AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST
BOOK REVIEWS
Single Reviews
a Elites and Ethnic Politics in Nigeria: O.baf
Yorub .
emi
ow
Awol . o.` and Corporate Agency by Wale Adebanwi.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. 312 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12540
Aderemi Suleiman Ajala
University of Ibadan, Nigeria and Max Planck Institute for Social
Anthropology, Halle, Germany
Wale Adebanwis book about O . baf e. mi Awol o. wo.` (1909
1987), Nigerian politician and nationalist, focuses on the
ways in which African elites appropriate politics beyond
their lifetime. Because Awol o. wo.` died almost 30 years ago
and many books have already been written about him, one
wonders what could yet be unknown, and because anthro-
pological texts are expected to be rich in etic and emic
perspectives, the quantity and quality of both employed in
this book are questionable. This may cause dissatisfaction
with the book, but Adebanwi has reinvented the spirit of
Awol o. wo.` by using a new paradigm that analyzes him as
an elite who created agency to reset the political order in
Yoruba society. Rather than providing more narratives of
Awol o. wo.` s biography, Adebanwi uses elitism and agency to
explore political profiles in Nigerian colonial and postcolo-
nial politics. Long-term fieldwork and engaging methodol-
ogy result in an amazingly dense description of Awol o. wo.` as
an agent of political modernity in Yoruba society. Thus this
book will spark interest.
Structured in two parts with an introduction, the book
has seven chapters that smoothly transit from the least to
the most complex ideas about Awol o. wo.` s background, his
politics, and his legacy. Describing his methodology and
the books structure, Adebanwi successfully entices readers
with juicy anthropological discourse as his introduction mag-
nanimously interacts with rich arrays of literature. The first
part of the book beautifully deconstructs Awol o. wo.` s biogra-
phy and theorizes about how traditions, social values, birth
and early years, energetic ambition, and integrity influenced
his social aspirations. How this was possible for Awol o. wo.` ,
whom he compares to Oduduwaa Yoruba personage of
progeny and nationalismis central to Adebanwis pre-
sentation. He lucidly describes how Awol o. wo.` established
and managed pan-Yoruba structures such as the political as-
sociation Afenifere and political parties Action Group and
Unity Party of Nigeria. Awol o. wo.` sustained this agency until
AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 118, No. 2, pp. 411465, ISSN 0002-7294, online ISSN 1548-1433.
Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/aman.12540
his death in 1987; imbued with intelligence, energy, and
integrity, he instilled these virtues in many of
his disciples as the philosophy of his power
cult. To Adebanwi, Awol o. wo.` established modern
Yoruba!
The challenge of sustaining this cult after his death is
a critical issue that forms the second part of Adebanwis
book. How the politics of succession (personal and corpo-
rate) manifested itself in the post-Awo era and the struggles
of Afeniferes continuous hold on Yoruba politics are of par-
ticular interest. The Awol o. wo.` cult was beset by the exclu-
siveness of some political elites of conservative background,
the death in succession of potential Afenifere leaders, and the
polarization of Afenifere. According to Adebanwi, Afenifere
weakened, but the Awol o. wo.` cult was never destroyed.
Because key cult leaders were imperiled by absence of
democratic opportunities for self-actualization of cultural
and political goals of the Yoruba nation in Nigeria (p. 137),
the agency was disillusioned but still attached to the cult.
Nonetheless, there was a reconciliation and reenactment
of the agency when Bola Ige assumed Awol o. wo.` s mantle
of intelligence, energy, and integrity as Awol o. wo.` reincar-
nate. The emergence of a democratic governance inspired
new momentum for elites and agency in Yoruba politics.
New elites emerged with new structures: the political par-
ties Alliance for Democracy and Action Congress of Nigeria,
patterned after Awol o. wo.` s Action Group and Unity Party of
Nigeria. The tentative success of this reinvention of agency
in the 21st century sees Yoruba politics and nation still at-
tached to the Awol o. wo.` cult but deeply polarized by the
structures and elites driving it.
Through the text Adebanwi demonstrates how theories
(elitism and agency) and concepts (corporate agency, the cult
of power, and the reinvention of tradition) played out in the
(re)making of the Yoruba nation and politics. Illustrations
and coherent presentation of data characterize the book as a
masterpiece of anthropology of person and text. Adebanwis
methodology is quite fascinating and demonstrates a perfect
mixture of observations, interviews, and inferences from
archival materials.
Nonetheless, use of the terms (post)colonial and
postcolonial is problematic because the author fails to
C 2016 by the American Anthropological
412 American Anthropologist Vol. 118, No. 2 June 2016
explicate their meanings. Ignoring the effect of non-
Western-educated elites on the construction of elite and
agency in Yoruba politics is also worrisome. Yoruba pol-
itics features non-Western-educated elites playing critical
roles in political patronage as Awol o. wo.` used them mostly
as the last link to the political masses. These elites constitute
agency in their own right. While self-studying is defensi-
ble, the authors closeness to certain structures he studies
and the fact that he was a director of one of these (p. 26)
are worrisome considering the ethics of anthropological re-
search. The book contains a few errors. On page 9, the
The Security Archipelago: Human-Security States, Sexuality
Politics, and the End of Neoliberalism by Paul Amar.
Durham: Duke University Press, 2013. 328 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12572
Maya Mikdashi
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
Paul Amars The Security Archipelago: Human-Security States,
Sexuality Politics, and the End of Neoliberalism accomplishes sev-
eral theoretical and methodological feats through his com-
bination of archival, ethnographic, and fieldwork research.
Amar demonstrates fluency across linguistic and national di-
vides while thinking across and with political science and
political economy, feminist and queer studies, and securiti-
zation studies. The Security Archipelago is a transnational study
of Brazil and Egypt and more specifically of Rio de Janeiro
and Cairo, two megacities that serve as laboratories for inter-
national strategies and technologies of securitization. Amar
asserts that cities are generators of international policy and
theory. This assertion reflects his insistent implosion of East
West binaries as well as his challenge to transnational stud-
ies penchant for routing comparative frameworks through
Western late liberal cities and states. Amar reveals a hu-
man security state system that reformulates the stakes in the
regulation of space, sexuality, race, and gender. He suggests
that a new global order centered in the south, an archipelago
of cities and capital and bodies, is not in the making: it is
already here.
In Amars archipelago bodies that are raced, classed, and
genderedbodies made hypervisible due to global and local
practices of securitization and parahumanitarianismare
sources of danger and desire, pleasure and precarity, and
consumption and waste. The moral panic here is a device
of governmentality that functions through a securitization
that brings together state and parastatal actors. The uses
of sexuality and moral panics tied to gendered and raced
bodies render invisible the structural and enduring nature
of political and economic inequality. In Rio or Cairo, for
author cites John Higley and Michael Burton 2001, but in
the references he cites a 2006 publication. On p. 38, re-
ferring to figure 3, he claims that Awol o. wo.` is shown in
his last decade on earth. But the picture is from March 26,
1950. Figure 3 also fails to correlate with the fact presented
on page 37.
Despite these minor shortcomings, Adebanwis book is
a good and classic work that problematizes elitism and agency
in 20th-century Yoruba politics. It successfully illuminates
Yoruba influences on 21st-century Nigerian politics. Thus I
can recommend it.
example, youth unemployment is framed as less of an
economic threat and more of a security threat. The security
threat posed by urban youth unemployment is articulated,
circulated, and consumed through moral discourses and
moral panics, including panics around sexual harassment and
sexual and gendered respectability. Contradictory forms of
racialized and sexualized parahumans proliferate: someone
whose violation may incite a moral panic in one instance may
become the target of a moral panic in another. The flexible
and proliferating nature of the technologies and targets of
securitization-as-rule accomplishes several feats, including
the stabilization of a sovereign power that is perceived as less
brutal than its military or liberal antecedents. In part this
perception is due to ways that securitizing technologies and
practices are distributed across state and parastatal actors
(in this case private local and transnational companies). No
one escapes the grid of the human security state, or at least
no one can be sure that they have.
Immanent bio- and necro-political forms of control and
sovereignty emerge from the technologies, practices, and
logics of security and sexuality. In these security regimes, the
hypervisibility of racial and sexual difference incubates and
incites practices of criminalization and protectionism both
by masculinist securitized parastatal actors and by the mas-
culinist state itself. The parahumanthe mob of men and
boys who endanger women in Cairo or the upper-class ho-
mosexuals who receive private and police protection in
Rioemerges as a constellation of racial and sexual differ-
ence, pleasure and danger, and local and international pro-
tection and policing (what Amar terms parahumanitarianism).
Amars theorizing of masculinity in an age of securi-
tization offers a new way of studying what he calls global
female insecurity, or what feminist and queer scholars have
long critiqued as the global circulations of liberal femi-
nist and LGBTQ rights discourses and remedies. Technolo-
gies and strategies of rule in the security archipelago are

conversant with, rather than strictly opposed to, transna-
tional discourses on the rights and NGO-ization of local
and global civil society. Deployments of securitization may
fail due to the ingenuity and tenacity of protestors, rev-
olutionaries, or prisonersbut when they do they are
analyzed, reformed, recalibrated, and redeployed else-
where along the archipelago. Intensification across transna-
tional circuits of capital and expertise connects actors and
institutions such as occupying armies, municipal police
forces, privately run incarceration sites, and campus security
forces.
Lest this vision of a securitized and parahuman-
ized transnational terrain seem overwhelming or totalizing,
Amar insists throughout his book that resistance across the
archipelago is consistent, innovative, and sometimes effec-
Zero Hunger: Political Culture and Antipoverty
Policy in Northeast Brazil by Aaron Ansell.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. 256 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12565
Kees Koonings
Utrecht University and CEDLA/University of Amsterdam
Aaron Ansell has written a perceptive ethnography about the
encounters of rural communities in the sertao of northeast
Brazil with the reformist social engineering strategies of the
Brazilian state during the first few years of President Lulas
Workers Partyled government, which came to power in
January 2003. This book offers fascinating insights into how
top-down policies of social reform are appropriated and
redefined by local stakeholders, especially local politicians,
civic leaders, activists, and state technocrats.
Ansell does not claim to assess the results of the so-
cial policies laid out in the backlands of the state of Piau
under the flag of President Lulas Zero Hunger program.
However, he succeeds in conveying the ambivalence of its
impact: failure of the intended germination of cooperative,
hunger-eradicating productive activities and success with
respect to the improvement of the material conditions of
some individual families, the empowerment of women pro-
tagonists in local quilombola (Afro-Brazilian) identity politics,
or the (temporary) neutralization of local political faction-
alism in the selection of beneficiaries of the Food Card and
Bolsa Famlia conditional cash grants.
Rather, the initial claim of the book is a different one: to
unveil the failure of the Brazilian state and its representatives
to break down the hierarchical patronage of local politics
that supposedly stands in the way of the full realization of
citizenship by the peasantry. Ansell argues that the reason for
this failure is the misrepresentation of local political culture
Book Reviews 413
tive. State and parastatal actors are not the only producers of
transnational strategies, technologies, theories, or expertise:
activists, protestors, and social movements are too. In fact,
Amar is at his most compelling when writing about these
sites of resistance, reversal, and innovationfrom prison re-
volts in Rio to the anti-authoritarian and anti-police national
uprising in Egypt. Amars ethnographic flair is on display in
the latter half of the book as he grounds his theoretical and
empirical insights in and from the (often broken and bruised)
bodies on the front lines of the human security state.
The Security Archipelago is a necessary read for anthro-
pologists interested in the Middle East, South America,
transnational anthropology, urban studies, securitization
studies, studies of the state, and, finally, feminist and queer
theory.
by the progressive Zero Hunger state officials. Rather than
being based on exclusionary and disempowering clientelism
(the premise of the officials), local politics is built on what
Ansell calls intimate hierarchies.
I do not doubt that this is an appropriate term to de-
scribe the nature of political transactions in the villages of
the municipality of Passarinho, but I am not convinced
that these hierarchies are in essence egalitarian, as Ansell
claims. For this claim, he first presents a conceptual critique
of the idea that patronage reflects unequal and exclusionary
political practices. He suggests that the political interaction
of intimate hierarchies is egalitarian because both parties to
the exchange (politicians versus villagers) trade equivalent
needs: political and electoral support versus resources,
including money. In doing so, both parties acknowledge
mutual vulnerability: lack of political and electoral support
versus lack of resources. In passing, Ansell dismisses Brazilian
anthropologist Roberto DaMattas seminal work on the un-
equal foundations of personal relations in Brazilian society
as not fitting the contemporary dynamics of patronage
(p. 10).
I think this is not only theoretically untenable (and re-
flects a misreading of DaMattas argument) but also not re-
ally demonstrated in the ethnographic analysis. For instance,
when Ansell describes a campaigning day of Henrique, a
relatively wealthy rancher and shopowner and a candidate
in the 2004 mayoral election, the egalitarian nature of his
encounters with villagers is merely deduced from observed
body language on the street, while the actual encounter with
one family took place behind closed doors and was not com-
mented upon by other villagers (pp. 7275). The apparent
joviality of Henrique may well reflect the cloaking of power
414 American Anthropologist Vol. 118, No. 2 June 2016
differentials in a display of cordiality meant to mediate asym-
metrical relations in a setting of face-to-face encounters.
Fortunately, the question of whether intimate hierar-
chies are egalitarian is not key to the real contribution made
by the study. In my view, this lies in Ansells insights into the
mechanisms of state making in the margins, which he shows
to be a complex process of claim making and negotiating
through the lens of conflicting and overlapping subjectivities.
Ansell dissects the Zero Hunger program officials identifi-
cation with a romanticized past of rural solidarity that guides
their interventions in the villages. He then defines three
strategies used to implement the Zero Hunger program.
Each of these strategies reflects specific constructs of polit-
ical culture. Antipoverty programs in the sertao generate
change through the conversations between state defenders
of progressive public citizenship and the personalist ethos of
villagers and local power brokers.
As far as methodological, epistemic, and ethical chal-
lenges are concerned, I want to make two closing observa-
Sherds of History: Domestic Life in Colonial Guadeloupe
by Myriam Arcangeli.
Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2015. 226 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12578
Guido Pezzarossi
Syracuse University
Ceramic artifacts are a critical element of the practice of ar-
chaeology, and Myriam Arcangelis analysis of colonial-era
ceramics on the island of Guadeloupe provides a masterful
example of the diverse insights that archaeological ceramic
analyses can facilitate. Through a reinterpretation of the ce-
ramic culture concept (pp. 14), this book investigates how
colonists, Creoles, and enslaved individuals either as pur-
chasers or users shaped the roles ceramics played in colonial
life on Guadeloupe (pp. 45).
Arcangeli carries out this analysis through a variety of
datasets (e.g., paintings and novels), among which the two
most prominent are the analysis of nearly two thousand
ceramic sherds from four distinct urban archaeological con-
texts excavated as part of cultural resource management
activities and a vast database of Guadeloupean probate
records spanning the period from 1770 to the 1830s from
both urban and rural contexts that describe more than
twenty thousand ceramic objects. While the abundant sites
and inventories used provide an inclusive cross section
of Guadeloupes Creole society, their sheer number,
coupled with a lack of data visualizations of any kind to help
summarize and organize the data, makes following data
patterns described in the text difficult at times.
tions. The first has to do with ethnographic interpretation.
At some points, Ansell engages in too thick description in
lengthy conceptualized vignettes when a posterior shared
reflection with protagonists might have lent more depth to
the interpretation of events. An example is the imputation of
nostalgia in observed encounters between officials and locals
based on terminology cited from Michael Herzfeld rather
than on follow-up interviews with the participating villagers
(p. 115).
Second, Ansell explicitly reports his active interference
in local affairs, sometimes at the behest of informants or local
friends, sometimes apparently of his own accord. In itself,
this explicitness is no problem but is, rather, commendable
because it is part and parcel of ethnography as an engaged
and highly personal research methodology. However, I do
feel that Ansell could have offered more reflection on the
consequences for his position in the field and how this inter-
ference might have informed his interpretation of intimate
hierarchies.
The archaeological deposits analyzed carry the ex-
pected challenges of CRM orphaned collections that are
excavated quickly and subsequently forgotten. Provenience
and metadata are lacking, providing only aggregate de-
posits of long and varied occupations with little potential
for diachronic analysis. Despite these limitations, Arcangeli
employs multiple complementary datasets to illuminate the
full behavior chains (cadenas) of ceramics while emphasizing
how ceramic artifacts were actually used in practice rather
than overstating the assumed uses and meanings of globally
circulating ceramic wares.
After a brief introduction, chapter 2 provides impor-
tant historical background for the island of Guadeloupe
and details the archaeological contexts, collections, and
documentary sources analyzed. In addition, information
on the demography of sampled probate inventories (e.g.,
racial classifications, wealth categories, and occupations) is
detailed.
Chapter 3 is an exciting contribution to historical ce-
ramic analyses with an analysis of ceramic artifacts critical
to water management practices within the home. This
work nicely connects to anthropological discussions of the
differing conceptions of and care for bodies and health in
colonial contexts, in this case particularly as carried out
by individuals and households rather than by broader
colonial administrations within the water-rich context
of Guadeloupe. Issues of race and class inequity and the
undermining of colonial authority emerge in Arcangelis

rich and unique analysis of the politics of water access,
water-related detriments to health, and the creative ceramic
practices employed to navigate these conditions.
Chapter 4 draws on inventories, ceramic vessel forms,
and use wear to examine the role and agency of over-
looked yet highly valued enslaved women cooks. These
powerless cooks, working in separate, minimally outfitted
kitchens, are argued to have become powerful contributors
and creative intermediaries to the emergence and develop-
ment of Guadeloupe-specific Creole cooking, cuisine, and
eating practices.
Chapter 5 shifts from cooking and food production
to food consumption and thus from cooking vessels to table-
wares and the entertaining practices to which they were cen-
tral. Arcangeli details ceramic decoration styles and vessel
forms that will serve as critical resources for future compar-
ative analyses of tablewares in Caribbean and Guadeloupean
contexts. Furthermore, she delves into important differ-
ences between Guadeloupean and French ceramic practices.
The archaeology and inventories from Guadeloupe in general
show similarities to households in France, yet with a greater
percentage of the population of Guadeloupe appearing to
have participated in more formal dining practices and meal
presentations via the medium of ceramic tablewares (p. 111).
Such observations go hand in hand with architectural
and furniture-related inventory entries that show that
compared to Parisian residences, Guadeloupean house-
holds appeared to have been more purposefully designed
to accommodate frequent organized dining events
(p. 135). Arcangeli infers that a greater emphasis on social
Social Identities in the Classic Maya Northern Lowlands:
Gender, Age, Memory, and Place by Traci Ardren.
Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015. 222 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12566
Brigitte Kovacevich
University of Central Florida
Traci Ardren uses the concept of the social imaginary to
gain a more nuanced understanding of Classic-period Maya
social identities. Chapters include investigations into ur-
ban imaginaries, reinvention of past imaginaries, the social
imaginary of childhood, and gendered imaginaries. These
diverse topics are relevant to all readers interested in the
construction of social identity. Although she focuses on ar-
chaeological data from her extensive experience at the Clas-
sic Maya northern lowland sites of Yaxuna, Chunchucmil,
and Xuenkal, Ardren also includes diverse social exam-
ples and demonstrates connections to Maya descendant
communities.
Book Reviews 415
dining, feasting, and reciprocity would have served to
build networks and establish or cement relationships as well
as police racialized divisions within Creole society.
Chapter 6 provides an insightful analysis of health-
and hygiene-related ceramic practices as inferred from the
presence and ubiquity of hygiene-related ceramic artifacts. In
this analysis, Arcangeli notes a greater emphasis on cleanli-
ness and presentation of the body and self in Guadeloupe
compared to France, based on the greater numbers of
and importance given to grooming wares such as barber
bowls (p. 145).
Chapter 7, a short conclusion, is a too brief theoriz-
ing about the agency of cooks, with a lack of theoretical
grounding and some missed opportunities to connect this
work to broader anthropological conversations. It would
have been helpful if Arcangeli had expanded both upon her
statement related to the greater importance of ceramics or
the centrality of ceramic culture in the colony compared
to French contexts (p. 179) and upon her argument that ce-
ramic and inventory analyses of the sort presented shed light
on some of the most disenfranchised elements of Creole so-
ciety (p. 180), which this book most certainly does.
In short, Arcangeli provides scholars with a trove of
insights into the variety of Guadeloupes ceramic-related
practices from water management to cooking, eating, and
grooming and their similarities and differences across class
and race divides and between colony and metropole that will
resonate for ceramic analyses, future studies of Guadeloupe,
and broader comparative analyses of colonial contexts across
the globe.
The concept of the social imaginary has not been widely
applied in archaeology, but Ardren argues that it is a useful
approach because of its focus on contingent change as a result
of human actors who make conscious and strategic choices.
She draws on the work of Charles Taylor to define the social
imaginary as the way that individuals imagine and create
their own existence and experience a sense of communion
and membership in that social creation.
In chapter 2 Ardren addresses the urban imaginary at
Chunchucmil. She looks at circulations to demonstrate how
social and economic exchanges served to construct a so-
cial imaginary that was fluid and changing. For example,
she shows that mid-level elites incorporated exotic objects
acquired through these circulations into everyday practice
when they needed a different language of power. This social
imaginary emphasized external connections but didnt reject
local traditions, showing that circulations are a mechanism
416 American Anthropologist Vol. 118, No. 2 June 2016
by which the social imaginary can be constituted and main-
tained. Residents may have been drawn to this city for just
that reason, because it may have had a culture of commer-
cialism that lent itself to reframing and negotiating social
identity.
Chapter 3 examines collapse from the perspective
of social memory and the reinvention of social identity.
Ardren found that activity at the site of Yaxuna after the
collapse focused on shrines near Classic-period monuments.
She demonstrates that there was no residential activity at
Yaxuna because the former leaders had become part of the
social imaginary of another powerful city, yet the social
imaginary of Yaxuna was still actively recreated and nested.
She argues that the new identity had to be performed to be
operational, creating continuity and survival. This was facil-
itated by the social memory of victories and glory but also by
forgetting or reframing defeats. She asks whether inhabitants
of postcollapse cities remembered or forgot Classic-period
institutions, and the answer appears to be both.
The fourth chapter focuses on the social imaginary of
childhood, which is often assumed to be biologically deter-
mined. Ardren demonstrates through burial patterns and
grave goods that children at Xuenkal and other communities
were considered equal to adults and not as lesser or par-
tial persons. She points out that partial child burials were
often incorporated into offerings after circulation among
the living, as were precious materials like jade, incense, or
shell. She argues that this context suggests that children were
viewed as having power and connections to the afterlife sim-
ilar to those of other precious substances. Ardren shows the
existence of personhood in objects among the Classic-period
Maya, and it becomes apparent that certain social imaginaries
can incorporate an understanding of some beings, material
or human, as numinous.
Cultivating the Nile: The Everyday Politics of Water in Egypt
by Jessica Barnes.
Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. 248 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12587
Rania K. Sweis
University of Richmond
In Cultivating the Nile: The Everyday Politics of Water in Egypt,
Jessica Barnes offers a unique and ethnographically rich ac-
count of how Egypts infamous Nile waters are made by
a range of actorsfrom farmers to local administrators to
technocrats to international donorsthrough a variety of
complex social and political practices spanning irrigation,
drainage, pumping, and diversion. Barnes presents readers
with a multiscaled account of how we should think about
Chapter 5 asks: What artifacts and practices made gen-
der self-evident to the Classic Maya? Ardren makes a good
case for gendered spaces based on contact-period writings
that depict gender-specific activities in particular architec-
tural settings and corroborates this with material culture. She
argues for the domestic not as a space strictly for womens
activities but as a representation of or metaphor for idealized
femaleness. She discusses possible archaeological examples
of public mens houses and makes an explicit link with hege-
monic masculinity, civic and ceremonial architecture, and
privilege. She points out that the complementarity between
mens and womens spaces reflected the metaphor of so-
cial reciprocity and that these two imaginaries were sepa-
rate, yet closely intertwined, and had to be cultivated and
maintained.
In the end, Ardren achieves her three primary objec-
tives. She uses relational archaeology to investigate relation-
ships of power in the past. I can see this approach having
broader applications, including further investigating social
imaginaries of elites and commoners and how these groups
differentially experienced collapse or hegemonic masculin-
ity. Second, she uses archaeological case studies to demon-
strate how patterned material culture helps create social
identities and how they are shared and manipulated within
the framework of the social imaginary, which could cer-
tainly have further applications including nested political
affiliations and ethnicities. Finally, Ardren presents primary
data from sites in the northern Maya lowlands that are valu-
able and relevant to Mesoamerican studies. By the end of
the book, the reader senses that the social imaginary ap-
proach allows for more freedom and creativity among ac-
tors than do traditional practice-based approaches, which can
tend to focus more on constraining factors and conservative
behaviors.
Egypts water in new waysas not only a substance that
is acted upon by humans but as an agent in and of itself
with unique material qualities that invariably shape human
experiences and relationships.
Water, in this study, is the primary ethnographic ob-
ject. Readers become intimately familiar with its chemical
features, its social life as it flows from the highlands of
East Africa into Egypt, and its critical role in contemporary
Egyptian and regional politics. Readers will learn how it
is redirected and manipulated according to politically pro-
duced conditions of scarcity and excess, and how Egyptian
farmers and management experts understand its social effects
(as in the term mafish mai, no water) and ascribe meaning to

