Book Reuiews

907

cent from Pakistan to Japan-an area influenced for the most part by the monsoons and therefore known as Monsoon Asia. Of the five parts into which the book is divided, the first sketches the physical setting and mans influence, and the last, the economic and political geography of Monsoon Asia as a whole, while the other parts are devoted to regional analyses, with major emphasis on patterns of land use. Dobby distinguishes three major realms: Southern, Southeast, and Eastern Asia, each of which is further divided into regions. His boundary between Eastern and Southeast Asia including North Vietnam, and the Philippines in Eastern Asia rather than in Southeast Asia, comes as a surprise. f Of great value are the numerous sketch maps as well as sections o topographic maps which illustrate the settlement and land use patterns of representative rural landscapes. A large body of statistical information is compressed into tables summarizing demographic, agricultural, industrial, trade, and other economic data. These tables contribute substantially to the value of the chapters dealing with the economic and political geography of Monsoon Asia.

Percevals Narrative: A Palietats Account of His Psychosis, 1830-1832. GREGORY BATESON (Ed.) Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1961. xxii, 331 pp., footnotes, frontispiece. $6.75. Reviewed by S . H. POSINSKY, York City New
John Perceval(1803-1876), son of an assassinated prime minister of England, wrote and published this book two decades before the birth of Freud-and long before the words psychiatry and schizophrenia had been coined. Percevals insights into his own symptoms, into mental dysfunction in general, and into the nature o the theraf peutic interaction are surprisingly modern. At any rate, after three years of schizophrenic illness and despite the ministrations of friends, relatives, and physicians, he experienced a spontaneous remission of his delusional symptoms. Percevals memoirs are relatively free of turgidity, and, thanks to Batesons editing, the repetition and contentiousness which generally characterize such a document are not unnecessarily burdensome. In the Introduction, Bateson touches on Percevals Freudianism, though he places the authors theoretical position as perhaps midway between that of Freud and William Blake; he indicates that Percevals language is often that of theology, where his thoughts are those of a scientist; he reminds us that contemporary therapy and hospitalization are not free of the defects which Perceval observed among the lunatic doctors of the 1830s;and, most significantly, he notes that schizophrenia, conventionally regarded as a disease, is more like some vast and painful initiatory ceremony conducted by the self. By making this important and rare book easily available, Bateson has done a service for students and practitioners of the behavioral sciences and therapeutic arts.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities. JANE 1961. 458 pp., index. $5.95.

JACOBS.

New York: Random House,

Reviewed by PAUL KUTSCHE, Colorado College The

On the face of i t this book has nothing to do with anthropology, and i t belongs in the realm of polemical journalism (along with Lincoln Steffens Tke Shame ofthe Cities, McClure, Phillips, 1904) rather than of scholarship. But i t should interest ethnologists who want to see how far beyond the discipline anthropological ideas have pene-

908

American Anthropologist

[64,19621

trated. And it will be a useful source of insights to ethnographers who are asked to involve themselves in the problems of man in mass society. Miss Jacobs point of departure is an attack . . on the principles and aims that have shaped modern, orthodox city planning and rebuilding (p. 3) starting with Ebenezer Howards garden city and proceeding straight through the prophets of the Radiant Garden City Beautiful-Patrick Geddes, Le Corbusier, Lewis Mumford, and the rest. She says they have built, and presentday planners use, an almost paranoid system of suburbanized ideals, and when their planning efforts fail to provide lively cities they seek remedies by proceeding further in the same direction. Successful city districts create themselves entirely without relation to, and sometimes in spite of the efforts of, city planners and their pupils, the banks and other lending agencies. Success Miss Jacobs defines as concentrated use, high diversity, and experimentation with new enterprise. Such districts are Greenwich Village, the North End of Boston, and Back of the Yards in Chicago, the last two of which survived mortgage blacklists. The authors point is that planning for city renewal makes sense only as a sequel to the study of whole cities and city neighborhoods as they actually function, with as much attention paid to what works as to what fails. A large portion of the book (especially Part 1, The Peculiar Nature of Cities and Part 3, Forces of Decline and Regeneration) reports her own participant observation of the way cities function and malfunction. She is particularly aware of the importance of informal social structure, which she refers to as the network of casual contacts between neighbors, forming a basis of trust underlying whatever joint action may be necessary for the neighborhood to achieve or maintain vitality. Her guides for the study of neighborhoods read like a manual on ethnographic field method. Ideal urban conditions-among them street safety, dense occupance, and cheek-byjowl heterogeneity-are approached from something very close to the structuralfunctional point of view: A sidewalk life . . . arises out of no mysterious qualities or talents for i t in this or that type of population. It arises only when the concrete tangible facilities it requires are present (p. 70). The conditons for generating the diversity which she regads as so important are all concrete and tangible: 1) each district must serve more than one primary function, the hours of use of which should be staggered so that people are on the streets a maximum portion of the day; 2) most blocks must be short, to give frequent opportunities to turn corners, hence knit the neighborhood together with a multitude of casual contacts; 3) buildings must vary in age and condition, so as to vary in the economic yield needed to break even, and attract different kinds of use; 4) people, including residents, must be densely concentrated. Possibly the worst sin which planners have perpetrated on the bodies of great cities is the housing project for people with low incomes. Miss Jacobs devotes considerable space to the dullness, danger, and social formlessness of life behind these uniform grey walls. Some of her best criticisms were anticipated in a little-known book written by A.F.C.Wallace for the Philadelphia Housing Authority (Bowing utd Social Strudwe, Philadelphia, 1952). Applying the concept of culture to the microcosm of housing projects, Wallace noted that the destruction of old buildings which precedes construction of projects disperses and often destroys a healthy existing social fabric. The new project usually stands architecturally distinct from its surroundings-e.g., the elevator park apartment in the midst of row housing-thus pointingout its tenants as invidiously different. And project authorities prevent the re-creation of effective social networks by paternalistic control and by income ceilings which tend to expel community leaders just at the point where they become recognized by their neighbors.

