Anthropological Theory

http://ant.sagepub.com

Book Review: Power and Intimacy in the Christian Philippines

Elizabeth Kopping
Anthropological Theory 2001; 1; 122
DOI: 10.1177/146349960100100112

The online version of this article can be found at:

http://ant.sagepub.com

Published by:

http://www.sagepublications.com

Additional services and information for Anthropological Theory can be found at:

Email Alerts: http://ant.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts

Subscriptions: http://ant.sagepub.com/subscriptions

Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav

Permissions: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav

Downloaded from http://ant.sagepub.com at UNIV DE SAO PAULO BIBLIOTECA on September 29, 2009
07 Book Reviews (JB/D) 15/2/01 3:43 pm Page 122

ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY 1(1)

much of political and ethical significance. But in order to have access to that significance
you must be able to interpret the classification scheme itself.
The book provides examples of how to read classification systems ‘against the grain’.
The authors write well, with an acute sense of how bizarre their enterprise is. It is no
small measure of their success that this reviewer found the results compelling and chal-
lenging as well as enjoyable to read.
Once upon a time you could die of ‘being worn out’ or ‘old age’, but no longer. More
recently it was possible to have GRIDS but now one can only have AIDS. Other cases
abound; part of the Durkheim industry has revolved around variation in ways of record-
ing suicides which render comparison difficult if not futile. Attitudes to abortion and
different religious beliefs also affect the recording of still-births with consequent reper-
cussions for national infant mortality rates. These are prominent cases that get Bowker
and Star started, but they do not linger on them. They prefer to examine the act of
classification itself and less controversial cases which, less imbued with particular politi-
cal orientation, are none the less political and full of practical implications for patients
and doctors alike. They take TB as one case in point, contrasting the doctors’ struggle
to decide what sort of TB it was (and therefore what treatment to give, what prognosis
was likely) with the experience of the patients as inmates in a sanatorium. Such a dis-
connection between domains of experience and activity connects to a power difference,
but one usually unnoticed and undiscussed. Other cases considered concern the treat-
ment of borderline cases by bureaucrats charged with managing the apartheid racial
classification in South African apartheid, and attempts to classify the work of nurses (can
one summarize the importance of a sense of humour?).
Bowker and Star end with a general discussion of the importance of classifications
and insist that these be studied rather than taken for granted and left as unregarded
(unnoticed) parts of the background. I leave the last words to them:

Classification does indeed have consequences – perceived as real, it has real effect . . .
Classifications are powerful technologies. Embedded in working infrastructures they
become relatively invisible without losing any of that power. In this book we demon-
strate that classifications should be recognized as the significant site of political and
ethical work that they are. They should be reclassified. (p. 319)

David Zeitlyn
Department of Anthropology
Eliot College, University of Kent
[email: D.Zeitlyn@ukc.ac.uk]

Power and Intimacy in the Christian Philippines, Fenella Cannell. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1999. xxvi + 312 pp. ISBN: (hbk) 0 521 64147 0, (pbk) 0 521
64622 7. £45.00 ($64.95), £15.95 ($24.95).

This book belongs to a Cambridge Studies series which ‘combines an expert and criti-
cal command of ethnography and a sophisticated engagement with current theoretical

122
Downloaded from http://ant.sagepub.com at UNIV DE SAO PAULO BIBLIOTECA on September 29, 2009
07 Book Reviews (JB/D) 15/2/01 3:43 pm Page 123