its agency and heterogeneous character (mai mumilih, salty
water, as opposed to mai hilu, good water).
Early on, Barnes asks the fundamental question that
frames the entire book: What is Egypts water? Her main
argument stipulates that Egypts water resources are not a
given but are made through daily practices of accessing, mon-
itoring, and manipulating. Water, therefore, is an outcome
of social, biophysical, technical and political processes that
produce particular quantity and quality characteristics in any
given time and place (p. 3). Barnes conducted 14 months of
ethnographic fieldwork to access the everyday practices of
making water in sites where it is managed and used, such as
global water conferences, water user associations, and farm-
land in the agricultural province of Fayoum. Drawing on
literature in anthropology, political ecology, and technology
studies, Barnes uses a multiscaled and multisited ethno-
graphic approach that links decisions made by international
donors, government officials, and technocrats to farmers
and their families. The local, national, and international are
masterfully woven together in this book, enabling a needed
analysis of water and water politics in the contemporary
Middle East.
In chapter 1, The End of a River, readers are intro-
duced to the Nile waters and their primary role in cultivat-
ing Egyptian land, past and present. Chapter 2, The Niles
Nadir, focuses on the key theme of water scarcity as well as
waters material nature and propensity to erode the channels
it passes through. In chapters 3 and 4, Fluid Governance
Electric Santera: Racial and Sexual Assemblages of
Transnational Religion by Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesus.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. 304 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12553
Diana Esprito Santo
Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile
Aisha Beliso-De Jesus begins her narrative with the story
of Padrino Alfredo Calvo Cano, her spiritual godfather
in Cuba, a high priest of legendary renown among San-
tera (Ocha) circuits in Matanzas, a prolifically productive
(with more than seven hundred initiations to his name) one
at that, and a transatlantic traveler, according to the author
(p. xii). Yet like most Cubans, he has never left the island at
all. The author returns again to her padrino at the end of the
bookwhere she describes his death ritualsto close the
(open) circle of the camino (path) he seems to have inspired
in her. Its a camino where what Beliso-De Jesus calls
co-presences electrify through bodies, televisual media,
and the transnational movements of persons and things,
reconfiguring the global oricha-scape (orichas are Cuban-
Book Reviews 417
and Irrigating the Desert, Deserting the Irrigated, we gain
a transnational perspective on water governance through an
analysis of water user associations and local land irrigation
practices. In each chapter, Barnes carefully highlights the
creative technopolitical practices through which individual
actors mold the contours of the Nile in order to access water
as well as the ways in which these practices are intimately
tied to identity and social hierarchies. The final ethnographic
chapter, Flows of Drainage, follows the movement of wa-
ter from canals to soil, revealing problematic points of water
excess and how these map onto economic inequality and
structural violence.
Most impressive in this book is Barness deployment of
diverse methodologies to tell the story of water scale, such
as tables, charts, maps, firsthand photographs, and ethno-
graphic data including observations and interviews. While
we do not get an intimate traditional ethnographic perspec-
tive into the social worlds of farmers in their households, we
do understand how waterthe central object under obser-
vation in this bookand farmers as well as engineers and
technocrats are deeply intertwined with each other in fields
and deserts, government offices, and global water confer-
ences. In this respect, Barness book is a fresh and innovative
addition to the study of inequality, globalization, and Egypt.
Scholars and students in a range of academic disciplines will
find Cultivating the Nile valuable due to its focus on timely
questions of the humannonhuman and the politicalnatural
worlds.
Yoruba gods). Co-presences are not merely spirits of
the dead, African-inspired saints, and other numinous
invisible entities of the Afro-Cuban spiritual pantheon that
manifest through technologytraditional (divination)
or otherwise (videos, DVDs, Internet, music). They are also
these very same technological and living human media that
mobilize ontologies of presence in particular and peculiar
ways. Co-presences enable ontological contiguities and par-
allel histories to take form: Beliso-De Jesus talks of twisting,
entangled, dispersed, and diffracted rhizomatic assem-
blages (p. 13) rather than imagined communities or even
imaginaries. She does not want to partition Santera into
global or local aspects but instead to follow and analytically
describe its ontology of movement and its effects, prag-
matically. Indeed, nowhere in the text are terms denoting
static and transcendent conceptions of cosmos.
In all five of the books chapters, Beliso-De Jesus fights
against several notions, two of which deserve elaboration
here. The first is that there is an original source of
418 American Anthropologist Vol. 118, No. 2 June 2016
African-inspired religious orthodoxy that is extended, dis-
torted, or reconfigured in transnational contexts. Santera
is probably Cubas best-known religious practice of African
inspiration. Since the islands post-Soviet era began in the
early 1990s, Santera has seen a boom in interest from
foreigners and nationals alike, which has implied that it has
traveled globally. But it cannot be described in the singular
(as only one thing) or independently of other cults (Palmie
2013). Indeed, as the author describes, Santera was itself
produced by cosmopolitan religious circuits among Nigeria,
Cuba, Brazil, and others well into the 20th century (p. 197),
and in a contemporary setting it has competing ritual models
that initiates can follow. But these are not dead debates. On
the one hand, Beliso-De Jesus delves into what have been
inherently controversial gender and sexuality debates, espe-
cially contested heteronormativities in disputes over female
initiations and homosexuality more broadly. On the other
hand, links with Africa are not given but are constantly re-
made in discourse and practice. Rather, she argues, Santera
is both raced and gendered in multiple subjective, nationalist,
and political ways by its actors, Cuban or otherwise. This
extends to ontologies of the senses and the production
of social spaces and distinctionssmells and tastes, for
instance.
The second notion is that thingsvisual and au- ing. This book is a major breakthrough in the conceptualiza-
ditory media, Internet technology, sacred stones, bod-
ies, and so onserve to represent or mediate spir- or not.
its and deities. But Beliso-De Jesus, like others who have
worked with Afro-Cuban religions (Ochoa 2010), argues
that concepts of mediation turn on Christian cosmologies
that are hardly appropriate in Cubas context of profound
spiritual immanence. Here is where this books elegance re-
sides. Beliso-De Jesus understands videos and other me-
dia productsfor example, those recorded by godchildren
in Cuba during initiations and taken to the United States
not as referents to something that has already occurred but as
living, pulsating spiritual currents whose effects are ontolog-
ical rather than merely epistemological. These technologies
Under Bright Lights: Gay Manila and the Global Scene
by Bobby Benedicto.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. 248 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12589
Christina Verano Carter
Appalachian State University
Bobby Benedictos ethnographic project Under Bright Lights is
an original and theoretically fluid work about an emergent
scene, the bright lights scene, comprising gay and privi-
enable the expansion of Santera fluidity (p. 36), creating
electrifying embodiments, spirit possession even, and onto-
logical proximities with co-presences scattered in time and
space. Electronic and telecommunicational animisms have
a long history stemming back to 19th-century spiritualism
(Sconce 2000). But Beliso-De Jesus does something different
with these animations. She follows the multiple caminos and
movements of spectral co-presences to understand how dif-
ferent Santera assemblages are put together in a transna-
tional setting as well as how geontologies are produced
affectively, drawing on a host of registers including race,
gender, sexuality, and nation.
This book is apparently about transnationalism, an
increasingly trendy theme in the contemporary study
of religion. But in contrast to the bulk of the literature
encapsulated within this trend, Beliso-De Jesus refuses to
separate things here inseparablehistories from stories,
pasts from present(s), spirits from objects, material from
immaterial, media from presence, heres from theres
(p. 216), representation from reality. Her rejection of the
transcendentalism (and representationalism) so tediously
implicit in most transnational religion (and media) studies
is sophisticated and bold, giving this text its theoretically
multiregistered and ethnographically sensual foot-
tion of transnational religious ontologies, be they in Cuba
REFERENCES CITED
Ochoa, Todd R.
2010 Society of the Dead: Quita Manaquita and Palo Praise in
Cuba. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Palmie, Stephan
2013 The Cooking of History: How Not to Study Afro-Cuban
Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Sconce, Jeffrey
2000 Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to
Television. Durham: Duke University Press.
leged men in Manila in the early 2000s. Overall, the book is
a vital contribution to writing about the urban lifeworld of
21st-century Manila, globalization, transnationalism, sexu-
ality in the postcolony, urban anthropology, and Southeast
Asia.
The bright lights scene for Benedicto is not a bounded
object or place of anthropological arrival and study, although
Manila is its main spatiotemporal locus. The reader is invited

along with members of the bright lights scene to a series of
automobile rides, plane trips, conversations with scenesters
old and new, bars, clubs, private homes, airport lounges,
and Internet portals. Taking a cue from Kathleen Stewart on
writing ethnographic affects and worlding (2007), Benedicto
portrays Manilas elite gay scene as a dreamwork assemblage
of spaces that are on the move, virtual, exclusive, or imagined
as an elsewhere that is anywhere but Manila, seeking to
rise above or escape from what he terms the noisy matter
of Manilas diminished standing in the global hierarchy as
a third world city (p. 3). In the fantasy-world making
of this much desired yet thwarted modern and global gay
elsewhere, Benedicto underscores the complicity of bright
lights scenesters in the maintenance of neoliberal orders and
regimes of social violence at home in Manila. For Benedicto,
elite gay and queer subjects in and of the third world city are
a knotty transnational entity that when at home pursues the
dreams of a privileged native and by contrast when abroad
experiences, recalling Frantz Fanon, alienation and shame
when called out as a racialized other.
Arguably the most compelling figure in the book is
the city of Manila itself. To this reader, who has lived in
Manila, Benedictos language arouses the felt experience of
a city that for writers such as the peripatetic philosopher
Alphonso Lingis (who is mentioned in the text) instills feel-
ings that oscillate between attraction and repulsion (1994).
However, for Benedicto, it is by way of Paul Virilios work
on speed and perception (1997), Michael Taussigs nervous
system (1992), or Dilip Gaonkar and Elizabeth Povinellis
ethnographies of form (2003) that his writing about the
city emerges. Initially, Benedicto generates the sensations
and contours of the scenes topography by attending to the
privilege and means of mobility itselfthe luxury of private
automobiles that allow bright lights members the speed,
enclosure, or distance to imagine that they can assert their
class distinction from the infamous traffic snarls of Manilas
teeming streets. Thus, desiring-machinic-mobility and dis-
tance constitute a structuring feature of the scene. The play
of nearness and farness resonates throughout, as Benedicto
artfully illuminates how the signs and images of this global
elsewhere come to roost in the urban landscape as Michel
Serress angels (1995) or as messengers of things from
afar (pp. 4546). Thus, as the reader tags along for nights
out between the ultramodern yet deserted climes of the
commercial hub called Global City and the once-upon-a-
time fashionable district of Cubao, place or event names and
imagery materialize the dream of this fantastic elsewhere
in the midst of squalor and poverty, rendering the possi-
bility of transformation or indexing failed visions of global
modernity.
Book Reviews 419
Across the book, the most provocative moments are the
skillfully narrated ethnographic scenes where the dream of
the bright lights scene is disrupted, haunted by gay specters
associated with the lower classes (the bakla, parlorista) or
by the global gay travelers anxiety over being misrecog-
nized abroad as an overseas foreign worker (the OFW)
or careworker, a crystalline shock (p. 116) as the rigor-
ously policed class borders of home collapse within spaces
of transit.
No doubt Benedicto writes of the bright lights scene
with some tough love, a critical stance formulated through
Lauren Berlants cruel optimism (2011) and one that carves
out the narrative space to make visible the dreamwork and
violent contradictions of global modernist aspirations in the
21st-century postcolony. This reader is left wondering about
other ways that this elite scenester formation might engage
with the multiplicity of scenes, signs, hierarchies, subjec-
tivities, and political investments that do not participate in
its precarious world-making project. In particular, as a foil
to toughness, I wonder how Benedicto might cast the more
tender moments when hierarchies of class, gender, and race
slacken and crystallize as love or other ways of relating within
the dream of the global gay scene, thereby adding dimension
to the writing of this unfinished world (Stewart 2008).
In all, however, Benedictos text is a stunning and lyrical
piece of writing in the ficto-critical mode, and his effort to
craft more than a good enough story of gay life in Manila,
but an immersive fiction of being something that feels like
something (p. 23) is a landmark offering and a marvelous
achievement.
REFERENCES CITED
Berlant, Lauren Gail
2011 Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press.
Gaonkar, Dilip Parameshwar, and Elizabeth A. Povinelli
2003 Technologies of Public Forms: Circulation, Transfiguration,
Recognition. Public Culture 15(3):385397.
Lingis, Alphonso
1994 Abuses. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Serres, Michel
1995 Angels: A Modern Myth. Paris: FlammarionP`ere Castor.
Stewart, Kathleen
2007 Ordinary Affects. Durham: Duke University Press.
2008 Weak Theory in an Unfinished World. Journal of Folklore
Research 45(1):7182.
Taussig, Michael
1992 The Nervous System. New York: Routledge.
Virilio, Paul
1997 Open Sky. New York: Verso.
420 American Anthropologist Vol. 118, No. 2 June 2016
Cultural Models: Genesis, Methods, and Experiences by
Giovanni Bennardo and Victor C. de Munck.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. 336 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12542
Maurice Bloch
London School of Economics and Political Science
This book is a new presentation of a type of research and
theory that has best been argued for by Roy DAndrade,
Naomi Quinn, and Claudia Strauss in a number of publica-
tions going back to at least the 1970s. Much of the book is a
review of work done in that tradition. The aim of this tra-
dition is to discover how culture as a mental phenomenon
leads people to produce the culture that an anthropologist
can observe from behavior including linguistic phenomena.
Trying to understand this link between the inside and the
outside clearly lies at the core of the anthropological project.
The way to do this, supported by Bennardo and de Munck
and the other scholars they endorse, is more specific. It
assumes not only that there is a culture to be found in
peoples nervous system but that this culture is made up
of distinguishable units (mental models) that people absorb
from each other and that these then guide their actions in
similar ways. This absorption makes people recognizable as
members of a culture.
The book consists of a first part tracing the development
of this theory through a rather ecumenical sweep of the his-
tory of the human sciences in which all kinds of authors from
Kant to Levi-Strauss to Chomsky are presented as though
their work prepared the way for the mental model view.
This is followed by a discussion of methods for discover-
ing and analyzing mental models. The second part of the
book consists of a worldwide tour of different cultures or
culture areas for which work on mental models is to be
found in the literature. Finally, there is a chapter on the
use of the culture model theory for applied anthropology in
such things as development and business. It seems, however,
that for this second half of the book a strict use of the idea
of a cultural model has been abandoned and what is being
considered is the simple proposition that culture matters.
It is strange that the two authors seem unaware of the
fundamental criticisms of the terms on which they rely.
They mention these difficulties but quickly move on. The
foundational authors of the tradition seemed much more
aware of the challenge. For example, what the word mind
refers to is here taken to be largely unproblematic in most of
the book. How the mind that the authors take for granted
relates to what we know of actual neural activity is not dis-
cussed. The implied learning process of mental models seems
for the authors to be simply a matter of smooth absorption,
and they do not refer to the huge recent literature on cogni-
tive development in psychology. Furthermore, what is his-
torically specific in the mental models of the book and what
is linked to other factors such as the general predispositions
of our species are not discussed. The much-discussed prob-
lematic character of what older U.S. anthropology meant
by culture and cultures is not touched on. The authors
talk of members of a culture as though this was a club.
Of course, the problem of the program assumes that an-
thropologists have access to the workings of the mind and
brain, and therefore this is hypothesized from precisely the
data to which the authors want to link. In fact, there is hardly
any discussion of evidence for the modular character of what
is stored in the mind.
The suppression of these difficult questions seems
linked to the methods proposed for discovering mental
models. Although other methods are mentioned, the only
ones for which we have any details concern the frequency
of words linked to mental models that are assumed to
exist as distinct entities. Thus we have a comparison of the
mental model for romantic love to be found in the heads
of Lithuanians and North Americans that is based on the
frequency of words used by both groups. Such a method
raises difficult questions about recent work on the relation
of words to thought and concepts that the authors here do
not seem to consider.
The same lack of precision is found in the discussion
of culture areas. For example, the discussion of African
cultural models focuses on the word ubuntu (presumably
pan-African concept, p. 213), found in a number of Bantu
languages. For Bennardo and de Munck this term seems
to indicate a distinctly African concept or mental model,
although, even in the work of the authors quoted, it is clear
that, as a lexical item at least, it means different things in
different places. Even more surprising is the fact that many of
the peoples considered in somewhat more detail (Hai//om,
Mursi, Maasai) do not speak Bantu languages.
The time has come for a critical review of the mental
model tradition in light of recent research in psychology,
neurology, and anthropology. Then we will be able to take
stock of both what is still valuable and what must be modified,
rethought, or abandoned. This book does not do that.

Upriver: TheTurbulent Life and Times of an Amazonian
People by Michael F. Brown.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014. 336 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12577
Maria Amalia Pesantes
Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia
Upriver is a book about the anthropological endeavor: its
challenges, its uncertainties, its possibility of saying some-
thing about other peoples lives and the relevance of
doing it. In part 1 Michael Brown narrates his experi-
ence as a young PhD student conducting ethnographic
fieldwork among Awajun in the Peruvian Amazon and
shares the lessons he learned. This section stresses the
importance of recognizing the limits of our knowledge
and the importance of humility when we interpret our find-
ings. Brown retrospectively analyzes the process of iden-
tifying the community where he would conduct his re-
search and the hardship of learning a new language and
conducting ethnographic research. One of his major find-
ings was that the training anthropologists receive in class-
rooms will never be enough to prepare us to what we will
encounter in the field (p. 41). Brown recounts his deci-
sion to change his research topic (due to the elusiveness
of Lamistas) and the disheartening realization that the place
he had selected was not appropriate for collecting relevant
data. Eventually, by both a stroke of luck and his persistence,
he was able to arrive at Huascayacu, where he spent the first
months of his research among Awajun.
Brown openly describes the various emotions he
endured throughout his fieldwork, showing that conduct-
ing ethnographic research is not a smooth process but rather
one that is at times frustrating, disappointing, and even bor-
ing. Most anthropologists who have embarked on similar
projects will relate to his accounts. Eventually, the young
Brown realizes that just being therejust showing up way we choose to report our findings. How to write about
was probably the most important methodological tool at
hand. Being there, he explains, paid off in small epiphanies,
disconnected and ambiguous, that eventually helped him
better understand local perceptions of the rain forest and its
creatures (p. 94). Browns fieldwork experience is narrated
as a rite of passage that made him face the limitations of an-
thropological training, theories, and methods. Data are not
just out there waiting to be collected by the shrewd an-
thropologist; they are sometimes shreds and patches of
Book Reviews 421
information that the anthropologist will have to work
with later, without the certainty that the data collected will
enable him or her to describe a coherent system intelligible
to others.
Part 2 not only transports us to the 21st century but
offers us reflections about another key element of anthro-
pological work: the importance of understanding and writ-
ing about the broader social, political, and economic con-
text in which the people we are studying live. Sometimes
anthropological accounts of indigenous people fail to ac-
knowledge that their actions are in dialogue with broader na-
tional and international dynamics. In Peru, this decontextu-
alized study of indigenous life and culture was at the root
of Orin Starns critique of Andeanists in his article Miss-
ing the Revolution: Anthropologists and the War in Peru
(1991). In it, he discusses the reasons behind anthropol-
ogists failure to realize the Shining Paths presence and
the inequalities that affected the people they were eagerly
studying. In this sense, part 2 helps the reader unfamil-
iar with Perus current developments vis-`a-vis indigenous
rights to contextualize the changes found by Brown in
Alto Mayo 20 years later. Based on in-depth interviews
with young Awajun university students and Awajun po-
litical leaders, Brown explains that the evident desire for
literacy that he encountered among Awajun people was a
response to a changing world where being literate and ed-
ucated will enable them to be less vulnerable to the fast-
growing economic interests that affect control over their
territories.
In this second part, Brown also reflects upon anthropo-
logical research beyond his personal experience. He broad-
ens the scope of his analysis of anthropological work and
brings to the discussion issues about responsibility in the
change in indigenous communities? Is saying that they are
losing their indigenousness through the incorporation
of foreign values an appropriate way of analyzing this situa-
tion? Brown addresses these questions and explains the limi-
tations of what he calls politically engaged approaches that,
he argues, force anthropologists to portray some as victims
and others as heroes of the penetration of new cultural values
into indigenous lives. In a way, he is warning anthropologists
against romantic portrayals of indigenous people because we
422 American Anthropologist Vol. 118, No. 2 June 2016
think our role is to support their cause. Browns conclu-
sion reconnects the arguments presented at the beginning of
his book, where he discusses the limitations of anthropology
to fully explain the processes that occur among people from
other cultures. His recognition of such limitations does not
mean that anthropology is not an endeavor worth pursu-
ing. On the contrary, for Brown, documenting the lives of
Magic: A Theory from the South by Ernesto de Martino
Dorothy Louise Zinn, trans.
Chicago: HAU Books, 2015. 160 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12541
Maurizio Albahari
University of Notre Dame
To be superstitious might be naive, but not to be supersti-
tious brings bad luck. Ernesto de Martinos Magic: A Theory
from the South helps illuminate the continuing cultural pur-
chase, beyond any local confine, of such a disposition. It is a
thought-provoking work that questions the shifting bound-
aries between south and north, naive and learned, magic
and religion. Originally published in 1959 in Italian and now
available in Dorothy Zinns precise translation, the book is
part of the trilogy that makes de Martino (19081965) a
seminal figure at the intersection of folklore, ethnology, and
the historical and philosophical study of religion.
Zinn comes to this task having previously translated
de Martinos equally influential The Land of Remorse (2005,
originally published in 1961), centered on Apulian tarantism
(introduced in the appendix to Magic). She illuminates de
Martinos academic context and his usage of standard and
nonstandard Italian, reflecting the works ethnographic focus
on the southern region of Basilicata.
Especially in the early pages of de Martinos preface,
readers will need to trust Zinn when she notes that de
Martino did not subscribe to the evolutionist framework
(p. xii n.1), even if he uses tropes of survival, backwardness,
and civilization. Indeed, de Martino offers a dynamic
understanding of culture and a self-reflective critical
approach. For example, he argues that when religious
folklore appears as a jumble of relics, this is likely due
to ethnographic analyses that abstract folklore from the
living whole of a particular society (p. xv). The rest of
the book keeps this early promise of a holistic approach. It
situates magical practices and formulas within the relevant
socioeconomic and political environment.
Part 1 presents substantial documentary material, with
parallel English and original texts, on Basilicatas low cer-
emonial magic (p. xiv). This includes both the fundamen-
others is important and relevant in ways that are often hard
to imagine.
REFERENCE CITED
Starn, Orin
1991 Missing the Revolution: Anthropologists and the War in
Peru. Cultural Anthropology 6(1):6391.
tal concern with interpersonal binding (characterizing love
spells, pregnancy, mothers milk, and childhood) and prac-
tices more specifically associated with peasant labor. While
each chapter integrates de Martinos brief commentary, it is
in part 2 that the author analyzes magical protection more
fully. By expanding on the psychological scholarship of Pierre
Janet and by combining originally the influence of Georg
Hegel, Martin Heidegger, Benedetto Croce, and Antonio
Gramsci, de Martino traces a psychologically functional-
ist paradigm. At liminal, precarious, and otherwise critical
junctures in their lives, those who are kept in inferior po-
sitions look for a protected regime of existence that is
beneficial both as it shelters from chaotic eruptions of the
unconscious and as it veils what is happening and allows
one to be in history as if he werent in it (p. 95).
Beyond its specific merits and relevance to scholarship
on magic, religion, and medical and psychological anthro-
pology, de Martinos perspective destabilizes simplistic di-
chotomies, including those between rationality and magic
and between magic and religion. In particular, he illumi-
nates the magical tone of southern Catholicism (p. 178)
and the well-documented coexistence and overlaps between
Catholic practice and magical invocations. More broadly, he
expands the scope of village-bound ethnography, foreshad-
owing the critical turn of English-speaking anthropology.
Thus, the book speaks to scholars interested in how struc-
tural violence, authoritarian discretion, and injustice (the
lasting power of the negative and the uninterrupted pres-
sure of uncontrollable forcesbe they natural or social)
translate into the unequally distributed precariousness of
elementary goods for survival and insecurity of prospects
(p. 186).
The author delves into the presumed limits of southern
Italian intellectuals critique of traditional religion. Here de
Martinos approach might err on the side of elitism (but
needs to be contextualized within Fascist and post-Fascist
Italy, with the important public role of figures such as
Croce and Pasolini). Nevertheless, it speaks to the ongo-
ing complications of the nexus between subaltern cultural

practices and hegemonic discussions. Additionally, it alerts
us to the stakes of any presumed purification of religion from
embodied religiosity.
Toward the end of the book, de Martino illustrates,
occasionally with entertaining outcomes, the concept and
practice of jettatura (jinx) pervasive among the upper bour-
geoisie. Jettatura, in his understanding, is a Neapolitan for-
mation expressed by Enlightenment thinkers who, unwilling
to live out the choice between magic and reason in all se-
riousness . . . kept to a compromise between seriousness
and facetiousness (p. 170). Its not true, but I believe it
(p. 152) is the phrase that captures such a disposition.
One may ask whether as 21st-century anthropologists
we are radically removed from the facetious ambiguity
(p. 186) of these Neapolitan lawyers, judges, courtesans,
Small-Language Fates and Prospects: Lessons
of Persistence and Change from Endangered Languages:
Collected Essays by Nancy C. Dorian.
Leiden: Brill, 2014. 476 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12588
Tok Thompson
University of Southern California
This book is a compendium of 23 individual essays (plus a
29-page introduction) by linguist Nancy Dorian spanning six
decades, all focused on the small, dwindling language com-
munity of East Sutherland Gaelic speakers. Dorians long-
term engagement has produced a careful, detail-oriented,
and nuanced understanding of the sociolinguistics of a spe-
cific minority language group. Few scholars could ever hope
to offer such an overview of a language community as com-
prehensive as this one. Given the rapid decline of East
Sutherland Gaelic, this will likely become a eulogy for the
language as well: the best overall description of its final days.
The author might object to this metaphor. In her intro-
duction, she decries the terms dying languages and language
death due to the implied biological metaphor, rightly ob-
serving that languages are social, not biological, phenomena
(p. 13). Alongside objecting to the death of languages, she
also rightly objects to conflating saving with document-
ing them, because documenting shifts the idea of language
to a set of abstractions, away from the only place language
actually exists: with the speakers themselves. It is the highly
social nature of her work that is perhaps the central theme
that defines her approach and informs her many insights.
In this collection, Dorian details what many parachute
linguiststhose who do not spend considerable lengths of
time in the communitywould likely miss. Likewise, her
Book Reviews 423
and kings. Do we entertain the possibility of the radically
unknown? Do we participate in the quest for the authentic
light of reason (p. 188) as de Martino demands? It is precisely
by building on works such as Magic that we keep exploring
how these options might not be mutually exclusive and that
we keep extricating justice and arbitrariness, law and abuse
(p. 180). As we work within an always insecure society (p.
188), we may occasionally knock on woodand that would
be okay.
REFERENCE CITED
de Martino, Ernesto
2005[1961] The Land of Remorse: A Study of Southern Ital-
ian Tarantism. Dorothy Louise Zinn, trans. London: Free
Association Press.
reflective approach in noting her own role as a long-term re-
searcher is important not only as a corrective to many other
linguistic works but also as part of her awareness of the
long-term effects of all the personalities (herself included)
involved in the language community. Her thoughtful re-
flections on the fieldwork process, including acknowledging
past mistakes, also help establish her authority on the subject
matter and provide a very helpful guide for future linguistic
researchers.
Dorians work is notable for its inclusion of semi-
speakers of various forms in the dwindling language
community and their important roles in such details as gram-
mar, morphology, sociolinguistic positioning, and other
aspects. She states that equally crucial to determining
important aspects of the semi-speakers role in the bilin-
gual community was a long-term observational component
(p. 11). The merging of grammar, morphology, socioeco-
nomic positioning, ideology, and personal connections (ap-
propriateness) of discourse over decades of observations
gives a rare holistic view of a minority language community.
Her descriptions of East Sutherland Gaelic provide an
excellent example of the common tensions between official
standardized versions and local (especially spoken) dialects.
Dorian pays close attention to what people actually say,
and these details give a good sense of the variations of oral
languages from town to town and sibling to sibling and over
time. She points out that such variations are an inherent part
of natural (and oral) languages rather than a sign of being
less than perfect, an idea derived from the ideology of
standardization (Milroy 2000:11).
424 American Anthropologist Vol. 118, No. 2 June 2016
Still, her lack of inclusion of standard Gaelic orthog-
raphy in her renderings of speech can be problematic; for
those who can read Gaelic (presumably much of her po-
tential audience), such orthography would have been very
helpful. At times, only people familiar with Gaelic grammat-
ical terminology as well as International Phonetic Alphabet
orthography would be able to piece together the recorded
speech. Dorian admits that her knowledge of Gaelic orthog-
raphy is incomplete to be sure and that she never formally
studied Gaelic (p. 113). Both would likely have added a layer
of comprehensibility and scholarly understanding to the es-
says. Also not as strong are her comments on other linguistic
communitiesher work on Ireland, for example, is some-
what lacking in variegated scholarship and at times contains
inaccurate representations of the language. Troublingly, she
omits the necessary accent marks on Irish words (e.g., p.
228, Udaras na Gaeltachta and Gaeltarra Eireann [sic]).
Another difficulty is perhaps inherent in such a com-
pendium of articles: many details are repeated article after
article, particularly the ethnographic settings and introduc-
tory material. Also, the articles were intended for vari-
ous audiences in various academic journals, and the writing
Vietnams New Middle Classes: Gender, Career,
City by Catherine Earl.
Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2014. 320 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12558
Sarah G. Grant
California State University, Fullerton
The newly middle-class women of Ho Chi Minh City seek
to achieve a high level of cultural capitalhigher educa-
tion, professional careers, leisure time, and marriage (if it
is strategic). They are ruralurban migrants who carefully
mitigate the risks of migration and cosmopolitan living and
develop a taste for class-based consumption yet forego ham-
burgers for regional cuisine. Despite their shift in lifestyle,
sending remittances back to their rural families is as impor-
tant as ever. Catherine Earls ethnography explores these
experiences through the lens of postcolonial autobiogra-
phies, dense urban neighborhood alleys of educated women
migrants, femininity in the workplace, urban recreation and
leisure practices, consumption and remittance practices, and
a delay in marriage among educated middle-class women. It
is a vast undertaking resulting in a richly detailed account of
middle-class women and their social practices across several
periods of transition in Vietnam.
Earls person-centered approach to middle-class that their own social mobility and urban opportunity have
women in Ho Chi Minh City centers on narrative accounts,
reflects this, giving the essays a somewhat disjointed flavor
as a whole. This is not an easy collection to read from cover
to cover.
Nonetheless, there are many gems in this compendium,
and throughout Dorian provides good comparisons with
differing linguistic ideologies around the world, establish-
ing herself as a major contributor to the global study of
endangered languages. This book will be an excellent re-
source for those interested in several topics of her work:
East Sutherland Gaelic, Gaelic-language revitalizations, the
fieldwork process, and more generally the sociolinguistics of
marginalized language communities. This is a rich overview
of a career well spent: a passionate and disciplined, if some-
what bittersweet, study of a language community fading
forever from the earth.
REFERENCE CITED
Milroy, Jim
2000 Historical Description and the Ideology of the Standard
Language. In The Development of Standard English, 1300
1800, Laura Write, ed. Pp. 1129. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
participant-observation, and what it was like to live there
and to live through change (p. 39). The change Earl ref-
erences begins in chapter 2a historical examination of
autobiographical sources of middle-class women from the
postcolonial period (195575) that reveals both continu-
ities and discontinuities with contemporary life for these
women. These autobiographies disclose a sense of home
(p. 55) but also a larger historical narrative that weaves a
story of loss for many women with a subsequent aspiration
to pursue higher education and thus new professional and
social opportunities. In the postcolonial urbanizing econ-
omy, middle-class women found themselves at a crossroads
where they were encouraged by the state to seek work out-
side the home while balancing a personal desire to achieve
cultural capital through marriage, feminization, and the per-
formance of proper etiquette amid the anxiety of a bustling
urban metropolis.
Chapter 3 introduces several women who live either
in or on the fringe of Ho Chi Minh City. Earl lived in
the dense heart of District One, and her relationship with
these educated migrant women illustrates the complexities
of multi-dimensional families (p. 107) and the influences
on others in their respective homes. Social mobility does not

