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Antonio Lauria-Perricelli), particularly interesting are Goldberg’s addition to complexity, observing that mi- grants are not only coming into U.S. capitalism, but often are nonwhite products of the results of U.S. capitalist expansion; Jones’s reminder that the new social situations are not stable, because they are so closely tied to the dynamics of capitalism; Sider’s emphasis on economics, in terms of which the migrants are themselves assets drained from the third to the first world, whose remit- tances seldom equal the cost of raising and educating them before they leave home; and Sutton’s call for more emphasis on gender-specific aspects of migration at both ends.

The editors have done their job well. Subsequent studies of migration will have to refer to this book. It will take its place in the wider growth of interest in transna- tional corporations and transnational professionals (such as the children of an American-Swedish friend of mine who are, respectively, a Swedish-born itinerant linguistics entrepreneur and an Italian-born marketing repre- sentative of a Swedish pharmaceutical firm that just ab- sorbed an Italian company). This book can shed some light on the support by U.S. Jews for Israel and by U.S. Irish for the Irish Republican Army. And what of the nation-state? It seems about to be displaced as a fixed reference point in ethnology.

Voices of Migmnts: Ruml-Urban Migration in Costa Rica. Paul Kutsche. Gainesville: University Press of Flor- ida, 1994. xii + 236 pp.

MILES RICHARDSON Louisiana State University

Any ethnography that lets us hear the voices of peo- ple surely earns our attention. And if the voices are those of the people who so wonderfully inhabit a country called Costa Rica, so much the better. Yet such an ethnography is not without pitfalls.

A veteran anthropologist, Paul Kutsche knows this. Thus, to provide the all-important context of local lives, in part 1, m e Historical and Cultural Matrix,” he con- cisely summarizes what we generally know about Costa Rican history and society. Particularly noteworthy is the account of how monetary devaluation, coupled with the shift from food crops to cash crops, particularly cattle, brought people to San Jos6, the nation’s capital, in such numbers and often in such desperate circumstances.

Likewise, following the autobiographies, in part 3, “Analysis,” Kutsche compares some of the lives whose voices we hear with generalizations about national values made by Biesanz et al. in The Costa Ricans (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1982). Here he seems less suc- cessful, perhaps in part because these generalizations of ideal behavior, such as equality and dignity for all human

beings, peace, and the family, are so sweeping that I am not certain what particular insights they give us for inter- preting the autobiographies.

In part 2, “The Life Histories,” an introduction ex- plains that 14 lives were “collected” in 1981, 1982, and 1984; initial contact with informants was opportunistic, and interviews were recorded in an office or at the author’s apartment. Kutsche knew some of the individuals prior to the one-stop, one-shot interviews; for others the interview was the only relationship. Following the intre duction, each person gets a separate chapter. It is here, the locus of the volume’s principal and admirable contri- bution, that, paradoxically, Kutsche becomes momentar- ily blind and teeters precariously. The pitfall, appropri- ately enough in this epoch of the “text,” is in how he creates text out of tape, how he turns listening into read- ing. The title material of each chapter lists in block letters the name, age, sex, marital status, and date of interview. A nickname is chosen to protect the individual’s privacy. The results resembles a crime poster:

El Cafetal Age 37 Male M a n i e d January 10,1982

In italics, Kutsche gives a brief sketch of the person, which in this case included such information as “El Cafetal i s an alcoholic who lost most of his jobs he had held because of his problem” @. 94). The sketch, italics and all, is picked up again at the chapter’s end: “El Cafetalk fortunes d id not imprcyve after 1982” @. 101).

The first person narrative begins: “I was born in San JosC . . .” @. 94).

Translated into English, the text apparently comes fresh from the tape. Paragraphs are long and convey little of the dynamism of voice. They successfully turn speech into text, which, despite its inherent vivacity, tends to drone on. Editing, in brackets, ranges from near pedan- tic-a [but] here, a [they] t h e r e t o the almost cavalier. An example of the latter is from the life of El Visionario. Kutsche complains that El Visionario’s glorification of his country life contrasted so “blatantly with the miserable circumstances of his family life that I grew a little bored . . . [and] edited out description that did not add anything to what he had already said” @. 113).

The net results of Kutsche’s strategy is that everyone sounds like everyone else. The treatment ostensibly pur- sued to bring out the particularity of individual lives in fact cloaks that very individuality. For this reader at least, the anguish and triumph of individual Costa Ricans’ coping with the traumas of migration lies hidden behind a format that recalls all the warnings about how writing stultifies speech.

