Lines: A brief history by Ingold, Tim

Reviews

Barbash, Ilisa and Lucien Taylor (eds.).2007. The cinema of Robert Gardner.Oxford and New York: Berg. vi + 253 pp.Pb.: £19.99/$34.95. ISBN: 978 1 84520774 8.

In non-fiction filmmaking ‘everythingdepends, it seems, on some combination ofknowledge, insight, inspiration and talent.These scarcely measurable and mostlyunteachable attributes tell me that film,whether we like it or not, is an art form andthat we should welcome, not despair of thefact’ (p. 99). The words and works of RobertGardner (RG) come to us in an unusualcombination of essays, analyses,conversations and reminiscences written byrenowned anthropologists, philosophers, filmtheorists and filmmakers as well as byGardner’s friends. Ilisa Barbash and LucienTaylor, who previously authored a handbookCross-Cultural Filmmaking (1997), nowpresent us with this unique volume that dealswith complexities of human creativity and itsarticulation in RG’s work. It poses questionsabout manipulation of sounds andjuxtaposition of images, the ways ofportraying and interpreting people’s doings,and calls for a discussion about subjectivity,reflexivity, and symbolic expressions in anethnographic film. RG’s films – not only thewell known ones, but also those that receivedless public attention – are approached fromdifferent perspectives. The essays provide areader with a means to tackle specificities ofartistic ‘Gardnerian’ style. One has anopportunity to obtain a more coherentimpression about RG, who he was and howhis work subsequently influenced studies inanthropology and cinema. His hermeneuticeye and ear seeking knowledge of life areexposed in the writings of Charles Warren,William Rothman and Stanley Cavell.Gardner’s intercontinental visits with a

camera bring us – readers and viewers – todifferent cultural worlds, communities, andenvironments. ‘For me going to distantcultures leads to self-examination which inturn refines sensibilities for detecting meaningin the lives of others’ explains RG in theconversation with Ilisa Barbash (p. 106). Weread about serendipity, vigilance, andaudacity, all of which have an important rolein a non-fiction filmmaking. RG pursued hiscreativity beyond the usual epistemology of aplot and a story. But did he do so at theexpense of his subjects? While theethnographic filmmakers are principallyconcerned with ‘the significance of the livedexperience of their subjects to the subjectsthemselves, Gardner by contrast is moreconcerned with what he himself makes of thatexperience – its significance to him’ (p. 10).Therefore, the portrayed worlds of theKwakiutl from British Columbia, the DugumDani of Irian Jaya, the Nuer and the Hamarof Ethiopia, and the Bororo Fulani of Niger,with the city of Varanasi (the holiest place forthe Hindus to die) can remain ambiguous.Yet, ‘there is more than controversy involved:the films announce themselves as deliberateand uncompromising works, demanding to betaken seriously. They are not simply films‘about’ something but the products of adistinctive and rigorous imagination’ writesMacDougall (p. 156). He discusses in depththe film Forest of Bliss (1986) as Gardner’smost mature long-term creative workmarking out new conceptual possibilities forvisual anthropology. In her photographicessay, Elizabeth Edwards points out that thebook Gardens of War (1968) is an actualmaterial performance of the images thatmoves visualised anthropology to a moreeclectic conceptualisation of photographicvalue within the discipline besides being moreaccessible to the public. The film Forest ofBliss with almost no words may seem to be a

484 Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale (2009) 17, 4 484–511. C© 2009 European Association of Social Anthropologists.doi:10.1111/j.1469-8676.2009.00088.x

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subtle inversion of his earlier film Dead Birds(1963) with a dense ethnographic and didacticnarration. Karl Heider, however, seesGardner’s ‘vectoring of the landscape’ in theshots – the images of landscape with the innerdirectional content – and their intentionalmontage as the basis of both films (p. 83).While Paul Henley focuses exclusively onGardner’s ‘technique in the edit suite’ (p. 34),Marcus Banks compares the overtly symbolicrealism of Gardner’s films with early andpost-war films of India. The two films werere-released on DVD, Forest of Bliss in 2001and Dead Birds in 2004, with RG’scommentaries about their making.Considering the two-DVD set Dead Birds,Roderick Coover finds how the past becomesimportant again for evaluation ofanthropology in a world where technologicaladvantages offer multilayeredrecontextualisation. RG also made portraits ofseveral artists. Anna Grimshaw analyses oneof them, Passenger (1998), about Irish-bornpainter Sean Scully who later in the bookreflects upon the first encounter with RG.Among other authors who remember thework of and friendship with RG areanthropologist Akos Ostor, filmmaker DusanMakavejev, and poet Susan Howe. TheImpulse to Preserve: Reflections of aFilmmaker comes to us not only as the title ofGardner’s almost simultaneously publishedmemoirs, but also at the end of this volume ashis clear life-testimony, because ‘one makesthe film for its own sake – less as a messagethan as a testament to what one has seen andwhat one cares about’ (David MacDougall,p. 163). This impressive and unique book willprovide all those anthropologists,philosophers and artists who are dealing withvision, visuality or audio-visual in asocio-cultural context, with a rich materialenabling them to ponder over their owncreativity.

DANIELA VAVROVAScientific Research Centre of the SlovenianAcademy of Sciences and Arts, Ljubljana(Slovenia)

Besteman, Catherine. 2008. TransformingCape Town. Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press. xii + 296 pp.Pb.: $ 24.95. ISBN: 978 0 520 25671 2.

Anyone who has read Waiting by Crapanzanowill find the necessary link to understand theargument Catherine Besteman poses inTransforming Cape Town. Besteman, a whiteanthropologist, goes to South Africa in 1999to run a study-abroad program sendingAmerican college students for a semester toCape Town (p. 29). The author’s originalplans change when she realises her own mainsocial relations are restricted to other whites,revealing the pervasive post-apartheid racialsegregation. Despite the racist statementsgenerally pronounced by those whites,Besteman perceives that ‘the subject of race istaboo’ (p. 135). In order to understand thereason for such denial in a country with thehistory of South Africa, she transforms herown journey into an ethnographic experienceabout a ‘culture of civility, where people avoidtalking about injustice, domination, and theunfair lasting effects of apartheid’ (p. 79).Besteman reflects on the transformationprocess she underwent in Cape Town, usingan assemblage of ‘representative vignettes’(p. 82) and observations written down in her‘little black book’ (p. 158) throughout ‘fiveyears of fieldwork visits’ (p. 157).

The introduction speaks of herdiscomfort at joining the horde of foreignresearchers interested in unveiling thepost-apartheid South Africa with nocommitment toward offering anything inreturn. Besteman borrows fromScheper-Hughes’ words a leitmotiv for herkind of engagement: ‘Like the old PeaceCorps recruiting poster, anthropology asks:‘How much can you give? How much canyou take?’’ (p. 161). Interested in ‘ananthropology with explicit transformativegoals’ (p. 149), she criticises the so-called‘lovely ethnography’ (p. 1), opting for aresearch attentive to the links and abyssesbetween the southern suburbs and thetownships. Since theoretically her mainproblem concerns the ‘question of individual

C© 2009 European Association of Social Anthropologists.

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choice versus social context’ (p. 255), theauthor focuses on ‘mundane things thatmatter to people and that contribute tounderlying resentments and disappointmentsat the individual level and within families’(p. 71), avoiding ‘an ethnography of aparticular community, social group, ordevelopment project’ (p. 41).

The book begins by addressing theemotional and economic scars inherited bythose segregated in residential zones createdduring apartheid to house different ‘races’ inunequal conditions. According to Besteman,as ‘[. . .] material and cultural capital run handin hand [. . .]’ (p. 74), the most dramatic legacyof the Group Area Act was ‘[. . .] the creationof dramatically unequal property values [. . .]’,which, summed to ‘the devastation wroughtby Bantu education on today’s youth’, speaksto ‘the reality of living in crushing poverty’(pp. 74–75). According to Besteman ‘anothereffect of apartheid is that people don’t knowhow much they don’t know’ (p. 85), whichimplies that black and coloured socialsuffering remains denied among whites.Attentive to the racist statements of herinterlocutors in situations defined as ‘whitedinner party talk’ (p. 124), Besteman gathersevidence to construct a typology: ‘[. . .] whitesin Cape Town have many choices about howto locate and define themselves in atransforming South Africa [. . .] the choicesfall into three broad categories [. . .]burrowing into a socially exclusive andprotected life while waiting for things to fallapart; seeking an alternative spiritual oraesthetic lifestyle based on a new ahistoricaland apolitical identity; and affirming acommitment to South Africa’s future [. . .]which is the choice of transformativeengagement’ (p.145). The final chaptersaddress individuals in the latter group. Likethe author herself, these ‘transformers’coordinate projects that ‘depend on visionaryleaders’ (p. 206), who, despite living in the gapand often feeling alone, seek their‘transformative power in changing minds,behaviour, and the feelings people have abouttheir mutual humanity and connectedness’(p. 258).

The narrative path the author adoptsrenders her defence of the ‘art of democracy’plausible (p. 257) and diametrically opposedto the ‘lack of a critical global discourse onpoverty in the current reign of neoliberalism’(p. 135). Such an analytical standpointcentered on a researcher’s own perspective is afertile option. At the beginning of a new era,Besteman states that, in post-apartheid SouthAfrica, ‘social status is tied more toconsumption than to wealth in people orwisdom’ (p. 16) and ‘most people in CapeTown continue to live segregated lives andcontinue to be ignorant of the lives of peoplein other parts of the city’ (p. 48). Despite theworldwide applicability of such conclusions,the recent history of South Africa asks formore ponderation. Probably far from theauthor’s intention, saying that things arerunning badly in South Africa may suggest anostalgia regarding the past, which would berather dangerous and undesirable.

ANTONADIA BORGESUniversity of Brasilia (Brazil)

Boellstorff, Tom. 2008. Coming of age inSecond Life: an anthropologist explores thevirtually human. Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press. 328 pp. Hb.: $29.95/£17.95. ISBN: 978 0 691 13528 1.

‘The virtual is the anthropological. Thismakes it possible to study virtual worlds withthe same flexible, undetermined ethnographictools used to study human cultures in theactual world’. Boellstorff thus concludes hismonograph on Second Life. The book isunique among studies of Internet culture.While most anthropologists prefer to studythe social embeddedness of the Internet invarious social and cultural contexts,Boellstorff investigates Second Life entirelyfrom within. From June 2004 to January 2007,Boellstorff immersed himself in Second Lifethrough his avatar, Tom Bukowski, and hisvirtual home and office, Ethnographia.Underlining the value of studying virtual


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worlds as social forms in their own right,Boellstorff treats Second Life as a place ratherthan a game, populated by residents ratherthan users or players. Through participantobservation and interviews he followseveryday life in Second Life, focusing on howselfhood and sociality are reconfigured in thistechnology-mediated virtual world, coveringtopics such as personhood, social relations,community and political economy.

Grounded in his Second Lifeethnography, Boellstorff’s theoreticalpostulations offer explanatory models forvirtual worlds as well as social life in what hedefines as the age of techne. Boellstorffmaintains a clear distinction between the‘virtual’ and the ‘actual’. Whileacknowledging that its residents tend todistinguish Second Life from ‘real life’ or ‘thereal world’, with ‘real’ serving as a synonymfor ‘offline’, Boellstorff argues that the virtualcannot be separated from or opposed to thereal. He defines the virtual in terms of ‘as if’or ‘almost’, which, just like culture, is a veryreal aspect of the human condition. Instead,he separates the virtual from the actual, a termthat allows him to explore the culturalimplications of the virtual, while maintaininga distinction between on-line and off-linesocial realities. This virtual/actual binarismsets Boellstorff’s analysis apart from otherstudies, which tend to look at the ways inwhich the boundaries between on-line andoff-line worlds are blurred. Boellstorff’sinsistence on keeping them separate may raisesome eyebrows among Internetanthropologists, but when contextualised inthis study of Second Life entirely fromwithin, this binarism offers an analytical toolwith which to better appreciate the culturalessence of the virtual. It is by insisting on thereal aspects of the virtual, while distinguishingit from the actual, that Boellstorff succeeds inidentifying both continuity and change invirtual social forms.