come at the expense of the familial supportmaterial and
otherwisethat facilitated their migration and education.
While the role of higher education in achieving urban success
is critical, recognizing the sacrifice of family members to
facilitate it is equally important.
Chapter 4 examines the long-gendered and competitive
Vietnamese workplace, gender inequalities in income, and
the performance of femininity within professional spaces.
In performing femininity, women and men can strategically
cater to workplace expectations and opportunities for so-
cial mobility. Chapter 5 focuses on leisure and recreational
practicesprimarily food consumptionof newly middle-
class women in Ho Chi Minh City, demonstrating that the
urban landscape shapes and is shaped by women migrants.
Shifts in public and private dining and cafe spaces, along
with conscious decisions to order specific regional dishes or
to dine in specific spaces, affirm the precariousness of a new
urban landscape where local and global (fast food) options
abound. For the new migrant middle-class woman, navigat-
ing these precarious spaces becomes a way to express both
identity and belonging.
Chapters 6 and 7 deal directly with consumption,
remittances, kinship, and marriage. Situating Vietnamese
middle-class women in the larger context of the Asian mid-
dle classes, Earl argues that they are aspirational and they
aim to build lifestyles marked by comfort, convenience and
Funerary Practices and Models in the Ancient Andes: The
Return of the Living Dead by Peter Eeckhout and Lawrence
S.Owens, eds.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 316 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12554
James L. Fitzsimmons
Middlebury College
Dedicated to funerary practices in the pre-Hispanic Andes,
this collection highlights recent excavations and bioarchae-
ological analyses at sites ranging from Ecuador to Chile. As
the outgrowth of a symposium, the volume brings together
scholars from a variety of specialties, with an overall em-
phasis on new field data and bioarchaeological approaches in
most of the chapters. The main theme of the book, as de-
scribed in the introductionbut one consciously contested
by some of the chapter authorsis that deceased ancestors
were perceived as being closely involved in the world of
the living. Overall, the book is a welcome addition to the
growing literature on broad mortuary patterns in the Andes.
There are, however, a number of areas that the edi-
tors of Funerary Practices and Models in the Ancient Andes could
Book Reviews 425
quality (p. 172). Here, comfort, convenience, and quality
follow a particular educational path and are marked by the
consumption of brand-name motorbikes, house decor, and
the ability to support families back home. This last marker
results in a hierarchy of social status within natal families
although a new flat-screen television is valued in the rural
areas from which many of these women migrate, it does not
signify the same cultural capital as an urban higher education.
Earls ethnography reveals a gap in official Vietnamese
state discourse in which educated urban migrant women
are largely absent. Although she recognizes this absence
and offers an ethnographic space in which the daily lives of
these women become visible, this reviewer wonders what
an official state discourse about this class of women might
look like. What does this complex migrant class mean for
the state and for post-reform policies that may or may not
take gender into account? Earl argues that urbanization in
Vietnam . . . is a salient factor in raising the population out
of poverty through state-led development (p. 243), but
to what degree does the emergent middle-class Vietnamese
woman figure into a larger project of state-led development
in Vietnam, Southeast Asia, and beyond? Attention
to these questions is increasingly important as urban
Vietnam and the role of womenin the middle class and
otherwisewithin these urban landscapes are perpetually
changing.
have developed further. One of these involves the inclusion
of more anthropological theory. The book is almost theory
avoidant, as stated prominently in the introduction, and has
only two chapters that make explicit use of different mod-
els. We have all read, and perhaps have written, too many
works touting original fieldwork that are theory driven and
not data driven. When overdone, anthropological theory
can indeed distract from actual data, even when the data are
evident. This is presumably what the editors were trying to
avoid. But theory combined with data is not necessarily a
bad thing. More attention to competing models of behavior
in the Andes, as well as greater use of comparative material
from the Americas (or elsewhere), would have provided a
more solid, overarching framework for the papers published
in this volume. All this being said, however, there are chap-
ters bearing comparative material: the wonderful chapter by
Enrique Lopez-Hurtado, for example, employs comparative
data from other parts of the Americas to discuss the use of
ancestor veneration in political competition. More of this
426 American Anthropologist Vol. 118, No. 2 June 2016
material would not only flesh out the volume somewhat but
also make it more accessible to archaeologists working in
other regions of the world.
Another criticism is also tied to accessibility, albeit
mostly in terms of style. The editors chose not to organize
the chapters by chronology, geography, or general culture
sphere. Instead, they chose to arrange them thematically,
with topics blending into one another as the volume pro-
gresses. This is, of course, a valid approach. Unfortunately,
the themes are not particularly transparent: it would have
been useful, for example, if the volume had been divided into
different parts, perhaps with thematic headings or brief fore-
words. The chapters, because they stand by themselves after
the introduction, do not appear at first glance to have any
reason for being where they are. Unless you have already
read the book, it is hard to know why, for example, the
chapter on the Tarapaca region in Chile (itself a very strong
contribution) is included between entries on the north and
south coasts of Peru.
Given these issues, the book would also have benefited
from a concluding chapter. Two themes run throughout the
volume that I would have liked to have seen explored further.
The first of these involves the disagreements between, or
different approaches of, the authors about what constitutes
ancestor venerationdistinct, to my mind, from ancestor
worshipand what types of datasets support or refute its
presence. The chapter comparing Wari and Tiwanaku fu-
nerary practices by William Isbell and Antti Korpisaari, for
example, is bold and refreshing; it argues that we should
The Heros Fight: African Americans in West Baltimore
and the Shadow of the State by Patricia Fernandez-Kelly.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015. 440 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12551
Dana-Ain Davis
Queens College, City University of New York
There are many luminaries of Baltimore, Maryland, in-
cluding Frederick Douglass, Billie Holiday, and Ta-Nahesi
Coates. But another Baltimorean thrust the city onto center
stage: Freddie Gray, who died in April 2015 after falling
into a coma while in police custody. Freddie Gray was
from West Baltimore, the community that is the subject of
Patricia Fernandez-Kellys The Heros Fight: African Americans
in West Baltimore and the Shadow of the State. Fernandez-Kelly
conducted research with 60 families from 1989 to 1999
in three neighborhoods: Upton, Sandtown-Winchester, and
Liberty Heights. During that decade, the city was devastated
by deindustrialization.
consider negative evidence when creating models for funer-
ary behavior. That there was no more discussion of this in a
concluding chapter or references among the chapters on this
or other points was a missed opportunity.
Likewise, a theme brought up in the introduction and
developed further in the final two chapters of the book was
the way in which deviant burials help us understand mor-
tuary behavior. The examples presented deal with sacrificial
victims in Nasca and Chimu contexts; they explore ideas
about imbuing places with life energy and the ancient uses of
Nectandra seeds in human sacrifice, respectively. Both were
rich subjects for development in a conclusion. Deviant
burials are not just an interesting subset of mortuary ritual,
they force us to examine the normative values and behaviors
of the people who create them. The Nasca chapter by Oscar
Llanos Jacinto touches upon this, but it would have been a
rich topic for further exploration.
On the whole, Funerary Practices and Models in the An-
cient Andes is a solid reference work, and one can imag-
ine its chapters being used in the classroom. The volume
is at its strongest when it combines bioarchaeology with
other forms of analysis. Several of these areas rightly
pointed out by the editorsrarely if ever used in Andean
archaeology. As a result, the individual chapters are cer-
tainly valuable contributions to our understanding of An-
dean mortuary behavior. But with more structural tweaks
and perhaps a concluding chapter, as a group they would
have come across as even stronger than they individually
are.
In 16 chapters Fernandez-Kelly argues that inner-city
poverty is more than just material scarcity. It also entails ex-
ceptional and systematic interactions between government
officials and vulnerable people (p. 1). Drawing upon an
underdevelopment framework, she examines poor peoples
relationship to and with the various government agencies
and programs that comprise the welfare state or, as she
terms it, the American state. Through extensive use of bio-
graphical narratives, Fernandez-Kelly uses her interlocutors
experience to produce new knowledge about poverty and
to critique the role of the state.
The first four chapters are a study of contrasts. First we
meet D.B. Wilson, whose success as a chauffeur captures
the American dream afforded to the working class prior to
the economic shifts that disrupted the lives of many. D.B.s
life is in contrast to that of Big Floyd, who is unable to find
a job after being caught in the tide of Baltimore corporate

relocations and plant closings. Much of the books strength
lies in Fernandez-Kellys analysis of how the global economy
reconfigured industrialism between the 1970s and 1990s in
this community. Although West Baltimore followed the
trajectory of other cities, every new reading of the conse-
quences of deindustrialization offers new insights.
Fernandez-Kelly shows that while those featured in the
book have desires congruent with mainstream society,
issues such as teen pregnancy, failed relationships, substance
use, and children in foster care create challenges that un-
dermine success. We also learn that gender identities are
determined in relation to labor markets (or the lack thereof)
and race. Definitions of masculinity and femininity are recon-
figured in the face of nonexistent resources. For example,
unable to find jobs, black men redefine success by rejecting
marriage in favor of sexual appeal and personal indepen-
dence (p. 60). For some men, masculinity and thin kinship
ties are managed by gang membership and, for some women,
maturity is achieved through childbirth.
Chapter 5 offers a historical account of the American
states emergence, drawing upon the work of Andre Gunder
Frank, who theorized about emerging states in Latin America
(pp. 103108). This framework posits exploitation, extrac-
tion, the dearth of financial assets, and the departure of
productive investment. Although this framework has been
critiqued for its spatial not temporal focus, Fernandez-Kelly
finds value in its understanding of advanced industrial coun-
tries. In this context we see contrasts between European
immigrants success and African Americans dispossession.
She acknowledges that the comparison is irrelevant owing
to immigrants history of assimilation and political partic-
ipation. Yet comparing African Americans to the immi-
grant narrative shows up several times. When discussing
differential treatment of parental discipline of children, she
notes that immigrant parents appear to have a larger cul-
tural and material stock to withstand state interference than
Valuing Deaf Worlds in Urban India by Michele Friedner.
New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2015. 216 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12579
Rashmi Sadana
George Mason University
This engaging and skillful ethnography of young deaf people
in Bangalore marks a critical contribution to disability
studies as well as to scholarship on language ideologies and
neoliberal India. The books five chapters follow the linear
development of young people from family to school to
church to NGO and business worlds. However, the chapters
are also arranged as a constellation of urban institutions and
Book Reviews 427
native-born African Americans in poor neighborhoods have
(p. 162).
Subsequent chapters center on the challenges children
face. In some cases, the portraits are raw and disturbing.
For example, through the lives of brother and sister Little
Floyd and Clarisse, we see the complex experiences of be-
ing in the foster care system, child molestation, and child
abuse as well as variances of gender expression. We also
learn that Fernandez-Kelly uses her access to provide re-
sources for young people that differ from the ways that the
affluent are able to make their lives work in accordance
with generalized notions of rationality (p. 196). Inner-city
residents need bridges to the outside world. With such
access points, young peoples vocabulary, both verbal and
emotional, expands. But when opportunities retract, there
is a retreat into marginal existence. Fernandez-Kelly cri-
tiques agencies of the foster care system and offers an in-
teresting interpretation of how young children use those
agencies to resist parental controls. Specifically, sometimes
charges of child abuse are brought by children against par-
ents, which Fernandez-Kelly sees as reframing norms. The
last six chapters focus on Lydia, Towanda, and Manny
Man, who each represent variations of povertys decima-
tion and the states inability to address poor education and
unemployment.
The biographies offer important perspectives, yet so
much of what is revealed in the book seems to reinforce
pathology. Is it possible that not one person succeeds in West
Baltimore? What other institutions and systems operate in
the community, such as community-based organizations and
religious groups? Are there no black-owned businesses in
West Baltimore? Any infrastructure plans that could have
been realized but were abandoned? Government agencies
alone cannot bear the blame for persistent poverty; attention
must be paid to how the capitalist system has underdeveloped
black lives.
thus demonstrate how key concepts in deaf worlds circulate
among them. The ethnography begins when Michele
Friedner identifies another deaf woman on a crowded
Bangalore bus using a phrase common among deafs in
India: deaf deaf same (p. 2). This idiom and moment of
recognition become a central concept in the book, which is
indeed about deaf worlds, how they are created, the value
that may be extracted from them, and how these worlds are
inextricably linked to normal ones, another local idiom
used throughout to great analytical effect. From the start,
Friedner identifies sites, practices, and structures of feeling
that are vital to deaf development, an idea that encapsulates
428 American Anthropologist Vol. 118, No. 2 June 2016
the desire to be part of deaf worlds and to communicate
among and between them. Being in and of these worlds
and the moral imperatives of such a life are key to this
rich text.
Chapter 1 is compelling for the authors attempt to
understand and reconceptualize the meaning of family for
young, deaf Bangalurus. In short, as Friedner shows, family
is an impediment to deaf kids in terms of the development of
their deaf sociality. The families she gets to know, while well
meaning, want their deaf children to be normal, and so they
push them toward oral learning, which, it turns out, is a ter-
rible way for deaf people to learn, resulting in not-learning
or learning in a half-half-half way. Curiously, the most re-
spected deaf schools in India also promote oral education,
and Friedner takes us to Chennai, where those schools are
located. Part of the problem is that oral education is not
matched with the appropriate technologies and expertise to
align each deaf persons disability with the proper hearing
aid (or implant) and its monitoring. In addition, oralism
not so subtly denigrates the use of sign language, which is
the mother tongue of the deaf, although not recognized by
the Indian state. As a result, deaf Indian kids dont learn
much in school, which becomes a life-long condition leading
to normalized practices such as copying (first exams, later
CVs), which in turn homogenizes deaf experience in the
workplace. What deafs do gain in deaf schools are friends,
real friends, because even though sign language is looked
down upon by normals and even by most deaf educators in
the Indian context (who are rarely deaf themselves), deaf
kids start signing with one another the moment they enter
a deaf context. Signing is almost subversive in Friedners
telling, and the more I read this absorbing book, the more I
realized that her use of the word friend was a deep reference
to what is sorely lacking in many of these young peoples
Tamil Brahmans: The Making of a Middle-Class Caste by C.
J. Fuller and Haripriya Narasimhan.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. 288 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12555
Kathinka Frystad
University of Oslo
This monograph analyzes the transformation of Tamil
Brahmans from a conservative community of rural landown-
ers to an urban and modern middle-class caste centered in
Chennai but with migration patterns far beyond, including
the United States. Drawing on interviews, historical statis-
tics, and active engagement with former studies of Brahmans
and other privileged communities in South India, C. J. Fuller
and Haripriya Narasimhan have written an impressive biog-
raphy of one of Indias high-status communities over the past
150-odd years.
lives: communication with their families, members of whom
almost never learn to sign.
Chapter 2 explains how deaf Christian churches fill an
important emotional gap for young deaf people and contains
an interesting discussion about conversion, drawing on the
work of Gauri Viswanathan, among others. Friedner analyzes
three different church settings and denominations in order
to show how deafs are encouraged to cultivate their unique
orientations rather than paper over them. This kind of deaf
development is in fact what it means to be saved, Friedner
argues (p. 54). One of the many fascinating concepts in this
book is sign butter, which refers to the beautiful signing
that young deafs encounter in churches. As for religious
identity, it is more an issue for families than for Friedners
deaf friends. As one of them states, At home I am Muslim,
in school I am Christian (p. 58).
Chapters 3, 4, and 5 delve into the world of work,
vocational training, NGOs, and multinational corporations
to show the ways in which deaf workers become a source
of value in neoliberal workplaces, from Phillip Morris to
local business start-ups. These chapters offer a detailed view
into the circulation of the knowledge and resources that
go into producing the deaf worker and also enable deafs
to produce themselves. It is a complicated scenario largely
because of the not-learning that has occurred in earlier edu-
cational settings. Friedner guides us through the benefits and
structural inequalities at play, especially with regard to the
desire and concept of for life, which has to do with stable
employment but also, ideally, a job that would help other
deafs develop; hence the term speaks not only to economic
but also to social and moral registers. From home to the
world, this book takes a nuanced view of classic questions of
social stigma and value, while it also reorients the discourse
on development in contemporary India.
A key question is why Brahmans were the first in Tamil
Nadu to leave their villages in order to make use of the new
educational and professional possibilities that were opening
up in the colonial cities. Besides pointing to their propensity
for studying and their financial ability to do so, the authors
convincingly argue that Brahmans neither identified with
other villagers nor had any deep attachment to their land,
given their contempt for agricultural labor.
Once in the city, young Brahman men typically stud-
ied law, engineering, or medicinethis last somewhat
less enthusiastically because many of the substances that a
medical doctor must handle could compromise their caste
status. Nonetheless, Brahmans soon gained an overwhelm-
ing dominance in these professions, particularly as lawyers
and government officials. This Brahman raj is what

motivated the anti-Brahman movement and the introduc-
tion of caste reservation, as detailed in many other studies.
Since the 1990s, Tamil Brahmans have excelled in the IT
industry, where their overrepresentation is unfettered by
caste quotas. In this process, they have increasingly come to
explain their superiority in terms of intelligence.
The most profound change was, however, in gender re-
lations. When the marriage age for girls was raised to 14 in
1930, Tamil Brahmans were slow to react, given the imper-
ative of marrying off daughters before the onset of puberty,
since a girls purity was seen to diminish once she reached
menarche. When Brahmans eventually responded to this re-
form after independence in 1947, girls could complete their
secondary education, if not more, which also turned them
into better companions for their husbands. Once educated,
women gradually began to enter selected professions. To-
day many work in the IT industry alongside men, where
they claim to experience full gender equality, although they
still struggle to combine motherhood with demanding ca-
reers. All in all, the authors document a remarkable tran-
sition from a caste superiority anchored in stark gender in-
equality to a pride in belonging to an educated middle class
that is more gender equal than most other communities in
Tamil Nadu.
Fuller and Narasimhan also draw attention to some
startling continuities. In the city, Tamil Brahmans often
replicate the village residential quarters traditionally re-
served for Brahmans in modern apartment complexes re-
served for vegetarians. Certain neighborhoods in Chennai
are moreover overwhelmingly Brahman dominated, which
is appreciated by some but resented by women who de-
test their social control. Sanskritic modes of worship remain
the norm, not just in the preference for Shiva and Vishnu
over Redfieldian little traditions but also in the continued
preference for Sanskrit rather than Tamil as the liturgical
language. Less continuous are the modern inventions of
Haunting Images: A Cultural Account of Selective
Reproduction in Vietnam by Tine M. Gammeltoft.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014. 336 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12576
Melissa J. Pashigian
Bryn Mawr College
Haunting Images: A Cultural Account of Selective Reproduction in
Vietnam is a poignant and eloquently written ethnography of
what happens when pregnant couples who undergo prenatal
ultrasound in Hanoi receive a diagnosis of fetal anomaly. The
existential struggles that the couples in Tine Gammeltofts
study endure reflect a dynamic process of decision making
by the couples extended family about whether to terminate
the pregnancy, which engages beliefs about personhood and
Book Reviews 429
Carnatic music and Bharatnatyam dance. Today these art
forms comprise a high culture with which Tamil Brahmans
identify so strongly that even many migrants to the U.S.
exert pressure on their daughters to learn them.
In terms of analysis, the main thrust concerns the meta-
morphosis of caste into class. Theoretically the authors rely
almost uniquely on Max Webers model of long-term trans-
formation from economic classes based on profession to
status groups, partly as reanalyzed by Anthony Giddens.
Despite the usefulness of this perspective, the authors re-
main silent on perspectives that could have brought out
more clearly their critique of the current tendency to ana-
lyze classnot least the new Indian middle classthrough
the lens of lifestyle and consumption. A deeper theoretical
engagement would also have enabled the authors to position
themselves more explicitly in the never-ending discussion
of the multifarious ways in which caste relates to class to
the point of intertwinement. Their lack of engagement with
general analytical debates, frameworks, and concepts is note-
worthy for a monograph written by two anthropologists. In
terms of method, for instance, it would have been interest-
ing to know what they can add to the debates about doing
anthropology at home, historical anthropology, and multi-
site anthropology. Also, how is anthropological scholarship
affected by the growing cooperation between senior profes-
sors and younger anthropologists who produce most of the
data?
When this book is read as historical sociology, however,
these questions vanish. From this angle it is more appropriate
to applaud the authors exceptionally thorough engagement
with former scholarship of the region, which allows them to
be unusually clear when documenting change, patterns, and
exceptions. For this very reason, Tamil Brahmans will be a
standard reference in the scholarship of Tamil Nadu and the
conundrum of caste and class in general for many years to
come.
causes of misfortune, contemporary economic exigencies,
the delivery of medical care, and the specter of past war-
fare that wends its way into present-day Vietnam. At stake
morally is not whether to have an abortion but, rather, the
diagnosis itself and whether it would be immoral or wrong
to have a child they believe would suffer in life and be unable
to attain full personhoodthat is, be able to care for others.
In other words, in this context, pregnancy termination can
signify a form of caring for the fetus and the extended family.
The book is based on nearly three years of research
from 2003 to 2006 at Hanois Obstetrics and Gynecology
Hospital. The author collaborated with a team of ten so-
cial scientists and medical doctors. The book is based on
430 American Anthropologist Vol. 118, No. 2 June 2016
30 core cases of women and interviews with numerous ad-
ditional women as well as with sonographers, obstetricians,
pediatricians, and 32 families with disabled children.
Gammeltofts provocative theoretical contribution is a
call for an Anthropology of Belonging as a lens through
which to explore and understand the connectedness of per-
sons and to shift focus from a Foucauldian emphasis on the
pregnant woman as individual subject to a connected body
of others. Drawing on Emmanuel Levinass discussion of
subjectivity as emerging out of relations with others, Gam-
meltoft argues that the choices families make about a fetal
anomaly diagnosis reflect a responsibility to one another.
Such weighty decisions about diagnostic misfortune are made
not by an autonomous mother or couple but by the husbands
extended family. Together, the family determines the cause
of the misfortune that has led to the diagnosis and deliberates
a course of action with regard to the pregnancy, with blame
for the misfortune attributable to causal, accidental, moral,
and cosmological origins. Gammeltoft suggests that the pro-
cess of deliberating the cause and the action is one of belong-
ing. Prenatal ultrasound becomes a means through which
ethical maternal and fetal subjectivities are produced (p. 20),
as well as a means through which women can demonstrate
maternal belonging to the social collectivity of the extended
family via ultrasound and acceptance of the patrilines wishes
(p. 27).
The idea of belonging extends to the relationship be-
tween citizens and the socialist state via the delivery of
medicine at state institutions. Doctors insert themselves into
moral discussions as interpreters of sonograms. They view
their role as medical experts but also as caregivers to less
scientifically knowledgeable, and often poor, rural women,
for whom the doctors believe caring for a profoundly dis-
abled child will be a significant economic and social burden.
When families accept state-sanctioned science, they do not
question the reliability of the scanning results. As the ma-
triarch of a family that agreed unanimously to terminate a
pregnancy expressed, we do not have long educations. But
science is skillful. We have to recognize that. . . . If we did
not believe in the state (nh`a nuoc), in the doctors, we would
Irish Travellers: The Unsettled Life by Sharon Bohn Gmelch
and George Gmelch.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014. 220 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12561
Jane Helleiner
Brock University
Aimed at a broad readership, this book by two well-
established scholars offers a compelling account of a return
not have consented. But now we feel at ease. . . . The state
is clever. It has helped our child [the fetus] escape suffering
(p. 202).
The rise of ultrasonography and the use of selective
reproductive technologies have paralleled nationalist calls
for a high-quality population, the privatization of the health
sector, and a renewed emphasis on science as Vietnams
economy has rapidly grown. Gammeltoft posits that, simul-
taneously, public attention to the spraying of herbicides dur-
ing wartime seems to have contributed to shifting the birth
of anomalous children from a moral-cosmological realm into
the sphere of science (p. 149), opening up new discussions
of disability. Ultrasonography is haunted by the specter of
wartime spraying of defoliants, socialist pasts, and cosmo-
logical connections to the spirits of ancestors that shape ev-
eryday life (Leshkowich 2008). This results in a propensity
for high numbers of readily available elective scans as women
vigilantly monitor their pregnancies.
In proposing an Anthropology of Belonging,
Gammeltoft suggests a justifiable shift from Foucaults
emphasis on the individual; however, she could have
explored the limitations of a Foucauldian approach more
extensively. In addition, while the disability experiences
presented in the accounts appear somewhat uniform and
may not reflect the varied nature of stigma and disability
across different patient groups in Vietnam, Gammeltofts
discussion of them is likely to foster further productive
debate about disability and its visibility. However, none
of these concerns should prevent scholars from benefiting
from this nuanced and powerful ethnography.
This book will appeal to scholars and undergraduate
and graduate students of the anthropology of reproduction,
medical anthropology, disability studies, and ethics, and to
area specialists.
REFERENCE CITED
Leshkowich, Ann Marie
2008 Wandering Ghosts of Late Socialism: Conflict, Metaphor,
and Memory in a Southern Vietnamese Marketplace. Journal
of Asian Studies 67(1):541.
to Ireland 40 years after their doctoral fieldwork among the
Irish minority population of Travelling People. Both authors
were central to the inauguration of serious scholarship on
Irish Travellers and have published extensively.
Dedicated to the three extended Traveller families that
they knew best in 197172, the book uses text and photos
to convey the experiences of reconnecting with many