404 A M E R I C A N A N T H R O P O L O G I S T V O L . 9 7 , N o . 2 J U N E 1995

The inappropriate strategy notwithstanding, the modo de ser costarricense, the Costa Rican heart-warm- ing way of being, shines through in the pride of El Viejo, who takes “cafe of my own people” (p. 148), in the enthu- siasm of Victoria, who believes in “succeeding every time a little better” @. 192), and in the skepticism of Maestro, who says the only function of the church is “to adapt people to laws of the country” (p. 130). Thus, in this manner, pitfalls or no, Voices of Migmnts makes its con- tribution. H

The Saga of Anthropology in China: From Malinowski to Moscow to Mao. Gregory Eliyu Guldin. h o n k , NY, and London: M. E. Sharpe, 1994.298 pp.

STEVEN HAKRELL

U n i v m i t y of Washington

The title of this informative book is misleading: the saga told here does go from Mahowski to Moscow to Mao, but it doesn’t stop there. It is the story of Chinese anthropologsts’ quest to locate their discipline in the 20th-century intellectual world, so that it has just the right balance between interaction with anthropologists else- where and distinctive national characteristics. This quest, Guldin suggests, has been even more difficult for anthro- pologists in China than in other countries outside Europe and North America because Chinese anthropologists have never had more than a decade or two to develop their discipline before they have had to reinvent it, sometimes almost from scratch, for political reasons.

The saga does not begin with Malinowski, but he certainly played an important part from the time when anthropology first became recognized as a discipline in the 1920s until the heyday of prerevolutionary anthropol- ogy in the 1930s and 1940s, when British functionalist ideas dominated social anthropology, though there were adherents of the American historicist and French stmc- tural schools as well. At this time, archaeology, anthropo- logical linguistics, and physical anthropology were devel- oping in some areas as separate disciplines and in others as parts of a four-field approach.

On to Moscow with the communist takeover in 1949; from then until the late 1950s, anthropology as a four-field discipline was eliminated, along with other social science fields, while ethnology was to follow the Soviet model (heavily based on Engels’s interpretation of Morgan’s evo- lutionism), and archaeology (also Engelsified) was trans- ferred to history departments. Physical anthropology, as a natural science, was less affected by ideological turns, except that scholars had to stress, again following Engels, that toolmaking, rather than bipedalism, was the key to human origms. The 1950s produced much valuable em- pirical research under the Soviet banner.

Thence to Mao: after 1957, the Soviet Union itself became an object of criticism, and any ethnology and archaeology done from then until the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution in 1966 stressed China’s chosen role as inheritor of the true Marxist tradition. During the “ten lost years” from 1966 to 1976, very little got done in ethnology, though there were important paleontological and archaeologcal discoveries. But there is a fourth stage after Mao. Since 1979 Chmese scholars in all fields of anthropology have enjoyed a fair mount of freedom to conduct field research; anthropology departments have been established at two universities; ethnology, linguis- tics, and archaeology have proceeded relatively unim- peded in other programs; and contact with foreign anthro- pologists has once again raised the dilemma of how distinctive or derivative is Chinese anthropology.

Guldin’s account is a pleasant and easy read and a compelling tale. It is, however, marred by a large number of careless mistakes, particularly in the spelling of per- sonal and place names. And the reader would like to know a bit more about content: we are told of many scholars and their research topics, but not what they thought or wrote about these topics. These shortcomings are com- pensated for, however, in the book’s thoughtful discus- sion of its main question: How can anthropology, a disci- pline that arose out of an unabashedly colonial consciousness, find a home in an independent third-world country? There are people everywhere who are fascinated by anthropology’s subject matter, and there are practical and moral reasons for wanting to know about human history and variation. The fact that anthropology has en- dured in China through so many changes of political winds is testimony to these facts, and Guldin’s book, in turn, is testimony both to the discipline’s perseverance and to its as yet unsolved puzzle: from Malinowski to Moscow to Mao to . . . where now? H

Knowing Practice: The Clinical Encounter of Chinese Medicine. Judith Farquhar. Boulder, CO. Westview Press, 1994.260 pp.

C. FRED BLAKE University of Hawaii at M a m a

The holistic medical tradition, which enjoys official recognition and widespread popularity in China, has been viewed by foreign scholars as the product of a particular culture history or as knowledge to be tested against the standards of biomedicine. Judith Farquhar offers a third view that describes the techrucal discourse as it is cur- rently taught and practiced in schools and clinics of Chi- nese medicine. Arguing that traditional medicine is a tech- nical discourse shaped by clinical experience, Farquhar employs an impressive corpus of teaching manuals, clini- cal reports, and discussions with doctors, material she