Focusing on the creative aspects of thevirtual, Boellstorff argues that virtual worldssignify the coming of the age of techne. Theterm techne draws on the distinction between

knowledge (episteme) and technology or art(techne), and points to how virtual worldsallow us to create new forms for humansociality. The emphasis is on crafting, and byunderlining its cultural aspects, Boellstorffmanages to identify the virtual nature ofhumans, while recognising the novelty oftechnology-mediated virtual worlds. Thesignificance of creativity is evident in the waysin which Second Life residents can createavatars of their choice, experimenting withsocial identities, while exploring a variety ofsocial relations, from on-line lovers tofriendships exclusive to the virtual world. Butcreativity is also a significant feature of thepolitical economy of Second Life, whichBoellstorff argues represents a new mode ofproduction: creationist capitalism. Far frombeing unique to virtual worlds, it is expressiveof neoliberalism, a mode of capitalism inwhich labour and value is understood in termsof creation, in this case embodied in thecompany that owns Second Life, Linden Lab.

Coming of Age in Second Life is anambitious attempt to establish virtualanthropology as a sub-discipline inanthropology. In so doing, Boellstorff payshumble tribute to his anthropologicalancestors, building on their ethnographiccraftsmanship in this unique exploration ofvirtual culture. The title evokes one of theclassic texts in anthropology, and themonograph begins and ends with citationsfrom Malinowski. The monograph is anelegant tribute to the relevance and strengthsof anthropology in the study of virtualworlds, a field of growing social significancethat younger generations in particular arekeen to investigate more fully. This wasevident when I introduced the book tostudents in a recent course on digitalanthropology, who could relate it to theirown online every day experiences. As one ofthe early Internet ethnographers, I can butappreciate Boellstorff’s efforts instrengthening this important domain ofresearch, while crafting analytical tools withwhich to better understand the virtual essenceof the human condition, as exposed to us


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through Internet-mediated virtualworlds.

PAULA UIMONENStockholm University (Sweden)

Boesen, Elisabeth and Laurence Marfaing(eds.). 2008. Les nouveaux urbains dansl’espace Sahara-Sahel. Un cosmopolitismepar le bas. Paris: Karthala & Berlin: ZMO.330 pp. Pb.: €25.00. ISBN: 978 2 84586951 6.

The book edited by Elisabeth Boesen andLaurence Marfaing applies both a ‘localised’and an indispensable trans-nationalperspective on modes of mobility to theSahara-Sahelian region that has been hithertodominated by studies on nomadism, traderoutes and the historico-political relationsbetween various ethnic groups. Thecontributions focus on new sociabilities,modes of urban insertion and settlement ofmobile actors such as traders, craftsmen,casual workers, gold miners or pilgrims, andespecially explore the appropriation of urbanspaces, yet the creation of new localities by(often marginalised) migrant groups. Thebook contains contributions by historians,anthropologists, and religious scientistsamong others from Germany, France, theNetherlands and Algeria.

In their introduction, Boesen andMarfaing mention that the recent wave oftrans-national studies based on Marcus’ claimof a multi-sited ethnography produced only afew studies on the processes of installationand modes of settlement of mobile groups.They argue in favour of a broadening of thepicture with regard to more marginal mobileactors, creatively profiting from economicand social niches, and discuss the particularaspects of a ‘cosmopolitanism from below’ inWest Africa, of actors that form part of urbaneconomies without being fully integrated intothe urban polities, featuring particular modesof spatial and economic flexibility.

Florence Boyer explores the journeys,networks and economic strategies of seasonalmigrants of the Iklan group, descendants offormer Tuareg slaves or dependants, from theBankilare area in Niger to a polyethnicsuburb in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire, anddescribes various forms of circular migration.Annemarie Bouman focuses on the samegroup whose migrant members partly make aliving in Abidjan by selling charcoal madefrom sawmill wastes, and discusses the way inwhich strong kinship relations enable ordisable successful individual migratorystrategies. Jean Schmitz analyses multi-localand trans-national migratory patterns ofSubale and Fulbe groups from the SenegalRiver valley which in part enjoy aconsiderable economic success. He recalls thehistory of these migratory moves and discernsthe main groups of actors: rural dwellerspracticing irrigation agriculture, peddlers,small-scale traders as well as urban dwellersthat tend to invest in real estate and becomelandlords for newly arriving migrants.Schmitz explains the success of the moreestablished urban migrants, occupying the‘internal urban frontier zones’, diversifyingtheir economic strategies and maintaininglinks to both rural middlemen and kinsmenliving abroad. Daouda Gary-Tounkara offersan historical account on the contradictorypolicies of immigration in Cote d’Ivoire fromthe 1960s onwards with regard to the rathersuccessful economic performance ofimmigrants from Sahelian countries. LaurenceMarfaing focuses on trans-nationalMauritanian traders and their modes ofdwelling in Casablanca, Morocco. She recallsthe history of their movements partly shiftedfrom pilgrimage to trade, involving manywomen, and describes the establishment of aparticular social space between both countriesand the corresponding social networks,involving various intermediaries. AbdoulayeKane investigates Senegalese pilgrims toMorocco. The Senegalese branch of the city ofMadina Gounass forms part of thetrans-national Tijaniyya Sufi order. Thereligious leaders of the Sufi-brotherhood


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annually leave on a pilgrimage to Fes wherethey renew their relationships and networkswith other pilgrims from northern Africa andEurope. Parallel to the religious endeavours,they engage in trade, either in large-scaleoperations or simply with souvenirs to sellback home to alleviate their travel costs. Kanemeticulously follows the typical itinerary ofpilgrims, their journey to and their arrival inFes, facilitated by the work of intermediarieshelping with accommodation and catering.Elisabeth Boesen investigates the strategies offemale peddlers of Wodaabe origin in Niger,whereas Amber Gemmeke follows themovements of female marabouts and theirnetworking strategies in Dakar, Senegal. TheWodaabe themselves keep up their role asstrangers, as a strategy of identification,interior integration and preservation of theirfew economic niches. Both the papers byDida Badi and Dalila Nadi present casestudies from Tamanrasset, an Algeriantransitory town and describe the way inwhich Sahelian immigrants find theirparticular economic opportunities in theformal and informal urban economy. Today,Saharan cities such as Tamanrasset or Agadez(see also Brachet 2005) are more than transitzones, they feature new sociabilities andeconomic specialisations of Sahelian migrantssustaining a socio-economic complementaritythat contributes to the prospering role of thetown as an economic hub. Katja Werthmannoffers insights into a make-shift communityof artisanal gold-miners in Burkina Faso andpredominantly focuses on gender relations inthese temporary, yet large, settlements. GeorgKlute detects the common historical,ecological and political background thatforms the unity of the Sahara-Sahelian regionand discusses the attractiveness of towns ascentres of prosperity, an idea that wasdeveloped in medieval times and always maderural dwellers yearn to leave their regions.Klute reiterates the divergent aspects thatshape this region – from economicopportunities through tourism to trading,nomadism, exchange systems between various

groups and the ambiguous aspects of therecent Tuareg rebellion.

The case studies include a considerablevariety of actors: pilgrims, cord makers,drivers, peddlers, gold miners; and relates togroups with very different time-spans ofurban dwelling, from seasonal presence tothird-generations of landed immigrants, andconsequently variant modes of dwelling –from the acquisition of real estate property toside-walk camps. This diversity, together withthe corresponding quite divergent culturalcontexts and social positions, sometimesprovides a difficult ground for a comparativeperspective assuming the common category as‘cosmopolitans from below’.

Unfortunately, no biographical data ofthe contributors is given. The publication inFrench enables the dialogue with scholars infrancophone Africa, but may close otherdoors to a larger, non-Africanist anglophonereadership. The book offers, however,valuable insights into the social organisationof trans-national economic and religiousnetworks across West Africa, and points tothe central role of old and new intermediariesat various social levels (tuteurs, coxeurs,correspondants, patrons), and their modes ofadaptation to changing political and economicenvironments. It thus offers a remarkableperspective on social change and urbansociability in the Sahara-Sahelian regionincluding the often neglected religiouscontexts of transmigration.

ReferenceBrachet, Julien 2005. ‘Constructions of

territoriality in the Sahara: thetransformation of spaces of transit’.Vienna Journal of African Studies, 8: 237–53.

TILO GRATZUniversity of Hamburg and Max PlanckInstitute, Halle (Germany)


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Crook, Tony. 2007. Exchanging skin:anthropological knowledge, secrecy andBolivip, Papua New Guinea. Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press. vii + 267 pp.Hb.: £40.00. ISBN: 978 0 19 726400 3.

Tony Crook’s book represents a welcomeaddition to the anthropological literature.Described by the author as an ‘experimentalethnography’, the book examinesknowledge-making practices among the Minof Papua New Guinea and amonganthropologists engaged in the task ofresearch and writing. The Min have long beendescribed in the scholarly literature as beingone of the most poorly understood groups inMelanesia. Since Frederik Barth’s pioneeringwork among the Baktaman in the 1970s,anthropological audiences have becomeacquainted with a culture based on secrecy.Here, important knowledge (awem) is said tobe the exclusive domain of older men and ispassed on to initiates only under carefullyguarded ritual conditions. To the extent thatanalysts have struggled to grasp the meaningof local practices, it would seem that ‘the Minhave kept all the anthropological answers tothemselves’ (p. 5).

Based on 39 months of fieldwork amongthe Angkaiyakmin people of Bolivip village,Exchanging Skin is devoted to developing analternative approach to knowledge. In thePrologue to the book, Crook describes hisinitial confusion upon coming to work in theMin area as he came to realise that knowledgewas not an object to be circulated (orhoarded) in keeping with one’s place in aseries of well-defined age grades.Conceptualised indigenously as an ‘exchangeof skin’, knowledge is bestowed uponappropriate persons in return for prior acts ofcare and nurture. It follows that ‘knowledge. . . is not information or data, but a formconstitutive of persons which draws uponbodily resources and substances of one togrow and bolster the other’ (p.11).Exchanging Skin argues that anthropology’sinterpretative impasse vis-a-vis the Min stemsfrom a faulty view of knowledge. Longconceptualised by fieldworkers as a ‘thing’

(i.e. a form of property), knowledge is,instead, best understood as a ‘person’ in theway that it ventures forth and becomes part ofother people.

Having revealed an alternative way tothink about knowledge, Crook turns theBolivip lens on anthropology itself. His aim isto reveal what anthropology might look like ifit were modeled on Bolivip ontology ratherthan its own taken-for-granted assumptions.Drawing upon the work of several influentialMelanesian scholars – Marilyn Strathern,James Weiner, Margaret Mead, Reo Fortune,Gregory Bateson, and Frederik Barth –Crook proposes an alternative reading ofseveral key texts. More than a simplerecounting of intellectual history, each ofthese explorations is intended ‘as anethnography of the encounter between theknowledge-practices of anthropology andMelanesia’ (p. 32). Crook’s analysis of theseworks yields several stimulating insights,including a thorough-going critique of theimage of the lone fieldworker whose work isevaluated by peers on the basis of the extentto which the researcher was capable of castingaside his or her own social relations and actingas a mere recorder of social life. The end resultis the introduction of a new analytical figure –‘the textual person’ – which not only accepts,but actually celebrates, the fact thatanthropological texts evince a constellation ofsocial relations, not unlike a Melanesianpearlshell or the valuables circulated in kulaexchange.