Travellers and settled people in the summer of 2011 (their
trip is also the subject of a 2012 documentary titled Unsettled:
From Tinker to Traveller [McGrath and Bartley 2012]). The
book features more than 70 stunning photographs taken by
George Gmelch. Approximately half of these were taken in
2011, while the remainder are from the original fieldwork
period.
The first-person text by Sharon Gmelch recounts how,
while showing some of their original fieldwork photos to
Travellers in 2011, she noticed responses ranging from nos-
talgia among older viewers to embarrassment on the part
of one young man. After learning that a subsequent exhibit
of the photos at a Dublin library had prompted intense in-
terest among many Traveller families, the couple decided
to return to Ireland and to use photo elicitation research
(p. 55) to explore changes in Traveller lives. The resulting
book eschews statistics and new scholarship on Travellers
in favor of a personal and selective (p. 11) account that com-
bines the story of their 2011 visit with extended personal
narratives gathered from four Travellers (three of whom are
well-known Traveller leaders) and one settled person whose
career as a youth worker centered on Travellers.
After contextualizing the return visit, Sharon describes
aspects of the 197172 fieldwork, including the initial ex-
periences of purchasing a barrel-top wagon, moving into
a camp, participant-observation in the camp, and beyond.
The remaining chapters intersperse details of the 2011 trip
with the five extended personal narratives mentioned above.
The trip involved encounters with several Traveller fam-
ilies, Traveller and non-Traveller individuals, and visits
to varied Traveller-related locations in different parts of
Ireland (e.g., former camping locations, a museum exhibit
on Traveller culture, and Traveller community centers and
group housing sites in Dublin, Cork, Ennis, Galway City,
and Tuam). Some of the encounters were with those already
known to both anthropologists, while others were with new
acquaintances. A few days were spent living in an official
Traveller site in County Cork, for example, among families
unconnected to the original Dublin-based fieldwork.
The result is a wide-ranging overview of contemporary
Traveller life combined with discussion of changes since the
After the Revolution: Youth, Democracy, and the Politics
of Disappointment in Serbia by Jessica Greenberg.
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014. 248 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12586
Jelena Spasenic
Uppsala University
In October 2000, when different strata of Serbian soci-
ety united to oppose Slobodan Milosevic, student activists
Book Reviews 431
1970s. An important topic is everyday anti-Traveller dis-
crimination (significantly, some Travellers did not appear in
the accompanying documentary because they did not want
their Traveller origins made public). Changes in gender and
intergenerational relations as well as childbearing and child
rearing, weddings and feuds, forms of work and consump-
tion, and Traveller politics and activism are also addressed.
While the text suggests that the greatest changes of the four
decades relate to Traveller settlement and comparative af-
fluence (p. 42), there is considerable evidence of ongoing
(often seasonal) mobility within and beyond Ireland despite
the fact that 86 percent of Traveller families in Ireland live
in permanent structures (p. 42). Increased education and
wealth for some are, moreover, paralleled by continued
marginalization for many others. The realities of a low life
expectancy for Traveller men was made evident by the fact
that none of the adult men known to the anthropologists in
the 1970s were still alive in 2011.
The book weaves together rich detail and insightful
commentary related to the experiences of the two
anthropologists, and the personal narratives emphasize
the diversity and complexity of Traveller lives and
politics. While raising many issues for future research,
the authors offer little new analysis and, as they state,
do not incorporate newer Traveller-related scholarship.
Inmigration to Ireland, the Celtic Tiger, and the subsequent
recession (acknowledged to be linked to a defunding of
many Traveller-related programs) are mentioned only
briefly. While they are candid about many other aspects of
their role as scholars, there is surprisingly little discussion
of the potential challenges of using photos in research
(e.g., the ethics of identifying real people and places).
While limited as a scholarly work, this beautifully written
and produced book will appeal to a wide audience and
could also be suitable for some introductory anthropology
courses.
REFERENCE CITED
McGrath, Liam, and Kim Bartley
2012 Unsettled: From Tinker to Traveller. Dublin: A Scratch
Films Production for RTE . Film.
played a key role by catalyzing the dissonance of a perturbed
Serbian polity. Its ten-year hibernation under Milosevic
ended after days of massive protests, and the country,
which in the West was associated with aggressive nation-
alism throughout the 1990s, emerged as a success story
of a well-orchestrated democratic revolution. The over-
turn would hardly have taken place without the students
432 American Anthropologist Vol. 118, No. 2 June 2016
persistence and consistency in challenging Milosevics power
for several years before the October Revolution. What hap-
pened with student activism afterward, and what struggles
have the students fought since then? In her monograph After
the Revolution, Jessica Greenberg provides important clues to
post-revolutionary imaginings and lives of Serbian student
activists, caught between high hopes and failed expectations.
After the Revolution charts students trajectories from the
streets to university offices, from rioters to experts craft-
ing policy documents, from struggling against the state to
working for it. Since 2001, Greenberg has engaged with a
number of interlocutors within and around Serbian univer-
sities. She studied their everyday talk about democracy and
revolution and looked more closely into institutional prac-
tices and categories that frame this discourse. Her main focus
rests on three student organizations in Belgrade, Novi Sad,
and Nis and their efforts to meet the challenges of unwieldy
administrative politics and the ambiguity of democratic rep-
resentation as well as their poor prospects in a labor market
with one of the highest unemployment rates in Europe.
Despite significant differences, members of all three or-
ganizations share a predicament of being shadowed by their
own revolutionary identity and success. At present, stu-
dents are only one among many internally divided groups in
Serbian society that, through democratic means, contend for
social change. Their fractiousness, difficulties in presenting
themselves as influential political actors, the uncertainty of
their political engagement, in which the prospect of corrupt-
ibility compromises the authenticity of their intentionsall
these conditions point to what Greenberg calls the politics
of disappointment. Being disappointed and disappointing
others follow from tensions between ideals and a messy re-
ality, between stubborn local practices and normative global
policies.
How do these conflicts unfold among Serbian student
activists? To begin with, they feel betrayed by their parents
generation, and a short glimpse into Yugoslavias history
tells us why. The adults are blamed for Yugoslavias demise,
and their utopian future-oriented politics (p. 19) is aban-
doned for a more pragmatic approach among the students.
This approach is, however, more than just pragmatic. For
instance, since 2000, the students have been trying to frame
their protests as quality protests of quality citizens (p.
73), that is, particular kinds of valued citizens (p. 19). The
very notion of quality is striking. First, as Greenberg argues,
it signifies an unholy alliance between democratic commit-
ments and exclusionist modes of representation. Second, it
reveals charged assumptions about which citizens the stu-
dents consider to be democratic or undemocratic in Serbia.
Quality is equated here with being well educated, urban,
middle class, and West oriented. Should we conclude that
the rest, at least half of Serbias population, are nonqual-
ity citizens? Questions also arise when students demand
that the state and university facilitate their entrance into
the labor market. Their suggestion is to cut the number of
enrollments, that is, to graduate fewer lawyers, doctors,
economists, philologists, and so on. How is that to be done
in a poor country such as Serbia, which as one of the officials
said still has so few academics? The contradictions are many,
and it is sometimes hard for this reader to sympathize with
the students plight. They seem too elitist. Why is that so?
Greenberg reminds us rightly about the rankings, cal-
culations, and reforms coming from the democratization
industry (p. 18), which measures newly emerged democra-
cies, such as Serbia, on scales of progress. The enforcement
of Western political ideals cannot be properly understood
without the careful analysis of local practices. In Greenbergs
own words, democracy is the name of the game, but what
that means is entirely up for grabs (p. 185). Among the local
traditions that she looks into, it is, however, not only the
recent socialist past that explains inconsistencies of student
politics. Student activists are among the latest in a long chain
of historical actors who have been trying to bring Serbia
closer to the West. Throughout the 20th century, this rela-
tionship has been swinging between imitation and rejection
of Western Europe and, more recently, the United States.
Similarly, Serbias own legacies have been discarded or el-
evated. This inbetweenness breeds elitism and arrogance
among quality citizens in Serbia, who remain disappointed
by the failure of their nation to become modern.
After the Revolution makes clear that the politics of dis-
appointment follows the politics of normative democrati-
zation. On timelines of progress, one either catches up
or is left behind. Like many other countries, Serbia has
been left behind. This warrants the analysis of its contra-
dictory local realities, as Greenberg does in this book, but
it also invites a more critical examination of ambiguous
Western policies.

Driving after Class: Anxious Times in an American Suburb
by Rachel Heiman.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015. 312 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12550
Arlene Davila
New York University
Driving after Class provides a timely ethnographic portrait of
the intersection of class and neoliberalism in an American
middle-class suburb. Rachel Heiman seeks to explain the up-
scaling of American suburbs amid the diminished economic
possibilities of achieving and maintaining this middle-class
lifestyle. How middle-class people make sense of this grow-
ing contradiction in their daily lives is the main question she
seeks to answer. The author does a great job of describing
the transformations that linked the middle class to grander
homes, bigger vehicles, and more consumption throughout
the 1990s and the growing anxieties that were the unavoid-
able byproducts of this trend. McMansions, SUVs, and vanity
furnishings such as ivory-colored carpets provide the objects
of discussion, as well as larger debates about gated commu-
nities and the shaping of school districts.
Heiman proposes the concept of rugged entitlement
to describe the neoliberal subjectivities of individual self-
reliance, enterprise, hard work, and tough attitudes that
were seen as a solution to insecure times, erasing the role
that public policies had historically played in the creation of
middle-class suburbs and previous middle classes. This con-
cept is especially evident in chapter 4, which explores the rise
of SUVs as the number one transportation choice for subur-
ban middle-class families. The voice of a teenager unable to
appreciate how her oversize vehicle may have been to blame
in her four accidents, all the while assuring the author that
she felt safe and protected in her SUV, provides a stark pic-
ture of the contradictions that middle-class people face on a
daily basis. In particular, the youths dismissal of the dangers
that SUVs pose to drivers in smaller vehicles becomes a clear
conduit of rugged entitlement. In this case, the teenager
felt entitled to the protection of her SUV, dismissing the
rights and safety of other driverswho she counters could
buy used cheap ones if they wantedbut also the intrinsic
hazards of SUVs due to their sheer size and lack of stability.
In other words, SUVs like McMansions were creating the
very conditions that threaten the economic stability of the
middle class at the same time that they were becoming the
favored objects for people clamoring to achieve security and
some sense of class stability during changing times.
Theres a lot that is great and valuable in this book.
First, I appreciate the authors impetus for bringing the U.S.
middle class into global class theorizing. This is one of the
most important contributions of her book, given that the
U.S. middle class has long been treated as an exceptional
Book Reviews 433
phenomenon, entirely unrelated to other middling groups
throughout the world or to the fate of other societies. This
is an issue that I wished the author had elaborated upon
further, particularly in relation to her previous co-edited
collection on the topic, The Global Classes: Theorizing through
Ethnography. The idea for Driving after Class was drawn from
the authors previous work in Zimbabwe, where a young
man asked her why Americans felt entitled to suck up the
worlds wealth, and I would have appreciated a return to
this global perspective at some point throughout the text. In
fact, her descriptions of the anxieties of Danboro residents
(a pseudonym for the New Jersey suburb that was the site
of her research) may not be very different from those de-
scribed by a growing global middle-class literature, which
also documents a widening divide between peoples dreams
and aspirations and their ability to make those dreams come
true or even close to true.
Another important contribution is the authors atten-
tion to race and racism, which are often obviated in class-
centered analysis. In this regard, I would have liked more
information on the racial and ethnic make-up of this com-
munity. New Jersey is also well known for its middle-class
Latino/a suburbs and for more diversified suburbs, and I
kept wishing that the author would have provided voices
from nonwhite informants. Instead, the community comes
across as extremely white and hence as a great example
of the growing anxieties over maintaining race exclusiv-
ity as a marker and guarantor of ones class status. Here,
Heiman is smart to pay attention to the nonracist ways in
which residents expressed racial anxieties and their prefer-
ence for segregated white-only spaces as the surest assurance
of their class status. This racist, colorblind language is most
evidently displayed in the chapter discussing plans for school
redistricting, where race and class tensions among the dif-
ferent communities that make up the regional high school
district came visibly to the forefront. Arguments against
redistricting and mixing student constituencies, however,
were voiced around claims to community spirit or pride or
around peoples rights to choice or their wishes to do the
best for their children. Each time, these euphemistic claims
proved to be loaded with racist and classist fears that mixing
diverse communities would unavoidably risk peoples class
standing.
In all, Heiman astutely connects the dots. The same
anxieties that gave her entry into the community by making
hera white PhD student with lots of cultural capitala
preferred domestic over an immigrant or a woman of color
are the same dynamics that keep the middle class craving
white-dominant schools that would secure, rather than risk
or compromise, their status.
434 American Anthropologist Vol. 118, No. 2 June 2016
Black Magic and Bogeymen: Fear, Rumour and Popular
Belief in the North of Ireland 197274 by Richard Jenkins.
Cork: Cork University Press, 2014. 306 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12557
Dennis Gaffin
State University of New York Buffalo State
Emeritus Professor of Sociology Richard Jenkins has con-
ducted a very detailed investigative history of not-so-well-
known phenomena accompanying the Troubles in Northern
Ireland and the Republic of Ireland in the early 1970s. These
were the presence of reports and rumors of rituals of satanism
and witchcraft, along with an upsurge in the presence of
bogeymen. The author uses a multidisciplinary approach
with media studies, folklore, sociology, (a little) cultural an-
thropology, and historical analysisto convince the reader
that there was a strong relationship between the violence of
the Troubles, especially in Belfast, and a black magic scare.
He terms his approach eclectic and multi-stranded. reformed faith and popery, and Ulster and republicanism
During this period there were reportedly a few inci-
dents that journalists and public figures described as satanic.
Such incidents included, allegedly, ritual killing of animals
and the disappearance of a young child for apparently evil
purpose. By poring through newspaper articles of the day,
Jenkins clearly exposes the fact that the apparent facts and
reports of these and other linked incidents were inventions
of journalists, of usually unnamed experts in satanic cult
behavior, and of the rumor mill. Many people seemed to
be convinced of the factual reality of these phenomena or,
at least, of the possibility of their factual reality. Jenkins
concludes that these primarily unfounded fears and beliefs
in what he calls the supernatural dovetailed well with the
general fear of conflict in those days of political and religious
violence. Indeed, they seemed to have fueled one another.
Jenkinss research is based almost entirely on news-
papers, public documents, and other writings during and
after those years. His methodology, while quite pointed,
is not anthropological, even with his occasional references
to anthropological works and perspectives. He sometimes
does connect Irish and Northern Irish and Catholic and
Protestant perspectives with wider Western concepts, influ-
ences, and trends of the day. But he also sometimes gener-
alizes about human behavior and culture without reference
to possible significant differences between cultural groups
surrounding the definitions of concepts and behaviors such
as witchcraft. The last line of the book is, Human beings
have feared witches and chased phantoms for millennia: it
seems unlikely that they are going to stop any time soon
(p. 257).
One of the books best accomplishments and insights is
its delineation of differences in the theology and epistemol-
ogy of Catholicism versus Protestantism in this part of the
world. Jenkins explains that the Catholics and Protestants
who took rumors of witchcraft and magic seriously did so
in different ways: For Catholics the [rumors] were part of
a world-view of death and mystery that pervaded everyday
life, through which the Troubles wove novel strands and
out of which new specters and moral tales emerged. When
fervently religious Protestants, who were not a majority,
took the rumours seriously, they did so within a world-view
of strugglebetween good and evil, God and the Devil, the
that sometimes erupted in almost ecstatic apocalyptic long-
ings (p. 214). Earlier he states that it is likely that . . . it was
fundamentalist Protestants who were most likely to believe
in the power and threat of an interventionist Devil, because
they had a history of apocalyptic prophecy and preaching
(p. 209).
After exhaustive (and exhausting) demonstration
throughout the book of the inaccuracy, guessing, and in-
ventiveness of the press; then-popular subject matters in
fiction and cinema; and the public repetition of rumors and
legends, Jenkins concludes that moral conflicts and social
tensionsdifficult issues of contemporary salienceoften
find expression in fear and blaming (p. 254), moral panics
seem to be disproportionately about children and young peo-
ple (p. 255), and economic decline and a loosened political
relationship between Northern Ireland and England made
the time especially stressful for Protestants. All these forces
combined with the general secularization and so-called moral
degeneracy (drugs, sexual promiscuity, and paganism) of the
day.
While the accuracy of the information forming the bases
of the rumors and reports is rightly questioned, and while
this sociologists exposure of the rumormongering of the
press and public figures is insightful, most of his suggestions
and conclusions are tentative. Nonetheless, Jenkinss work
is must reading for those interested in the Troubles.

Ghosts of the New City: Spirits, Urbanity, and the Ruins
of Progress in Chiang Mai by Andrew Alan Johnson.
Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2014. 208 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12584
Dan Smyer Yu
Yunnan Minzu University and Center for Trans-Himalayan Studies
The city of Chiang Mai is animated with ghosts, spirits,
mandalic power, and the magic of modernity, but its
vibrancy is hauntingly felt by its residents. Multiple tensions
of heritage and modernization in magico-religious terms are
manifest in all corners of the city. These tensions are not at
all head-on clashes and oppositions due to their perceived
qualitative differences. Their felt magical powers and
perceived logics for human flourishing are often assumed
to ally each with the other in principle, working toward a
prosperous Thai society. At the same time, their entangled
social and spatial materiality shows a mutual subversion in
the architectural, animistic, and public discourses on the
topics of progress and prosperity.
Andrew Johnson presents a complex study of Chiang
Mai, a city simultaneously a Buddhist sacred site, a super-
natural domain, an embodiment of cultural heritage and
past rulers, and a vessel of both cultural essence and modern
progress. Throughout the book, he sustains the argument
that the modern progress sanctioned by the state and by
the Buddhist logic of spiritual advancement is severely
challenged by ghosts and spirits who invade, occupy, and
ruin the modern high-rises and exclusive communities of the
affluent.
The book is both ethnographically and theoretically
captivating; each chapter recounts how the entanglements of
the haunting ghosts and the haunted urban architectures and
exclusive communities produce a series of social discourses
on progress, cultural essence, and social discontent. Thanks
to Johnsons command of the Thai language and his solid
fieldwork, barami (charisma), charoen (progress), mueang
(polity, Sanskrit mandala), and farang (foreigner) are the
critical phrases that he uses to bind all the chapters together.
Each of these terms effectively mediates his discussions of
how both religious practice and modernity are generative
of their respective magic powers, enchantments, and
disillusions for the diverse residents of Chiang Mai.
Take mueang, for example. Its Sanskrit root, mandala,
sets the fundamental nature of the city as both a sacred
site and a polity or, simply, as what Johnson calls the
mandalic state. It permits a fusion of the Buddhist utopian
imaginations of an enlightened human realm and the modern
nation-building process of Thais. In his description of how
this mandalic society is constructed, Johnson highlights an
Book Reviews 435
aspiration of Thais, who wish for an alliance of modern
material development and spiritual progress. In this process,
the premodern conception of mueang as the ruling center
and the abode of a national protective spirit is retained to
sanction the perceived prosperity that modern development
is supposed to bring.
This is where Johnsons elaborate discussion of charoen
comes in, presenting the simultaneous convergence and
divergence of modern material development, Buddhist
spiritual advancement, and the actual impacts of both on
the residents of Chiang Mai. The meaning of charoen is thus
threefold: it retains its Buddhist idea of ascending mobility
regarding ones spiritual enlightenment; it professes the
tangible progression of ones material development in
the modern context; and complications occur when its
practitioners (e.g., the spirit mediums, urban planners,
and common city dwellers) find their personal, social,
or patriotic interests are at stake, because to be modern
does not mean a simple linear progression of material
and spiritual aspirations. The actual development process
involves social stratification and cultural instability due to
the uneven distribution of resources, incoming outsiders,
the overall transformation of communal landscape, and
the local Buddhistanimistic reading of the forces of
modern change. In Johnsons findings, charoen in practice
is manifested in its opposite formsregression, ruin, and
poverty.
Johnson opens a new theoretical front for the study of
Buddhist folk practices, which are intrinsically connected
with the ideas of spirit cults (Tambiah 1970), apotropaic
Buddhism (Spiro 1970), practical religion (Wilson 1982),
and spirit religion (Gombrich and Obeyesekere 1988).
However, his focus is set not only on the guardian spirits
who are invoked to ensure the worldly needs of their adher-
ents, for example, healing, fertility, and the preservation of
heritage, but also on the ghosts of the dead whose lives were
taken mostly by crime, suicide, and traffic accidents. These
ghosts do not have the apotropaic or thaumaturgic functions
(Gombrich and Obeyesekere 1988) for ones worldly gains;
instead, they produce the haunting effect that Johnson
narrates throughout the book. His ghost study presents a
multidimensional linkage of the living and the dead found
in Chiang Mais modernization process. As the deaths are
often concentrated in the growing parts of Chiang Mai,
the relations of the dead with the living are markedly
expressed in popular discourses on the threatened national
and religious heritage, the disenchantment with modernity,
and the power of the unseen world. The magic of modernity
436 American Anthropologist Vol. 118, No. 2 June 2016
is thus perceived as the source of death, ruin, disillusion,
and the haunted urban space. The strengths of this book are
shown in Johnsons rich ethnographic materials and ample
theoretical engagements.
REFERENCES CITED
Gombrich, Richard, and Gananath Obeyesekere
1988 Buddhism Transformed: Religious Change in Sri Lanka.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Wrapped in the Flag of Israel: Mizrah.i Single Mothers
and Bureaucratic Torture by Smadar Lavie.
New York: Berghahn Books 2014. 214 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12552
Anne de Jong
University of Amsterdam
This rigorously researched book is incredibly uncomfortable
to read and exactly, therefore, it deserves a wide audience.
The book begins with an ethnographic description of the
205-kilometer-long protest march to Jerusalem of 43-year-
old Israeli single mother Vicky Knafo. Literally wrapped
in the Israeli flag, this Mizrah.ia Jew with origins in the
Arab and Muslim worldmother made a strong nationalistic
claim against deteriorating provisions for single mothers
in Israel. Joined by many other impoverished Israeli single
mothers, her march resulted in a makeshift protest camp
dubbed Knafoland.
While her book is interesting in its own right, Smadar
Lavie soon makes clear that what follows is not a straight-
forward ethnography about the hardship of single mothers
and that she did not attend these protests as a mere re-
searcher. Instead, Lavie herself was a welfare mom legally
stuck in Israel engaged in a vicious custody battle. In order
to stay sane, [Lavie] joined the effort to build the Mizrah.i
feminist movement, . . . gamely ethnographed everything
[and thus] became [her] own informant (p. 15). Skillfully
weaving personal experience with fresh empirics and ro-
bust analysis, she contends that the everyday experience of
Mizrah.i single mothers on welfare consists of a continuous
process of bureaucratic torture in which bureaucracy devoid
of agency amalgamates [the] intersectional, constructionist
concepts of gender and race, and then calcifies them into a
primordial truism that prohibits identity politics (p. 82).
Lavie first meticulously explains the historic con-
text and development of gendered race relationsMizrah.i
as Jews from the Orient versus Ashkenazi as Jews of
European decentin the Zionist movement and later in
Israel. Through the concept of GendeRace, she analyzes
Spiro, Melford E.
1970 Buddhism and Society: A Great Tradition and Its Burmese
Vicissitudes. New York: Harper and Row.
Tambiah, Stanley J.
1970 Buddhism and the Spirit Cults in North-East Thailand.
London: Cambridge University Press.
Wilson, Bryan
1982 Religion in Sociological Perspective. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
why the majority of deprived Mizrah.i women vote for the
right and how Mizrah.im deny the history of discrimination
that they and their parents experienced in order to fit into
the Ashkenazi middle class mainstream, i.e., to embody
Israeliness (p. 78). She sequentially shows how this
divinity of the Jewish State combined with Israels state
bureaucracy denies Mizrah.i single mothers their agency
(p. 80). That is, the mirage of Mizrah.i and Ashkenazi
Jewish unity to narrate how all Jews should fight a single
front so Israelthe little Davidcan survive surrounded
by Arab Goyim Goliaths (p. 80) leaves the women with-
out a claim to discourse while the repetitive, regulatory
policy of welfare survival strips them of any time, energy,
or space with which to change their predicament (p. 108).
In doing so, Lavie boldly departs from the anthropologi-
cal emphasis on agency and cynically yet realistically con-
cludes that there are situations where agency is impossible
(p. 80).
This argument is deepened in the next three chap-
ters. However, this is done not through a U.SU.K. an-
thropological formula (p. 84) but rather through three
innovative modes of ethnographic writing [that aim]
to overcome the elusiveness of bureaucratic torture
(p. 84). Each chapter is presented as a take with its own
writing style and characteristics. Take 1 in chapter 3 pro-
vides the general model of the interrelationship between
democracy and torture (p. 88), and take 2 in chapter 4
employs the scientific objective gaze through the entry of
the article Ideology, Welfare, and the H.ad Horit that Lavie
co-authored with Oxford law scholar Amir Paz-Fuchs (pp.
115119). These takes consciously exclude voices from the
field into the theory as nodal I have been there points
of proof so as not to appropriate these womens lives and
words to glorify [Lavies] theoretical model (p. 89).
In stark contrast, take 3 consists of diary entries so
personal and vivid that they take you by the throat: Every
summer, I take my son to bear these lines. A dark child

with no trust fund and no one to pull strings for him to get
ahead, he must understand the Mizrah.i struggle first-hand to
survive (p. 124). So you avoid me. You are afraid to look,
scared that your enlightened racism will talk back at you
(p. 130). We glanced at each other, fear in our eyes. We
shut up (p. 135). I hold up the mirror so the White woman
can see the reality she creates for me (p. 139). When in
war, act like its war (p. 151).
Chapter 5 is equally relentless. It forces the lived ex-
perience of bureaucratic torture upon you, and you cannot
help but feel personally addressed. Because you are. Hard
as it is to read, this essential chapter makes the theory of
bureaucratic torture of Mizrah.i women in Israel come alive.
You may hope to reach the safety zone of chapter 6 but, un-
surprisingly by now, the conclusion will give you no solace.
Lavie refuses the pretense of coherence (p. 23) and instead
leaves you with troubling observations about the end of the
Mainstream Polygamy: The Non-Marital Child Paradox
in the West by Dominique Legros.
New York: Springer, 2014. 113 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12564
William Jankowiak
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Dominique Legros asks a provocative question: When a
society imposes universal monogamy by making it strictly
impossible to acknowledge any other forms of affectionate
or reproductive bonding, such as a polygamous marriage,
does that fact not make the culture somewhat uncivilized,
savage, and too fundamentally monogamous?
To aid us in answering this question, Legros in an advo-
cacy essay provides a sketch of western European historys
official position and tacit practices toward plural sexual
arrangements (with some asides to Middle Eastern and
African social practices). She approaches western European
society as if it is the anthropological other to highlight tacit
cultural understandings and legal realities that have histor-
ically disadvantaged the offspring of married men and their
mistresses.
Along the way, we learn that the Catholic Church cre-
ated categories of mistress and bastard in order to obtain
the landed estates of deceased childless couples. The churchs
reasoning came out of pragmatic corporate interest: to pre-
serve the late Roman concubinage system would have put
the church in competition with the children of mistresses
defined as legitimate heirs (p. 21). The church delegit-
imized the Roman concubinage system so that common-law
Book Reviews 437
Knafo protest and its relation to suicide bombing: And this
is exactly what we did (p. 148).
While some will be disturbed by Lavies unapologetic
victim narrative (pp. 23, 84) and others may object to her
uncompromising accusations and controversial conclusion,
I find these to be great albeit uncomfortable strengths. If I can
voice one critique, it is only that the title and the cover do not
transmit the relevance of this book to scholars beyond Israeli
and Jewish studies. Innovative, uncomfortable, rigorous,
thick, accusative, and critical, Wrapped in the Flag of Israel is
indeed a must-read for all.
REFERENCE CITED
Lavie, Smadar, and Amir Paz-Fuchs
2003 But There Is Discrimination: The State Penetrates the Single
Familys Bedroom [in Hebrew]. Globes: Israel Business News
1617:3.
marriages were outlawed, and it ignored the exceptions,
which continue today as more or less a system of wives plus
mistresses.
For men who do not want to divorce their first wife
but who become involved with a second woman and have
children with her, their offspring are legally considered
illegitimate or bastards. Thus, they have no right to in-
herit their fathers property or use his name without his
permission. Legros points out that Catholics who obtain a
divorce in civil court are still considered, in the eyes of
the church, to be married, and thus remarriages are tech-
nically perceived as polygamous or polyandrous unions. It
was this technicality that encouraged France in 2005 to alter
its marriage law to extend rights to the children of sec-
ond and third wives and mistresses, who had essentially
been in de facto polygamous marriages. An unintended
consequence of extending birthrights to every offspring
of all sexual unions was to allow for a type of unofficial
polygamy.
Legros seems to want a fuller openness for multiple-
marriage systems that are officially, as opposed to tacitly,
recognized. At the head of this list is plural marriage. Her
advocacy essay urges us to reevaluate our cultural as-
sumptions, which have made monogamy morally supe-
rior to polygamy even when the enforcement of universal
monogamy results in legislative laws that have a negative im-
pact on infants who are born without full rights. She wants
to correct this legal and cultural blind spot.
438 American Anthropologist Vol. 118, No. 2 June 2016
In making her case, Legros glosses over possible nega-
tive outcomes of legalizing the wifeconcubine system, and
she does not explore the possible emotional and financial
difficulties that wives may experience. To be fair, this is not
Moral Laboratories: Family Peril and the Struggle for a Good
Life by Cheryl Mattingly.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014. 280 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12582
Susan J. Shaw
University of Arizona
Cheryl Mattinglys recent tour de force, Moral Laboratories:
Family Peril and the Struggle for a Good Life, engages with
the anthropology of morality and first-person virtue
ethics to investigate the struggles and small victories of
African American parents with critically ill children. The
latest installment in a series of publications resulting from
Mattinglys research with Mary Lawler, funded by the
National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Department of
Health and Human Services, this book describes Mattinglys
long-term ethnographic involvement with 50 African
American families of children with severe disabilities and
chronic illnesses. In this volume, Mattingly focuses on
parents struggles to raise their children in ways that can
facilitate the best good life for their children in emotionally
wrenching situations where choices and possible futures
range from bad to worse. Drawing particularly on the work
of Charles Taylor and Alasdaire MacIntyre, she develops the
concept of first-person virtue ethics to analyze these parents
moral transformations as they occur in everyday spaces such
as the home, the clinic and hospital, the church, and the
street. These are spaces of possibility, marked with radical
uncertainty, in which parents, children, and their caregivers
experiment with ethical self-fashioning, evaluating their
lives and actions in light of what is ethically good or right.
Mattingly frames her account with the idea of moral
laboratoriessites where parents experiment with possible
futures as they make one decision after another using
their familys welfare, holistically imagined, as their moral
barometer. Moral experimentation involves not only the
transformation of selves but also the transformation of
social and physical spaces, such as the soccer field or the
physical therapy room, as parents and care providers seek
to allow their critically ill children to develop into their best
selves. These chapters highlight everyday events that reveal
how the normative becomes subject to experiment and
problematization (p. 26), for example, dividing cooking
or child care chores among members of a multigenerational
her intention. Instead, she wants to call our attention to the
negative impact on offspring born into this system who must
construct a meaningful life in the face of their marginalized
social status.
household or allowing a child in a wheelchair to engage in
an after-school soccer game.
Chapter 2 offers a detailed theoretical analysis of
first-person virtue ethics in which Mattingly puts poststruc-
turalist analyses of ethics (or, as she terms it, the Foucauldian
tradition) in dialogue with neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics as
represented by Taylor, Martha Nussbaum, and others. Her
aim in this exercise is to highlight the differences between
the two approaches. The debate she constructs contrasts
these two philosophical traditions on three points: (1) How
should we account for the productive effects of power and
discourse? (2) What about the poststructuralist death of the
self? (3) The so what? questionwhy does this argument
matter? In seeking to reconcile these disparate streams
of thought, she argues for a theoretical approach that
accommodates self-reflective and agentive selves born of
inherited moral traditions and processes of subjectivation.
Because, in Mattinglys view, witnessing suffering
engenders new moral responsibilities, this is a story of the
moral becoming of parents, children, and clinical caregivers.
The third chapter, Home Experiments: Scenes from the
Moral Ordinary, offers a compelling example of the ways
that the African American families Mattingly interviews ex-
perience structural constraints in their daily lives. In chapter
3 we meet Delores and her grown daughter Marcy, who is in
recovery from substance abuse. Marcys son Leroy was born
with a hip problem that requires regular physical therapy;
the specter of future surgery looms. The complicated rela-
tionships of love and conflict in Deloress multigenerational
household, where Marcy and her grown sister both live with
their five children, are sensitively and vividly portrayed. In a
scene set in the physical therapy clinic, Mattingly describes
Deloress ongoing effort to reintegrate Marcy into Leroys
daily routine as a primary caregiver. These efforts seem
entirely invisible to the PT staff, however, who ignore
Deloress contributions to the session and who only critique
Marcy for her apparent noninvolvement (Marcy is studying
the Narcotics Anonymous Big Book during Leroys PT
session). The chapter closes with a portrayal of the kinds
of transformation Marcy has experienced on her journey
of recovery and as a recently returned mother of a disabled
child.