BOOK REVIEWS

debates.’ The author writes on the Bicos people of Southern Luzon, some 100 km from
Manila, as sturdily defending their anthropological importance as their authenticity. Her
research, both contemporary and historical, is indeed a valuable contribution to the
ethnography of the region which outside Indonesia has tended towards the static. A tan-
gible outcome to the ‘theoretical engagement’ is less easy to define, though theoreticians
interested in the areas of religion and kinship could usefully utilize the bulk of the
book.
Cannell elucidates the mountain/plain and hierarchical/egalitarian dichotomies in
both recent and historical writing on the Philippines, emphasizing the importance of
Bicolano patterns as part of a coherent and commonplace system, clearly anchored in
historical processes, rather than as a derided colonial or Christian mongrel. This is a per-
fectly understandable project given past views of ‘cultures’, the current if unspoken
assumptions underlying both hybridity and globalization discussions, and the anthro-
pological failure to engage with (or overcome anthropologists’ own problems with)
Christianity. At times, however, it leads to platitudes; the fact that ‘poverty is always rela-
tive’ or that it ‘carries more than material implications’ is hardly a ‘specifically Filipino
aspect’ (p. 18) while the Bicolano explanation for ‘the rich becoming richer and the poor
poorer’ (p. 229) appears in suburbs, favellas and kampongs the world over.
In opening she argues that ‘the Bicolano view of power is of a relationship in which
both powerful and less powerful are liable to affect each other, and in which the hope
of those “who have nothing” is always that the gap between the two parties may be some-
what lessened by what they do and what they say’ (p. 25). In concluding she returns to
this point, stating that ‘my argument has been that lowland society is constituted neither
as an achieved society of ancestral tradition nor as an ‘egalitarian’ society of persons who
make themselves through distinct activity . . . It is instead a society where process is rela-
tional’ (p. 251). A common pattern in the region is rarely as clearly stated.
Part One, made up of chapters entitled ‘Marriage Stories’ and ‘Kinship and the
Ritualisation of Marriage’, is excellent, showing detailed and sensitive fieldwork, a sound
grasp of process, and the sort of clear and necessary linkage between historical change
and continuity which is so often lacking in kinship studies. The elusive yet tangible
tension which underlies social relations in the region is excellently set out in a variety of
male-female interactions. The equally valuable Part Two goes into healing and the spirits,
with chapters on spirit mediums and spirit-companions, spirit mediums and séance
forms, and the birthday-parties of the spirits.
One quibble, however, is that given how often ‘pity’ occurs in this and indeed other
sections, it is unfortunate that the relations between what appear to be two different
contexts – the more Christian ‘pity-obligation-action’ behind the imploring of saints and
spirits (apparently a ‘vulgar’ demand: p. 101) and the more Filipino ‘pity-shame-inac-
tion’ taking place at the (non-maternal) interpersonal – level is not clearly discussed.
One suspects there is more crossover, more appeal to action as ‘reasonable’ people, than
indicated. It also seems the power of shame is inadequately addressed.
The discussion of current Protestantizing and Catholic inculturating trends in the
Philippines (p. 118ff ) is most useful, as is that on conversion and meaning (pp. 193–8)
in the final and again excellent substantive section, ‘Saints and the Dead.’ Less worthy
is the banality of Cannell’s ‘much which is probably continuous in local practice goes
unarticulated and unannounced’ (p. 251), and her sneers over the dreams, luggage and

123
Downloaded from http://ant.sagepub.com at UNIV DE SAO PAULO BIBLIOTECA on September 29, 2009
07 Book Reviews (JB/D) 15/2/01 3:43 pm Page 124

ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY 1(1)

attitudes of ‘lady-discoverers’ such as Mabel Cole who travelled up the Cordillera in

1929 (pp. 242–3).
The closing chapter is somewhat disjointed. It is here that the threads of theory strewn
through the book needed to be carefully collected and woven together, yet the five pages
allotted to this task is woefully inadequate. Certainly the lowland Philippines was unin-
teresting to American anthropologists of the colonial period; they preferred the high-
lands. Yet the nearby ‘wild’ Iban were also more attractive to the British than the ‘mild’
Kadazan, while African towns were neglected in favour of exotic hinterlands until the
Rhodes-Livingstone and East Africa Institutes altered that focus. Indeed dichotomizing
(or ‘lobotomizing’ given the crassness of the results) meant that until the 1960s if not until
today a decently ‘boxed’ society cram-full with ‘neatened’ data was the aspiration of
many British anthropologists. If Bicol sits ‘oddly in anthropological discussions’, it is the
discussions past and present which need a thorough shaking up in order to take account
of the fact that while some anthropologists still like boxes, real people slip and slide
between, negotiating and manipulating conflicting discourses with alacrity and élan.
Cannell realizes this, yet she neither sets out the case from her own theoretical corner
with consistent confidence nor engages the not-quite-defined opposition with tightly
honed and logical argument about key concepts such as power. Despite her failure to
live up to the title of the book (or the series) by analysing and grounding power suf-
ficiently, the book is well worth reading for those interested in the ethnography of nego-
tiated power and local religion in a little known region.
Elizabeth Köpping
Eberbach
Germany
[email: elizak@t-online.de]

Signifying Identities: Anthropological Perspectives on Boundaries and Contested Values,

Anthony Cohen, ed. London: Routledge, 2000. viii+ 178 pp. ISBN: (hbk) 0 415 19237 4,
(pbk) 0 415 19238 2. £50, £15.99.

In spite of the misuse and inflation of the identity and boundary concepts in the social
sciences and humanities, the editor of this volume thinks these basic notions valuable
enough to abstain from rehabilitating them. The book focuses on the internal-external
dialectic of identity formation. Anthony Cohen’s main claim is not just to contrast in-
group and out-group interaction, but to address the qualitative nature of social and cul-
tural boundaries and ‘show how they are implicated in the formation, articulation,
management and valorization of collective identities’ (p. 2). The six chapters unevenly
develop this basic point which the introduction defines, to my mind too optimistically,
as the book’s cohesive core.
Fredrik Barth, who pioneered an interactionist approach to the study of ethnic groups
and their boundaries, now calls for systematic attention to cognitive features of bound-
aries in intimate relation to embodied experiences, an approach inspired by Lakoff ’s
Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. He criticizes the anthropological practice of impos-
ing on other groups images and assumptions associated with the Western concept of

124
Downloaded from http://ant.sagepub.com at UNIV DE SAO PAULO BIBLIOTECA on September 29, 2009