Exchanging Skin is intended to shakethings up and is nothing if not deeplyprovocative. As previously mentioned, Crookdescribes his book as ‘an experimental’ethnography. More than experimental, thistext can be described as ‘experiential’.Throughout the exposition of Minethnography, the reader is confronted with ‘adizzying kaleidoscope of dislocated images’(p. 26). Themes are introduced, fade away,re-emerge later, and are sometimes droppedaltogether. This often makes for a frustratingread. Crook is aware of this and unapologetic.The intent is to have the reader confront theworld in the same way that a resident of


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Bolivip would. It is our task to bring somemeasure of coherence to what is otherwise abedrock of chaos. In the words of the author:‘My exposition in these sections is asstraightforward as I could make it. Anythingclearer will only serve to keep the point of itall hidden – anything more efficient could notdo the work. The point there, as in Bolivip, isgot by not getting it and works by notworking at first. Only eventually and after theevent can a wood be seen for the trees’ (p. 32).At the end, Crook hopes that the reader willhave brought her or his own knowledge,social relationships, and experience to bearupon what has been presented and will have‘made skin’ with the text. The goal is lofty andundeniably bold and original. ExchangingSkin is a book that will linger in the minds ofthe reader long after they have turned the finalpage.

This book is best read by persons whopossess detailed knowledge of socio-culturalanthropology. The book calls for a verydifferent kind of anthropology – one thatembraces those social relationships thatinform ethnographic fieldwork. While thisbook is topically focused on Melanesia, it canbe productively read by persons whosegeographical area of interest lies elsewhere.The main point is to question the form thatanthropological knowledge normally takesand to initiate a debate on where it may go inthe future.

Roy Wagner once offered up a plea inThe invention of culture (1975). He insistedthat anthropologists invent ‘cultures’ forpeople who do not have them. Ethnographersusurp the creativity of the people with whomthey work and subject them to our owninterpretative conventions. Exchanging Skinrefuses to take this route. It forces the readerto confront the Angkaiyakmin on their ownterms. It also demonstrates that despite itsstated aims, anthropology has a long way togo if our intent is to ‘give voice’ to the peoplewith whom we work. Crook’s book opens upmany debates and in a radically new way. Theconversations that follow are sure to beproductive and illuminating.

ReferenceWagner, Roy 1975. The invention of culture.

Chicago: Chicago University Press.

SANDRA BAMFORDUniversity of Toronto at Scarborough(Canada)

Ekholm Friedman, Kajsa and JonathanFriedman. 2008. Modernities, class, and thecontradictions of globalization. Theanthropology of global systems. New York:AltaMira Press. vi + 323 pp. Hb.: £49.00.ISBN: 0 759 11112 X.

The book under review offers a collection ofpreviously published and revised papersdating from the period 1991 to 2003.Including five chapters by JonathanFriedman, three chapters by Kajsa EkholmFriedman and one joint chapter, the book isdivided into three main sections. The first twosections both deal with issues of modernityand globalisation, concentrating respectivelyon ‘Resistances, continuities andtransformations’ and on modernity’sinterrelation with ‘Globalization, the stateand violence’. A final section containing twochapters by Jonathan Friedman centres thediscussion on ‘Globalization as representationand reality’. Throughout the book bothauthors draw on their studies of andfieldwork in three main regions: the Congo,Hawaii and the Western world.Running through the volume as a leitmotiv isboth authors’ commitment to an analysis oflocal circumstances within the framework ofhistorically-formed global systemic relations.Their endeavour is in tune with the interest in‘la longue duree’ of other practitioners ofWorld Systems Analysis and as such theirapproach must be regarded as decidedlydifferent from evolutionary conceptions ofglobalisation.

What exemplifying roles can the Congoand Hawaii take in such an analysis? A


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recurring interest in the volume is thebuilding, maintenance and crisis of social andindividual identities. In the authors’ analysisthe Hawaiian, the Congolese and the Westernsocieties mark extreme points in a spectrum ofpossible identificatory orientations asgenerated within the dynamics of the globalsystem.

Within the global system the Congo hashistorically developed as a peripheral regioncharacterised by strong internal socialhierarchies. Here, both land ownership and‘force’ (in a sense at once political, economicand spiritual – ‘mana’) has traditionally beenseparated from the local people and has ratherbeen associated with external actors orsources. This can be contrasted withHawaiian beliefs that political legitimacy andidentity arise from within the communalsocial structure and with Hawaiian principlesof low hierarchies and communal ownership.

In the wake of economic decline andregime changes since the 1970s the Congo hasexperienced a rise of magic, witchcraft andreligious spiritualism. According to KajsaEkholm Friedman these intensifications arenot merely phenomena of a return towardstraditional cultural practices, but aresystemically related to the larger situation.They can be understood as periodicallyreoccurring efforts to re-channel towardscommunities and towards individuals thoseflows of life force that are felt to have beendiverted through alterations in the largersocial and economic structure. In a verysimilar sense Jonathan Friedman interpretsthe Sappeurs who appropriate French HauteCouture as ‘mana’, inspired by the traditionsof cargo cults.

On the other side, Hawaiian integrationinto the capitalist dynamics of the globalsystem as a satellite to the US has motivated arevival of cultural practices which affirmtraditional Hawaiian identity by following adifferent strategy. Here, things external toHawaiian identity get acculturated into thesocial structure by (re)attributing to themtraditional meaning and thus byreinterpreting the Hawaiian past.

To the Western (academic) observer suchprocesses of reattribution of meaning asobserved in Hawaii have caused doubts overthe authenticity of culture and consequentlythey have invoked scholarly elaborations onthe concept of ‘hybridity’. This concept isstrongly criticised in this volume for itsimplied essentialisation of culture. Accordingto Jonathan Friedman questions overauthenticity or ‘mixture’ of culture and over‘veritable’ history and myth, should be settledfrom the vantage point of those who areengaged with cultural practice, rather thanfrom the position of those who interpretcultures from a supposedly neutral eticperspective.

The possibility for such controversies toarise between anthropologists and theirobjects of analysis is again related to changesin the structure of the Western globalsystemic position. Recent decline of Westerneconomic hegemony has also been gnawing atWestern authority to interpret and presentreality on a global scale. In this sense, theconcluding chapters by Jonathan Friedmaninvestigate the widespread presentation of acurrent shift from a local to global(borderless, interconnected, etc) world aslargely the result of a self-informed discourseamong global elites who mistake theirpersonal life experiences as pars-pro-totopresentations of a socially all-encompassingreality.

As a corpus of papers bearing witness toa long-term scholarly engagement with thearticulations between modernity, class and theglobal system this present volume must behighly recommended to scholars cultivatingan interest in the anthropology of globalsystems. Together with those alreadyacquainted with the authors’ work they willbe grateful to find a series of challenging andthought stimulating papers and positionsunited in one single collection.

ULRICH UFERUniversite de Montreal (Canada)


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Galasinska, Aleksandra and MichałKrzyzanowski (eds.). 2009. Discourse andtransformation in Central and EasternEurope. Basingstoke and New York:Palgrave Macmillan. xi + 239 pp. Hb.:$85.00. ISBN: 978 0 230 52102 5.

Ce volume collectif examine les discoursconcernant la transformation sociale etpolitique qui a eu lieu apres 1989 dans les paysd’Europe centrale et des Balkans (designes parcertains hommes politiques occidentauxcomme la « nouvelle Europe » par oppositiona la « vieille Europe »). En insistant sur ladiversite plutot que sur l’uniformite de ceschangements, et plus generalement sur leseffets de la modernisation, ces articles traitentde sujets assez differents, allant de l’analyse dela presse, d’Internet et des medias auxdiscours politiques, aux debats culturels et a laperception de la transformationpost-socialiste par les acteurs sociauxeux-memes. Les strategies, qui definissent lesproblemes et les erreurs du passe et du presentet qui donnent forme aux « imaginaires »futurs (p.26), y sont aussi etudiees. Enadoptant une approche constructiviste, lesarticles mettent en question la separationtraditionnelle entre Ouest et Est europeen(impliques tous deux dans des processussimilaires de globalisation, mais aussi dans lapolitique regulatrice de l’Union europeenne),ainsi que la pertinence du — tant utilise quecritique — terme de « transition » (percuecomme un passage inevitable de la mauvaisefacon de faire a la bonne facon d’agir).

En fait, ce processus de transformationest interroge en tant que processusteleologique de « normalisation » (apres la find’une periode d’anormalite) etd’« Europeanisation » (p. 45). Le changementsocial est defini dans le chapitre 6 (qui pose laquestion des politiques publiques de nataliteet du controle « biopolitique ») comme « laforce decentralisatrice et plurielle dans lesrelations de pouvoir de la vie quotidienne »(p.13). Les pratiques de normalisationdiscutees dans cet article utilisent tant desstrategies de medicalisation que des donneesdu savoir pediatrique (p.121). L’article

examine comment la societe civile devient,dans le contexte tcheque, un modele negatifevoquant un espace anarchique (projectionexcessive de liberalisme, donc) qui contrasteavec l’espace bureaucratique considerecomme « normal » (p. 125) ; l’auteur expliqueces positions en arguant que, malgre leschangements, la politique etatique tcheque estencore impregnee de la mentalite paternalistedes modes de gouvernance socialistes. Lechapitre 7 examine un debat culturel centresur le fait religieux : le maintien de l’usageliturgique de l’ancienne langue slave au sein del’Eglise orthodoxe en Russie, qui estincomprehensible aux fideles — ce qui pose laquestion de l’intelligibilite, mais aussi de lamaniere dont on definit une langue sacreedonnee par Dieu (p. 144). Dans ce cas aussi,l’Ouest (et, plus precisement, l’Amerique) estconnote negativement : son influence estdecadente et obscene, et menace la Russie de« genocide culturel ».

Un certain nombre de chapitres examineles consequences politiques de la fin dusocialisme, comme la desintegration decertaines entites politiques en etats-nations :dans le chapitre 2, la politique dedifferentiation linguistique, la privatisationdes medias et la production de formatsmediatiques en plusieurs dialectes et languescomme reponse aux processus d’ethnicisation,sont analysees dans l’espace del’ex-Yougoslavie ; le chapitre 3 est dedie auxdebats autour de l’education en Lettonie,apres son detachement de l’Union Sovietique,concernant la minorite russophone et sesdroits, mais aussi les communautes juive etrom. Le chapitre 5 examine la tension entre lediscours national et les nouveaux modelesd’identification inspires par l’integration de laPologne a l’Union europeenne (assimilee aune force de modernisation et de renouveauindispensable, en somme a une necessitenationale). Le chapitre 9 analyse la relation ala « verite », a la confession biographique, auxregimes de justifications et aux normes demoralite de ceux qui ont recemment admispubliquement, a travers les medias, avoircollabore avec la Securitate en Roumanie. Lechapitre 10 etudie comment dans les forums


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de discussion sur Internet, de nouveauxmodeles concernant la migration polonaise etde nouveaux scripts culturels commencent aemerger. Le chapitre 8 est le seul qui metl’accent sur les changements economiques : ilexamine la maniere dont certaines entreprisesd’Allemagne de l’Est presentent leur parcours(en insistant soit sur les continuites soit sur lesruptures) au fil de changements politiques.

Les effets negatifs de la transformationactuelle sont aussi examines : dans le chapitre4, le racisme et la discrimination, quirenforcent l’inegalite dans les relations entregroupes sociaux en Slovenie — qu’il s’agissedes refugies de Bosnie ou d’immigres illegaux,assimiles a des contrevenants impurs de la loi,qui polluent l’espace national tout enevoquant des metaphores de catastrophenaturelle ; et dans le chapitre 11, la fin de lasecurite de l’emploi et la montee du chomageen Pologne post-socialiste, ce qui cree laperception d’une realite chaotique danslaquelle ceux qui appartiennent aux couchessociales les moins favorisees ont du mal as’engager et a agir. La question du role de lasociete civile et de la definition de la spherepublic et des droits de l’Homme traverse lesdifferents articles du volume, qui vehicule desimages contradictoires (car complexes) dessocietes post-socialistes, hesitant entre lanostalgie pour un passe idealise et securisant,l’optimisme pour des ameliorations a venir etl’impuissance de se debarrasser de sonheritage autoritaire.

