, as reflected by the military counterinsurgency role inGreece at the height of the civil war described by Mazower.

Mazowers work raises a pivotal and troubling issue: Is policing re-sponsible for the pacification of societies? How do we measure the successor efficiency of political policing? Despite the Special Branch efforts, the

British Empire vanished. Even more disturbing is the fact that, as Jean-Marc Berliere has shown, in France, political police often developed whatit was fighting by giving importance, means, attention and troops togroups that otherwise would have disappeared (p. 47). Berliere demon-strates the constant temptation for the secret arm of the state to become

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a state in itself, and for its agents to keep themselves in business by nour-ishing subversive threats that justify their own existence. Nor can weignore the different ways in which practices that became routine partsof secret police repertoire, such as monitoring, surveillance, infiltration,shadowing, vetting, and covert operations (described by Athan Theoharisin the United States; Mazower in Greece; Berliere in France; Elise Tiptonin Japan; Herbert Reinke in Germany), strongly affected the capacity ofcontestation and resistance of diverse actors.

Mazower is pessimistic about the prospects for shrinking security ser-vices in the absence of public concern. It should be noted that the persis-tence of secrecy and the autonomization of secret political policing con-spire against public disclosure and accountability despite periodicoversight, as the recent FBI example illustrates.

In Mazowers view, Bureaucratic empire-building, personal ambitionand ideology explain at least as much and perhaps more than the exis-tence of actual threats (p. 254). We could add, however that institutionalmemories, past legacies, the demonstration effect of policing lessons, andmutual exchangesincluding international cooperation in the definitionand repression of threats (superbly portrayed by Fijnaut)also shapepolicing regimes. This raises the troubling idea that, once institutional-ized, the initial form, style, and organizational schemes adopted by polic-ing regimes are quite resilient to change. Modern professional policing

does not necessarily accompany political democracy, even after attemptsat democratizing and professionalizing the police force.

Settling Accounts: Violence, Justice, and Accountability in PostsocialistEurope. By John Borneman. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,1998. Pp. xii197. $49.50 (cloth); $14.95 (paper).

Stanley CohenLondon School of Economics

Justice in transition, accountability, coming to terms with the past, de-mocratization, truth commissions, reconciliation, after the falltheseare familiar terms in the public discourse about recent dramatic changesfrom authoritarian regimes toward democracy. The vexing question ishow these societies deal with their dark pasts, especially the abuses ofpower, human rights violations, or crimes committed by the previous re-gime. Three very different clusters of cases have dominated the debate:first, the collapse of military juntas in various Latin American countries;second, the end of apartheid in South Africa; and third, the dismantling

of Soviet and Eastern Bloc Communism.John Bornemans study of accountability in the former East Germany

(with some rather selective comparisons with other East-Central Euro-pean states) is a valuable contribution to the expanding social scientificliterature on transitional justice. Beyond his interest in this specific case

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of decommunization, he has a more ambitious thesis about the centralityof the rule of lawmore particularly, retributive justicein legitimizingthe emerging democratic order.

As an anthropologist, though, the most original and convincing partsof the book are his ethnographies of how taken-for-granted categoriescriminality and the rule of law, perpetrator and victim, reconciliation andvindicationare politically constructed. Thus, under the heading eth-nography of criminality, he shows how the Rechtsstaat was invokedthrough criminal justice. What did the new unified German judicial sys-tem deem to be crime in the former GDR? Borneman describes howthis project was carried out by ZERV, the Central Investigative Office forGovernmental and Unification Criminality, set up in 1991. Unificationcriminality covers economic crimes associated with unification, govern-mental criminality refers to crimes and human rights violations commit-ted by party and state officials throughout the GDR history from 1949to 1989. He shows in detail the role of evidence and archives (the 120miles of shelves of documents stored in the Stasi Document Center) inwhat he nicely terms the transformation from misfortune to injustice.The consequent problems of accountability are illustrated by a well-known extortion trial from 1994.