In narrating the stories of these families, Mattinglys
voice is personal, intimate. She presents the moral dilemmas
that she herself faced in constructing these narratives, the
struggles she went through in figuring out how to write about
the death of a key informant and friend whose death (suicide?
heart attack?) is never explained. She is actively ethnograph-
ically present in these stories. At the same time, she draws
generously on anthropological and philosophical literature
as she develops and elaborates an ethical concept of rela-
At Home with the Sapa Inca: Architecture, Space,
and Legacy at Chinchero by Stella Nair.
Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015. 304 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12583
Scott C. Smith
Franklin and Marshall College
In At Home with the Sapa Inca: Architecture, Space, and Legacy at
Chinchero, Stella Nair presents a detailed exploration of the
Inca site of Chinchero, a royal estate built for the ruler Topa
Inca, one of the most formidable of the Sapa Inca (Unique
Inca). Nairs approach is explicitly ideographic and experi-
ential. As she writes in the introduction, the study began as
an attempt at reqsiy, the Quechua word meaning to know a
place or a people (p. 1). Nair takes us on a journey through
the landscape and built environment of Chinchero, and as we
come to know the place, experiencing the textures and facets
of its constructed landscape, the contours of Inca political
practice are revealed. Nair draws on a rich corpus of archi-
tectural data, colonial written records, and some excavation
data to understand the sophisticated ways in which the Inca
structured space at Chinchero for political ends at the height
of power, as well as the fate of the site when the Inca world
erupted into civil war and then experienced the violence of
colonialism.
At Home with the Sapa Inca is enjoyable to read; it is
both well illustrated and quite well written. The book
consists of an introduction, seven chapters that discuss
aspects of the landscape and architecture of Chinchero,
and an epilogue. In the introduction, Nair presents the
background to the study, framing the architectural analysis
as an important complement to the use of historical sources
to understand Chinchero. The introduction also argues for
the importance of the ideographic approach to architecture,
which, she writes, draws heavily from phenomenology and
is more sensitive to the sensory experience of place and the
ways that people moved through the built environment.
Chapter 1, PircaWall, identifies a critical problem
with much existing Inca scholarship: the idea that Inca
architecture can be interpreted in terms of the notion that
Book Reviews 439
tional personhood that incorporates the kind of agency she
demands for this project of narrative re-envisioning. To med-
ical anthropology, this book contributes an anthropology of
disability and chronic illness that situates these experiences
firmly in their social contexts. Moral Laboratories also makes
an important contribution to studies of race and health and
to the anthropology of hope. The book would be suitable for
graduate and advanced undergraduate seminars in medical
anthropology and the anthropology of mind, body, and self.
form reveals function. In a fascinating discussion, Nair
argues instead that the Inca conceptualized architecture in
terms of facture (the process of making), materiality, and
patronage. These categories structure her analyses through-
out the book.
Chapters 2 through 6 draw the reader through the
landscape and built environment of Chinchero, presenting
extensive data and analyses. The journey begins with the
approach to the site through the landscape (chapter 2,
PachaPlace and Time) and continues into the large plaza
(chapter 3, PampaPlaza), through the different buildings
at the site (chapter 4, PuncuDoorway, and chapter 5,
UasiHouse), and finally into the interior and more
intimate spaces of the estate (chapter 6, PataPlatform).
Tying these chapters together is an extended argument,
supported by various analyses, about the importance of
performance and theater to the construction of political
subjects and power relations. For example, Nair presents a
compelling argument in chapter 4 that the structures known
as cuyusmanco, which are typically interpreted as council
or judicial houses, were actually defined by the Inca not
in terms of function but in terms of their large, centered
doorways. She argues that these thresholds, which exposed
the darkened interior of the buildings as a backdrop,
served as framing devices to highlight the actions of the
Sapa Inca.
Throughout the book there is a keen sensitivity to the
degree to which the built environment filtered access and
controlled proximity to the Inca. In chapter 5, for example,
Nair discusses a series of important structures along the edge
of the plaza. Access to these structures was highly restricted,
but the structures themselves were particularly visible from
public areas. She suggests that windows in these structures
were strategically designed to allow people gathered in the
plaza brief glimpses of the political process. The windows
were stages as well as signifiers of status and hierarchy in
space (p. 119). In chapter 7, LlactaCommunity, Nair
traces the fate of Chinchero after the death of Topa Inca.
440 American Anthropologist Vol. 118, No. 2 June 2016
She discusses the succession dispute between two of Topa
Incas sons and also traces the biography of the site forward
through the conquest and the entanglements of colonialism,
sifting through the ways that a variety of influences and
memories affected the built environment.
This is an impressive and important contribution
to Andean studies and to the anthropological study of
landscape and architecture. The volume is full of nuanced
analyses of the construction and experience of Chinchero.
Biography of a Hacienda: Work and Revolution in Rural
Mexico by Elizabeth Terese Newman.
Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2014. 280 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12543
Stacey Lynn Camp
University of Idaho
Elizabeth Terese Newmans Biography of a Hacienda: Work
and Revolution in Rural Mexico is a multisited exploration of
Mexicos interconnected past and present through ethno-
graphic, archival, and archaeological research. Newmans
work considers the linkages between the historic residents of
Hacienda San Miguel Acocotla and contemporary residents
of the neighboring village of La Soledad Morelos. Her work
questions how the hacienda structure changed since the late
1500s by carefully retracing each step of her archaeological
and ethnographic investigations.
The book is organized in a logical fashion that leads the
reader through the stages of archival, ethnographic, and ar-
chaeological inquiry. Newman guides readers through the
early days of historical research necessary to understand the
sociopolitical context of historic Mexico in the first chapter,
One Hundred Years: From Independence to Revolution in
Mexico. The second chapter provides a thorough literature
review of the historical archaeology of Mexico as well as a
nicely composed section on how revolutions can be under-
stood using anthropological and historical theories. At the
crux of her argument in this chapter is that while a hegemonic
economic system, be it the hacienda system or capitalism, re-
quires an underclass living in deprived conditions, people
still seem to be willing to accept poor economic conditions
as long as they remain in control of their homelives (p. 32).
Newmans work is most inventive when she seeks to
connect events that occurred in Mexicos past with what is
taking place in contemporary Mexico. In the fourth chapter,
The Legacy of Revolution, she explores the impact of the
Mexican Revolution on residents of the modern Mexican
town of La Soledad Morelos, some of whom are descendants
of the hacienda residents. Using the tools of historiography,
archaeology, and ethnography, Newman and her students
Nair presents fascinating interpretations throughout the
book and touches on a wide range of theoretical domains,
including performance, landscape, materiality, movement,
place making, and phenomenology, among others. At
times I found myself wanting to read more about how
the arguments she presents articulate with established
literatures in these areas. This critique aside, At Home with
the Sapa Inca is a wonderful and erudite book that will
inform analyses of the Inca state for years to come.
discover that the town residents lack of access to healthcare,
education, and food are the heritage of four hundred years
of life and labor at the Hacienda San Miguel Acocotla, as
well as the result of post-Revolutionary reforms introduced
by the twentieth-century Mexican government (p. 65).
Newman and her students use a creative, mixed-methods
approach that involves ethnographic observation of La
Soledad Morelos residents as well as the mapping of the
contemporary villages architectural features. They use
this work to predict where human burials and artifact
concentrations could be found in Hacienda San Miguel
Acocotlas archaeological record.
A few areas of the book could have been refined.
Newmans interpretations of archaeological data seem to
rest on theories of power and inequality, but such theories
are not explored in depth. This is especially visible in
her discussion of jewelry, perfume, and other artifacts
associated with bodily adornment and modification. She
states that such possessions represent some of those happy
moments common to people around the world (regardless
of economic standing): a mans attempt to begin a flirtation
with a pretty girl, a young womans desire to make herself
pretty in the eyes of her parents, her children, or her
boyfriend, or a husbands loving birthday gift (p. 186).
This interpretation neglects to consider the broad range of
ideologies (e.g., gender, race, class, etc.) structuring indi-
viduals agency and choice in dress. This section of the book
could have greatly benefited from engagement with theorists
who grapple with the archaeology of bodily adornment
and social identity, such as Diana DiPaolo Loren (2001,
2010), Barbara Voss (2008), and Carolyn White (2005).
If Newman is not finished with this research, she might
consider reinterpreting this subset of artifacts in a future
publication.
Overall, this is a compelling read that provides insight
not only into the subject of the authors research but also into
the process of archaeological discovery. In the past, archaeol-
ogists have been guilty of weaving their discoveries into tidy

narratives that neglect to address the many questions that
arise and sometimes remain unanswered once archaeologi-
cal, oral history, and archival work has concluded. Newman
is open to what Mark Hauser has termed the messiness of
the past (2012:192); she does not shy away from addressing
things that are unclear, and she frames her interpretations
of data in such a way that leaves the door open for addi-
tional interpretation. This makes for an excellent read for
students planning to pursue archaeology as a profession who
will also encounter absences in their work. Newmans use
of a first-person, conversational tone to tell the story of her
research reinforces the difficulties in constructing the past,
as does her repeated interjection of her students and the
local residents observations, questions, and theories about
her work. This is perhaps why her use of storytelling to
preface or frame her interpretations also works well in this
book, as it adds another layer of intrigue about life in the
calpanera, the housing provided by a hacienda owner for
his/her workers (p. 243).
Getting By: Class and State Formation among Chinese
in Malaysia by Donald M. Nonini.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015. 360 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12581
Seng-Guan Yeoh
Monash University, Malaysia
In Getting By, Donald Nonini takes issue with a range of classic
and contemporary studies by sinologists that portray dias-
poric or overseas Chinese as quintessentially thrifty, wealthy,
and successful business entrepreneurs. While the specific
subject of Getting By is Malaysian Chinese, the criticisms it
embodies have general applicability beyond Malaysian and
overseas Chinese.
According to Nonini, much of the body of work on over-
seas Chinese is flawed. One influential corpus essentially im-
bibes Orientalist, functionalist, and masculinist proclivities
that, as a consequence of their China-oriented lens, look
out for peculiar Chinese cultural and organizational traits
and practices in a diasporic context. Given the deep eco-
nomic inequalities that exist among Malaysian Chinese, the
presumed existence of a homogeneous Chinese community
is problematic.
Another body of work, comparatively smaller in
number, argues that the prominence given to (Chinese)
ethnicity is actually an outcome of ideological manipulation
or mystification of everyday class relations conjured up by
the dominant ruling class. For Nonini, however, ethnicity
must be accorded a reality in its own right, as must the
Book Reviews 441
REFERENCES CITED
Hauser, Mark W.
2012 Messy Data, Ordered Questions, Year in Review: Archae-
ology. American Anthropologist 114(2):184195.
Loren, Diana DiPaolo
2001 Social Sciences: Orthodoxies and Practices of Dressing in
the Early Colonial Lower Mississippi Valley. Journal of Social
Archaeology 1(2):172189.
2010 The Archaeology of Clothing and Bodily Adornment
in Colonial America. Gainesville: University Press of
Florida.
Voss, Barbara L.
2008 Poor People in Silk Shirts: Dress and Ethnogenesis in
Spanish-Colonial San Francisco. Journal of Social Archaeology
8(3):404432.
White, Carolyn
2005 American Artifacts of Personal Adornment, 16801820:
A Guide to Identification and Interpretation. Lanham, MD:
Altamira Press.
role of cultural production, which cannot be reduced to the
expression of ideology (p. 12).
In multiethnic countries like Malaysia, another influen-
tial variant deploys a subjective pluralist analytical lens.
Here, its proponents contend that the class consciousness
of their research subjects is limited and inchoate compared to
the consciousness of ethnic differences in wealth, power,
and privilege (p. 11). Any awareness of their objective
conditions has to give way to the more socially salient and
meaningful experiences of subjective perceptions. Nonini
maintains, however, that there are cultural dimensions to
class and material dimensions to ethnicity (p. 12).
In contrast to the foregoing, Getting By offers a coun-
tervailing perspective by foregrounding a critical historical
narrative of the processes of class and state formation of
the Chinese in Malaysia to account for the habituation
of this prevailing ethnic stereotype. The key theoretical
takeoff point of the book is drawn from the insights of
Karl Marx (particularly with respect to his reproduction
of labour thesis) and E. P. Thompson, the eminent
historian of the working class. Additionally, Nonini utilizes
concepts from Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, and Henri
Lefebvre to illuminate the processes of gendered relations,
embodied performative and discursive styles, and the statist
production of urban spaces in his primary fieldwork site of
Bukit Mertajam, a predominantly Chinese market town
in northern Peninsular (western) Malaysia.
442 American Anthropologist Vol. 118, No. 2 June 2016
The outcome is a masterful historical ethnography
of how these disparate formative processes and everyday
practices intersect and overlap with one another over time to
produce diasporic Chinese citizenship in Malaysia. Noninis
ethnography is especially compelling, rich, and nuanced
given his deep lodes of data extracted from fieldwork begun
in the late 1970s and supplemented with periodic return
visits to his fieldwork site up to the late 2000s. His primary
informants were Chinese merchants and businessmen
(towkays) and the long-distance truck drivers who work for
some of these towkays. Ethnographically fleshing out the
differential strategies, tactics, and subjectivities of these
two contrastingly positioned subjects in juxtaposition to
state and global processes forms the crux of the book.
The book is organized into two parts. Part 1, which
covers the period 1969 to 1985, is longer (six chapters) and
arguably better developed. The narratives and practices that
Nonini deciphers in this section are set in a milieu when
Malaysian society was in flux after the race riots of May
1969 and the subsequent radical social engineering that un-
folded under the New Economy Policy (NEP, 197190).
Nonini teases out what class formation and class conflict
look like among the Chinese in Bukit Mertajam by pay-
Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century
Colombia by Ana Mara Ochoa Gautier.
Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. 280 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12544
Leonardo Cardoso
Texas A&M University
In the 1980s, two publications introduced innovative ap-
proaches to the study of Latin America. Both books quickly
became foundational texts for the study of colonialism and
modernity in the region. La ciudad letrada (The Lettered City),
by Angel Rama (1984), offered an insightful analysis of
colonial Latin America and its ramifications as the region
entered into modernity. Rama argued that the history of
Latin America is entangled with successive attempts to con-
trol a textual matrix, where the proper manner of con-
structing and interpreting texts informs the regulation of
the Latin American urban centeritself a metonym for the
nation. From instructions on how to organize the colony into
ordered settlements to political doctrines for nation-
building, the letrados (lettered men) were invested in erecting
a literary edifice able to order the social. Only at the turn of
the 20th century would such an attempt to master a social
reality permeated by symbolic and bodily intrusions find
(equally textual) opposition from intellectuals more inclined
to suture popular culture and democratic values. The other
ing attention to the stylized class practices of laboring men
and the bosses for whom they work. While the latter can
afford to perform acts of public benevolence and meritori-
ous consumption, the former are engaged in a dialectics of
disputatiousness with their bosses.
Part 2 covers the period from 1985 to 1997, which
indexes a different milieu under the neoliberal policies of
Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad and the push for Malaysia
to be global. By then, the transformative powers of the
NEP had reconfigured the ways that class formation among
Chinese capitalists and businessmen had to proceed. Many
resorted to forging new kinds of patronage ties with influ-
ential members of the ruling Malay-based political party,
the United Malay National Organization, as well as crafting
joint ventures with business partners from China, Taiwan,
and Hong Kong. In Bukit Mertajam, while the Chinese mer-
chant class managed to evolve new business strategies in
order to survive, many in the working class decided to seek
better-paid work overseas.
Getting By is an exemplary piece of engaged schol-
arship. It balances judiciously between theoretical so-
phistication and lucid prose and deserves to be read
widely.
publication, De los medios a las mediaciones (From the Media
to Mediations), by Jesus Martn-Barbero (1987), considered
mediatized contexts for the negotiation of cultural distinc-
tion in Latin America. Focusing on the reception of media
content, the book aimed at carving a more heterogeneous
understanding of (mass) culture during modernization and
nationalism.
Aurality draws on these two pillars of Latin American
scholarship to examine Colombias national project in the
19th century. Similar to The Lettered City and From the Media
to Mediations, Aurality offers fresh analytical tools for under-
standing Latin America through the links between colony
and postcolony, culture and politics. Like Angel Rama, Ana
Mara Ochoa Gautier focuses on the successive demarcation
of otherness by a literate elite at a historical moment when
such an endeavor was an urgent political necessity (p. 2).
Like From the Media to Mediations, her book is attentive to
how the heterogeneous reception of social practices both
mediatizes and mediates the nations cultural field. Different
from both publications, however, Aurality examines these
processes in close detail, revealing a fascinating collection
of cosmopolitical projects for Colombia.
Besides the aforementioned relation to Latin American
scholarship, Aurality dialogues with sound studies and

linguistic, cultural, and sensory anthropology. In reading
the archive against the grain, the book unearths a variety
of voices and audile techniques that contributed to but
also disrupted the project of a lettered city. Rather than
taking for granted certain modes of aural signification (e.g.,
language and music), Aurality traverses technologies of
inscription in novels, poems, literary histories, songbooks,
grammars, ethnographies, and writings on language. In so
doing, the book shows how, subsumed under apparent
purposes such as the literary, the grammatical, the poetic,
the ritual, the disciplinary, or the ethnographic (pp. 78),
sounds have been ambiguously located between nature and
culture, human and nonhuman, signal and noise, textuality
and orality, listening and writing. A quick overview of the
book will elucidate its scope.
Chapter 1 discusses the vocalization of boat rowers on
the Magdalena River, which informed the Westernized
assessment of this riverine group as somewhere between
the human and the animal, their howls standing in contrast
to emerging European definitions of music and language.
The author argues that for the indigenous peoples such
vocalization was less a unifying marker of identity than
the manifestation of multiple forms of being. Chapter 2
examines debates about popular song through three differ-
ent strategies for inscribing the oral into the literary form:
popular poetry, songbooks, and the novel. By highlighting
such contradictory political and aesthetic endeavors, what
emerges is a more diverse and contested history of the
senses in the relation between listening, vision, orality,
and the politics of inscription of sound than implied by the
notion of the lettered city (p. 16).
The ambiguous relation between culture and nature
reappears in chapter 3 with debates about the inscription
Return to Sender: The Moral Economy of Perus Migrant
Remittances by Karsten Paerregaard.
Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2015. 336 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12570
Enrique Mayer
Yale University
Karsten Paerregaard has been studying Peruvian migration
patterns for three decades. He has visited enclaves of Peru-
vian migrants in the United States, Japan, Spain, Chile, and
Argentina. The essentials are: The bulk of the countrys mi-
grants come from the countrys capital city and a few other
cities on the coast. In addition, they are mostly women, and
many of them have received some form of higher educa-
tion. And perhaps most remarkable, the majority belong to
Book Reviews 443
of indigenous languages. Such debates put into evidence the
disjuncture between colony and postcolony, particularly
regarding the symbolic, ontological, and juridico-political
status of indigenous groups in the country. Finally, chapter 4
describes voicing, pronunciation, and orthography as inter-
linked devices in the political endeavor of turning indigenous
peoples into modern citizens. The eloquent use of the voice
via the effective training of the ear, the construction of
a language genealogy able to filter and folklorize popular
verbal expressions as part of the cultural heritage, and the
development of an orthographic system of musical notation
(a symptom of the lettered citys logocentric idealism): all
suggest modes of vocal (and racial) purification enmeshed
in the formation of the res publica.
In tracing these acoustic assemblages, systems of
mediation that open space for the mutually constitutive
and transformative relation between the given and the made
that is generated in the interrelationship between a listening
entity that theorizes about the process of hearing producing
notions of the listening entity . . . , notions of the sonorous
producing entities, and notions of the type of relationship
between them (pp. 2223), Ochoa Gautier provides a
vitally important account of the intricate and heterogeneous
modes of knowing, being, becoming, and belonging that
continue to resonate in the postcolonial lettered city.
REFERENCES CITED
Martn-Barbero, Jesus
1987 De los medios a las mediaciones [From the media to media-
tions]. Barcelona: Gustavo Gili.
Rama, Angel
1984 La ciudad letrada [The lettered city]. Montevideo: Fundacion
Internacional.
Perus middle class. This bias is reflected in Perus remit-
tances, which reach women primarily and are captured by
a very small number of households, many of them from the
countrys better off income groups. Peruvian remittances
therefore enhance existing inequalities in Peru deepening
the gap between the haves and the have-nots (p. 63).
Perus remittances came to 2.788 billion USD for the
year 2010, a mere drop in the bucket in the ocean of
the worlds remittances. The main source is the United
States with 40 percent, then Spain with 15 percent, Japan
with 8 percent, and Chile and Argentina with 4.6 and 3.9
percent respectively, but there are Peruvians in almost ev-
ery other country, and these add another 20 percent. The
444 American Anthropologist Vol. 118, No. 2 June 2016
countrys migration-remittance balance is negative given
that 8.5 percent of the population are migrants, while only
3.8 percent receive remittances, and the receivers of these
monies are primarily women. Peruvian destinations changed
direction in the 1990s; migrants selected Spain, Italy, Chile,
and Argentina in response to high demand for domestic la-
bor, while legal measures taken by Japan and the United
States made entry to those countries problematic. Most Pe-
ruvians work in the service sector. The statistics highlight
the urban destination of the migrants, in that they cluster in
a few cities where they form distinct support communities
in the receiving countries.
To understand the motivations behind remittances, the
book turns to qualitative analysis that allows Paerregaard
to map the contexts, the evolving transnational kinship sit-
uations, to interpret the reasons why people send large
portions of their hard-earned income back home. These are
pledges tied to specific relationships of trust and responsi-
bility between remittance senders and their recipients . . .
which may need reassessment as circumstances evolve, but
are understood as an oath (p. 30).
The first type of pledge is called a compromiso, the
Spanish word for a commitment made to the household
that remains in Peru to provide it with the means of liveli-
hood, but it may also support named individuals with the
means to complete, for example, their education. The many
case studies describe the impact of events against the stub-
born and devoted efforts to keep sending money when their
earning capacity is impaired. The senders often see their
compromiso as a heavy sacrifice. Interesting is the analysis of
how these flows are monitored to ensure that the senders
intent is carried out at the receiving end as well as how
conflicts within the family are resolved despite the physical
separation.
The section called voluntad (good will) describes efforts
by migrant communities to support collective projects back
home. Among the cases discussed is the sponsorship of com-
petitive and expensive fiestas that migrants undertake to
enhance their status back home. The most famous are the
patron saint festivities of Cabanaconde, in the Colca Valley
of Arequipa, which individuals in the Washington, DC, com-
munity have undertaken for more than two decades. In cen-
tral Peru, members of communities who sign three-year
contracts to work as shepherds on ranches in the United
States are charged a fee by the community during their ab-
sences that is used to defray the cost of community services.
Another example describes how migrants in Hartford, Con-
necticut, who hark back to the District of Bolognesi in the
Department of Ancash, organize charitable collections to
provide development projects for schools, churches, and
organizations in their home district.
The final chapter details the circumstances and impor-
tance of the motivation to improve ones lot. Superarse (to
overcome) refers to the efforts that remittances play in help-
ing recipients pull themselves up by their bootstraps, either
as individuals or as the family split apart but sticking to-
gether. Discussed here are how dreams come true through
thrift, houses get built, businesses get established, careers get
completed, and even rightfully earned pensions that some
retired migrants now enjoy are attained. Also discussed are
the stubborn and combative efforts by migrants to handle
the immensely difficult processes of overcoming their illegal
status by achieving visas, citizenship, drivers licenses, bank
accounts, and memberships in organizations in the places
of their destinations. These are the success stories that lure
future waves of migrants.
In the conclusion, Paerregaard dismisses various
government-sponsored or internationally sponsored
schemes to tap into the resource flow that remittances
could (if pooled, taxed, or channeled) provide to enhance
infrastructure, development, or employment in depressed
areas. The poverty, inequalities, and lack of opportunities
that initially motivate women and men to leave their homes
to seek a better future will not change. It is the authors eval-
uation that remittances will not slow or speed up migration,
because they are part of the pattern itself. He quite rightly
states: Remittances represent hard-earned money that
belongs to the migrants and their families, not to national
governments and international organizations (p. 207).
This book will be useful for students interested in migra-
tion issues, because it focuses on one country in depth, stud-
ied with quantitative data and with many telling long-term
trajectories noting individual successes and tribulations. It
will be useful for scholars who wish to compare the Peruvian
case with their own. This study is also a foil for those theories
that focus on macro-economic models, because it concen-
trates its analysis on the appropriate locus: the family that
sticks together to achieve its dreams. How this solidarity is
maintained despite the separation is an amazing accomplish-
ment. Remittances highlight the role that money transfers
play in maintaining kinship ties over the long run and across
international borders.