KATERINA SERAIDARILaboratoire Interdisciplinaire SocietesSolidarites Territoires, Toulouse (France)

Gudeman, Stephen. 2008. Economy’stension: the dialectics of community andmarket. New York: Berghahn Books. 188pp. Hb.: $49.95/£25.00. ISBN: 978 184545 514 9.

Stephen Gudeman is one of the best knownworking economic anthropologists. In thisbook he addresses economic transaction, andin the process pursues two issues that have

characterised much of his published work.One is the ways that people understand theirtransactions with each other; the other is therelationship between market and society.

Transaction, exchange, is a standardanthropological topic, and most work on it isconcerned with its form and function: whotransacts with whom, what they transact,what its consequences are. Anthropologybeing anthropology, the classics in the fieldare concerned with places other than theheartlands of modern capitalist societies.Economy’s Tension is different. Gudemanconsiders not the form or function oftransaction, but its logic, and his focus is thoseheartlands. To round out that difference,Gudeman draws on a classic social theoristseldom considered by anthropologists, MaxWeber.

The logic Gudeman considers iscalculative reason, Weber’s Zweckrationalitat,manifest in things as diverse as cost–benefitanalysis and comparison shopping. In these,there is rational calculation of the relationshipbetween means and end. In markettransactions the means typically is moneyspent and the end typically is object or servicedesired. This kind of transaction and logic arethe staple of much of the discipline ofeconomics, and since the 1970s they havebecome the standard way of framing alldecisions, whether in government orindividual life.

While Gudeman’s concern withcalculative reason echoes Weber, he arguesthat Weber erred in rooting its ascendance inascetic Protestantism. Rather, Gudeman holdsthat it springs from market exchange itself,the transaction of alienated objects betweenautonomous individuals, which he says isfound in all societies throughout history. Butwhile such transactions and logic are foundeverywhere, the rising significance of themarket makes for the increasing significanceof the logic, its status as uncontestedstandard.

Although the market and its logic maydominate public thought and debate, themarket does not exist on its own and economyis more than economics. Rather, Gudeman


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says, it exists in an uneasy relationship withcommunity and with a social or relationalway of thinking. Community is harder tograsp than market, for Gudeman includeswithin the concept pretty much every form ofsociality and sharing, from the most formalsystem of gift exchange and clan property ingroups tightly defined by kinship to thecasual chats about problems at work amongpeople employed by different companies inSilicon Valley. What characterises all of theseinteractions, though, is that they link peopleinto collectivities that possess things of value,however durable or ephemeral they may be.

For Gudeman, real, existing economy,distinct from the virtual economy ofeconomists, relies on and involves bothmarket and community, and he devotesattention throughout Economy’s Tension toshowing how this is so. But while economyrequires both realms, the two are in tension:the realm of community tends to invade themarket, as in insider trading or cartels; therealm of market tends to invade community,as in the selling off of public assets or theimposition of user fees for what previouslywere public services. In principle this tensionis symmetrical, each side tending to invade theother. However, for the past few hundredyears the market has made most of therunning.

The various chapters of Economy’sTension explore different aspects andcorollaries of the model that I have described.Those who read the book are advised to keepthat model in mind, for the book requires careand attention. It is a short work that dealswith a host of topics and ideas. The result isthat, at points, it is schematic rather thandiscursive, laying out points briefly ratherthan describing and discussing them. Even so,it is clearly worth the effort.

The recent, rapid decay of boomeconomies in many parts of the world hasmade markets and their logic lessself-evidently virtuous than they have beenfor some time. Efforts to deal with that decayare beginning to challenge a number ofassumptions about markets and the ways thatthey ought to operate. Many of those who

follow these events and debates may, however,suspect that the result will be more of thesame, for we seem to be unable to talk abouteconomy in terms other than markets andcalculative reason. Economy’s Tension goessome way toward giving us a different way oftalking about economy, one based not on theutopian idealism of neo-classical economicsbut on the hard-headed realism of economicanthropology.

JAMES G. CARRIERIndiana and Oxford Brookes Universities(USA and UK)

Harris, Mark (ed.). 2007. Ways of knowing.New approaches in the anthropology ofexperience and learning. New York andOxford: Berghahn Books. xii + 340 pp.Hb.: $80.00/£47.00. ISBN: 978 1 84545364 0.

‘Anthropology, perhaps more than any otherdiscipline, is about learning how to learn’,write Tim Ingold and Ray Lucas in theircontribution to the volume under review here(p. 287). Anthropology, one might add, is alsoabout understanding the ways with which wecome to experience and know the world –about ‘ways of knowing’, as this book’s titleevokes. The editor, Mark Harris, hasassembled a versatile collection of essaysdealing with different modes of cognitiveand/or perceptual apprehension of the worldbased on ethnographic research and unifiedby the idea that knowing is ongoing andpractical (p. 2). The volume in general standsin the tradition of phenomenological thoughtand accounts for a conception of cognitionand understanding as ‘social activities situatedin the nexus of ongoing relations between theperson and the world’ (p. 20). Manycontributors engage with an anthropology ofknowledge as skill – referred to as ‘intellectualworkmanship’ in C. Wright Mills’s term(p. 2) – that encompasses tacit aspects such asbody techniques, skills, the senses andpractical know-how, thus bringing together


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reflective consciousness and embodiment.Methodological considerations throughoutthe book focus on anthropology’s ownepistemic practices, forms and relations andare also thoroughly contextualised in socialpractice. The topics examined range fromways of knowing and learning about BrazilianCapoeira (Downey), skilled cattle inspectionin Northern Italy (Grasseni), teachingundergraduates in Scotland (Ingold andLucas), Songhay sorcery applied in the UnitedStates (Stoller), Swahili poetry (Kresse), losingknowledge in a northern English housingestate and an art school (Ravetz), the auditingof knowledge of artisans and academics(Herzfeld) to Hegelian dialectics (Boyer). Inthis context, vision – be it skilled vision(Grasseni), peripheral vision or the plasticityof perception (Downey) – and craft(Herzfeld, Ingold) generate particular modesof knowing and are treated as ‘critical tool[s]with which anthropologists can address issuesof knowledge and method’ (p. 9).

The first part of the volume is entitled‘Paradigms and polemics’ and the essays, notonly of this section, but of the whole book,certainly do justice to this heading. Whilesome of the authors mainly investigate thephilosophical dimensions of indigenous andother knowledges (Boyer, Kresse, Velho),Michael Herzfeld focuses rather on‘deskilling’ and simplicity as salient aspects ofethnographic practice and insightfullycompares anthropological work to theexpertise of Cretan artisans and craft workersin general (pp. 91–110).

In Part II, ‘Time and the disruption ofknowing’, the unsaid or the opposite ofknowledge – ignorance and deception – isaddressed (Platt, Dilley). The contributions inthis section mainly deal with historicalknowledge and examine ways in whichknowledge of the past can be of use toanthropologists. The third part, ‘Rethinkingembodiment’, principally tackles skill-basedknowledge, drawing on neuroscience(Marchand, Downey), and explores practicesof ‘good looking’ (Grasseni). The volumerevisits work that has been published and

extensively elaborated elsewhere (i.e.Grasseni, Stoller), and re-engages its relevanceto themes under consideration here. PaulStoller’s essay, for example, in which here-evaluates his knowledge of Songhaysorcery acquired in West Africa almost thirtyyears ago, as he faces cancer treatment in aclinic in the US, is an extraordinarilyimpressive and touching account of theauthor’s personal transformation. Similarly,Christina Grasseni’s chapter provides valuableinsights into the relationship between practiceand understanding as she further develops themotifs of vision and learning.

The fourth and last part, entitled‘Learning and repositionings’, primarily dealswith matters of teaching, learning and analysisin anthropology and builds on the revisionistarguments of the previous section. This partalso contains Amanda Ravetz’s notableexploration of how art and anthropology maycombine at the level of practice and theory.The last chapter, ‘A discussion concerningways of knowing’, is presented as a morepersonal dialogue between Nigel Rapport andMark Harris on their disagreements andagreements concerning imaginative andperceptive forms of knowing. Thisconversation takes the shape of performativedialectics, and, as in many other passages inthe book, the reader has the impression ofdirectly participating in the different authors’processes of thought-formation. This verytransparency makes for a highly stimulatingand diverse collection of essays.

The volume seeks neither to teachvarious kinds and ways of knowing nor totransmit a ready-made body of informationbut rather to open up a range of possibleoptions in the ‘bracketing off’ of subjectiveexperience. The collection also provides agood insight into how anthropologists tend tocraft their knowledge and might thereforealso be worthwhile for readers of otherdisciplines dealing with situated forms ofknowing, including sociologists andphilosophers. All in all, this is an excitingbook that invites the reader to reflect onher/his perception of the world and, as Harris


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puts it in his introduction, to attempt to‘incorporate other presents’ (p. 19).

MICHAELA SCHAUBLEMartin Luther University, Halle Wittenberg(Germany)

Helman, Cecil G. (ed). 2008. Medicalanthropology. Aldershot: Ashgate. xxix +549 pp. Hb.: £145.00. ISBN: 978 0 75462655 8.

Cet ouvrage s’inscrit dans la collection « TheInternational of essays in anthropology »dirige par l’anthropologue britannique GeraldMars. Chaque volume reunit les articles lesplus significatifs d’un domaine de recherchede l’anthropologie contemporaine.Contrairement a bien des anthologies, celle-cioffre a lire l’integralite des articles selectionnesen conservant notamment la pagination et lamise en page initiale. L’exhaustivite n’est pasl’objectif premier, mais la realisation d’untableau des grandes tendances de la recherche.

Dans une introduction qui a le merite dela clarte et de la concision, Cecil G. Helmanpresente avec une remarquable economie demoyen ce domaine de recherche prolifique,fille de l’anthropologie des religions, quietudie comment les hommes expliquent etaffrontent tres diversement la souffrance(p. xv). Rappelant a juste titre la contributiondes medecins, et plus particulierement despsychiatres (de W.H.R. Rivers a A.Kleinman,notamment), au developpement de cedomaine ces 30 dernieres annees, il en souligneegalement la dimension critique a l’egard de labiomedecine (ou medecine cosmopolitaine).On a neanmoins le sentiment qu’il s’agit lad’un role de composition qui s’accomodeparfaitement de la place qu’accorde au fond lamedecine a l’anthropologie : aux uns, lesinvariants et les universaux quidecontextualisent les malades et la maladie ;aux autres, le bon vieux relativisme culturelqui rappelle la force du contexte des societesou des groupe sociaux. Mais comme a pu lemontrer Leslie Butt, entre autre, le relativisme

des anthropologues « critiques » fonctionneparfaitement bien avec l’universalisme moraldes droits de l’homme porte par desinstitutions (nationales ou internationales) quine cessent de reproduire l’inegalitedenoncee.

Trois parties organisent le volume : lesdeux principales, en tension, posent lesconcepts fondamentaux de l’anthropologiemedicale d’une part, et l’anthropologieappliquee a la sante a l’echelle internationale,d’autre part. Une derniere partie, plusrestreinte, vient rappeler l’importance de lathematique contemporaine du corps enanthropologie medicale. Il est possible d’endeduire, apres bien d’autres auteurs, que leperimetre du domaine de recherche ne serestreint plus a la maladie et a la medecine,mais s’etend au vivant, au corps et a la sante.L’appellation d’anthropologie de la sante, deplus en plus frequente, marque cette tendancelourde du domaine a s’affranchir desproblemes et des definitions strictementmedicaux. C’est un point sur lequel l’editeuraurait pu beaucoup plus insister pourmontrer, au dela de la simple specialisation quirisque de l’enclaver, son considerable etincontournable apport a l’anthropologiegenerale qu’elle a tente de renouveler cesdernieres annees. Ainsi, bien trop d’articlesretenus ici relevent encore de revuesspecialisees comme Anthropology andMedicine, a l’exception de cinq articles parusrespectivement dans Man, AnthropologyToday, International Migration Review,Asian Anthropology et le Journal of the RoyalAnthropological Institute.