Even more original is a section fascinatingly entitled ethnography ofvindication. The complex theoretical links between retributive justice

and restoration of dignity to the victim are grounded in a study of theworkings of an East German Commission of Vindication/Rehabilitation.In certain firms and organizations, such commissions functioned fromlate 1989 through 1994 to restore the dignity of victims of the old regimethrough acts of vindication and rehabilitation. Borneman sees theselike the criminal trialsas staged public events, rituals to repair the dam-age done to the victim and to defeat the wrongdoers claim to mastery.They are performed in the belief that the performance itself will clarifywhat is right. His case study of the vindication proceedings for radio andtelevision staff gives a rich sense of the micropolitics and personal lives

behind the abstractions of justice.As public events, though, these ceremonies of offender prosecution and

victim vindication are, to say the least, more morally nuanced than theseterms suggest. Two of Bornemans many examples: first, the most suc-cessful prosecutions have not been for typical or normal forms of wrong-doing, but for excesses in the performance of public duties (p. 143); sec-ond, former officials seek to deflect attention from their own complicityby reinventing themselves as victims of overzealous judicial reformers.

These empirical sections are framed by a general argument that I foundless convincing. It is one matter to claim that accountability is central for

emerging democracies and is established in part [my emphasis] throughretributive justice: a reckoning with the past where the government ritu-ally purifies itself in periodic prosecutions of actual wrongdoing in thecenter (p. 144). It is less evident that settling accounts by ritual criminalproceedings is absolutely necessary both to reestablish the dignity of vic-

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tims and as a key index of state legitimacy. Nor does Bornemans ratheruneven comparisons with other postsocialist states prove that withoutretributive justice, cycles of retributive justice will inevitably follow, di-rected either against an internal scapegoat or an external enemy. His ty-pology of jural restructuring in East-Central Europe (radical regimechange and some retributive justice; little regime change and little retrib-utive justice; radical regime change and extensive retributive justice) isinteresting. But it hardly shows the relationship between the use of retrib-utive justice and the absence of subsequent cycles of violence, nor doeshis citation of the horrors in the former Yugoslavia. The case becomeseven weaker if extended to transitions other than postcommunism.

Borneman notes that up to 1989, the German phrase for overcoming/reckoning with the past referred to the Nazi pastand proved impossi-ble to fix. His thought-provoking study shows how the unified govern-ments mandate of overcoming of/reckoning with the GDRs pastthrough criminal law is just as troublesome.

The Great Surprise of the Small Transformation: The Demise of Commu-nism and the Rise of the Private Sector in Hungary. By Akos Rona-Tas.Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Pp. xv289. $49.50.

Tony LevitasRTI

Akos Rona-Tass Great Surprise of the Small Transformation representsone of the first sustained attempts to bridge the intellectual gap betweenthe study of communism per se and the study of what has happened inits wake. Rona-Tas attempts to bridge this gap by linking the answers totwo important and apparently disparate questions: Why did communismcollapse? And what forces account for the particular tragjectories priva-tization has taken in postcommunist countries?

In the spirit of Polanyi, Rona-Tas focuses on the labor market in an-swering the first question. He begins by elegantly recapitulating argu-ments that identify the essence of Marxist-Leninism in the effort to orga-nize society as if it were a single factory. And he shows how in practicethis entailed making the state both a universal owner and a universalemployer. Moreover, he argues convincingly that by the 1960s, and afterthe CP itself, full employment had become the central institution for po-litical legitimization and control under communism.

At the same time, he claims that in order to compensate for the short-ages engendered by organizing society as if it were a single factory, the

party began to loosen restrictions on the private sector, particularly inthe production of consumer goods. This is fair enough, though Rona-Tasseems a little uncertain at times about whether he wants to argue thatthe economic problems of communism were caused primarily by the elim-ination of competitive labor markets or by a larger set of forces. The

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problem for him here is that the former position is no doubt too reduc-tionist while the latter position weakens thethough maybe less than hemay have fearedlinkage he is trying to draw between the forces thatled to communisms collapse and the trajectory privatization took in post-communist Hungary.

In any case, he continues his argument by showing how the centrifugaltendencies unleashed by the partial accomodation of a rump private sec-tor had begun to effect that state sector by the 1960s, leading to greaterautonomy for industrial firms and their managers. Indeed, a hardeningof the party line in the 1970s failed to fully stop the deconcentration ofeconomic power that had begun earlier. But the real break happened inthe early 1980s when party officials began to see the private sector andquasi-competitive labor markets not simply as a saftey valve for the pro-duction of consumer goods but as forces that could be used to revitalizesocialism.

