BOOK RKVIKWS / Sodooillunil Anthropology 661
Descriptions of Xerox's PARC ethnographers and Sherry
Turkle's Internet identities are combined with discussions of
Geertz and C. P. Snow. The hypothetical ethnographer is"she."
Hakken's book is like a computer system that is running sev-
eral programs simultaneously. The two main programs are:
what does anthropology have to offer the study of computer-me-
diated communication, and what does computer-mediated com-
munication have to offer anthropology? Hakken thinks in both
directions, often on the same page. Regarding the first program,
Hakken's consulting work in Sheffield, Scandinavia, and the
United States produced mixed results (see especially chapter 7).
He offers many practical examples and suggestions (and also
ethical concerns). Regarding the second program, Hakken ably
demonstrates that computer-related issues are good to think
with. If nothing else, this book reminds us that anthropology is
about the chance to think about what it means to be human. Has
the Computer Revolution occurred and has it brought about a
species transformation? Probably not (p. 213). but interesting
things are going on anyway.
By emphasizing the future and by referring to such phrases as
"Man [sic] makes himself [sic]" Hakken places himself on the
cutting edge of something in the process of becoming, a condi-
tion that intrigues and delights him. The question mark in his ti-
tle is part of the playfulness of cyberspace, and perhaps repre-
sents more than anything else in this book the characteristic
pattern of this "culture." I recognize the pattern from my child-
hood immersion in science fiction. It is a wistful and powerful
dynamic, combining the humanistic yearn to experience all hu-
man possibilities with the promise of science as an objectivedis-
covery tool. Cyberspace is the domicile of Homo ludens. It is a
world of change, play, and possibility. The journey is the place.
No computer to carry? Never mind, you still have an address.
Luddite@cipherspace will suffice. •*
The Trading Crowd: An Ethnography of the Shanghai
Stock Market Ellen Hertz. New York: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1998. 238 pp.
ROBERT L. MOORE
Rollins College
This study of the Shanghai stock market is based on fieldwork
done by the author in 1992, the year the market suddenly became
all the rage with the Chinese public. The Mandarin term describ-
ing this kind of intense public interest is re, or "fever," and Hertz
places gupiao re, or "stock fever," in a context that relates it to
other crazes that have shaken Chinese society in recent years.
For example, just preceding Shanghai's stock t'e\cr was a na-
tional outbreak of "Mao fever," which had taxi drivers all over
the country adorning their rearview mirrors with double por-
traits of the late Great Helmsman. According to Hertz, these "fe-
vers" are best understood vis-a-vis the mass movements that the
Communist Party has so often used to attain political or eco-
nomic goals. But fevers emerge and sweep the social landscape
without the catalyst of political leadership, and it is the capacity
of such grassroots movements to operate beyond the control of
the state that is one of Hertz's key themes. In fact, "the trading
crowd" of the title refers to the myriad investors whose buying
and selling send the Shanghai stock market soaring and sinking
despite the government's best efforts to control or at least ame-
liorate price swings.
Hertz discusses the different pkiyers on the Shanghai stock
market in terms of the categories used by the Shanghainese
themselves: the big players, the dispersed (or small) players, and
the state. It is a peculiarity of Chinese stock markets that the state
acts on them both through the implementation of regulations
and through its ownership of large blocks of stock in formerly
state-owned enterprises. Hertz's ability to elucidate the arcane
interrelationships between state and private channels of control
and interest is one of the merits of this work. Her description is
informed by Hill Gates' s model of China's traditional economy,
adichotomous model that distinguishes two modes of produc-
tion, the government-controlled tributary mode and the petty
capitalist mode.
Hertz's analyses of the mentalities of the various players in
the market are intriguing and reflect the many hours she spent in
conversation with investors. Some of this ethnographic work
was focused on the VIP rooms of brokerage houses where the
big players watch market trends, chat, scheme, and submit buy
and sell orders. One key image that emerges from Hertz's obser-
vations is that of the "iconic" big player—a flamboyant risk
taker who doesn't mind being seen as something of a playboy.
Hertz also spent time on the streets and sidewalks where
crowds of small investors cluster around speakers who attempt
to declaim their predictions of where the market is heading. The
individual finds himself (most investors are male) in a position
to listen to one speaker or another and can move from cluster to
cluster in search of useful information. Here, in one of the most
interesting sections of the book, Hertz uncovers some of theritu-
als and symbols according to which these interactions among
strangers, which might be described as "guardedly pragmatic,"
are distinguished from behavior typical of friends or associates.