Ayyas Accounts: A Ledger of Hope in Modern India
by Anand Pandian and M. P. Mariappan.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014. 232 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12547
Subhadra Mitra Channa
University of Delhi
This book follows an accepted genre in anthropological writ-
ings, using a detailed personal narrative to illustrate a lifeway
in a specific temporal setting. The skill of the anthropolo-
gist in presenting such a document as an academic work
lies in the selection of appropriate excerpts and supporting
commentary to enhance the intellectual impact. The basic
premise of such a work assumes that a persons life reflects
larger, more generalized aspects of the world rather than
simply being a chronicle of particularistic events. This book
does not disappoint on these counts. The life of a 94-year-
old man as recorded by his anthropologist grandson brings
out the ground-level realities of colonial rule, world war,
the changing geopolitical scene of the postwar world, and
the creation of the postcolonial diaspora, when large num-
bers of people from earlier colonies migrated to First World
nations or former metropoles. The disparities of develop-
ment between the colonized countries and those that had
used their resources to move ahead are reflected in these
movements, which reversed the colonial process. It also be-
comes clear, though only through mild comments made by
the grandmother, that this brain drain was another form of
colonization through which developing countries lost their
human resources to the developed world.
This story could come from any middle-class South
Asian family, where the older grandparents symbolize sacri-
fice, hardship, and selfless commitment to bringing up their
children with minimal resources, whereas the grandchildren
are relatively opulent, spend lavishly, and enjoy a far better
standard of living. Every flight from India even today brings
old parents frightened yet proud to be visiting successful
children in an alien land where they cannot speak the lan-
guage or eat the food. Yet they come again and are again
drawn by ties of blood and commitment.
The vignettes of narratives in this book touch upon
social and political aspects of caste, marriage, and economy
in South Asia as Anand Pandian draws upon his grandfathers
narratives and compares them with his own life in some
places. We get glimpses of caste discrimination and gender
relations, social mobility and community life. Yet not all
Book Reviews 445
aspects of social life have been clearly depicted. It is as if a
curtain is suddenly lifted to give a small glimpse and then
dropped again before we are truly informed. There are many
unanswered questions. What happened to the social position
of the Nader community with their economic prosperity in
the new environment? Did the priest come for subsequent
marriages in the family? Who were the friends? What was
the social network? How did the political position of castes
change? Pandian probably expects readers to contextualize
this life history against the existing body of literature on
South Asia, but a little guidance in this respect would have
made this book more useful to undergraduates and students
learning about South Asia.
Another aspect is the subjective positioning of the
narrator, a man brought up in the United States. His
predisposition is to record some matters more acutely than
others. He is troubled by his grandfathers values, which
seem to conflict with his own, especially regarding the
economy and the environment. It is clear that the grandson
does not subscribe to the inherent calculative mindset of his
grandfather. Yet both men are silent about women. Why did
the grandson not interview and record his grandmother in-
stead of his grandfather? Is it because she never expected this
or because he never thought about it? This gap is mentioned
in the afterword by Veena Das, to whom, as a woman,
the oversight was quite evident. In a characteristically (I
would say) Western approach, Pandian does touch upon the
possible erotic aspect of his grandparents relationship, one
that brought forth eight children. But he is silent about his
paatis life except for recording his grandfathers comments.
The author has the mental disposition to calculate every
aspect of life as something that characterized his grandfather,
but is it only his grandfather? In the model society of South
Asia, there is a concept of jati dharmaappropriate conduct
for persons of a common jatiwhich attributes thrift and
a calculative disposition to all members of trading castes or
jati. The model breaks down when occupational diversity
takes place, thus releasing the hold of jati on the individ-
ual. This relationship between the individual and the social
universe is something that the book could have highlighted
more. However, in a subtle way, the book does capture a lot.
One positive aspect is the beauty of the language in all its sim-
plicity, which makes for immense readability, expanding the
possible audience to include the nonacademic reader as well.
446 American Anthropologist Vol. 118, No. 2 June 2016
Living with Insecurity in a Brazilian Favela: Urban Violence
and Daily Life by R. Ben Penglase.
New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2014. 224 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12573
Kathleen M. Millar
Simon Fraser University
In 2008, elite police and military forces initiated a series of
invasions of squatter neighborhoods (favelas) in the Brazilian
city of Rio de Janeiro. Their goal was first to expel the
drug traffickers who controlled these neighborhoods and
then to implant permanent pacifying police units. These
operations were lauded internationally as a way to secure
the city in advance of Rios hosting of the 2016 Olympic
Games. Locally, the operations were framed as a means
to end a decades-long war between rival drug gangs and
between drug gangs and police that made lethal violence an
everyday part of the lives of favela residents.
R. Ben Penglases Living with Insecurity in a Brazilian
Favela offers a fresh perspective on urban violence in Latin
America by shifting the readers gaze away from these kinds
of spectacular events. There are no shoot-outs or large-
scale police invasions in the pages of the bookimages
often associated with insecurity in Rios favelas. Instead, this
richly narrated ethnography invites us to consider seemingly
mundane moments in a trafficker-controlled favela when
safety and danger, security and insecurity are not easily
defined. There is the time, for example, when the author is
searched by police in the midst of a casual conversation with
neighbors on the street and later receives an unexpected
visit from one of the local drug dealers, who asks if he is
all right. Living with drug trafficker and police violence,
Penglase argues, involves knowing how to negotiate such
situations of ambiguity, uncertainty, and doubt about who
offers protection and what constitutes danger.
By attending to moments of indeterminacy, this book
complicates the common binary of order and disorder in
accounts of urban violence. Outsiders to Rios favelas typi-
cally view the violence of drug traffickers as disrupting the
social order that police aim to reinstate. A counterdiscourse
circulates among favela residents that inverts this view: drug
dealers are the ones who maintain order in the favela by pro-
hibiting theft and resolving disputes, while police are the
threatening and unpredictable force. Penglase challenges
these two discourses by showing instead how traffickers
and police are symbiotically related (p. 156). Each relies
on the violently disruptive actions of the other to assert
its own authority, thereby coproducing a state of ordered
disorder or what Penglase calls (in)security. While rooted
in the specific context of Rio de Janeiro, this insight has
far-reaching significance for expanding theories of violence
and stability as mutually constitutive and for illuminating
the social processes through which nonstate actors achieve
legitimacy.
Penglase spent a year and a half (followed by an addi-
tional research trip) living in the favela he calls Caxambu.
One of books greatest attributes is the way it draws on his
often-befuddled efforts to learn how to manage the uncer-
tainty and ambivalence that permeate this social world. This
narrative approach produces a genuineness and a lucidity
in the writing that I found captivating. It also provides a
convincing ethnographic foundation for an analysis of favela
life inspired by Michel de Certeaus notion (1984) of social
tacticsthe artful ways people navigate in and around
structures of power. Each of the four core chapters revolves
around one or two indeterminate moments that illuminate
the tactics residents use to contend with unpredictable and
potentially violent situations. Many of these tacticssuch
as keeping public secrets or staying close but not too close
to relatives or dangerous intimates involved in the drug
tradeare deeply paradoxical. This is not only a case, then,
of violence producing epistemic murk (Taussig 1986).
Rather, Penglase shows how the ambiguity that arises from
urban violence is also part and parcel of the very tactics
residents use to cope with this insecurity.
The book concludes with one of its most intriguing ar-
guments, which could merit a fuller chapter of its own.
Here, Penglase examines the traces of urban violence: a wall
pockmarked with bullet holes, a front gate of a house where
a young girl was accidentally shot by police, a hillside cross
lit at night with red bulbs to symbolize the Red Command
gang. These marked spaces act as present, visible signs of
violence that is long past or is now absent. The lived experi-
ence of violence, Penglase suggests, has as much to do with
these lingering, eerie, phantasmagorical effects as it does
with the original violent incident (p. 175). Through his anal-
ysis of these traces, Penglase once again draws the readers
gaze toward dimensions of urban violence often eclipsed by
accounts of dramatic events. In doing so, he crafts a com-
pelling ethnography that will surely become required reading
for students and scholars interested in violence, urban space,
and contemporary Latin America.
REFERENCES CITED
de Certeau, Michel
1984 The Practice of Everyday Life. Steven F. Rendall, trans.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Taussig, Michael
1986 Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.

Daughters of Parvati: Women and Madness
in Contemporary India by Sarah Pinto.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. 296 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12585
Anubha Sood
Southern Methodist University
Sarah Pintos Daughters of Parvati: Women and Madness in
Contemporary India is a compelling ethnography about
womens engagement with Western psychiatric care in
North India. In bearing witness to the difficult lives of
women on the verge of mental and relational breakdowns,
Pinto offers a nuanced account of the gendered partic-
ularities of everyday psychiatric practice in India. Her
observations of the Indian context open windows onto global
anthropological debates about the ethics of institutional care
and medical therapeutics, the vicissitudes of biopolitical
power and subject making, and the challenges of reflexive
research in conditions of human crises and abuses.
The lifeworlds of two psychiatric settings in a North
Indian city provide the framing for the book. Pintos first
field site is a private facility that houses mentally ill women
estranged from their families for indeterminate periods of
time; the second is the family ward of a government-run
psychiatric unit where women stay with their kin for
shorter durations of treatment. Pinto juxtaposes these two
medical spaces to explore how institutional confinement,
social abandonment, and culturally distinct clinical practices
offer broken responses to womens personal and familial
suffering. The comparison points to the ethical paradox
involved in managing Indian womens psychological and
societal crises, wherein boundaries between what consti-
tutes the constraining overreach of psychiatric treatment
versus its role in providing therapeutic care become
blurred by everyday processes of intimacy and kinship in
womens lives, as well as by gendered considerations of
womens social vulnerabilities and the practical limits of an
overburdened psychiatric system.
The brilliance of Pintos analysis lies in how she con-
ceptualizes Indian psychiatry as a magnifying, kaleidoscopic
stage for observing the ruptures of intimate relations and
familial bonds that accompany womens mental ailments.
Pinto uses a life-history approach to follow the trajectories of
pathologization, exclusion, and abandonment experienced
by women with mental afflictions in India, finding that
womens gendered vulnerabilities are interwoven with their
mental illnesses, how each ratchets up the effects of the
other (p. 261). In paying close attention to the actions of
clinicians, family members, and female patients, she high-
lights how the complexity and plurality of clinical responses
to female crises in India do not fit within the parameters
Book Reviews 447
of evaluation that underpin global ethical models regarding,
say, the exclusionary potential of biopolitical power in set-
ting people apart under the guise of therapeutic benevolence
or setting them aside in blatant disregard of human rights.
Instead, she finds that Indian psychiatry unfolds according to
an ethic of dissolution in its embedment in the messiness
of lives lived in relationships and households that presents
itself as a site for negotiating the dissolutions thereof, which
occur simultaneously with womens psychiatric crises.
While the material from the psychiatric settings is ex-
cellent, the book achieves greater ethnographic depth when
Pinto masterfully interweaves the stories of the numerous
women she encounters outside the institutions, as well as
reflections from her own crisis in the midst of a dissolving
marriage, into the analysis. Her external and internal space
and time merge seamlessly in her writing, which makes for
not only more involved reading but a closer portrayal of the
profoundly disordering potential of the normative ordering
of kinship and marriage in womens lives. In parts of the
book, ethnographic vignettes and analyses are interspersed
with long sections on the history and sociology of psychia-
try in India, which distract from the narrative flow of the
chapters. However, these discussions are rich in content
and analysis. A special mention needs to be made of Pintos
excellent discussion of the cultural salience and distinctive
presentation of female hysteria in Indian psychiatry, which
is comprehensive enough to serve as a stand-alone academic
source on the subject.
Pintos method of merging diverse sets of ethnographic
material, courageously personal reflections, and socio-
historical material, albeit winding in parts, makes for an
excellent contribution to the anthropologies of gender,
kinship, and global psychiatry. Her work comes closest to
Joao Biehls in attending to the moral dimensions of medical
care and the effects of biopolitical arrangements on the
lives of individuals, families, and societies. Pinto, however,
situates her work away from explorations of the structural
dimensions and global effects of biopolitical power; she is
invested in staying with the precariousness of selves and
relations and with the desires and struggles of the actors
living under intensified conditions of loss, desperation, and
hope. Pintos focus on the habitation of breakdown as a
crucial analytic (p. 257) that reaches beyond the analytic
of disciplinary power and its discontents does not give
readers the comfort of outrage or offer liberatory promises
for resolving the violence entrenched in the containment
of female maladies. This makes Daughters of Parvati a heavy
read but places it among some of the most sophisticated
anthropological writings on the subject.
448 American Anthropologist Vol. 118, No. 2 June 2016
Pilgrimage Tourism of Diaspora Africans to Ghana
by Ann Reed.
New York: Routledge, 2015. 220 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12556
Mattia Fumanti
University of St. Andrews
The ways in which people remember the past form the cen-
tral theme of this rich ethnography about pilgrimage tourism
of diaspora Africans to Ghana. Building on long-term field
research with tourists, tour guides, and locals in Cape Coast
and Elmina in Ghanas Central Region, Ann Reed success-
fully conveys a very subtle portrayal of the diverse meanings
and interpretations of the history and memory of the slave
trade held by a variety of social actors directly and indirectly
involved in Ghanas growing tourism and heritage industry.
Contrary to previous works that privilege an emphasis on
the economic dimensions of heritage tourism, the author in-
stead argues for an analysis that reclaims the personal and the
subjective alongside the social and the collective. In so doing
she brings a nuanced understanding of the diverse meanings
that diaspora Africans and Ghanaians ascribe to their experi-
ences of touring, working, and living by the historical sites
of the transatlantic slave trade. What ensues is a sophisti-
cated and sensitive account of the wealth of official, popular,
and personal memories and histories focusing on what the
slave trade and its heritage industry mean to people. These,
the author convincingly shows, emerge and reemerge and
are created, invented, and debated in local, national, and
transnational public spheres at different historical moments
and in different contexts. They are as much a product of
global historical processes as they are of the different social
and cultural milieu that generates them and of individual and
personal experiences.
From the onset Reed contends that the experiences
of traveling to Ghana for diaspora Africans are charged
with complex and overlapping disjunctures that operate at
the moral, political, and personal level. Diaspora Africans,
mostly from the United States, experience this journey
largely as one of pilgrimage, a defining moment in their
lives that holds the potential for personal transformations.
But in reconnecting with the perceived ancestral land, they
find that their personal experiences of journeying to Ghana
as well as their reception by ordinary Ghanaians, local chiefs,
and the state yield very different responses. As Reed points
out, while powerful discourses produced by the state, the
media, culture brokers, and capitalism contribute to the con-
struction of a discourse that African descended folks whose
ancestors were forcibly removed from the continent as a
direct result of the transatlantic slave trade should now be
welcomed back home as diaspora African kin, the reality is
more complex as individuals and groups hold different views
about the history of the slave trade and how this should be
remembered and about the purpose of reuniting the African
family (p. 7). This dynamic between the personal and the so-
cial collective, argues Reed, is highly significant in diaspora
Africa pilgrimage tours to Ghana . . . because it illuminates
meaning over notion of identity and belonging (p. 22).
It is around meanings over the notion of identity and
belonging that this ethnography makes a significant con-
tribution. In seven detailed chapters, Reed explores how
different mediascapes and ideoscapes inform the experi-
ences and meanings of the memory of the transatlantic slave
trade for diaspora Africans and Ghanaians. This memory
is contested, invented, remembered, and reenacted by the
state, by local and diasporic culture brokers, by tourists, and
by Ghanaians living near the heritage sites. It is this pro-
cess of contestation that brings novel and fresh meaning to
peoples understanding of identity and belonging. Here we
hear the different and differing voices of these social actors
as they debate the meanings, notions, and interpretations of
the history and memory of the slave trade; how this memory
should best be transmitted, produced, and circulated; how
the tourism and heritage industry should best address the ex-
periential and existential needs of diaspora tourists; and how
it should contribute to Ghanas development and economic
growth.
These issues, as Reed shows, are not simply matters
of pragmatics but carry deeply felt emotions and for this
reason remain profoundly contested. Issues of reparation
and repatriation, the staging of invented traditions and state-
sponsored festivals, and discourses of kinship, chieftaincy,
belonging, and foreignness are tied to wider discourses about
the historical impact of the slave trade on Africa and its
diasporas, the continents underdevelopment by colonialism
and neocolonialism, and the continuous impact of racism on
Africa and the African diasporas. Here we hear, for example,
about how Ghanaian tour guides often separate white tourists
from diaspora Africans to avoid personal confrontations and
how they adapt their tours to their audiences demands for
specific narratives of the slave trade. In a similar vein, we
hear about culture brokers efforts to cater to diasporic
expectations of the heritage tours as well as to promote pan-
African ideas to the Ghanaian public. These personal efforts
require subtle negotiations over meanings and experiences
at the personal, political, and moral level.

In addressing issues of identity, belonging, memory, and
history in the heritage industry in Ghana, Ann Reeds Pilgrim-
age Tourism of Diaspora Africans to Ghana makes a substantial
Center Places and Cherokee Towns: Archaeological
Perspectives on Native American Architecture and
Landscape in the Southern Appalachians by Christopher
B. Rodning.
Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2015. 280 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12590
Alice P. Wright
Appalachian State University
In recent years, the integration of indigenous oral tradi-
tions into archaeological research has enriched our under-
standing of the late prehistoric U.S. Southeast. Christopher
Rodnings Center Places and Cherokee Towns is a welcome ad-
dition to this body of scholarship. By interpreting the results
of his extensive investigations of the Coweeta Creek site in
southwestern North Carolina through the lens of Cherokee
myths and early historical accounts, Rodning convincingly
shows how Cherokee towns constituted the material and
symbolic centers of indigenous societies in the southern Ap-
palachians. His detailed examination of the centripetal nature
of Coweeta Creeks built environment reveals the multidi-
mensional connections between Cherokee people and places
in the past and underscores the significance of ancestral places
to living Cherokee communities.
Rodning outlines the theoretical underpinnings of his
book in chapter 1 in a series of premises: because cul-
tural concepts about places and peoples relationships with
places are embedded in the built environment, archaeolo-
gists can make inferences about social and historical processes
on the basis of settlement patterns and architecture. More
specifically, they can identify center places in past land-
scapes. For Rodning, the concept of center places derives
from archaeological research in the American Southwest,
which has highlighted how particular architectural features
anchored the social lives and spiritual experiences of an-
cestral Pueblo communities. Such central places often wit-
nessed long-term occupations that created archaeological
palimpsests and were arranged according to various princi-
ples of sacred geography. As such, the communities attached
to these places were situated not only at the enduring center
of their lived experiences but also at the geographic cen-
ter of the cosmos. Indigenous oral histories and traditions
are especially important for understanding the cosmological
dimensions of central places. To that end, Rodning engages
Book Reviews 449
contribution to current academic debates about diaspora,
globalization, heritage tourism, and memory. This is an im-
portant book that deserves to be widely read.
recorded Cherokee myths, legends, and ethnohistorical ac-
counts to reveal and unpack center symbolism in the south-
ern Appalachian landscapean approach summarized in
chapter 2.
Chapters 3 to 6 strive to link architectural features
and activities described in these sources to the archaeo-
logical record of the southern Appalachians, in particular
that of the Coweeta Creek site. While Rodning has pub-
lished numerous articles drawing upon these data, their
arrangement into a single volume yields a perspective on
Cherokee place making that is greater than the sum of its
parts. One chapter each is devoted to public architecture
(townhouses), domestic architecture, hearths, and burials.
The various locations of these featuresfor example, the
superimposition of seven stages of townhouse reconstruc-
tion, the placement of hearths relative to structural support
posts, and the concentration of burials and grave goods at
the entryway to the townhouseare richly interpreted vis-
a`-vis certain Cherokee myths, such as The Mounds and the
Constant Fire and The Daughter of the Sun. Reading the
book cover to cover, one notices that particular myths are
summarized and alluded to repeatedly, but this highlights
the consistency of center place symbolism in the Chero-
kee cultural tradition andpractically speakingproduces
stand-alone chapters amenable to discussion in the class-
room.
In chapters 7 and 8, Rodning shifts his emphasis from
the materialization of mythic themes in the Cherokee built
environment to the effects of historically documented
events on Cherokee towns. In keeping with recent contact-
period scholarship in the Southeast, he links 18th-century
transformations in Cherokee settlements, including the
abandonment of the Coweeta Creek site, to related chal-
lenges wrought by the colonial encounter: the Indian slave
trade, the threat of warfare and raiding, the establishment
of colonial trading posts, and shifting political relationships
with colonial governments. Importantly, however, such
physical displacements did not eradicate evidence for central
places and center symbolism from Cherokee oral traditions.
The idea that these aspects of Cherokee worldview persisted
450 American Anthropologist Vol. 118, No. 2 June 2016
in the face of colonial disjunction is fundamental to the con-
nections Rodning proposes between Cherokee myths and
legends on the one hand and the archaeological record on the
other.
Even as Center Places and Cherokee Towns provides a deeply
contextualized account of Cherokee architecture in the
southern Appalachians, it also contributes to anthropological
archaeology more broadly with nuanced considerations
of landscapes, the built environment, and temporality.
Each chapter includes a discussion of the topic of interest
from a theoretical perspective and in comparative cultural
The Archaeology of Gender in Historic America by Deborah
L. Rotman.
Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2015. 192 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12563
Sandra Hollimon
Santa Rosa Junior College
Deborah Rotman uses a dialectical framework to examine
the material and spatial expressions of gendered social rela-
tions in the contiguous United States. Her study covers the
colonial period through the early 20th century and focuses
primarily on the town of Deerfield, Massachusetts. Rotman
considers the ways in which gender is also linked to other
aspects of identity such as race, ethnicity, class, sexuality,
and the life cycle and considers how these are negotiated and
mediated by gender ideologies.
Rotman applies a feminist perspective and discusses the
theoretical literature that researchers have employed in ar-
chaeological studies of gender. In addition, she considers the
households, communities, and institutions where individuals
interacted and forged their various identities. In her analysis
of Deerfield, she examines the interactions of several families
of different socioeconomic classes and how they manifested
their status through architecture and ceramic styles. She
also compares and contrasts these assemblages on the ba-
sis of urban versus rural locations. She notes that in rural
households, gender lines could be crossed in the necessity of
getting work done, while elite households in town observed
much more rigid separation between the spheres of women
and men.
When considering the intersection of race and class
in the 19th century, Rotman describes the home of W.
E. B. Du Bois near her primary site of Deerfield. She
not only compares the experience of this family to Anglo-
Americans in Deerfield, she also discusses the experience
of free African Americans in the north in contrast to en-
slaved people in the south. Rotman reminds us that sig-
nificant differences in the lived experiences of individuals
contexts; Rodnings treatment of burials and abandonment
is especially strong in this regard.
If there is a shortcoming in Rodnings book, it is the sub-
title, as Center Places and Cherokee Towns offers more than ar-
chaeological perspectives on Native American architecture
and landscape in the southern Appalachians. In reality, the
book comprises a sophisticated multidisciplinary project, in
which archaeological data, historical sources, and recorded
oral traditions are skillfully combined to produce a rich ac-
count of Cherokee geography and worldview as well as an
important contribution to the anthropology of landscapes.
could be influenced by gender, race, class, ethnicity, region,
and legal status (free or enslaved, landowning, indentured,
voting, etc.).
This is a very ambitious book that covers roughly two
hundred years and an entire continent. As such, it casts a
wide net over many important topics that vary through time
and by region. The discipline of archaeology has essentially
accepted that the presence of people of European descent de-
fines a site as historic, although this arbitrary designation can
be quite problematic. Rotmans book therefore includes ref-
erences to studies that are widely separated by time, by place,
and most important by the people who inhabited these sites.
She describes reform institutions such as the Magdalen Soci-
ety Asylum for fallen women in Philadelphia (180050),
instructional institutions such as the Phoenix Indian School
(18911990), and military institutions such as the Presidio
of San Francisco (late 18th to early 19th century). I appreci-
ate the examination of gender dynamics in these institutions,
but I think that a stronger case could be made for the link-
ages among them in terms of power dynamics based on race
and class. For example, it is just as appropriate to label a
Native American school run by religious or reform agents as
a penal or reform institution. Rotman accurately notes the
attempts of forced assimilation in places such as the Phoenix
Indian School but stops short of discussing the experiences
of students who were third or fourth gender as recognized
in their own cultures. The attempt to force Native children
into the expected gender roles and behaviors of late Victo-
rian dominant culture in the United States was particularly
traumatic for youngsters who were not girls or boys to
begin with, as defined in their own cultures.
This inclusion of so many different archaeological ex-
amples makes reading this book a bit difficult in a narrative
sense, as the topics move quickly from one time period or
region to another. In the space of several pages, we move
from Camp Nelson, Kentucky (1860s), to Agnews State