La premiere partie distingue cinq grandesthematiques de recherche. Outre l’etude del’alimentation-nutrition, l’usage de drogues etd’alcools, le pluralisme medical, les idiomes dedetresse (en Inde et Chine) et les rites denaissance et de mort, chacun represente pardeux articles tout a fait interessants, l’editeuraccorde judicieusement une grande place a la« psychiatrie transculturelle » avec six articles,dont l’un des siens analysant le diagnostic demaladie du cœur comme un « culture boundsyndrome ». La deuxieme grande partiedistingue cinq thematiques introduites par un


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article critique sur la notion de « santemondiale » : planning familial, maladiediarrheal, HIV-Sida, paludisme et maladiesinfectieuses. Le tableau qui en ressort n’estabsolument pas statique ou fige, car meme siles lois du genre rendent toujours discutablesles criteres de selection retenus, la majoritedes articles choisis par Cecil G. Helmandemeure significatif du point de vue desquestions centrales et generales qu’ilssoulevent a partir d’un objet d’etude ou d’unsous-domaine particulier.

Medical anthropology et les autresvolumes de cette collection sont avant tout desoutils de travail indispensables pour se tenirinforme de domaine de recherche de plus enplus specialise, mais qui conserve l’exigence des’inspirer et de contribuer a une anthropologiegenerale theoriquement riche et feconde.

SAMUEL LEZEEHESS, Paris (France)

de Hontheim, Astrid. 2008. Chasseurs dediables et collecteurs d’art: tentatives deconversion des Asmat par les missionnairespionniers protestants et catholiques.Brussels: Peter Lang. 317 pp.Pb.: € 32.90. ISBN: 978 90 5201 380 0.

Asmat people of the southwestern coast ofNew Guinea are famous internationally fortheir woodcarvings, which figure prominentlyin the ‘primitive art’ installations of a dozen ormore major museums and the private holdingsof many hundreds of collectors and dealers.Yet very little professional anthropologicalresearch has ever been carried out in theAsmat area, due to governmental obstaclessince the Indonesian takeover in 1963. Noethnographic monograph describing anAsmat community has ever been published.Through museum exhibits, carving-focusedbooks, travel journalism, the tourismindustry, and ethnographic writings byCatholic missionaries, many anthropologistsare aware in broad outlines that Asmat intimes past have lived rich lives of festivity,warfare, and mythological and cultic belief,

but the particulars of this elaborate culturalcomplex in any location have never beensatisfactorily described. Manyanthropologists will also be broadly awarethat the last half-century has been a period ofcomplex sociopolitical transformation in theAsmat lands, and that Catholic missionariesin particular have had a prominent place inmediating the ongoing shape of Asmatcarving traditions and collective life. Butagain, little straightforward documentation ofthese processes is available to interestedscholars.

The book under review is thus a mostwelcome contribution. It is an ethnography ofintercultural interactions between Asmat, onthe one hand, and the respective Protestantand Catholic networks of missionaries whohave worked in their lands, on the other. Thebook is based on a total of about five monthsof field research in the Asmat area, six monthsof peripatetic, methodologically innovativefieldwork with returned or furloughedmissionaries in the United States and Europe(as well as with a few non-missionaries withstrong links to the Asmat area), additionalperiods of archival research, and substantialcorrespondence with other missionarieswhom the author did not interview inperson.

The book’s chapters treat successively theoverall geography and history of the Asmatarea across the second half of the twentiethcentury; the main lines of institutional andtheological difference between Catholic andProtestant missions in the area; broad patternsof Asmat residence, family life, andconceptions of ancestral heritage andlife-determining power; divergent Catholicand Protestant orientations to ‘culture’;Asmat understandings of health, illness, andmissionary medicine; and Asmat orientationsto Christianity. Overall, the book is notclearly organised around a single question orset of interrelated questions. Even in itsdominant character as an compilation ofethnographic and ethnohistorical data, thebook is empirically dispersed: no singletheme, topic, or category of actor holdsconsistent place as the central focus. The


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strongest recurrent subject of discussion isthat of the contrasting approaches of Catholicand Protestant missionaries in a single regionwhere both have been working since 1955.The main lines of difference are unsurprising,given the well-known differences of doctrinaltendency that have dominated relationsbetween the two overall branches since theReformation. For example, Protestantmissionaries in the Asmat area have generallyrejected all cultural forms as sinful (only alanguage-based personal relation to scripturematters), connected to Protestantism’sconviction of the radical separateness of Godand world except in Christ, whereas Catholicmissionaries have selectively embraced Asmatsculpture, feasting, and ritual, motivatedtheologically by a notion of God’s presence inpeople’s daily acts. This contrast is referencedin the book’s titular pun on ‘hunter-gatherers’:Protestant missionaries take seriously thepresence of Satanic or demonic elements inthe Asmat social landscape, as enemies to besearched out and vanquished, while Catholicmissionaries engage in active projects ofcultural preservation such as the collecting,display and marketing of carved sculptures.

Asmat themselves, by the author’saccount, are not highly attuned to thesedifferences, nor deeply engaged withChristian doctrine and practice generally.While many of the book’s most interestingdetails pertain to Asmat experience ofmissionaries, though, this subject is moreweakly represented in the study’s overallfabric than the converse subject of missionaryapproaches to Asmat. In this respect, thebook is somewhat out of step with the largebody of ethnographic monographs and editedcollections published in the last ten yearsdocumenting in great ethnographic depth thecomplexity of local cultural engagement withChristianity in social settings across theAsia-Pacific region, Africa, and elsewhere.But this does not diminish the intrinsic valueof this study’s hard-won observations.

RUPERT STASCHUniversity of California, San Diego (US)

Howell, Signe. 2006. The kinning offoreigners: transnational adoption in aglobal perspective. Oxford: Berghahn. xvi +255 pp. Hb.: $75.00/£45.00. ISBN: 9781 84545 184 4. Pb.: $27.95/£15.00.ISBN: 978 1 84545 330 5.

It has become a platitude to argue thatimportant impulses to new anthropologicalkinship theory have come from recent studiesof reproduction. These include the newreproductive technologies as well as studiesabout adoption and fosterage. Both ways ofreproduction offer people the possibility ofbecoming parents even if the ‘natural’ wayfails. This makes them important empiricalexamples having the potential to give newinsights on the relation betweennature/biology and culture/society.

In the last decade a broad literature onnew reproductive technologies has appearedwhile the ethnographic fields of adoption andfosterage have received much less attention.Among the still small selection of literature onadoption is Signe Howell’s new book. Howelllinks the theme to recent debates on kinshipand morality, as well as to globalisationtheory, which makes the theoretical andempirical arguments an intriguing narrative.

Her empirical interest lies intrans-national adoption practices, childrenbrought from so-called third-world countriesinto Western families, especially Norway.Trans-national adoption practices are the mostexpensive way of adopting children, birth andadoptive parents being socially, economicallyand spatially very distant. This extremedistance between the involved parties requiresa whole apparatus of experts, laws, nationaland international forms of regulations, andtravel costs in order not only to transfer achild, but also to match the involvedpeople.

These globalised practices ofgovernmental and social regulation maketrans-national adoption more comparablewith new reproductive technologies than withother forms of locally limited adoptions andfostering practices. It is an enormous socialtechnology, including many forms of social


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regulations that help parents perform theirchosen way of parenthood.

Trans-national adoption itself is seen asthe result of two movements in a globalisedworld: substances, mainly children, movefrom poor countries in the South to richcountries in the West, and, simultaneously,ideas and normative concepts aboutchildhood, personhood and adoption, movein the other direction. Both flows constituteasymmetrical relations between the donor andthe receiving countries and structure the wayin which children move from one part of theworld to the other.

The analytical approach of the bookfollows three threads: the anthropology ofkinship; the growth of psychology and thepsychological-based professions which enablegovernance; and the globalisation of moralityand rationality (p. 5).

To start with the second, Howell showshow experts appeared, whose main task is thespread of ideas about the well-being of thechild, the child-focused perspective and abouthighly normative ideas on ‘correct’ childdevelopment. Their profession is grounded onpsychological theories on identity,personhood and child development createdwithin academic psychology during thetwentieth century. Howell characterises thesetheories as being highly normative,generalising the Western model ofchildhood.

Concerning the third point, theglobalisation of morality and rationality,Howell emphasises the importance ofinternational conventions and treaties such asthe United Nations’ Children’s RightsConvention (1989). Being highly normativeand full of implicit ideas about a properchildhood, these conventions enable therelatively unquestioned flow of Western ideasabout childhood and morality to the donorcountries of the south. However, Howellshows once again that globalisation does notsimply homogenise the world. Looking atadoption practices and norms in four differentdonor countries, India, China, Ethiopia andRomania, she argues that their inhabitantsperceive the globalised treaties differently and

find different ways of adoption practices. Sherecalls that it is power relations which enabledifferent answers to globalisation. Thepoorest country, Ethiopia, is less able thanthe other countries to set up its own ruleson and preconditions to internationaladoption.

Personally, I find the first point, Howell’scontribution to kinship theory, the book’smost important point. Here, the focus is onher invention of the term kinning as anecessary process of all forms of kinship. Bykinning Howell means the process of makingand confirming a kinship relation by concretesocial behaviour. In the case of adoption, therespective child has to be made ‘sociallynaked’, i.e. free of all social and kin relations,which Howell calls ‘de-kinning’. Theconstructed subject, she argues, could be seenas the ideal autonomous individual (p. 8)because he or she is completely free fromentanglement with others. After beingde-kinned, the adoption procedure isperceived as a process of kinning, ofconstructing new juridical and social bondswith the adoptive family.

Various rites of passage, according toHowell’s argument (p. 9), help to perform theuniversal process of kinning, which has threeaspects: kinning by nature, nurture and law.Several taboos and normative thinkingaccompany the process of de-kinning and(re-) kinning, i.e. the taboo of being paid forgiving a child away.

The kinning of foreigners is a veryreadable book, not only for anthropologistsand kinship experts, but to everybodyinterested in the discussions about childhoodin globalised times.

Howell’s reflection on methodologicalissues is somewhat unorthodox. They appearin a postscript at the end of the book. Idiscovered this part only after reading itsmain chapters. While reading the mainchapters, I missed some words onmethodology. This appendix form slightlydisconnects the author’s reflections from thechapters. But this small remark does notchange the general impression of having reada book that sets the tone for future debates on


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the reorganisation of childhood and kinshipin times of globalisation.

ERDMUTE ALBERUniversity of Bayreuth (Germany)

Ingold, Tim. 2007. Lines: A brief history.London: Routledge. xii + 186 pp.Pb.: $24.95/£14.95. ISBN: 978 0 41542427 1.

An archeology of knowledge assemblageunder the star of modernity, Tim Ingold’sLines: a brief history explores the ways inwhich technologies of notation using thepoint and line have become central tocontemporary epistemes – and in so doing, ithas served to ‘detach the dynamics ofmovement from the formation of knowledge’(p. 102).

Throughout, Ingold revels in theethnographic arts: ranging across regions andhistories to offer diverse examplars of thehuman will to build knowledge fromexperience. As such, his material invokesprocess, form, gesture, breath, wayfinding,art, and relationality. The book is a work inprogress, he notes in the preface; it is a sketchof a terrain, and an attempt to prise open adifferent view of the world. It is a gentle book,not a manifesto, and the example it drawsfrom range from designs from South Indiaand New Guinea to medieval manuscripts,Chinese calligraphy and Winnie the Pooh.