In this, they proved misguided. In fact, throughout the book, Rona-Tas provides no truly compelling argument for why the Hungarian Partyfirst started on this track and then, more or less continuously, held to it.Nonetheless, he does demonstrate that the shift in party policy allowedfor both the rapid expansion of the private sector per se and the equallyimportant proliferation of quasi-private activities within the state sectoritself. The proliferation of these new entrepreneurial structures, in turn,

had profound consequence for the nature of communisms collapse inHungary, as well as on the strategies of privatization that were pursuedafter the fall: First, Rona-Tas argueswith compelling and well-mar-shaled datathat the communist elite had become so profitably engagedin the private sector that they could afford to give up political powerwithout too much of a fight. Second, and more interestingly, he arguesthat the blurring of the boundaries between the private and state sectorsthat had taken place in Hungary during the 1980s made voucher-typeprivatization schemes unpopular. In short, key insidersboth managersand skilled workersproved strong enough to block all privatization

schemes that would have taken control over the pace and nature of theprocess out of their hands. Here Rona-Tas is clearly on very strongground. Moreover, the general story he tells is well told, well documented,and will no doubt be of use in the field for years to come.

At the same time, it is a shame that Rona-Tas failed to make use ofhis mentors concept of a double movement: Polanyi, it will be remem-bered, used this concept to describe the commodification of labor thattook place during the 19th century as well as the countermovements thatimmediately arose to limit its full impactcountermovements that heargued ultimately resulted in the emergence of the welfare state. Some-

thing similar seems to have happened under Soviet socialism, with thestrength and effects of the double movement being less a product of thesystem itself than in the nature of its external imposition and mainte-nance. Indeed, the most interesting question may be what organizationalforms might have developed out of communisms misguided attempt to

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organize society as a single factory if its double movement had not beenconstrained by Soviet power.

The Testimony of Lives: Narrative and Memory in Post-Soviet Latvia. ByVieda Skultans. New York: Routledge, 1997. Pp. xxi217. $75.00 (cloth);$24.99 (paper).

Mikk TitmaStanford University

The opening to the world of the lands formerly in the Soviet bloc is amajor historical event, leading to extensive scholarship on how societyreally functioned under Soviet rule. The Testimony of Lives by V. Skul-tans typifies an aspect of such work. It aims for depth on a narrow topic,not a broad picture. Through personal letters and oral narratives col-lected during visits to Latvia in the 1990s, Skultans, an anthropologisttrained in England, chooses to rediscover her Latvian homeland, whichher family left during World War II.

The Testimony of Lives has three main parts. The first (chaps. 13)relates the authors discovery of her homeland, her family history, andher research approach. The second (chaps. 49) contains her analyses of

oral narratives she collected from a few dozen people. The third (chap. 10and the appendix) describes Latvia and gives her overview of its history.Latvia is a small European country on the southern coast of the Baltic

Sea in the historical no-mans land between the German and Russiannations. Latvians as a nation were actors only during World Wars I andII. World War I brought suffering but also the first state belonging toLatvians. World War II took statehood away from Latvians and placedit in the Soviet domain. Most personal histories analyzed by Skultansreflect on this second national experience.

There is an ongoing debate about the subjectivity of perception of real-

ity, especially of history in different cultural contexts; a nation developsits own view of history. For example, in Latvian history, the 16th-centuryinvasion of Latvia by Russian Tsar Ivan IV (The Terrible) is seen asa massive slaughter of people. In Russian history, Ivan IV is seen as uni-fying all Russian territories. Interpretations of the same events inevitablyvary across national contexts, and these varying interpretations form akey element of a nations unique heritage.

Skultans describes how she collected and documented oral narrativesto lay the basis for a written version of the national memory of Latviain the mid-20th century. My approach does not challenge the truth of

the past as witnessed, but rather investigates the cultural resources usedto make sense of the past and incorporate it into a personal history(p. 27).

The destiny of the Latvian people appears to be the broader culturalcontext into which Skultans positions personal histories. This worldview

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is typical in small nations. The nations existence demands a constantstruggle for survival among more powerful neighbors and forms thebackdrop against which its members evaluate their lives. While the gain-ing of Latvias independence after World War I heightened the image ofa national destiny and gave an enlarged cultural context for individuallife, World War II brought misery and the loss of a Latvian state. It shookan important foundation upon which individual life had meaning anddestiny. The cruel destiny of the Latvian nation cast its imprint on theindividual lives described in Skultans narratives.

