Book Reviews would preclude nding that the causal sequence might run the other way around.

Nevertheless, Rochon has written an important book that is a very welcome contribution to the scholarly discourse on movements and culture, particularly because it focuses on the cultural effects of movement activities, a topic that deserves more attention than it has received since the cultural turn of movement studies. This book is a must for scholars in the eld of cultural studies and social movements and will be very helpful to students of these subjects. The Art of Moral Protest: Culture, Biography, and Creativity in Social Movements. By James Jasper. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Pp. xv514. $35.00. Robert D. Benford University of Nebraska, Lincoln Once in a great while a book comes along that fundamentally changes the ways we think about a topic. I am condent that James Jaspers deeply theoretical and richly illustrated The Art of Moral Protest will have such an impact on social movements scholars. Indeed, its impact could extend well beyond a single substantive area to inuence the way sociologists view structure, culture, and agency and the relationships among them. Few writers since C. Wright Mills have so cogently articulated the intersection of social forces and biography. Perhaps the greatest single contribution Jasper makes is to bring fulledged human actors back into the spotlight of social movement analysis. These are not the irrational and apprehensive individuals of the crowd theories who mill about mimicking one another or who are occasionally whipped into a collective frenzy by the vicissitudes of rapid social changes. Nor are they the hedonistic, mostly self-interested, prot maximizers of the rationalist and mobilization theorists. And Jaspers movement actors are certainly not relatively helpless pawns of their political and economic environments as the process theorists often imply. Nor are movement actors suffering, as some new social movement theorists suggest, from a postindustrial-induced identity crisis. And nally, they are not simply the dispassionate, strategic manipulators of public discourse and meanings, as often implied by framing theorists. While Jasper acknowledges that under some conditions movement actors may in fact respond in one or more of the foregoing ways, they tend to be much more complicated and multifaceted than classical and contemporary movement theorists depict them. Movement actors, according to Jasper, are thinking, artfully creating, feeling, moralizing human beings. They are thinking actors who behave strategically and artfully, aware of what they are doing, making plans,

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American Journal of Sociology developing projects, and innovating in trying to achieve new goals, all the while learning from their mistakes as well as from the mistakes of their opponents. But they are also feeling beings, whose protests are motivated by anger, fear, dread, suspicion, indignation, outrage, and hope, among other emotions. Far from rendering their actions irrational, emotions supply much of the motivational impetus for individual and collective action. And most of all, movement actors are moral beings. Their protests are frequently inspired by moral outrage sometimes from experiencing a moral shock such as news of the catastrophe at Three Mile Island. Protesters subsequent actions are typically predicated upon moral principles as are their critiques of the conditions they wish to alter and their visions and hopes for a better society. In one of many provocative passages, Jasper asserts that moral protest provides individuals with a rare chance to probe their moral intuitions and articulate their principles (p. 367). He observes that contemporary institutions provide few opportunities for exploring, voicing, and pursuing moral visions. Indeed, for Jasper, the importance of protesters . . . lies more in their moral visions than in their practical accomplishments (p. 379). The second signicant contribution Jasper makes is to synthesize various concepts associated with cultural/constructionist perspectives, while selectively drawing on constructs from the more established resource mobilization, political process, and new social movements perspectives as well as literature from psychology, philosophy, anthropology, history, political science, and communication studies to creatively fashion a holistic, compelling approach to analyzing protest dynamics. In constructing this synthesis, Jasper critically assesses the major theoretical approaches, beginning with classical theories and ending with various contemporary paradigms. This is not the ritualistic exercise in theory bashing consumers of social movement monographs and articles have grown accustomed to reading. Rather, for each theory, Jasper carefully identies not only the problematic dimensions but also its enduring contributions. A recurrent theme in this critique is the idea that many of the elds core concepts suffer from theoretical and empirical overextension (p. 41) due in part to the fact that our main paradigms are surprisingly metaphorical (p. 17). Resources, political opportunity structures, collective identities, and framing are all asked to do more work than is warranted. Jasper insightfully species each constructs limitations and the contexts in which each would seem to be applicable. Jasper then identies four basic, that is analytically autonomous, dimensions of protest: resources, strategies, culture, and biography. After demonstrating the essentiality of these four constructs, he explains why one contender, structure, is analytically reducible to culture and resources. Once the four dimensions are fused with artfulness (agency), they can be analyzed dynamically rather than statically. Most of the remainder of the book is an elaboration of the interrelationships among the basic dimensions, often richly illustrated from case studies of the anti 1836

Book Reviews nuclear power, animal rights, and environmental movements Jasper and various collaborators have spent the past two decades studying. The Art of Moral Protest dees adequate description in such limited space. Readers will nd something of interest on almost every page of this well-written monographcogent observations, theoretical insights, provocative assertions, original research hypotheses, and pearls of wisdom. Serious students of social movements should place it at the top of their reading list. Beyond that, I highly recommend that all scholars interested in the human condition partake in this artful scholarly creation. Agrarian Reform and Class Consciousness in Nicaragua. By Laura J. quez. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1997. Pp. x206. Enr $49.95. Carlos M. Vilas CEIICH-UNAM Agrarian reform was a most relevant ingredient in the Sandinista strategy for revolutionary change. With regard to the peasantry, it was addressed to the fulllment of three basic, interrelated objectives: furthering economic development through both productive differentiation and the promotion of cooperative organization; improvement of peasants well-being by means of access to credit, productive inputs, technical services, and so on; strengthening peasants political support to Sandinismo. Enriquez discusses the performance of the reform along these three avenues. She focuses on the shifts in the Sandinista regimes approach to the role of peasants in economic development and the impact of these shifts upon peasants attitudes toward both the government and the opposition. Two additional ingredients played a decisive role in the development of the peasantrys political attitudes toward Sandinismo, which Enriquez also deals with in detail: the class origins of specic segments of the peasantry (i.e., poor and landless peasants, minifundista peasants, and others) and the type of productive organization (collective ownership of land as well as of production; individual/family ownership of land together with cooperative management of credit, commercialization, or specic inputs; and so on) promoted by the revolutionary government. Through two case studies, Enriquez concludes that, despite the agrarian reforms economic success (output growth and differentiation, technical improvements, and so on), its ability to feed political support toward Sandinismo was mostly conned to former poor and former landless peasants, while small producers, enjoying some access to land prior to the reform, tended to be less politically enthusiastic. In turn, the specic types of peasant organization, pushed forward by policy makers, acted in different segments of the peasant class to favor either an increased political involvement in the revolution, a pragmatic acceptance of specic policies while rejecting others, or an increasing shift toward political opposition. 1837

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