Hospital, California (1920). The former was an ostensibly
all-male military site used during the Civil War, and the
latter was a psychiatric institution with gender-segregated
wards. The reader is left to connect the dots to some extent.
Nevertheless, I think this book would be a good introduction
to many of these topics for an upper-division or first-year
Cora Du Bois: Anthropologist, Diplomat, Agent by Susan
C. Seymour.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015. 432 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12580
Alice E. Schlegel
University of Arizona
In this comprehensive biography of one of the founding
mothers of anthropology, Susan Seymour blends the three
dimensions of the life of Cora Du Bois (19031991): the
anthropologist, the patriot, and the very private and some-
times difficult person. In doing so, she illuminates the
theories, schools, and personalities of midcentury U.S.
anthropology.
As a child, Du Bois defended herself against her
brothers antagonism and her mothers tirades by distancing
herself emotionally and turning inward. Perhaps it was this
early participant-observation that prepared her for fieldwork
in Alor, far from the companionship of like-minded people.
University of California Berkeley, where Du Bois did her
graduate studies, was a happy place for her. In her student
field research among the Wintu of northern California,
she developed her interest in the individual in culture. She
received her PhD in 1932 during the Depression, when
jobs in anthropology were scarce and usually went to men.
Women anthropologists picked up jobs where they could.
For two years, she and psychoanalyst Abram Kardiner
jointly taught a seminar at the New York Psychoanalytic
Society. She introduced cross-cultural issues into the highly
parochial psychological theories of the day.
With the help of a research grant, Du Bois set out for
what was then the Netherlands East Indies to test theories
developed in the seminar. Margaret Mead invited Du Bois
to join her and Gregory Bateson in working in Bali, and
she seemed quite miffed when Du Bois preferred her own
research siteand Du Bois had some harsh words to say
about her. In 1938 she began the 16 months of fieldwork that
resulted in her classic ethnography, The People of Alor (1960).
The descendants of the Alorese villagers still referred to her
in 2006 as a good being and spoke of her returning.
During World War II, Du Boiss knowledge of Southeast
Asia brought her an invitation to join a group of distinguished
scholars to work for the Office of Strategic Services. Much
Book Reviews 451
graduate course. There are minor issues such as the mis-
spelling of Pamela Gellers name, and some index entries
are not immediately logical. However, this is an important
overview of many topics that could be used in conjunc-
tion with case studies for an expanded understanding of the
archaeology of gender in historic America.
of this work was secret and thus information is scanty, but
we do know that Du Bois felt productive and purposeful,
as did many anthropologists involved in the war effort. Her
work was much admired, and after the war she was honored
by the Thai government for outstanding service.
Du Bois returned to a country mired in the Cold War and
paranoid about the communist menace. Her faithful service
to the nation did not save her from being investigated by the
FBI because of her associations with individuals suspected of
having communist sympathies. J. Edgar Hoover was on a cru-
sade to purge homosexuals from the State Department, and
Du Boiss lesbian relationship probably played a part in this.
When UC Berkeley offered Du Bois a tenured position
in 1949, it seemed like a dream come trueuntil she learned
about the loyalty oath. With great sadness, she turned down
the offer. Her principled letter of refusal initiated another
investigation by the FBI. In 1965, she accepted an offer from
Radcliffe and Harvard: a named chair, to be filled by a distin-
guished woman scholar. Her years there were both difficult,
in that she was effectively ignored, and gratifying, in that she
mentored a line of excellent students who later had distin-
guished careers (Seymour was one of these). Her experiences
with sexism there are neatly captured in a satirical mystery
story by Carolyn Heilbrun, writing as Amanda Cross (1981).
Du Boiss last major research effort was the Harvard-
Bhubaneswar Project, begun in 1961 and designed to mea-
sure sociocultural change in India following independence
in 1947. One gets the impression that she was in over her
head, because she lacked the grasp of Indian history, re-
ligions, languages, and cultures necessary to fulfill such a
demand. Although she never wrote the book she had hoped
to, by 1973 the project had produced 11 PhDs. Du Bois
retired from Harvard in 1969 at age 65.
Du Bois was highly principled and courageous, but she
also seems to have been quite inflexible and dismissive of
those with whom she profoundly disagreed. Years after their
intimate relationship ended, May Sarton (1992:313314)
still felt bitter (but she was known to hold grudges). One gets
the impression of defensiveness, only relaxed when Du Bois
was with her long-time companion, friends like Paul and Julia
Child, and some of her students. She expressed her private
452 American Anthropologist Vol. 118, No. 2 June 2016
feelings by writing poetry. Her capacity for deep feeling is
revealed in the appendix to the preface of a two-volume
edition of The People of Alor (1960), where she recounts the
news that during the Japanese occupation, several Alorese
had innocently spoken of Hamerika. Fearing rebellion,
the Japanese publicly decapitated them. Pain seeps through
every line of her restrained account.
This book gives an excellent picture of a life, a time,
and a profession.
The Social Value of Drug Addicts: Uses of the Useless
by Merrill Singer and J. Bryan Page.
Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2014. 248 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12545
Jennifer J. Carroll
Brown University
In The Social Value of Drug Addicts: Uses of the Useless,
Merrill Singer and J. Bryan Page provide a sweeping anal-
ysis of popular representations of drug use and drug users
in U.S. culture. The main premise of their book is that the
social category of drug user is a cultural artifact of con-
temporary society (U.S. society, in particular) produced by
official government sources, the mass media, the cultural
industries, policy makers and enforcers, and even public
health (p. 22). Singer and Page argue that the construction
of the drug user as a social other is a particularly insidious
phenomenon; it causes great harm to countless individuals
yet is thoroughly black-boxed beyond public awareness and,
therefore, beyond public scrutiny. The book is concerned,
first and foremost, with reducing the harm done to drug
users by Othering (p. 23) by virtue of illuminating the so-
cial forces that drive this process. Secondary to this, Singer
and Page highlight the utility, both practical and political,
of perpetuating negative stereotypes of drug users, arguing
that some actors benefit from the creation of [this] pariah
group (p. 23).
The introduction to the book begins abruptly, sending
the reader headlong into a review of social labeling theory
and existing literature about addiction. Chapter 1 then
defines the public stereotypes of drug users, articulating
the image of lazy, irresponsible, criminal, and ultimately
unworthy characters who exist in the public imagination.
Singer and Page are careful to illustrate how this stereotype
is mapped onto racial, gender, and class distinctions.
The next two chapters provide grounded, historical
perspectives. Chapter 2 discusses the content of current
drug user stereotypes, focusing not only on the construction
of the drug user as a concept but also on public acceptance
REFERENCES CITED
Cross, Amanda
1981 Death in a Tenured Position. New York: Ballantine Books.
Du Bois, Cora
1960[1944] The People of Alor: A Social-Psychological Study of
an East Indian Island. New York: Harper and Row.
Sarton, May
1992 Endgame: A Journal of the Seventy-Ninth Year. New York:
W. W. Norton.
of this concept as an a priori truth. Chapter 3 examines
temperance movements in the United States and the United
Kingdom, highlighting the central role that these political
movements played in delineating the drug addict as a
distinct type of person.
Chapters 4 and 5 chronicle the many representations
of drug use and drug users in written and visual media,
respectively, reaching as far back as kinetoscope films from
the late 1800s and selections from the Epic of Gilgamesh. Here,
Singer and Page argue that a narrow range of negative and
hyperbolized representations have become iconic of drug
users in contemporary media, as these representations are
deemed to be the most entertaining by artists and audiences
alike.
Chapter 6 analyzes legal responses to drug use in
the past century, including Prohibition, the establishment
of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, and the so-called
War on Drugs. Singer and Page highlight especially the
benefits to be gained by policymakers who support the
criminalization of drug use, even though research has shown
that criminalization increases public harm. In chapter 7,
Singer and Page turn their gaze onto social researchers
like themselves, offering a humbling account of the ways
in which scholars can, and often do, benefit from the
reification of the social othering of drug users.
In his book Totemism, Claude Levi-Strauss argued that
anthropologists studying a social phenomenon known
as totemism had effectively fabricated their own object,
collecting disparate and unrelated behaviors under a single
banner as though [the researchers] were seeking, con-
sciously or unconsciously, and under the guise of scientific
objectivity, to make the latterwhether mental patients or
so-called primitivesmore different than they really are
(1963:1). Similarly, The Social Value of Drug Addicts provides
a necessary antidote to the hegemonic constructions of
addiction and addicted persons that dominate scientific
discourses about drug use. The work of historically and

culturally situating contemporary constructions of drug
use, which Singer and Page set out to do here, is a necessary
step toward dismantling those constructions.
Singer and Page are among the most (if not the
most) experienced ethnographers of legal and illegal
substance use today. However, little attempt is made to
integrate rich, evidentiary ethnographic detail from the
authors own research into the text. Given that Singer
and Page are both captivating storytellers, this feels like
a missed opportunity. Nevertheless, this pair has once
again demonstrated their unparalleled ability to synthesize
enormous bodies of literature into small, coherent texts.
In this regard, Singer and Page shine, effectively presenting
an impressive breadth of information in not so many
pages.
The Polynesian Iconoclasm: Religious Revolution and the
Seasonality of Power by Jeffrey Sissons.
New York: Berghahn Books, 2014. 170 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12569
Alexander Mawyer
University of Hawaii at Manoa
Jeffrey Sissonss slim The Polynesian Iconoclasm: Religious Rev-
olution and the Seasonality of Power demonstrates a gravitas
inversely proportionate to its length and to the duration
of the ephemeral events it narrates. The Polynesian Icon-
oclasm raged across the archipelagos of the eastern Pacific
over several years in the early 19th century. In Sissonss
intimate, pellucid, and detailed account, this was a period of
orgiastic sacrilege and the repudiation of everyday and not-
so-everyday powersof God burnings, bond breakings, and
social unweavings. Somehow, this was also a period for the
perdurance of the sacred and the reinscription of powers
both spiritual and temporal. Working out this paradox is
Sissonss pursuit. At root, he takes a Sahlinsesque stance
on the need to better understand the diversity of struc-
tures that have guided different modes of historical practice
(p. 2) and a Bourdieuesque stance on the mechanisms and op-
erations of habitus visible among elites and nonelites alike,
offering explanatory purchase on motivations and actions
that might otherwise be inscrutable or appear momentary
or accidental, such as the destruction of sacred objects or the
repudiation of prior practices. The result is an illuminating
inquiry into iconoclasm as rituopraxis . . . a revolution-
ary mode of historical agency (p. 6). Where Sahlins places
the stress (p. 136) on cosmological precedent in modulat-
ing historical practice, Sissons emphasizes the role of ritual
Book Reviews 453
Determining the most appropriate audience for this
book presents a challenge. Undergraduates may struggle
with the theoretical language of the text, and experienced
researchers may crave stricter argumentationespecially
in the chapters analyzing film and print media. Yet there
arent many models for a text like this one, in which the
epistemological terrain that defines a singular social issue is
brought into question. In making such an offering, Merrill
Singer and J. Bryan Page continue to cement their legacy
as scholars who have tried to talk sense to us about our
societys most harmful habits of social distinction.
REFERENCE CITED
Levi-Strauss, Claude
1963 Totemism. Rodney Needham, trans. Boston: Beacon Press.
precedent, particularly the seasonal orchestration of the ebbs
and flows of power via ritual management.
Sissonss volume consists of eight chapters tightly
wrapped in potency. The first establishes the temporal
dimension of the historically active rituopraxis being
described. In the decades after early contacts with European
powers, as Polynesian chiefs, priests, and commoners alike
found themselves in a froth of transition and uncertain future
alignments of power and potentiality, seasonally adjusted
dispositions offered charged opportunities for effecting
change that became visible in the destruction of temples,
God images, and the transformation or abandonment of
numerous sacred practices. Chapter 2 closely scrutinizes
the first warmings of iconoclasms fire in a series of disputes
between chiefships and priestships in the Society Islands. Sis-
son quickly establishes the regionality of what initially seem
to be highly localized and specific events and wonderfully
articulates how improvised rituopractical performances can
be transformative, replicating, and constitutive. Chapter 3
forwards the theme of replication as the strategic rejection
of seasonalitya refusal to return to hierarchy in favor of an
unending season of communitasspreads from one district
to the next, then between islands and across archipelagos in a
vast seascape. Chapter 4 joins a growing body of work that is
currently rewriting the histories of Pacific islands in Oceanic
terms. As Sisson efficiently establishes, in the decades
following the first arrivals of Europeans in the region,
robust, complex, and transformative linkages between
Tahiti and Hawaii had little to do with European interlopers
and were supported by shared seasonalities of power.
454 American Anthropologist Vol. 118, No. 2 June 2016
Chapter 5 arrives at the expected moment. If winter
comes, can spring be far behind? A season of flaming com-
munitas is revealed as the occasion for a re-architecturing
of social relations, a reconsolidation of spiritual and chiefly
powers, and a literal new architecture via the erection of
Christian chapels, new roads, domiciles, and seats of gov-
ernment. Chapters 6 and 7 further illuminate the return
of hierarchy and the reestablishment of bipolar seasonality
after years of disruption. Chapter 6 is among the most no-
table chapters in the volume. Sissonss close engagement
with David Graebers reworked theory of fetishes leads to
an illuminating discussion of the role of books and printing
presses in the transformation of chiefs into kings and of chief-
ships into newly potent sacred centers (p. 109) styled after
Western kingships. His discussion of the dynamics in which
the social agency of God images was transferred to mission
(and later to legal) texts would be fascinating to read against
William Hanks Converting Words (2010). The final chapter
is striking for its thoroughly robust re-engagement with his-
torical theory and also for its introduction of inertia as a
tertium quid in the framing of seasonality.
The volume has significant synthetic implications for re-
gional history, repudiating long-standing tendencies to ex-
amine the social, cultural, and political transformations of
Pacific places in isolation. That the Polynesian Iconoclasm
Living on Your Own: Single Women, Rental Housing, and
Post-Revolutionary Affect in Contemporary South Korea
by Jesook Song.
Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014. 164 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12574
Okpyo Moon
Academy of Korean Studies, Korea
Given the relative scarcity of serious monographs published
in English about Korea, any addition is always welcome.
Jesook Songs study of the life trajectories of single women
in contemporary South Korea is particularly valuable in that
it addresses a marginalized group that hitherto has not drawn
much scholarly attention. The single women in Songs study
are marginalized primarily because they have chosen not to
marry in a society where the Confucian concept of marriage
as an important condition for becoming a full-fledged adult
human being still exerts considerable force, albeit diminished
compared to the past. Through nuanced in-depth interviews
apparently conducted over a prolonged period of time, the
book successfully illuminates the gendered nature of the
social and familial pressures that these women face.
was regional is an inescapable conclusion of Sissonss work.
It is not a perfect work. Glosses of Tahitian and Hawaiian
terms and, sometimes, ritual texts are poetic or sometimes
misleadingly based on translations possibly drawn from 19th-
century mission texts that may have claimed too much or too
little for the semantics of certain terms or phrases. Other
Polynesian seasonalities that may also have played active
roles in shaping practical dispositions and the motivations
that flow from them in everyday and ritual contextsfor
instance, lunar cyclesappear only marginally in this ac-
count. However, while the historical events of iconoclasm
or subsequent new instaurations of power may be difficult to
perfectly couple to the orchestral movements of the Pleiades
in Eastern Polynesia, Sissonss conclusions at the chiasmus
of Sahlins and Bourdieu, of habitus and improvisation, of
hierarchy and communitas, and of two seasons of power
require serious consideration, offer significant opportunities
for theoretical reflection, and bring the chaos of this critical
period in Polynesian history into view with a clarity that
deserves applause and gratitude.
REFERENCE CITED
Hanks, William F.
2010 Converting Words: Maya in the Age of the Cross. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
In addition to the more general form of social marginal-
ization rooted in kinship practices and gender biases, Song
attempts to show how Koreas particular system of rental
housing, which requires lump sum deposits, contributes to
the polarization of financial classes and regulates womens
mobility and residential autonomy. Her analysis is useful
because it opens a channel for us to look into the ways that
cultural concepts of family, gender, marriage, sexuality,
personhood, and so on are embedded in social and economic
institutions and welfare systems. It also helps us understand
how changes in global capitalism and the financial market,
both formal and informal, might affect household economy
and peoples lives, those of Korean single women in partic-
ular. Song repeatedly emphasizes the aggravated difficulties
faced by young single women in achieving residential
autonomy as a result of the discrimination in the formal
financial institutions and the prevalence of informal financial
practices. However, it is interesting to note that this issue
has never made its way onto the main agendas of feminist

movements in a country where an independent Ministry of
Gender Equality and Family was established as early as 2001
under the prerogative of Kim Dae-Jungs government.
Some readers, including myself, might find it helpful if
the author had added a little more analysis of this political
dimension.
Curiosity about political dimension arises particularly
because Songs research objects are not just ordinary Korean
single women but, rather, a specific group of single women:
most of those interviewed had been radical student activists
in the antimilitary state movements, the most vehement
opposition movements in the modern history of South Korea
that, in the end, succeeded in bringing about democratiza-
tion and the establishment of civilian government in 1993.
By continuing to nurture an anti-establishment culture,
despite the fact that the so-called progressive government
was in power for two consecutive regimes from 1998 to
2008, the activists have deeply divided the population. What
is often referred to as camp logic (jinyong nolli in Korean)
appears to affect every aspect of peoples attitudes toward
and understanding of current affairs. If this entrenched polit-
ical landscape had been more clearly contextualized, readers
Leprosy and a Life in South India: Journeys with a Tamil
Brahmin by James Staples.
Lanham, M.D: Lexington Books, 2014. 204 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12560
Abhijit Guha
Vidyasagar University
Anthropological monographs on caste in India have a rich
tradition developed by both Indian and Western anthropol-
ogists in which the village and the caste jointly occupied
center stage. Themes like Sanskritization, dominant caste,
factionalism, caste ranking, hierarchy, the jajmani caste sys-
tem, inequality, and social mobility were invoked to un-
derstand the caste system as a unique and ubiquitous social
institution. A fixed social group and a fixed locality were
chosen by the participant-observer from which concepts and
theories emerged to explicate how the system either func-
tioned or transformed over time. Thus the fictive names of
villages like Rampura, Kishan Gharhi, and Gopalpur became
symbols of particular sociocultural processes like dominant
caste, parochialization, and factionalism. The group rather
than the individuals who formed the group was the point
of entry as well as exit for the anthropologist. In addition,
the participant-observation and the ethnography written by
the anthropologist or sociologist hardly resulted in self-
reflective narratives.
James Staples has made a significant departure from the
aforementioned genre in the anthropology and sociology of
Book Reviews 455
would be better able to judge the connotations of such
statements as the newly launched national pension plan was
not trusted because of the state bureaucracys reputation for
corruption and mismanagement (p. 56) without distortion.
A national pension plan in South Korea may still be consid-
ered insufficient but, to my knowledge at least, corruption
and mismanagement have never been major issues. The
interpretations and analyses in Songs book rely heavily on
the views of those who are undoubtedly politicized.
Although Song could have more clearly positioned the
women she interviewed, the most interesting aspect of her
book lies in the depiction of the seemingly contradictory
combination of leftist political ideologists seeking both so-
cial reform and the personal enjoyment and self-cultivation
endorsed by a liberal market ideology that coexist in the lives
of the single women she studied. While some readers may
not be thoroughly convinced by the authors theoretical in-
terpretation of this phenomenon as a form of self-suspension
or small vacations from the will (p. 82), Songs detailed
depiction of the various patterns of postrevolutionary ad-
justments of former activists in South Korea is in itself most
valuable and deserves attention.
the Indian caste system by selecting an individual high-caste
poor Tamil Brahmin, who being affected by leprosy and
the associated social stigma moved through several places
over time and changed his role, status, and even religion yet
retained some elements of his ascribed social status. At the
same time he lived his life like a Western individual through
his own achievements, whether in the arena of betting on race
horses or keeping meticulous accounts for an NGO working
for the betterment of a leper colony named Anandapuram
in South India.
Leprosy and a Life (not leprosy and life) is a thrilling book,
written almost like a novel, in the first person with a hero and
several other characters and a number of plots and subplots.
The book differs from a novel, or for that matter from any
literary work, because Staples makes no attempt to create
an illusory or a magical effect through fictions in the mind
of the reader. Furthermore, except for the prologue, which
contains 46 chapter notes and a score of references, all ten
chapters are devoid of complex theoretical exercises. These
thickly described chapters form the core of the book, which
is the painstaking result of anthropological fieldwork by the
author over three decades in India.
The method adopted by the author toward the construc-
tion of his self-reflective ethnography is life history, which
in recent years has emerged as a potentially rich technique
with immense future possibilities since the work done by
456 American Anthropologist Vol. 118, No. 2 June 2016
Sidney Mintz in the early 1980s on the life history of sug-
arcane workers in Puerto Rico. The subtitle of the book,
Journeys with a Tamil Brahmin, epitomizes its different chap-
ters, which stand out as a narrative of the protagonist, G.
Mohandas Iyer (turned into Tajagani Jobdas through Chris-
tian baptism and referred to intimately as Das all through
the ethnography). Das seemed to speak extremely frankly to
the author; unlike the ordinary Indian, he confessed his illicit
sexual liaisons with prostitutes in Mumbai and with a nurse
who lured him under the threat of alleged rape as well as the
uncanny invitations from a young European homosexual in a
hotel. Intriguing though it was to read about Dass tramp life
and religious conversionhis up-and-down sort of life grapher; for example, he possessed no envy of the relatively
his conviction about the dignity of a Brahmin, which he
thought he had inherited from his familial ancestry, was more
interesting to this reader.
One important justification for writing the book seems
significant. I quote Staples: A final reason for writing this
bookor at least for doing the research on which it draws
Biomedicine in an Unstable Place: Infrastructure and
Personhood in a Papua New Guinean Hospital
by Alice Street.
Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. 304 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12549
John Cox
Australian National University
Biomedicine in an Unstable Place is a remarkable study
of biomedical institutions and practices in a severely
underresourced environment. The book is based on author
Alice Streets long-term ethnographic fieldwork at Madang
hospital, one of the better-functioning provincial hospitals in
Papua New Guinea. Streets astute observations of the day-
to-day practices of hospital administrators, clinicians, pa-
tients, and their relatives provide fresh insights into medical
anthropology, the anthropology of development, Christian-
ity, and personhood. The book is grounded in its Papua New
Guinean case study, but it will appeal to anyone interested in
the workings of institutions and the delivery of basic services.
Street begins with the colonial history of Papua New
Guinea and the efforts made by the Australian colonial ad-
ministration to establish health services across the country.
These intensified in the 1960s and 1970s, leading to the re-
building of Madang hospital as a crucial hub of biomedical
practice for Madang Province and an exemplary site of devel-
opmental ambition in anticipation of the independent nation
of Papua New Guinea. The book documents the gradual
neglect of the late colonial hospital and the ongoing efforts
is that I wanted to explore the relationship between the
anthropologist and his or her research assistants: those lo-
cal people who, although sometimes even credited in the
by-lines of our books, somehow remain in the background
(p. xix). Putting a research assistant in the foreground of a
multisited ethnographic narrative and using his lens to view
postcolonial India are definitely novel. Staples has opened
new windows not only for anthropology but also for social
science research in South Asia in general, wherein big themes
like globalization, marginality, and the subaltern conscious-
ness still predominate. Interestingly, at the end Das emerges
as a self-made and self-taught person no less than his ethno-
successful family life and career of his brother, with whom
he united in Anandapuram.
I believe that this book will help bridge the proverbial
gap between the self and the other, the observer and the ob-
served, and the objective and the subjective in ethnographic
representations of the changing nature of caste in India.
made by hospital staff and patients to make it an efficacious
place for medical treatment. In doing so, it contests the
nostalgic remembrances popular within Papua New Guinea
that construct an effective developmental colonial state run
by white Australians as a counterpoint to postcolonial state
failure, poverty, and corruption.
The ethnographic chapters chart the ways in which
curative practices at Madang hospital diverge from standard
biomedical models. Doctors in Papua New Guinea are well
trained in Western medicine at their universities but have
to improvise in the Madang context. Inadequate supplies of
drugs, lack of access to appropriate testing equipment, and
so forth do not allow the replication of the ideal biomedical
model of practice. Therefore, the diagnostic techniques
that doctors are trained to use in treating patients must
be adapted to the reality of the hospital setting in which
they find themselves. This context means that diagnoses
are rarely conclusive and patients are often admitted as
generally sick.
Street provides a compelling account of these dy-
namics, showing how relationships between doctors and
nurses or between patients and clinicians reconstruct the
therapeutic environment. Hospitals are not enclaves of
a universal biomedicine but reflect the social, economic,
and cultural worlds in which they are situated. The failings
of the biomedical infrastructure in Madang mean that the

workplace hierarchies that make biomedicine effective
elsewhere are subverted by local ideologies of Melanesian
egalitarianism: doctors acquiesce to nurses, who ignore
requests for tests and are told not to act like white doctors.
The nonstandard biomedical practices of Madang hospi-
tal reflect the rise of fundamentalist Christianity in Melanesia
as nurses exercise Christian disciplines of pastoral care, of-
fering moral direction and exhortations to faith and prayer.
These spiritual approaches to healing assemble a range of
techniques and mobilize various powers. Nurses may toler-
ate visits from the glasman, a diviner thought to be able to
identify those who cause illness in patients bodies by the
use of malicious sorcery. Fearing that their illness is a prod-
uct of jealousy from their kinfolk, patients give attention to
maintaining or restoring relationships with people back in
their village homes well beyond the boundaries of the hos-
pital compound. In so doing, they make the hospital a site of
the reworking of Melanesian relationships and personhood,
even as the staff struggles to practice the best biomedicine
that they can.
Where Foucauldian accounts of biopower typically
imagine a biomedical therapeutic gaze that imposes itself
From West to East: Current Approaches to Medieval
Archaeology by Scott D. Stull, ed.
Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014. 275 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12571
Aleksandra McClain
University of York
As an American who moved to the United Kingdom to pur-
sue medieval archaeology due to the lack of opportunities
on home soil, I am enormously pleased to see a published
volume focusing on medieval archaeology generated for the
North American academic market. The study of the material
culture of the Middle Ages in North America has long been
the domain of art and architectural historians, with the the-
ories and methods of archaeology and anthropology making
few inroads into the landscapes, buildings, and artifacts of
the medieval world. Pursuing medieval archaeology in the
United States thus has particular challenges, which are well
illustrated by the list of contributors to this volume. It is
noteworthy that none of the authors who are in posts at
U.S. universities find themselves housed in archaeology de-
partments, suggesting that the dominant paradigms of North
American archaeology have been less friendly to a historically
informed, European-focused approach, in stark contrast to
the UK environment. Similarly, the long-standing hegemony
of historians and art historians in the period has meant that
Book Reviews 457
efficaciously onto spaces and practices of healing, Biomedicine
in an Unstable Place provides a highly perceptive account
of how incompletely this has occurred in Papua New
Guinea. With an innovative tweak of James Scotts ideas of
legibility, Street shows how patients strive to make them-
selves visible to doctors in the hope of attracting the at-
tention they need to receive effective care. Clinical staff
too try to bring patients complaints into a form that is
visible to their biomedical gaze and can be stabilized in a
diagnosis that is treatable. Street argues that these attempts
to make the state see (p. 224) reveal a profoundly un-
certain project of making biomedicine in the postcolonial
state.
This excellent book is a compelling and often moving
ethnography. It makes an original contribution to medical
anthropology and the anthropology of the state, institu-
tions, and infrastructure. Biomedicine in an Unstable Place
also advances the anthropological study of personhood,
Christianity, race, and class. The elegance of Streets prose
together with her satisfying and succinct analysis of so
many complex and urgent issues will make Biomedicine in an
Unstable Place an outstanding teaching resource.
those interested in medieval archaeology rarely find a place in
those departments or at interdisciplinary centers, although
historians such as Robin Fleming at Boston College are now
working to change that culture. However, the range of pa-
pers that Scott Stull was able to collect for this volume, as
well as the number of young scholars participating, gives
hope that change is afoot.
The book is based around papers given at a conference at
SUNY Cortland in October 2014, although additional con-
tributions have also been solicited. It comprises 12 chapters
focusing on discrete topics, along with a brief introduction
by the editor that explains the challenges facing medieval
archaeology in U.S. academia and comments on themes in
the volume and the aims of the individual chapters. While
the introduction to the books genesis and content is use-
ful, I would have liked to see it set a more ambitious or
even polemic agenda, outlining where the editor would like
to see the practice of medieval archaeology going in North
America. An opportunity was also missed to make a strong
point here about what contributions medieval archaeology
can make to the theoretical, methodological, and interpre-
tive outlook of archaeology and anthropology in general,
and how archaeological sites and evidence can add nuance or
even rewrite the narratives generated by medieval history
458 American Anthropologist Vol. 118, No. 2 June 2016
and art historyin short, why nonmedieval archaeologists
should care.
The papers feature a welcome variety of methodological
approaches, including excavations, landscape and geophysi-
cal survey, artifact studies, historical research, and building
analysis, representing the wide spectrum of current medieval
archaeology. There is some engagement with theoretical
perspectives, but this is patchyin the articles focused on
buildings it is good, but in others recent research driving me-
dieval archaeological theory forward has been overlooked, or
there is little follow-through on the promised theoretical in-
terpretations. One of the strengths of the volume lies in its in-
ternational scope, a perspective that is admittedly often lack-
ing in British medieval archaeology. It offers papers focusing
on England, Ireland, Norse Greenland and Vinland, Hun-
gary, Turkey, Germany, and Jordan, with the Middle East-
ern articles particularly offering insights beyond the standard
Eurocentric perspective of medievalism. The authors of the
Jordan article can be singled out for praise for their thought-
ful commentary on the difficulties of locating Islamic archae-
ology within a medieval paradigm but also expertly demon-
strating the benefits of doing so, highlighting the connections
between Europe and the Levant that persisted throughout the
Middle Ages.
Drugs, Thugs, and Diplomats: U.S. Policymaking in
Colombia by Winifred Tate.
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015. 304 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12546
Alejandro Castillejo-Cu ellar
Universidad de los Andes, Colombia
Winifred Tates Drugs, Thugs, and Diplomats: U.S. Policymak-
ing in Colombia makes an interesting contribution not only
to the field of the anthropology of policy but also to the
understanding of Plan Colombia, one of the backbones of
U.S. strategy in its War on Drugs in Latin America. The
extent of this initiative was so broad that it would make
Colombia the third-largest recipient of military aid in the
world by the end of the 1990s.
Building on her experience as a researcher and analyst
at the Washington Office on Latin America, Tate studied
the process of conceiving, creating, and implementing the
program from the drafting and actual writing of the interstate
agreement to its effects on the ground. Tates proposal,
in line with other similar studies, is to approach public
policy (an aspect of U.S. foreign policy) from a perspective
that explores a series of interconnected spaces where policy
is negotiated and contested: from policy debates among
politicians and activists in the United States to intermediaries
The quick turnaround from the conference to print
suggests that the editor commendably produced the book in
record time, although this was perhaps done at the expense
of ensuring consistent quality across all the contributions.
Several papers, including the editors own, offer strong,
original scholarship, which bodes well for the future of
medieval archaeology in North America, but a few are
disappointingly underdeveloped in comparison. The volume
is neatly although not lavishly produced, and it is well illus-
trated with black-and-white photos, maps, and diagrams, but
the list price of $81.99 (at the time this review was written)
is too high for the quality offered and will limit its audience.
It is generally well edited, although a few typographical er-
rors and an instance of missing images have slipped through.
The choice to put the entire bibliography at the end, divided
by chapter headings, instead of directly after the relevant
contributions seems to offer little benefit and makes finding
references more of a hassle than it needs to be. Overall,
while problems with individual papers mar the consistent
academic quality of the volume, I nevertheless commend
Stull on having the ambition to plan the conference and pro-
duce this book, and I genuinely hope it is a sign that medieval
archaeologys future will regularly feature North American
voices.
and recipients (state agents in Colombia, coca farmers, and
local authorities).
The book is divided into four parts. First, Tate discusses
the connections between human rights discourse and the mil-
itarization of U.S. aid programs, particularly how these links
technically played out in the final making of the agreement.
The second section deals with the local context of violence
in Putumayo before the implementation of Plan Colombia.
It focuses on the regional landscapes of paramilitary terror,
a topic widely studied by Colombian anthropologists for
more than a decade. Here Tate shows the relationships
between paramilitaries and state agents as part of a broader
counterinsurgency strategy. Third, she deals with the myths
of origin of Plan Colombia and the institutions that claimed
the intellectual property of an idea that, at the time, was per-
ceived by policymakers as a success. Finally, she discusses the
impacts of Plan Colombia (particularly the massive spraying
of glyphosate on large tracts of land) and the ways that local
organizations tried to contest its implementation by making
alternative arguments and building complex alliances among
local politicians, farmers, and international organizations.
Despite the fact that Plan Colombia was mainly a
military-oriented aid package, it is clear from Tates