Her chapter on The Expropriation of Biography points to anothermajor aspect of the narratives. Every conqueror of Latvia rewrote itshistory, and the Soviets were no exception. But no previous conquerorforced people to change their personal and even their family history tosurvive and succeed. This experience is unique. Some people interviewedby Skultans requested anonymity because they are still in a vulnerableposition.

A special chapter discusses the forest brothers, as postWorld WarII guerilla fighters were called in the Baltic. The Soviets managed to sub-due them in the Baltic region and western Ukraine only through massdeportation in March 1949. This deportation crushed all thoughts of re-sistance and made personal survival the primary issue. In the new psy-chological climate, fear was a constant element of personal life.

Chapters 8 and 9 are on the meaning of life. Latvian narrators arepreoccupied with meaning in a quite explicit way: they complain thattheir lives lack meaning and purpose (p. 124). In a nation visibly losingground and a society with a limited range of personal goals, memorieslack a thread giving meaning to a harsh personal life history. It is hardfor the objective analyst to know to what extent the meaning of personallife was destroyed by the communist system per se and to what extentby the unhappy fate of the Latvian nation in the Soviet Union.

For American readers who are not specialists, The Testimony of Livesmay seem to be mainly a story about a small nation and its people. Its

extensive details and interpretations of the meaning of Latvian wordsare sometimes tedious, but this is how anthropological treatises are oftenwrittenthey are usually intended for specialists and not a large audi-ence.

Power and the Sacred in Revolutionary Russia: Religious Activists inthe Village. By Glennys Young. University Park: Pennsylvania State Uni-versity Press, 1997. Pp. xvii307. $47.50.

Richard L. HernandezStanford University

In this pioneering study of rural religion and politics under the Bolshevikregime, Glennys Young goes far toward filling in one of the least noted

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but most deleterious blank spots in contemporary historiography of theSoviet Union. Until recently, the field has implicitly suggested throughits own silence that religious belief during this period was in quiet declineor that it simply became the passive object of state-sponsored persecu-tion. While both of these misconceptions are based on the reality of Bol-shevik attempts to eradicate religion by the hook of social engineering orthe crook of brutal repression, they nevertheless leave us ignorant of theeveryday plight of believers under this regime. Young, however, succeedsat restoring a credible sense of the historical agency available to religiousbelievers in the face of, indeed often in response to, the states demands.Aside from a brief but thorough introduction to the rural religious sceneat the end of the tsarist era, the author focuses mainly on the first decadeof Bolshevik rule, at which time a cultural conflict raged over what rolereligion was to play in the new village. In light of the aforementionedscholarly neglect and the persistent assumption that Russian peasants in-habited an apolitical world, Youngs conclusion is surprising. During the1920s, religion remained so important to peasants social identity that itmobilized rural clergy and laity to revive factional politics in the Sovietcountryside (p. 273)a state of affairs that eventually helped motivatethe regimes brutal war on the peasantry during collectivization in theearly 1930s.

Chapters 1 and 2 search out the historical beginnings of clerical and lay

religious activism. Here, in a masterful synthesis of previous scholarshipsupplemented by her own research, Young locates the antecedents of reli-gious politics in the tsarist Great Reforms era and in the first few yearsafter the October Revolution of 1917, at which time rural clergy and laityfaced the increasing pressures of social modernization as well as the polit-ical and cultural designs of the state. Chapters 3 and 4 survey the impactof official antireligious efforts in the countryside, suggesting that aspira-tions toward a godless utopia were largely frustrated by religious believ-ers indefatigable political activity. The books remaining five chapterseschew chronological organization in favor of thematic analysiscov-

ering the relationship between clergy and laity, the laicization of parishlife, the co-option of Soviet political institutions by religious believers,and the vicissitudes of Bolshevik antireligious rhetorical categories.