Opening with an argument that anyhistory of writing must also be a history ofmusical notation (p. 10), he considers voiceand breath: arguing that technologies leadingto modern notation afforded the detachmentof sound from words; of music from song; ofvoice from speech. Working with a range ofmedieval manuscripts he traces a shift fromtechnologies that sought to ‘make present’ (orre-present) the speaking and singing voice, totechnologies that become objects ofrepresentation of words or notes divorcedfrom the physical act of speaking orsinging.

In order to grasp the changing history ofthe line, he says, there is a need to explore theconcomitant shifts in the idea of the surface.The chapter ‘Traces, threads and surfaces’makes for a marvellous journey throughregions and histories and ethnographies as heexplores the range of ways in which humanshave appropriated threads (defined asfilaments with surfaces that are not drawn onsurfaces) in the making of things withmeanings. By the chapter’s end, however, sucha vast range of examples of traces and threadshas been drawn upon that the overallargument about the production of surfaces, ismuted.

The third chapter, ‘Up, across and along’is in many senses the core of the book.Building on his long-standing interest inwayfaring, Ingold contends that ‘[i]t is notpossible to detach the dynamics of movementfrom the formation of knowledge’ (p. 102).The casualty: travel becomes understood aspoint-to-point along lines, in whichenvironment between these designated‘points’ becomes a barrier to be transcendedwith ever more powerful technologies oftransportation, rather than an environment tobe experienced, and a journey in whichknowledges might build up. The consequence:environment becomes understood as a surfaceof nodes and connectors, rather than anecology of threads and traces.

The fourth chapter deals with thetransformation of the idea of a genealogicalline into the scientific notation of genealogyin anthropology and biology. Ingold rejectsthe idea of cultural transmission from point topoint, seeking a model that allows instead forflows and transgenerational overlaps. Such amodel, he posits, might be more akin to abraid than a line, giving ‘a way of describingancestry and descent which . . . morefaithfully reflects . . . the narrativeinterweaving of present and past . . . than theplotting of connections between unique andself-contained individuals’ (p. 118).

The fifth chapter explores drawing,writing and calligraphy. In the sixth and finalchapter, Ingold explores the straightening andfragmenting of the line. The utopia of the


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modernist line, he contends, gives way to thedystopia of the line under the star of thepost-modern. Where the epistemic principlesof point and line offered a means ofrepresenting knowledge that offered ‘reason,certainty, authority, a sense of direction’(p. 167), post-modern scholarshipdemonstrates that that rationality has workedin profoundly irrational ways, and he drawson innovative musicians and architects toillustrate alternatives. Yet neither themodernist nor the post-modern approach, heconcludes, allows the grasp of what KennethOlwig calls the topianism that recogniseshuman beings as creatures – creatures ofhistory, and creatures of place.

While that argument is one I wouldsupport, the challenge, for Ingold, will be inconvincing his detractors that this iteration ofit is not a manifestation of Heideggeriandisenchantment with technology and science.Ingold studiously avoids the programmaticand is to be commended for doing so, yet atthe same time I wished, at the end of almostevery chapter, for a fuller discussion ofdialogues in and between the arts and sciencesthat might elucidate more of the emergingalternatives in the sciences. Several referencesto the work of Nelson Goodman hinttowards ways in which an engagement withsome of the pragmatists – such as CatherineElgin’s evaluations of the arts in the sciences –could be useful to an anthropology in searchof ways to evaluate diverse epistemes. I amalso left with questions about the sense of thearrow of time in the work. Is the erasure ofthe body from knowledge only a product ofmodernity, or have there been other times andcontexts in which the disavowel of bodilyexperience has been a dominant socio-culturalprinciple? What of the various asceticmovements throughout history that havesought to deny the body? The enormousrange of creativity that Ingold draws on todemonstrate diverse forms of embodiedknowledges compel the question of a searchfor opposites: surely there are more examplesin the ethnographic literature of a politics ofdisembodied knowledge? In what ways mighta more complex political history of

disembodied knowledges be drawn? Howmight one factor power and wealthdifferentials into the equation?

In several senses these questions arebeyond the scope of the work. That itprovokes them is indicative of the value ofLines to anthropologists intrigued by thepossibilities for a phenomenologicalanthropology of knowledge. As such, Lines: abrief history makes a significant contributionto Ingold’s project of drawing togetherbiological and socio-cultural anthropology,and constitutes a valuable signpost towards asymmetrical and global anthropology ofknowledge.

LESLEY GREENUniversity of Cape Town (South Africa)

Isnart, Cyril. 2008. Saints legionnaires desAlpes du Sud. Ethnologie d’une saintetelocale. Paris: Editions de la Maison dessciences de l’homme. 181 pp. Pb.: €24.00.ISBN: 978 2 7351 1179 4.

The story is that legionary saints were soldierscoming from Thebes, Upper Egypt, tostrengthen the Roman Empire’s army at theend of the 3rd century AD. Converted toChristianity by the first anchorites in theEgyptian desert, they refused to obey theEmperor Maximien’s order to sacrifice toidols and to recant their faith in Jesus Christ.They withdrew to Agaune (later known asSaint-Maurice in the Swiss Alps), where forevery ten soldiers the emperor ordered one tobe killed (‘decimation’) in order to punishthem. Still they kept their faith. The Romansdecided then to put them all to death. Only afew escaped martyrdom and started toevangelise various locations throughout theregion. One of them is well-known in socialanthropology thanks to Robert Hertz’ studyon Saint Besse (Hertz 1928), even if the saint’slegionary characteristic does not appear to becentral.

Cyril Isnart focuses his research preciselyon those saints, evolving in the Southern Alps


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(an area overlapping partly France and Italy),where their cult spread and is still deeplyrooted. His objective is to compare them inorder to emphasise how each of them belongsto a particular place: in the framework ofsainthood making, the main purpose of hisanalysis is to consider the relationshipbetween a shrine and this model of legionarysainthood – the ‘localization’ (p. 6). At leastfor two reasons the book is not a classicalmonograph: firstly, the author has to take intoaccount a multiplicity of local variations,which gives him the opportunity to underlinethe differences and the adaptation of valuesrather than their similarity and theirorthodoxy; secondly, he gathered rich andvaried data: historical, iconographical,hagiographical, and ethnographical. Mostanthropologists described the legionary saintsas ‘meaningless and without any interest’(p. 141). Going through those different scales,Isnart convincingly demonstrates theopposite: those figures of sainthood and theirvariations reveal the very process ofsaint-making in a local context, particularly inthe case of saints who are not ‘universal’ butonly acknowledged there. Legionary saintshave a double identity (soldiers orevangelists), which has to be linked to theecclesiastical discourse on the Christianpresence in the Alps; they are depicted withambivalent age (old or young men), a fact thatmust be confronted with rituals of patronageand more specifically with the construction ofmanhood. Their local inscription is connectedto rituals, practiced by various groups ofactors (among whom there are women andsometimes individuals who are not native ofthe area), and shows links with the memoryof the place. Thus this study underlines notonly the liminality of the saints, but also thatof their believers and of their practices.

In that Isnart presents an original fieldand subject, we can feel regret that the book,which is quite short, does not go further withthe descriptions and the analysis. Goingthrough the different scales of discourses ordata, the author sometimes gives theimpression he skims over them withoutlinking them together. Isnart’s fieldwork,

maybe because it encompasses an extendedarea, seems almost trivial in the analyticaldevelopment: if the author had concentratedmore precisely on two or three figures ofthese saints through the varied material hegathered, the whole picture of sainthood andits process of local insertion would have beenmore complete and consistent. In this sense,the title or subtitle of the book shouldpreferably have stressed the tension betweenvariations, localisation and the multiplicity offigures, and the perspective that it was moreanthropological.

ReferenceHertz, Robert 1928. ‘Saint Besse. Etude d’un culte

alpestre’ in Melanges de sociologie religieuseet de folklore. Paris: Alcan (transl. 1983.‘Saint Besse: A study of an Alpine cult’, inStephen Wilson (ed.), Saints and their cults:studies in religious sociology, folklore andhistory. Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress).

SEVERINE REYUniversity of Lausanne (Switzerland)

de Jong, Ferdinand. 2007. Masquerades ofmodernity. Power and secrecy inCasamance, Senegal. Edinburgh: EdinburghUniversity Press for the InternationalAfrican Institute. i-ii + 228 pp. Hb.:£55.00. ISBN: 9 780 74863 319 7.

De Jong’s work is a collection of essays ratherthan a monograph, and it covers a diversearray of subjects in the Casamance region ofSenegal, a multi-ethnic region in the sway ofglobal modernity, including initiationceremonies, age-sets and gendering,Islamisation, state formation, civil unrest, andthe commoditisation of performance as‘heritage’. The thread that weaves suchethnographic diversity together is preciselythe question regarding labour migration, theglobal flows of people to urban centres and toWestern metropolises and the concomitantpractices of localisation to which the


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displaced and fragmented communities ofthe Casamance devote themselves in theface of their journey through globalmodernity.

If practices of localisation guide de Jong’sargument throughout this study, it is practicesof secrecy that form the case studies on whichhe turns his ethnographic eye, all of thisdoubled by a secondary focus on hisethnographic gaze itself. This latterpost-structuralist tendency is not surprisingin light of the fact that – as de Jong has noqualms in admitting – his research wasthwarted at every turn by his exclusion fromthe initiation and other ceremonies he waskeen to observe. As a non-initiate, he wasexcluded from the sacred forests in whichyoung Jola and Mandinko boys were beingturned into men, and as a man, he wasexcluded from female initiations. This doubleexclusion spurs him to make secrecy itself thesubject of his work and to look at the ways inwhich it is used for social and politicalpurposes – both, as he stresses, by those whoknow the secret and by those who collude inits mystery by playing the role of innocents.

Following the introduction, Part II of thebook includes a chapter on the 1994 and 1997male and female initiation ceremonies thattook place in the village of Thionck Essyl,Ziguinchor. The chapter emphasises thegendering effects that the ceremonies – andthe secrecy attendant upon them – facilitatewhile simultaneously revealing how theysubtly address Jola relations with theMandinko and the history of theirIslamisation. The second chapter of thissection demonstrates how Jola initiationceremonies produce local subjects out of adiasporic community, revealing the ways inwhich globalisation and insertion into themarket economy has led to a revival oftradition. The third chapter presents a casestudy on the initiation of a high-ranking Jolacivil servant to further highlight thecontemporary importance of traditional ritesof passage in the post-colonial state.

The chapters of Part III turn to the cityof Ziguinchor, the first chapter examining thetransposition of a rural Mandinko rite of

passage into the city. Again belying the claimthat ritual is obsolescent in the modernnation-state, the new rite marks theappropriation of a local, ethnicallycircumscribed practice to a cosmopolitanmultiethnic and Islamic setting in which it hasbecome first a form of anti-colonial resistanceand now of local heritage in contradistinctionto a monolithic post-colonial state. It is herethat de Jong first focuses his attention onmasks, describing the role of the fearsomeKankurang in this initiation rite. The secondchapter of this section analyses two crisespreceding his research in which Kankurangmasks were involved – one a very publicmurder and the other a violent confrontationwith the police. The chapter follows thestruggles for control over the masks betweenyouths, elders and the state that followedthese events.

The first chapter of Part IV turns to theuse of the Jola bachelors’ Kumpo mask first asa means young farmers have used to forceyoung girls to return from the city to thevillage in time for agricultural labour, andthen as a form of folkloric entertainment forWestern tourists and high-ranking officials.Despite the transformation of culture into‘heritage’ that the history of this maskevinces, de Jong once again illustrates hisunderlying argument that traditional practicescan accommodate modernity, and even beused to bend it to local concerns. The secondchapter of this section examines the use ofinitiation ceremonies as a motif incontemporary painting by artists of theCasamance, highlighting yet another modernefflorescence of ‘traditional’ practices ofsecrecy. The final chapter, ‘Writing Secrecy’,constitutes a reflexive exercise taking a‘writing culture’ approach to the conduct ofresearch into secrecy.