argument that for the U.S. government the deepening of
democracy and human rights in Colombia was a discursive
line necessary to consolidate its legitimacy at home and
abroad. Tates reading of the preparation of Plan Colom-
bia highlights the multiplicity of elements that constitute its
historical context: for instance, the tensions and interests
among members of the political establishment in the United
States and the situation of President Clintonbuffeted by
his personal scandalswho could not appear before the
public as being soft on drugs at a time when they seemed
to be the countrys greatest enemy. Likewise, Tate dis-
cusses the Colombian situation, where the security sector
particularly the national police and the Colombian army
competed for limited resources and the need to establish a
new legitimacy. Also, the perception that the Colombian
Revolutionary Armed Forces was gaining more military and
economic power at the time is also central.
Tate argues that, in this plans framework, the term
narcoguerrilla emerged as a strategic concept and a kind
of geopolitical buzzword. The fight against drugs became
a fight against guerrillas. Recognizing this genealogy is
central to understanding todays political landscape, as the
word subsequently became absorbed by a local version
of Plan Colombia, that is, Plan Patriota (Patriot Plan,
from 2003 onward, under President Alvaro Uribe): a
counterinsurgency-cum-counternarcotics military offensive
supported by additional U.S. military aid. What emerges as
a question, particularly now in the middle of a peace process
The Modern Spirit of Asia: The Spiritual and the Secular in
China and India by Peter van der Veer.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014. 296 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12567
Chiara Letizia
Universite du Quebec
a` Montreal
The Modern Spirit of Asia broadens the project of compara-
tive historical sociology that Peter van der Veer started in
Imperial Encounters (2001), where he showed that the modern
histories and national cultures of India and Britain were mu-
tually constitutive and that the entangled notions of religion
and secularity played a major role in imagining the modern
nation in both countries.
Focusing on the relation between nationalism and reli-
gion, van der Veer offers an ambitious comparative analysis
of the impact of Western imperial modernity on the forma-
tion of a modern nation in 19th- and 20th-century India and
China. He argues that the interrelated and mutually defin-
ing terms religion, secularity, magic, and spirituality (forming
together what he calls a syntagmatic chain) emerge or trans-
Book Reviews 459
in Cuba and the prospects for a future truth commission in
Colombia, revolves around the role that external influences
(in the form of policies, aid packages, and military
agreements) have had in shaping local forms of violence,
influencing in this way the dynamics of internal armed
conflict. Should the relationship among paramilitarism,
the politics of humanitarian aid, human rights violations,
and the security sector not be part of the discussions and
investigations of a commission of inquiry? It should.
Tates research also deals with the reinvigoration and in-
ternal dynamics of NGOs. Indeed, the connections between
U.S. military aid to Colombia and human rights violations
conducted by state forces allowed Washington-based advo-
cacy institutions to revitalize and reframe their agendas in
the late 1990s, after prior decades devoted to this topic in
Central America. Furthermore, Tate shows how any kind of
policy-making process implies various kinds of social places
and interactions where public policy is articulated in a com-
plex field of local and transnational powers. In the end,
policy is also shaped by various forms of solidarity, devel-
oped through partnerships between organizations fostering
affective geographies and through a number of mechanisms
and practices.
Drugs, Thugs, and Diplomats is an ethnographic approach
to these sites and an invitation to understand them in
their global and local connections. For broader debates in
Colombia, this book furthers interest in the study of present
policies as they are interlinked with previous processes.
form as universalizing categories at the end of the 19th cen-
tury and occupy a key position in nationalist imaginings of
modernity. The interactional history of these nodes within
a shifting field of power (p. 9) shows that new formations
were produced on both sides of the interaction, dispelling any
assumption that China and India were merely recipients of
Western modernity. Both countries sought to transform re-
ligion into a moral and respectable source of citizenship and
national belonging, but in India religion became a resource in
the anticolonial resistance, while Chinese reformers adopted
an aggressive antireligious stance.
Seven chapters analyze the interrelated aspects of this
complex encounter. After a rich introductory chapter, chap-
ter 2 demonstrates the impact of the modern Western term
spirituality (produced simultaneously with the secular as an
alternative to institutionalized religion) on the production
of the Orientalist representation of the East as the site of
spirituality lost in the West. The chapter also discusses the
creative appropriation of this representation by Indian and
460 American Anthropologist Vol. 118, No. 2 June 2016
Chinese intellectuals and nationalists. The next chapter de-
scribes the reformulation of beliefs and practices in the wake
of the emerging fields of Oriental studies and comparative
world religions and the simultaneous development of both
a universal spirituality and religious nationalism. Chapter 4
deals with the missionary project and local responses, which
included self-conscious apologetics and reforms but eventu-
ally also anti-imperialist nationalism. Chapter 5 analyzes how
the European opposition between magic and religion (where
religion is purged of unscientific beliefs and practices) was
projected onto the opposition between the modern West
and the traditional or backward East. This opposition be-
came part of the ideology of modernizing elites, generating
the persecution of popular religion in China and the Brah-
manical idealization of a rational past in India. Chapter 6
discusses the impact of the political project of secularism on
the Indian and Chinese ideas of the nation: while in India
secularism is historically articulated as neutral, in nationalist
and communist China it produces an atheistic, anticleri-
cal form of scientism and rationalism. Chapter 7 describes
how yoga and qigong, now products of the global market of
Eastern spirituality, were reformulated as modern and scien-
tific. Finally, chapter 8 describes the impact of Chinese and
Indian nationalism on the position of Muslims, constructed
as a threatening, internal foreign minority.
This book is a model of historical and interactional com-
parison as a double act of reflection on the network of
concepts that underlie our study of society as well as the
formation of those societies themselves (p. 14). For an af-
firmed anthropologist of India to start learning Chinese and
to undertake new fieldwork in China is itself an inspiring
example of the need to go beyond the specialists focus on
a single nation-state. In an impressive display of erudition
and cultural breadth, van der Veer synthesizes, in clear and
jargon-free language, the works of a large number of (mostly
Western) scholars of India and China and the rich literature
that has been rethinking secularism since the works of Jose
Casanova and Talal Asad. The work of Niels Bubandt and
Martijn van Beek (2012), which provides ethnographically
Latino Heartland: Of Borders and Belonging in the Midwest
by Sujey Vega.
New York: New York University Press, 2015. 304 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12548
Alex E. Chavez
University of Notre Dame
Set in the geographic and cultural crossroads of America,
Latino Heartland contributes to a growing body of work ad-
based comparisons of Asian secularisms, would be a good
addition to this literature. A wide array of examples (al-
though the comparisons sometimes appear cursory) lead to
often-brilliant and counterintuitive, sometimes ironic, re-
marks and connections while dispelling myths of the clash of
civilizations, as well as commonplaces and Western-centric
bias in the theories of secularization and modernization.
Although it was beyond the scope of the volume, this
reader missed a historical or ethnographic analysis of how
the different conceptualizations of social practices forming
the syntagmatic chain operate and interact in specific texts
or discourses and are translated differently depending on
the context of their use. This could be less important for
English-speaking India (but see the analysis of the terms
andhavisvas and superstition made by Bharati 1970) but would
be fundamental for Chinese terms.
Except for the conclusion, where it appears almost as an
afterthought, Japan is rather absent from this interactional
history. As the author himself acknowledges, Japan, itself
an imperial force, served as a model for the adoption of
Western modernity for all of Asia and played a pivotal role
as a translator of the vocabulary of Western modernity for
China.
This book will be a fundamental point of reference for
any ethnography of secularism and for anyone interested in
the study of religion, secularism, modernity, and politics in
Asia and in the global world.
REFERENCES CITED
Bharati, Agehananda
1970 The Use of Superstition as an Anti-Traditional Device
in Urban Hinduism. Contributions to Indian Sociology 4(1):
3649.
Bubandt, Niels, and Martijn Van Beek
2012 Varieties of Secularism in Asia: Anthropological Explorations
of Religion, Politics and the Spiritual. New York: Routledge.
van der Veer, Peter
2001 Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and
Britain. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
vancing an anthropological perspective on the experiences
of settlement and migration among transnational Latina/o
communities in the post-NAFTA era. Sujey Vegas volume
is uniquely positioned in relation to this literature in two
ways. First, her account is ethnographic; in the wake of the
dramatic expressions of civic and political belonging most
evident in the immigrant rights marches of 2006, she traces

how migrants combat tensions and shape personhood in ev-
eryday life through quotidian practices. Second, her field
site is central Indiana, a midwestern landscape mistakenly
imagined as homogeneous, English-speaking, and free of po-
litical controversy (pp. 56). Her focus on Latino Hoosiers
challenges the conventional narratives of the Latino presence
in the Midwest, which has typically located this community
in urban centers like Chicago. In this regard, she follows the
work of Dionicio Valdess Barrios Nortenos (2000) and Ann
Millard and Jorge Chapas Apple Pie and Enchiladas (2004) in
direct conversation with scholars currently examining mi-
grant destinations beyond the U.S.Mexico border region
(Byrd 2015; Odem and Lacy 2009; Shutika 2011; Smith and
Furuseth 2006).
The research that informs the book took shape during
the 2006 immigrant rights marches; thus the ethnographic
focuses are shaped by the political effervescence of that
moment. With this in mind, Vega explores the lives of mi-
grants in greater Lafayette, Indiana, with attention to their
bicultural experiences, personal histories, and narratives of
migration across generations. Braced by borderlands theo-
retical insights that hearken back to the work of Gloria An-
zaldua (1998) and Alejandro Lugo (2008) and recent voices
like that of Gilberto Rosas (2012), Vega makes a case for
how the logics of the U.S.Mexico border reach into far-off
places like Indiana and how migrants confront and manage
them despite their vulnerable position.
Vega first traces histories of migration, settlement, and
racial formation in Lafayette since the 1960s, including how
the presence of Latinos has been silenced in the towns col-
lective memory. In the chapter Kneading Homeperhaps
the crux of the workshe examines practices of community
building in both public and private lives. Here, the most
compelling ethnographic instances are of cross-cultural
faith-based work. She follows up on this discussion in her
final chapter with a focus on community organizing and
solidarity work in schools among Latinos and non-Latino
allies aimed at combating state-level anti-immigrant
legislation. The chapters in between address the emergence
of anti-Latino and anti-immigrant sentiment through
discourse analysisin particular how media and public
accounts have shaped local perceptions of Latinosas well
as ethnographic renderings of lived moments of micro-
aggression among neighbors and residents. This attention to
the spatial dynamics of everyday encountersthat have the
potential to both build and threaten communityoffers a
fascinating glimpse into interactional contexts where power
relations of race, class, gender, and citizenship intersect
and subsequently contribute to the marking and making of
community.
Despite the richness of her ethnographic accounts,
however, Vega does not provide an in-depth critique of
placial constructions in the heartland, and there is a missed
opportunity to fully theorize the concepts she presents,
which would otherwise allow the text to make a much
Book Reviews 461
fuller intervention. For instance, she wields belonging as
her major guiding analytic. While she subtly approaches a
definition in the beginningwriting that ethnic belonging
fuses ethnicity, nationalism, transnationalism, and local be-
longing (p. 15) there isnt a more complete explanation
by the end of the text. We can, however, assume that what
undergirds belongingas a tactic of place-making and
community buildingis the collapsing of otherwise distinct
social and legal categories demarcating temporal and spatial
boundaries of inclusion according to cultural and juridical
logics. While the ethnographic portions push the reader into
such contexts, the differential and multiple registers of both
time and spaceas elements crucial to competing construc-
tions of place and attachmentare not attended to in their
fullest extent. A critical return to the major analytic of the
entire work would provide a much more cogent threading
of the books arguments as they relate to the ordinary and
everyday life and how both take place or, in other words,
how both resignify space. Further, while Vega explains why
she prioritizes the use of Latino as a way to include various
national origin groups and forms of citizenship, she uses
the term immigrant without explanation and at times uses it
interchangeably with migrant. This ambiguity does not assist
the reader in conceptualizing the positioning of migrants
in the imaginative sociology of America and how their
incorporation into the U.S. polity is often a segmented,
fractured, and complex process, as past studies have
shown (Alba and Nee 2003; Portes et al. 2005; Portes and
Rumbaut 2001).
Despite these theoretical concerns, Latino Heartland is an
important read given the current atmosphere regarding the
issue of immigration. What is often missing from this national
discussion is an understanding of how migrants form part of
vibrant Latino communities. Through Vegas account, we
are afforded such a perspective, in particular, the ways in
which these communities sustain social bonds in the face of
antagonistic politics that labor to exclude them.
REFERENCES CITED
Alba, Richard, and Victor Nee
2003 Remaking the American Mainstream: Assimilation and
Contemporary Immigration. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press.
Anzaldua, Gloria
1998 To(o) Queer the Writer-Loca, Escritora y Chicana. In Living
Chicana Theory. Carla Trujillo, ed. Pp. 263276. Berkeley:
Third Woman Press.
Byrd, Samuel K.
2015 The Sounds of Latinidad: Immigrants Making Music and
Creating Culture in a Southern City. New York: New York
University Press.
Lugo, Alejandro
2008 Fragmented Lives, Assembled Parts: Culture, Capitalism,
and Conquest at the U.S.Mexico Border. Austin: University
of Texas Press.
462 American Anthropologist Vol. 118, No. 2 June 2016
Millard, Ann V., and Jorge Chapa
2004 Apple Pie and Enchiladas: Latino Newcomers in the Rural
Midwest. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Odem, Mary, and Elaine Lacy, eds.
2009 Latino Immigrants and the Transformation of the U.S. South.
Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Portes, Alejandro, Patricia Fernandez-Kelly, and William Haller
2005 Segmented Assimilation on the Ground: The New
Second Generation in Early Adulthood. Ethnic and Racial
Studies 28(6):10001040.
Portes, Alejandro, and Ruben G. Rumbaut
2001 Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant Sec-
ond Generation. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Eating in the Side Room: Food, Archaeology, and African
American Identity by Mark S. Warner.
Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2015. 208 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12575
Jennifer L. Muller
Ithaca College
In the 1850s, a free black man named John Maynard built
a home at 163 Duke of Gloucester Street in the ethnically
mixed community of Annapolis, Maryland. Mark Warners
Eating in the Side Room: Food, Archaeology, and African American
Identity explores the foodways of Maynards extended family.
The side room references the room adjacent to the parlor; it
was a private space, a family space, devoid of the oppressive
forces of whiteness. Within this space, the Maynard and
Burgess families gathered to consume cuts of pork from
commercial markets and a diversity of fish and fowl.
Warners book focuses on the analysis of faunal
assemblages associated with the Maynard-Burgess home.
His analysis is richly contextualized through the integration
of an impressive variety of archival and archaeological
data. Warner incorporates newspapers, Maryland and
Annapolis laws, federal household studies, oral histories,
cookbooks, etiquette guides, quilts, and blues lyrics to
identify the Maynard-Burgess food choices, in particular
the preference for pork. As he demonstrates throughout
his book, their continued consumption of pork over beef is
more than a preference in taste or the result of economic
circumstance. It is an expression of their African American
identity.
John Maynard shared his home with his wife and children
as well as extended family members. The home was later
purchased by one of these relatives, Willis Burgess. Warner
places the Maynard-Burgess families within the broader con-
Rosas, Gilberto
2012 Barrio Libre: Criminalizing States and Delinquent Refusals
of the New Frontier. Durham: Duke University Press.
Shutika, Debra Lattanzi
2011 Beyond the Borderlands: Migration and Belonging in the
United States and Mexico. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Smith, Heather A., and Owen Furuseth, eds.
2006 Latinos in the New South: Transformations of Place. Burling-
ton, VT: Ashgate.
Valdes, Dionicio Nodn
2000 Barrios Nortenos: St. Paul and Midwestern Mexican Com-
munities in the Twentieth Century. Austin: University of Texas
Press.
text of African American experiences in Annapolis. By the
mid-1800s, blacks owned businesses and houses in the city.
White Annapolis afforded them a limited degree of economic
tolerance, perhaps attributable to the fact that many worked
in service professions. Social acceptance, on the other hand,
was not extended, as is evident in the continued denial of
basic rights and attempts to limit the growth of the black
population. Such political decisions served to purposefully
transition African Americans from indentured servitude to
permanent enslavement and led to the pervasive structural
violence that affected the free black community.
Warner details the methodologies employed in identi-
fying and analyzing the remnants of the Maynard and Burgess
meals. A barrel privy, a root cellar, yard scatters, and a small
trash pit yielded approximately 25 thousand artifacts. Data
collection included species identification, skeletal elements,
symmetry, epiphyseal fusion, bone modifications, and bone
weight. Quantitative measurements including number
of identifiable specimens (NISP), minimum number of
individuals (MNI), and biomass estimates are provided in
detailed tables. Warner includes a background on these
quantitative methodologies, detailing the possible analytical
limitations of each. His descriptions make the resulting anal-
ysis highly accessible to those outside the zooarchaeology
discipline.
Warners faunal analysis demonstrates that the pig is by
far the dominant meat. His analysis of cut marks in the bones,
coupled with age at death, suggests that the household pur-
chased pork from commercial markets. Fish also composed
a significant portion of the family diet. The fish were likely
to have been caught and processed by household members as
evidenced by the large number of recovered scales and the

repurposed oyster shells that lined the base of the root cellar.
Faunal analysis indicates that birds were also processed in the
backyard. Warner suggests that the preponderance of adult
fowl remains indicates that chickens were kept for their egg
production and then consumed.
Comparisons were made between the Maynard-Burgess
households and other post-emancipation, mid-Atlantic sites,
exhaustive details of which are available in appendix B. Com-
parative analysis demonstrates that the preference for pork
is a broader trend found among African American fami-
lies throughout the Chesapeake region, compared to white
households, which show a preference for beef. Warners re-
view of federal household studies and oral histories similarly
supports the preference for pork in black households and also
conveys the importance of private economies and informal
exchange-based networks, in which foods were traded for
goods and services. Commercial markets were dominated
by white merchants, and with them came harassment and
deception. Exchange networks served as a mechanism of
Conscientious Objectors in Israel: Citizenship, Sacrifice,
Trials of Fealty by Erica Weiss.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. 216 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12562
Sara L. Helman
Ben Gurion University of the Negev
The importance and relevance of this work go far beyond
the tension between political obligation and the individ-
uals conscience. Erica Weiss questions the liberal under-
standings of the relations between individual rights and
state sovereignty in contemporary democracies. Focusing
on the experiences of conscientious objectors who belong to
two organizationsCombatants for Peace (CFP) and New
Profileand to two generations, she presents a compelling
ethnography of the sacrifices that a state engaged in pro-
tracted conflict demands from its citizens and examines how
individuals mobilize the sacrificial economy to resist these
demands and redefine communal responsibilities and ethical
commitments.
Weiss conceptualizes sacrifice as an essential element of
the formation of social solidarity not as a constraint to free-
dom. However, when the sacrificial economy is organized
in relation to the state, as is the case with military service,
it is a fertile ground for the emergence of resistance, first
and foremost because soldiers must sacrifice their lives. Fur-
thermore, the appropriation of the sacrificial economy for
the pursuit of the raison detat may arouse conflicts over the
meaning of sacrifice.
Book Reviews 463
avoidance of white oppression while reinforcing social and
economic relationships within black communities.
Warner provides a striking interdisciplinary analysis
that confirms that African Americans co-opted an animal
that once provided slaves their rations, into a vibrant
regional foodway (p. 112). He addresses the broader
cultural meanings attributed to the pig among African
Americans, drawing upon folksongs and blues lyrics and
beautifully crafted quilts. Through his analysis, he provides
evidence of Maynard-Burgess food choices as everyday acts
of resistance to discriminatory practices. As such, his study
demonstrates the agency of free blacks in the racialized
climate of 19th-century Annapolis. His book underscores
the value of zooarchaeological analysis in informing our
understanding of the past, especially of people devalued
and muted in our mainstream historical texts. In making
his analysis accessible to audiences outside archaeology,
Warner has amplified the contributions of his research to
the understanding of African American lived experiences.
In chapter 1, Interrupted Sacrifice, which centers on
CFP, conscientious objectors narrate their immersion in the
economy of sacrifice and its emerging crisis. The crisis is
represented in these narratives as a mismatch between their
initial readiness to embody ideals of sacrifice and voluntarism
through military service in combat units and the realization
that their sacrifice is deployed for missions that betray these
ideals. These conscientious objectors, raised at the heart
of what is considered the elite in Israel (Ashkenazi, urban
middle and upper-middle class, and highly educated), invert
the very motifs of the sacrificial economy to challenge state
sovereignty. It is not a coincidence that conscientious objec-
tion became a social phenomenon after the Arab-Israeli War
in 1967. The deployment of the military to control a civilian
population slowly developed into a rupture between military
commands and the meaning that individuals attributed to
their military service.
CFP has adopted confession as a repertoire of con-
tention. Confession, as richly exposed in the second chapter,
Confess, is a ritual through which personal and collective
sins are presented to an audience, mainly in order to break
away from the culture of collective denial. This audience is
composed of Israeli Jews, most of them still serving in the
military and others who have served in the past. However,
the audience is reluctant to accept collective responsibility
for the deeds of the confessors and is even more hostile to
Palestinian ex-combatants.
464 American Anthropologist Vol. 118, No. 2 June 2016
The sacrificial economy is deeply entangled in the con-
stitution of a regime of value. This hierarchy of value is
consequential in terms of which voices and sacrifices in the
name of conscience are valued. Chapter 3, Confronting
Sacrifice, introduces us to the new generation of consci-
entious objectors, a group of high school students not yet
enlisted. The group consists of both men and women, in
sharp contrast to the other conscientious objection organi-
zations, which are dominated by men. In this chapter, as
well as in chapter 5, the hierarchy of value and the con-
straints and possibilities it sets for the abnegation of sacrifice
are highlighted through the different trajectories followed by
male and female conscientious objectors. Women can be ex-
empted from military service on conscientious grounds due
to historical legacies. However, refusal to perform military
service on the grounds of conscience is not a legal option for
men. The bifurcation of the right of conscientious objection
along gender lines allows men to abnegate sacrifice, whereas
women refusers are relegated to the margins of sacrifice and,
as a consequence, their voices are not heard (pp. 9098).
Chapter 4, Pacifist? Prove It, presents the trials and
tribulations experienced by those refusing military service
Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala
by Kirsten Weld.
Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. 352 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.12559
Linda Green
University of Arizona
Kirsten Welds Paper Cadavers is an extraordinary book. It is
a multistranded tale of intrigue, of power, and of struggle
skillfully woven together by the author. On the one hand,
Paper Cadavers is a riveting story of the accidental discovery
in 2005 of 80 million pages of Guatemalan National Police
documents, some dating back nearly a century. Yet many of
these rodent-infested bundles, piled high in an abandoned
building on the grounds of a police compound, contained
35 index cards confirming what had long been known
among progressives and human rights and social movement
activists. The disappearances, the torture, and the murders
of thousands of urban Guatemalanstrade unionists, clergy,
university students and faculty, and ordinary citizens, among
many otherswere a calculated strategy of the Dirty War
in Guatemala. Not surprisingly, the United States bears re-
sponsibility for much of the architecture and infrastructure
of the police surveillance of subversives under the guise of
professionalizing law enforcement. As Weld rightly points
out, subversion and surveillance techniques including docu-
mentation are critical elements of counterinsurgency.
on pacifist grounds. Because pacifism challenges the state
deployment of violence, it is politically dangerous. On
the other hand, an outright rejection of pacifism is not an
option for the military. The way out of this conundrum
lies in the production of a specific kind of pacifist subject,
a pathological one. This amounts to the depoliticization of
pacifism through its psychologization. Psychologizing paci-
fism widens the margins of what is considered permissible
violence.
Chapters 3, 4, and 5 provide an original contribution to
the analysis of conscientious objection in Israel. However,
I was surprised that the book refers only tangentially
(pp. 1112) to previous waves of conscientious objection,
for example, the one that occurred during the 1982
Lebanon War. It was at this time that conscientious objec-
tion emerged as a social phenomenon in Israel. Nonetheless,
Weiss makes a valuable contribution to the subject thanks
to her theoretical framing of military service and the refusal
to perform it in terms of the sacrificial economy. Moreover,
this book would appeal to anthropologists of war and ethics
as well as to a wider audience of scholars interested in the
limits and constraints of liberal reason.
These documents came to light only serendipitously
after a series of unexplained explosions at a nearby mili-
tary compound rocked an urban neighborhood in the mid-
dle of Guatemala City over a four-hour period. A savvy
worker from the states Office of the Ombudsman for
Human Rights was sent to investigate whether similar ex-
plosives were stored at a nearby police depository. The
investigator, a historian by training, understood immedi-
ately the implications of what he had found. Moreover,
the discovery had been foretold in a young trade union-
ists dream some 40 years earlier. Incredibly, he would
later become a member of the team of activist archivists who
worked tirelessly, especially during the first years, to turn the
haphazard piles of papers into usable archives. This strand
of the story alone stands as a worthy companion to
Francisco Goldmans masterful account (2007) of the mur-
der of Bishop Juan Gerardi by the military two days after
the release of the Guatemalan Catholic Churchs Human
Rights Office report; Guatemala: Nunca Mas (1998) docu-
mented the fact that the military was responsible for well
over 90 percent of the murder and mayhem. Weld, like
Goldman, offers searing evidence of unbridled criminality,
arrogance, and ineptitude on the part of the Guatemalan
states multi-institutional apparatus of surveillance and social
control.

Weld details how the physical papers represent two dif-
ferent historical moments with distinct archival logics. On
the one hand, they document the wielding of state power
through surveillance and ultimately acts of terror and bru-
tality. On the other, transformed into usable archives, the
papers provide documentary evidence of crimes committed
by the stateviz. the National Policeand expose how
impunity for those crimes lies at the heart of a now-rampant
lawlessness in all strata of Guatemalan society. Further, by
revealing the logics of state power, the papers dispel any
notion that only a few bad apples were responsible for the
crimes committed, as is often claimed.
Converting index cards to archives with their potential
power to break through the wall of silence that has shielded
the military, including the National Police, from their re-
sponsibility as perpetrators of crimes against the Guatemalan
people was no easy task. There were no funds available in
Guatemala; nor, not surprisingly, was there much political
will on the part of the state to see this project to fruition. Even
with funds from the international community, the Office of
the Ombudsman for Human Rights confronted innumerable
challenges. Although far from putting an end to impunity,
what the archives accomplish is to bring to the fore what is
at stake for justice to prevail in Guatemala.
This is a story of hope, strands of which are woven
together through what Weld calls memory work in the
long, seemingly endless struggle in Guatemala for social
justice. Memory of the past became a mechanism to inform
the futuresolidifying for some of the workers a sense of
struggle, not against only lifes injustices but for a collective
Book Reviews 465
and inclusive dignity, one in which the salience of C. Wright
Mills injuncture to turn private misery into public concerns
is evident.
One of the most extraordinary outcomes of these in-
tensive years of work was the forging of new social rela-
tions. Former members of the revolutionary movements of
the 1970s and 1980s worked alongside young, mostly ur-
ban middle-class Guatemalans, some of whose parents had
fled the country during the worst years of the counterin-
surgency war, while others wanted to understand firsthand
the recent violent history of Guatemala. Together they nur-
tured bonds of solidarity and visions of a just future. More-
over, these memory workers began to reconcile some of the
more intractable contradictions, for example, recognizing
the humanity of the rank-and-file police, like their foot sol-
dier counterparts, who were simultaneously perpetrators as
well as victims of the systemic violence that continues to
circumscribe Guatemalan society.
In sum, Paper Cadavers is a first-rate work of history
and historical production that importantly demonstrates
the power of a rapprochement between anthropology and
history.
REFERENCES CITED
Goldman, Francisco
2007 The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop? New
York: Grove Press.
Proyecto Interdiocesano de Recuperacion de la Memoria Historica
1998 Guatemala: Nunca Mas.Guatemala City: Oficina de
Derechos Humanos del Arzobispado de Guatemala.