To her credit, Young is not wedded to any single set of historiographi-cal questions or methods but approaches her topic from a variety ofangles in order to tell a complex, sometimes paradoxical, story. Socialhistory has a prominent place here as the author highlights generationalconflict, social mobility, gender, and economic conditions as importantfactors in the rural religious conflict. Explorations of cultural issues, how-ever, produce the books most important insights. Treatments of law, le-

gality, and administration within the villages religiopolitical milieu, forinstance, are valuable contributions to our growing knowledge of the ac-companying complexities and ironies of Soviet modernity in the country-side. The 1918 Bolshevik Decree on the Separation of Church andState, for example, was in many ways quite successful as a secularizing

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instrument as it delegitimized the churchs traditional structures and dis-enfranchised its hierarchy. Yet, because the decree allowed limited reli-gious activity if strict legal requirements were met, it also gave religiousbelievers in the village a modicum of juridical legitimacy and a concomi-tant rhetorical means to defend themselves against the regimes more mil-itant antireligious activists. Moreover, by compelling interaction with thestates agents (through petition drives, tax payments, approvals forchurch upkeep, and so on), legislative or administrative efforts to controlor repress ended up baptizing peasants into the world of modern politicsand political technique. This is especially evident in electoral politicsthrough which religious believers managed to infiltrate (a highlycharged Bolshevik term) local Soviet administrative organs.

The book also makes important, though sometimes limited, contribu-tions to our understanding of what Young labels village semiotics.There are only brief discussions of apocalyptic discourse and religiousimages (icons) here, but there are also sustained and extremely insightfulexplorations of how the village church served as a crucial focal point ofcultural struggle. Its enduring significance as a symbol for so much ofwhat the regime attempted to destroy in the villagenamely a politicallyindependent peasantry with a competing cultural identityexplains whythe activity of religious and antireligious activists alike so often centeredon the sacred space of the church and why the destruction of churches

became a paramount concern for the regime in the decades that followed.The book is written in a clear style, never overburdened by theoreticallanguage. At times, however, it would have benefited from a more rigor-ous theoretical defense. For example, the relationship between religion,or culture in general, and power appears too unidirectional in placeswhere the functionalist biases of the sources (nearly all Bolshevik) arenot always checked by the authors own interpretive framework. Thisminor criticism aside, Young has written a crucial and seminal book thatwill, I hope, spur a new wave of studies of religious identity and politicsin the former Soviet Union.

Sacred Tensions: Modernity and Religious Transformation in Malaysia.By Raymond L. M. Lee and Susan E. Ackerman. Columbia: Universityof South Carolina Press, 1997. Pp. xi172. $29.95.

Robert W. HefnerBoston University

Few countries present a more complex religious profile than the Southeast

Asian nation of Malaysia. Ethnic Malays are officially recognized as thecountrys indigenous sons of the soil (bumiputera) and constitute 56%of the population. Malays are Muslim, and Islam is the national religion.Descendants of 19th-century traders and laborers, Chinese compose 32%of the population and are predominantly, if heterogeneously, Buddhist.

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Indians, at 8% of the population, profess widely varying versions of Hin-duism. Besides these primary groupings, Malaysia also has Sikhs, Ba-hais, tribal animists, and a small but growing Christian community.

In this short, densely argued book, Raymond Lee and Susan Ackermanset out to make sense of this pluralist cacophony, explaining its originsin the early modern era and the dynamics of the religious revitalizationsweeping Malaysia today. Though the authors have conducted extensiveresearch on Malaysian religions, the books argument is presented not asa summary of primary research but as an overview and reanalysis ofliterature on religion and modernity in Malaysia as a whole. Though attimes this makes it difficult to assess the empirical grounds for their gen-eralizations, the approach allows the authors to stand back and comparedevelopments across Malaysias ethnoreligious mosaic.

The authors begin with a discussion of Islam and the Malaysian state.They show that, prior to the colonial period, Malay Islam was raja-cen-tered and little concerned with a detailed implementation of Islamic law(sharia). The arrival of British colonialism in the late 19th century, how-ever, coincided with the ascent of religious reformism in the Muslimworld. Through their efforts to bureaucratize the administration of Is-lamic law, the British unwittingly undermined the religious authority ofMuslim rulers and strengthened the hand of religious scholars. Equallyimportant, the bureaucracy provided an organized means for the defini-

tion of Malayness (p. 33).Since the 1960s, the authors reveal, an otherwise secular Malay elitehas seen fit to promote a highly Protestantized (p. 36) form of Islam soas to strengthen Malay unity and inculcate a work ethic consonant withstate-promoted capitalism. The elite failed to anticipate that some Malayswould put the new orthodoxy to oppositional use, invoking Islam to voicetheir dissatisfaction with industrialization and its bureaucratic patrons.Challenged in the 1970s by a fundamentalist upsurge, the state bid upits commitment to Islam, obliging ordinary Malays to conform to a moreunitary expression of their faith.