There are few references to the classicliterature on rites of passage in this book, or,despite references to the carnivalseque, toBakhtin, nor is Gluckman mentioned whenrites of reversal are invoked, orEvans-Pritchard when age grades areexamined. But what this work lacks inimitatio veterum it makes up for,


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appropriately enough for a work onmodernity, in a solid and thought-provokingengagement with contemporary theoreticians;affording the study of masking its rightfulplace at the forefront of contemporaryanthropological thinking.

NICOLAS ARGENTIBrunel University (UK)

Kan, Sergei A. and Pauline Turner Strong(eds.). 2006. New perspectives on NativeNorth America. Cultures, histories, andrepresentations. Lincoln & London:University of Nebraska Press. xiii + 514 pp.Pb.: $35.00/£25.99. ISBN: 978 80327830 1.

This collection of essays is dedicated toProfessor Raymond D. Fogelson, who taughtat the University of Chicago from 1965. Itcomprises primarily contributions that wereoriginally presented at a number of sessions inhis honour during a 1996 meeting of theAmerican Anthropological Association.Employing a wide array of theoretical andmethodological styles, the essays range acrossvarious historical periods and geographicallocations. The contributors are, with only afew exceptions, students of Fogelson’s andthus represent several generations of scholarsat different stages in their careers, includingsome of the leading anthropologists andethnohistorians working in the field of NativeAmerican Studies. As is customary with aFestschrift collection, the topics discussedextend over the – impressively broad – rangeof Fogelson’s research interests. Any work ofsuch scope is bound to be uneven, perhapsmore so than edited volumes in general. Andto find a suitable title for such acomprehensive offering is difficult – NewPerspectives is an obvious if somewhat tiredand, as so often, not entirely accurate solutionto the problem: some of the perspectivesoffered are indeed new (at least to thisreviewer) while others are part of ‘the canon’which is not always treated as critically as it

might have been. But that should not detractunduly from the merits of this volume. As atext for advanced students it offers a goodoverview of issues and debates across a broadspectrum of topics and geographical locations.There are a number of contributions thatopen up new questions or engage in new andchallenging ways with established themes.More than usual, many of the essays combinepersonal memories with work obviouslyfollowing in the academic footsteps of theteacher, here and there straying from or goingbeyond the indicated track, and thus thevolume’s particular value may be itsusefulness, quite apart from the subjectcontent itself, as a document of intellectualhistory. This is perhaps not surprising, givenFogelson’s personal interest in this field,which – as the editors note in theirIntroduction (p. xii) – he appears to havepassed on to many of his students.

The three essays in the first part of thecollection take up this particular interest.Under the theme of ‘Perspectives: on thegenealogy and legacy of an anthropologicaltradition’, Regna Darnell traces theintellectual roots of Fogelson’s work and hisubiquitous use of the prefix ‘ethno-’, whichsignals an emphasis on the ‘emic’ or ‘native’point of view. Jennifer Brown revisits thework of Fogelson’s mentor, A. IrvingHallowell, with the Berens River Ojibwe inthe light of later work, including her own,illustrating the fruitfulness of a combinationof historical and ethnographic methodologies.Based on fieldwork among the EasternCherokee, with whom Fogelson had workedclosely during his postgraduate research,Margaret Bender’s essay examines the culturalposition of the medicine man, Sequoyah.

Five essays make up the second part ofthe collection, entitled ‘Cultures: on personsand powers, rituals and creativity’. GregUrban, in one of the most unusualcontributions to the volume, discusses aspectsof power and the transmission of culture,using reference to the film ‘Babe’ to makeimportant observations about the innovativecore of tradition. A case study of a conflictover off-reservation hunting, fishing and


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gathering rights at Lac de Flambeau is used byLarry Nesper to highlight the significance ofglobalisation in the form of tourism. JeffreyAnderson’s essay on Arapaho Ghost Dancesongs, Raymond Bucko’s contribution on theLakota sweat lodge, and Robert Moore’sdiscussion of ‘Self-consciousness,ceremonialism, and the problem of thepresent in the anthropology of Native NorthAmerica’ are examples of psychologicalanthropology that try to negotiate theprecarious tensions between history andethnohistory. The rise of ‘identity politics’that Moore, for example, describes, is oftenseen as invalidating ethnohistorical accountswhich are regarded as culturalist, andtherefore inferior to ‘western’ modes ofknowledge. Many of the essays in thiscollection acknowledge this problematicexplicitly, which is important.

Even if they cannot offer a way out ofthe dilemma, the essays in the third part,under the theme ‘Histories: on varieties oftemporal experience and historicalrepresentation’, try to address the different‘ways of history’ (to borrow Peter Nabokov’sphrase). Thomas Buckley considers Nativeauthorship in twentieth century California;Raymond DeMallie, Mary Druke Becker andJoseph Jastrzembski look at similar mattersarising with narratives from earlier periods indifferent locations. The contributions bySergei Kan, on events and ‘non-events’, andDavid Dinwoodie, on time and the individual,offer critical reflections on the cultural natureof time and, consequently, history.

In the final part, Robert Brightman setsthe scene for the examination of‘Representations: on selves and others,hybridities and appropriations’ with abroadly-based essay on cultural‘objectifications’ and the issue of authenticity.This is followed by five case studies of howcultural identities and differences have beenrepresented. Barrik Van Winkle looks atWashoe interpretations of a notoriousincident of cannibalism that occurred when agroup of white settlers were caught in a snowstorm in 1846. The discursive annihilation ofNew England tribes through concepts of

racial and cultural purity is examined by JeanO’Brien. In the final three essays, romanticrepresentations and appropriations of NativeAmerican culture are discussed. FrederickGleach analyses the myth of Pocahontas,Michael Harkin examines imagery of theAmerican West in Saint Germain des Pres as acase of French exoticism, and Pauline TurnerStrong explores the primitivist ideology andpractice of the Camp Fire Girls movement.

An Afterword by Peter Nabokovconcludes the volume. Overall,notwithstanding earlier criticisms, this is avaluable addition to the literature on NativeNorth America. It contains a number ofhighly stimulating individual contributions,much useful case study material for graduateprogrammes, and ample incentives to readfurther.

ULLRICH KOCKELUniversity of Ulster (UK)

Marranci, Gabriele 2008. The anthropologyof Islam. Oxford and New York: Berg. 182pp. Hb.: £55.00. ISBN: 1 84520 284 8.Pb.: £17.99. 1 84520 285 6.

There is something very strange about beingan anthropologist of Islam. To identifyoneself as such to colleagues from othersubfields often comes across as either naive orironical. In any case it requires explanation.Many anthropologists are, in fact, workinghard to explain what kind of an object ofanthropological study Islam is. This is oddbecause anthropologists focussing on otherreligions do not seem to have the same senseof urgency to explain what, for the sake of anexample, Christianity ‘is’.

Marranci’s The anthropology of Islam isnot the first attempt to make sense of thisproblem – it follows in the footsteps ofnumerous works which he discusses criticallyand in detail. Although it touches on many ofthe issues that have been important in studiesabout the lives of Muslims, the book is aboutanthropologists much more than it is about


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Muslims. The anthropology of Islam is firstand foremost a critical engagement with thedifferent theoretical perspectives that haveinformed the study of Muslims, and isdefinitely worth reading as such.

Marranci argues, and he certainly doeshave a point, that most attempts toconceptualise the anthropological study ofMuslims and Islam have either fallen intopitfalls of essentialism (Gellner), or reducedthe significance of Islam to symbolicrepresentations (Geertz) or to doctrinaldebate (Asad) at the cost of the emotionaldimension of being Muslim. In contrast, heargues that it is much more helpful tounderstand Islam ‘as a map of discoursesderived from the different ways of feeling tobe Muslim’ (p. 146).

Much of the author’s argumentation isconvincing, as is his critical review of existingethnographies. And yet the book appears asproblematic to me, less because of the answersit offers, than the overall problem it tries tosolve: ‘We need a paradigm through which theanthropologist of Islam can effectively studyMuslims as human beings rather than livingsymbols of a religion’ (p. 100). Why onlyMuslims? Why not Buddhists? Why notcommunists (who can also be Muslims)? Whynot Germans (some of whom are Muslims)?By consistently framing the problematic asone concerning Muslims (he in fact frequentlycritically comments on the fact that Muslimshave often been studied as members of ethnicgroups, as businesspeople, or as inhabitants ofvillages rather than as Muslims – But whynot? It depends on what one wants to know),the author implicitly establishes theanthropology of Islam as a sub-discipline ofits own, not only defined by a specific groupof people, but also somehow qualitativelydifferent and therefore in need of a centralparadigm.

Although the author distances himselffrom the search for a definite answer to whatIslam ‘is’, he ends up offering one himself,and argues for a paradigm that makes feelingsthe analytical key to Islam and the lives ofMuslims. The answer is interesting, but thequestion is misleading. What Islam is about in

the context of ethnography depends on thespecific research problematic at hand. Ibelieve that precisely the concern, explicit orimplicit, with the question as to what Islam‘is’ has powered the search for a paradigmespecially suited for the study Muslims. Sucha search unwittingly reinforces theexceptionalism that has so long haunted thestudy of Islam – not with the bluntness ofGellner, but in a subtle way by foregroundingMuslimness in all matters that involve peoplewho, among other things, are Muslims, andthus privileging religious sentiment as theArchimedian point to understand thecomplex lives of different people. In somecases this is appropriate, in others it is not.

SAMULI SCHIELKEZentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin (Germany)

McLean, Athena and Annette Leibing(eds.). 2007. The shadow side of fieldwork:exploring the blurred borders betweenethnography and life. Oxford:Wiley-Blackwell. xviii + 302 pp.Pb.: £24.99/€30.00. ISBN: 978 1 40516981 3.

This publication developed out of a panel atthe 2003 meeting of the AmericanAnthropological Association. The topic of thepanel was the fusion of private life andprofessional field research. Far from allcontributions to the book under review stickto this subject. If they do, the binaryopposition of private life and professionalresearch tends to be transposed intoalternative, not necessarily related,dichotomies like leisure and work, private andpublic, irrational and rational, the psyche andthe social, the non-conceptual and theconceptual, identity and alterity, etc. Thismakes for a straggling collection of essays.The contributions by Anne Lovell, AnnetteLeibing, Ellen Corin and Athena McLeanhave the most in common in that all of themaddress issues raised by Vincent Crapanzanoin his article, ‘The scene: shadowing the real’


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(Theoretical Anthropology, 6:4, 2006),reprinted in this volume. Another reprintedtext is the extremely poor analysis by AlisseWaterston and Barbara Rylko-Bauer of theirrespective parents’ personal memories inrelation to the Holocaust (first published inAmerican Ethnologist 33:3, 2006). Instead ofdeconstructing the metanarratives that shapethese memories, the authors are surprised bythe inauthenticity of the personal; that is, bythe fact that the personal is culturallyconstructed. Let me pass over in silence thischapter, as well as the other poor parts of thisbook, and focus on the contributions that arekept together thematically by Crapanzano’sjuxtaposition of psychoanalysis andethnography.

Anne Lovell’s discussion of fieldwork asan exchange of innermost secrets is thehighlight of the volume. With illustrationsfrom her ethnographic work at a patient-runalternative to psychiatric hospitals andrehabilitation clinics in Manhattan and amongyoung users of psychotropics in Marseille, sheanalyses how the personal is produced in fieldencounters as well as in situations ofvulnerability. Her notion that physicalrepugnance may be a strategy homelesspeople use to repel ‘those who might look tooclosely or be too eager to offer their services’(p. 62), while not entirely new, isthought-provoking. In the context ofmethodological debate, her comments onself-revelation as a feature in ethnographicfield research deserve further attention.