New Polbldtations Received

909

The Death aad L4fe o j G & Americas Cities has faults which wl frustrate the r il ethnologist seeking more than inspiration from it. The author is apparently innocent of such work in the social structure of large entities as has actually been done in anthropology and sociology. Her attack on traditional city planning and planners is more vociferous than precise and shows little awareness of the 19th century urban conditions which gave rise to that school. And she never mentions the rebuilding egoorts o Northf ern European cities, the history of which might shed considerable light on American urban problems. But anthropologists who are asked to bring their discipline to bear on problems of urban organization will find in the book a point of view which is congenial, and enough hypotheses about the functional improvements to be gained from reform of urban structures (physical and otherwise) to incite years of research activity.

New Publications Received

Aame, Antti. The types 0 the folktale: a cla.&&&m and bibliograjhy. Second revision translated 1 and enlarged by Stith Thompson. (FF Communications Vol. LXXV, No. 184.) Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1961. 588 pp., bibliography, index. 3000 mk (paper bound) ; 3300 mk (cloth bound). Argyris, Chris. Znk@ersonal cornpehnce and wganiadiond ejectivencss. With a chapter by Roger Harrison. (One of the Irwin-Dorsey Series in Behavioral Science in Business.) Homewood, Illinois: Richard D. Irwin, Inc., 1962. xi, 292 pp., 2 figures, indices, 18 tables. $6.50. de Azevedo, Thales. Ankcdenla do h m . (Publication Series 3, N .13.) Bahia, Brad: Universio dade da Babia, 1961. 77 pp., 1 figure, 1 chart. n.p. Bascom, William K. and Melville J. Herskovits (Eds.) Conlinuily and change in Ajrkan cullures. (A Phoenix Book.) (Originallypublished in 1959.) Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1962. x, 309 pp., figures, footnotes, index, tables. $1.95. Benedict, Burton. Indians in a p h d socie4y: a report an Mauritius. (Colonial O f c ,Colonial Refie search Studies No. 34.) London: Her Majestys Stationery Office, 1961.168 pp., index, 1 map, 8 plates, references, 25 tables. 25s, Berg, Giista and others (Eds.) S c b d i s c k e Vdkskundc: Qucucrr, Fwschung, Ergcbniss. (Festschrift filr Sigfrid Svenssonm sechzigsten Geburtstag am 1. Juni 1961.) Stockholm: Almqvist and u m Wiksells, 1961. 511 pp., bibliographies, figures. n.p. Beshers, James M.U r h soGid s t c f u r c . New York:The Free Press of Glencoe, Inc., 1962. ix, 207 pp., appendix, index, references. $5.50. Biegert, von Joseph. Volarhaul dcr H W e und Fdsse. (Primatologia, Vol. I, Part 1, Chapter 3, edited by H. Hofer, A. H. Schultz, and D. Starck.) Basel: S. Karger, 1961. vi, 326 pp., bibliography, 101 figures, 58 tables. sFr 75.--. von Bonin, Gerhardt and Percival Bailey. P&re ofthe c ~ & d kocork. (Primatologia, Vol. 11, Part 2, Chapter 10, edited by H. Hofer, A. H. Schultz, and D. Starck.) Basel: S. Karger, 1961. iv, 42 pp., 33 figures, references, 4 colored plates. sFr 20.--. de Borhegyi, Stephan F. and others. MhWe America% research ~ccwds.(Volume 1 , Numbers 1 1-8.) (Publication 18, Middle American Research Institute.) New Orleans: Tulane University, 1961. 175 pp,, charts, figures, references. n.p. v Bourne, Edward Gaylord. Spain i a America 1450-1580. New introduction and supplementary bibliography by Benjamin Keen. (A University Paperback reprint, originally published in 1904.) New York: Barnes and Noble, Inc., 1962. xviii, 366 pp., bibliography, frontispiece, index, 1 map. $2.25 (paper); $5.00(cloth). Brewster, Paul G. and Georgia Tarsouli. IIanajd and Lioymneti and child 76 and 110: a study in sirniloritiw. (FF Communications No. 183.) Helnnki: Academia SEientiarum Fennica, 1961. 17 pp., footnotes, 1 map. 100 mk. r Burgess, M.Elaine. Negro ledemhip ie D soulkern city. Chapel Hill: The University of North