The situation of Malaysias Buddhists and Hindus, Lee and Ackermanshow, differs greatly from that of the Malays. Deeply involved in theinstitutions of colonial capitalism and education, the Chinese communitywas internally diverse from the start. Though resinification has takenplace since 1969, many in the Chinese community are English-speakingand internationalist in their cultural and economic orientation. Re-sponding to the Islamic resurgence among Malays, Chinese Malaysianssought to deepen their understanding of Buddhism. Many English-speak-ing Chinese did so by looking to Western Buddhism for inspiration, pre-ferring its mediation and intellectualized study to the ritual and asceti-

cism of its Asian counterparts. Even in the aftermath of efforts byBuddhist reformists to mobilize the laity and demystify folk Buddhism,however, Malaysian Buddhism remains heterogeneous and ecumenicallynonsectarian.

Though considerably smaller, the Indian-Hindu population also shows

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considerable internal diversity. The paucity of Brahmans among this im-migrant population made caste concerns less divisive than in India. Butcaste divisions have been maintained nonetheless through marriage ar-rangements, occupational differentiation, and ritual roles. Brought bylow-caste Tamils, popular Hindu worship focused on village and guard-ian spirits rather than Sanskritic deities. Over time, some in the Hinducommunity have sought to elevate the status of their temple deitiesthrough grander temple reconstruction and ritual refurbishment (p. 96).Others, however, have experimented with more direct forms of worshipsuch as devotional hymns deemphasizing priestly ritual roles or orgiasticrites of penance and possession. Though the Islamic revival among Ma-lays has given rise calls for Hindu unity, the community remains cultur-ally and organizationally fissiparous.

Sacred Tensions provides an original and insightful summary of reli-gious change in Malaysias varied religious communities. Some readerswill find the authors strict constructionist Weberian framework, with itsbroad generalizations as to the civilizational concerns of the Westernmind (p. x), one of the books less attractive features. Even here, how-ever, the authors take pains to point out Asia is not replicating the West-ern history of secularization, and their comments on the way in whichglobal cultural transfers are affecting Malaysian religions are convincing.For courses on Southeast Asian religions or the general sociologist of reli-

gion interested in an intriguing non-Western case study, then, this is auseful and welcome book.

Millennium, Messiahs, and Mayhem: Contemporary Apocalyptic Move-ments. Edited by Thomas Robbins and Susan J. Palmer. New York:Routledge, 1997. Pp. ix334. $18.95 (paper).

James T. RichardsonUniversity of Nevada, Reno

This is a fine collection of high-quality papers concerning millenarianismin Western culture. Some may think the effort too ambitious and thecoverage too varied. But others will be appreciative of the attempt torelate scholarship in several areas that are sometimes thought of as inde-pendent of each other. The collection is obviously designed to speak tothe growing interest in millenarianism among scholars and the generalpublic as we approach that magic date of 2000. The volume will servewell as a text for special courses on that phenomenon, as well as for soci-ology of religion and social movements courses.

The volume is divided somewhat arbitrarily into four major sections:the first focuses on theories of apocalypticism, the second contains pa-pers on secularizing the millennium, the third is called apocalypticismand the churches, and the fourth covers the important issue of violenceand confrontation. Major scholars in the sociology of religion, social

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movements, and religious studies are contributors, including such figuresas Tom Robbins, Dick Anthony, Michael Barkum, John Hall, CatherineWessinger, Maasimo Introvigne, Mark Mullins, Anson Shupe, Jim Aho,Robert Balch, and David Bromley.

The theory section is strong, with a lead paper by Bromley that offershis usual well-grounded theoretical analysis of apocalyptic themes inWestern culture. He proposes a structural as opposed to a theologicalanalysis as being more valuable for understanding such views. The sec-ond paper by Wessinger is short and to the point but w

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