Ellen Corin provides the most explicitexamination of the psychoanalysis-ethnography dichotomy. Whatpsychoanalysis and ethnography have incommon, argues Corin, is that both ‘bypassthe representations that, in any society, peopleform of themselves, and of life, their needsand meanings lodged within language’(p. 255). Corin points to cultural and mentaldetachment as a positive and productive formof withdrawal that allows the ethnographer tostudy cultural differences and the psychoticindividual to self-heal and recover. While herresearch on the importance of cultural modelsof abnormality for the understanding and

treatment of mental disorders is hardlytrailblazing, continuing this type ofexploration is of great consequence, not leastfor those who suffer from a disabling mentalillness.

Annette Leibing elaborates on themetaphor of the invisible without finding herway out of the maze of intertextuality. AthenaMcLean’s concluding chapter on herfieldwork in an American nursing home thatcoincided with her own mother’s confinementto another such home provides no newinsights and little in the way of analysis. Asmight be expected, the care (and neglect) hermother was exposed to coloured McLean’sinterpretation of what went on in the nursinghome where she conducted her fieldwork.The chapters by Anne Lovell and EllenCorin, then, stand out as valuablecontributions to the methodological debate inanthropology. Two chapters, however, justifyneither the publication nor the purchase of anentire book.

RONALD STADEMalmo University (Sweden)

Soares, Benjamin. 2005. Islam and theprayer economy. History and authority in aMalian town. Edinburgh and London:Edinburgh University Press for theInternational African Institute. xii + 306pp. Pb.: £19.99. ISBN: 9 780 74862 3587. Hb.: £60.00. ISBN: 9 780 74862 285 6.

There is a growing consensus amongstanthropologists working on Islam andMuslim societies that not enough attentionhas been paid in recent years to thecomplexity of the relation between thespiritual and material dimensions of beingMuslim in the world today. One importantreason for this gap in the literature is theferocity with which many anthropologistshave challenged work on the so-called Islamicrevival or piety movement that focuses on thesocio-economic causes behindtransformations in Muslim thought and


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identity without paying sufficient attention tothe ethical standards and moral worldviewsthat underpin them. Importantly, however,anthropologists are now recognising thecontinuing need to think through the complexrelationships between varying forms ofMuslim identity, religiosity and economic life.Indonesian factory workers attend spiritualgatherings at which self-defined Islamicspeakers highlight the piety of hard work(Rudnyckyj 2009), for example, whilst IndianMuslim entrepreneurs in the Gulf States arguethat Islam and capitalism are compatible, yetin a way distinctive from West variants(Osella and Osella 2009). More studies are,one hopes, now being written and conceivedconcerning the diversity of Muslim responses,reactions, reflections and coping strategies inthe face of the economic crisis, an ‘event’ ofplanetary significance, which, of course, hasalready had very visible effects both on theMuslim world’s financial centres, especiallyglobal cities such as Dubai, and the complexand often deeply political unstable peripherieswith which these are intimately entwined.

There is no better starting point forthinking about the complex issues and debatessurrounding this old yet vital ethnographicand theoretical project than Benjamin Soares’Islam and the Prayer Economy. The book isbased on extensive, rich and in-depthhistorical and ethnographic fieldwork in theMalian town of Nioro, a ‘relatively small andeconomically marginal’ place that neverthelessis and has for long been an ‘important centreof Islamic religious activity’ (p. 11). Thetown’s religious significance derives from itsstatus as the home of the leaders of two majorSufi brotherhoods: the Tijaniyya and theHamawiyya. The former of these two menwill be known to many West African andIslam specialists as the descendent of UmarTall – a nineteenth century Sufi leader whosejihad or ‘holy war’ played a major role inforging a state that covered much of today’sMali. Nioro, thus, is a destination point forMalian and African pilgrims – thousands ofpeople travel to the town each year with theaim of having one or both of the two leadersinterceding with God on their behalf. In

return for prayers, significantly, followersmust also present gifts to the leaders: thesemay be as luxurious as a brand new car, whilsteven the gifts of poorer devotees are expectedto meet a certain standard.

It is, indeed, the intersection betweencommodities and religious practice that is oneof Soares’ central themes. Soares deploysMurray Last’s concept of the prayer economyto offer unique and rich insights into thechanging nature of the relationship betweensaints and their devotees at a time of economictransformation and structural readjustment.For not only do pilgrims give gifts forprayers, they also buy photos and videos oftheir religious leaders, ‘religious commodities’which the saints themselves authorise certainindividuals to make and sell. Moreover, tripsmade by wealthy merchants to Nioro areoften more like holidays than they arereligious pilgrimages (p. 173): flights arechartered, personal meetings with the Sufileaders arranged, and stays in purpose builtluxury accommodation organised. For suchguests, moreover, ‘saints’ will perform formsof Islamic ‘divination’ or istikhara that arerarely if ever offered to their less wealthydevotees. If the signs of sainthood – ‘miracles,numerous followers, great wealth’ (p. 175) –show considerable continuity over the pastdecades, argues Soares, then the form takenby relationships between saints and theirfollowers have undergone dramatictransformations.

I hope such a necessarily brief discussionof Soares’ rich and readable ethnographyexemplifies some of the many and very goodreasons why scholars and students from awide range of disciplinary backgrounds andwith varying research interests should readand reflect upon this book. Most broadly, it isa major contribution to one of anthropology’smost important and challenging bodies ofliterature – the nature of religious forms ofgiving – and I am aware of no othercomparable work that explores in such detailand nuance the forms and meanings taken byobligatory and informal forms of alms-givingin Islam, and the relationship of these to bothlocal conceptions of merit and blessing.


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Anthropologists more concerned with thestudy of Islam will find a text that offers aunique and sensitive treatment of therelationship of the material and spiritual in thelives of West African Muslims living in an eraof structural readjustment and neo-liberalreforms. They will also read a text thatdefinitively challenges the continuedrelevance of tired categories such as‘reformist’ and ‘traditional’ or ‘Sufi’ and‘anti-Sufi’ for understanding the complexityof Muslim identity and forms of belief anddevotion in the world today. Finally, the bookwill also attract a much wider readershipinterested in the state of Islam in Africa andthe wider Muslim world, notably because ofthe distinguished contribution it makes to theunderstanding of the complexity and vibrancyof Sufism in conditions of rapid social andpolitical transformation.

Having already used Soares’ Islam andthe Prayer Economy for teaching, I canconfirm, that it is one of those rare texts thatcombines precise overviews of key themes inthe literature with in-depth yet lucidlywritten historical ethnography. It is, thus, avery suitable addition for both undergraduateand postgraduate student reading lists, andstands to become a classic contribution to theanthropology of Islam, being Muslim inAfrica, and wider, ongoing debatesconcerning anthropological perspectives onthe intersection of religion, politics andeconomics in the contemporary world.

ReferencesOsella, Filippo and Caroline Osella 2009. Muslim

entrepreneurs in public life between Indiaand the Gulf: making good and doing good.Journal of the Royal Anthropological Insti-tute, Special Issue: 202–21.

Rudnyckyj, Daromir 2009. Market Islam in In-donesia. Journal of the Royal Anthropologi-cal Institute, Special Issue: 183–210.

MAGNUS MARSDENSchool of Oriental and African Studies,University of London (UK)

Zeitzen, Miriam Koktvedgaard. 2008.Polygamy: a cross-cultural analysis. Oxfordand New York: Berg. 206 pp. Pb.: £19.99.ISBN: 978 1 84520 221 7.

Polygamy, Zeitzen explains, comes in threeforms, but with a host of consequences andcomplexities for each. This study outlines thethree types of polygamy – polygyny,polyandry, and group marriage – and offers across-cultural review of the literature, withparticular attention to polygyny amongAfricans, Malaysians, and Mormons, alongwith Himalayan polyandry and groupmarriage.

This is a well-researched collection ofhistorical and contemporary anthropologicalinformation, touching on evolutionary,environmental, and political theories, butprimarily concentrating on the economic,emotional, status, sexual, and logisticalconcerns inherent in polygamous unions. Forthe specialist, this study offers nothing novel,either in the way of theory or data, althoughthe book may serve as a valuable reference forcase studies on polygamy. As Zeitzen states,‘the aim of the book is [. . .] to give readers ageneral understanding of polygamy, its forms,foundations and functions’ (p. 6). Zeitzen’saccount is purely ethnological, drawing onstudies from around the world, rather thanpresenting original ethnographic material.Nevertheless, this book succeeds in its intentto gather together information on polygamyin a compact form that is valuable tonon-specialists or university students.

The other goal is ‘to illustrate that amajority of the world’s cultures have someform of polygamous practice and todemystify it as an exotic non-Western practiceinto one found also in Western societies’(p. 6). Although I agree with this goal, it ismet with less success than the first. Zeitzenably shows the geographic and cultural rangeof polygamous marriages, but Westernreaders are unlikely to view polygamy as anyless exotic, because the bulk of theethnographic examples derive from Africa,South Asia, and Malaysia, potentiallyreinforcing exotic Western perceptions. The


REVIEWS 511

one Western case study focuses on Mormonfundamentalist polygyny in the United States,but as fundamentalist Mormons are shown tobe minorities who are often marginalised,maladjusted, extremist, possibly criminal, andinternally divided, their case fails to demystifythe practice. Zeitzen briefly mentions otherWestern encounters with polygamy, involvingimmigrants or African–American Muslims,but these examples tend to maintain the imageof polygamous people as unrepresentativeminorities in the West.

Zeitzen rightly highlights the difficultiesin defining polygamy arising out of broaderdebates over the definition of marriage. Yet, attimes, the author falls victim to thisterminological confusion, referring to serialmarriage (p. 12) or serial polygyny (p. 18),while defining polygamy in terms of multiplemarriages ‘at a time’ (p. 21). The authoroccasionally gets caught up in debatingwhether certain arrangements could beconsidered true or de facto marriages insteadof following contemporary anthropologicaltrends less concerned with definitionalcriteria.

The book’s content is rich informationculled from a range of societies, thoughoccasionally using present tense in referringto conditions described 50 years ago. Theauthor offers case studies of Malaysianpolygyny, Mormon polygyny, and Himalayanpolyandry (which blends into groupmarriage). In the Mormon and Malaysiancases, there is excellent treatment of the waylegal statutes interact with religious and/orethnic identities. In the Himalayan case, weare also witness to how people of the JaunsarBawar region of India may use polyandry asan ethnic marker, but the most interestingpoint is how polyandry, monogamy,polygyny, and group marriage can coexist

within the same population, and, given thefluidity of marital forms over time, transforminto one another in the same family. Althoughthere is no case study from Africa, there isample data regarding the history of Africa’sinteraction with Western Christian ideals ofmonogamy, and the resulting tensionsbetween contemporary spouses. Zeitzenshows that economic motives for polygynyare obsolete in Africa, but men’s desire tomaintain multiple partners collides with theattraction of being Christian, resulting in thewidespread practice of informal polygyny.

The book also tackles the question ofinequality and power in polygamous unions.Zeitzen shows how both polygyny andpolyandry may tend toward male domination,though she qualifies this with anacknowledgement that more recent feministworks question Western biases in analysingpower. In line with these critiques, sheconcludes that there is no universalistrelationship between male dominance andmarriage, since each culture (and indeed eachmarriage) contains its own particulararrangements, relationships, and possibilitiesfor exercising power.

Despite being overly repetitious at times,this book is clearly written and offersnon-specialists a solid grounding in thevariety of polygamous marriages. This studywould be appropriate for courses on kinship,gender and marriage. The focus on polygamymakes this a unique contribution toanthropological literature, and its value isheightened by its timeliness, given thatscholars and the American media have showninterest in Mormon polygamy.

DOUGLAS J. FALENAgnes Scott College (US)


Lines: A brief history by Ingold, Tim

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