Her analysis of this sidewalk culture is in some ways similar to
William Jankowiak's description \nSe.x, Death, and Hierarchy
in a Chinese City (Columbia University Press, 1993) of small-
scale dispute settlement rituals on the streets of Huhhot. Paral-
lels in these analyses hint at the usefulness of an ethnology of
public interaction rituals that might support current studies of
China's civil society. In fact, the analysis of strangers interact-
ing according to Chinese presuppositions is another of Hertz's
important themes.
The theoretical implications of this study do not speak di-
rectly to the usual concerns of economic anthropology but,
rather, to the ways in which social actors construe themselves.
The trading crowd is not an identifiable group of people with
shared goals or intentions but, rather, is a new way of conceptu-
alizing the stock players of the Shanghai market. Hertz acknow-
ledges that the term trading crowd is her own construction and is
not based on any common Chinese expressions. This raises the
question of how she justifies the leap from such native catego-
ries as the state, the big players, and the dispersed players to this
entity that is not encoded by the Shanghainese themselves. She
argues that "the qualities . . . belonging to the trading crowd
were thoroughly perceptible in and through stock market dis-
course" (p, 189). This may be, but this claim would be more con-
vincing if Herl/ were to illustrate it through specific quotations
from this discourse. In the absence of such quotes, one has to
ask. What explains the analyst's highlighting of this prime actor
662 AMI RiCAN ANTHROt'OUHiisT • VOL. 102, No. 3 • SEPTEMBER 2000
or "collective agent," on the one hand, and its apparent absence,
at least as a labeled category, in the eyes of the Shanghainese?
This question is by no means fatal, and all in all The Trading
Crowd is to be recommended as an extraordinarily enlightening
account of a feature of Chinese society that was, until now, terra
incognita. The author effectively uses traditional ethnographic
research methods to produce an insightful account of the emer-
gence of the Shanghai stock market within a well-described cul-
tural context. Furthermore, her analyses of various related as-
pects of Shanghainese and urban Chinese behavior are thought
provoking and suggestive of a number of potential new paths of
research. This is an excellent text for upper-level undergraduate
and graduate courses dealing with contemporary China, eco-
nomic anthropology, economic development, and international
business. •»
Kindreds of the Earth-. Badaga Household Structure and
Demography. Paul Hackings. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage
Publications, 1999.302 pp.
ALAKA BASU
Cornell University
The fast growing discipline of anthropological demography
has made many mainstream demographers embarrassed about
their inability to talk in words rather than numbers. Some of
them make up for this embarrassment in the most literal
way—calling "200" "two hundred," for example, or repeating
in sentences exactly what a table has just demonstrated in rows
and columns. A parallel growth in what may be called demo-
graphic anthropology has resulted conversely in some anthro-
pologists trying to quantify their findings sometimes by doing
little more than putting up a table of responses from a dozen men
or women.
But at the urging of some of the big names in demography
(JohnCaldwell in particular) and some of the more radical foun-
dations, there has also been some real marrying of anthropology
and demography, and as many as three edited books (A. M. Basu
and P. Aaby, eds., The Methods and Uses of Anthropological
Demography. Clarendon Press, 1998; S. Greenhalgh, ed., Situ-
ating Fertility: Anthropology and Demographic Inquiry', Cam-
bridge University Press, 1995; and D. I. Kertzer and T. Fricke.
eds., Anthropological Demography: Toward a New Synthesis,
University of Chicago Press, 1997) in recent years illustrate
some of the exciting ways in which this marriage can prosper.
After all, the demographic variables of births and deaths are at
one level merely the outcome of the kinship, culture, and local
politics that engage traditional anthropology.
The presenl book, alas, ends up pointing out the dangers also
inherent in such a marriage. Paul Hockings has undoubtedly
done much to raise our consciousness of a unique little group of
South India—the Badagas, whoare Hindus buthaveassimilated
many tribal practices, who have their own language but no
script, who have a rich oral tradition but were until recently non-
literate, and who have become quite aggressively modern with-
out becoming significantly industrialized or urbanized. He
elaborates on many of these special features and changes in them
in the first half of this book, to produce what is a fasemaling
account of a fascinating community, even if he has already writ-
ten on all these subjects earlier.
But his anthropological demography itself is confusing and
disappointing. Given the title, this should be the meat of the
book. But the discussion on Badaga demography is confined to
two chapters; there is no real attempt to link it to the "household
structure" that also makes up the book title, and. the preface by
John Caldwell notwithstanding, the author does not seem to
have consulted a basic textbook of demography or a profes-
sional demographer to confirm his demographic methods and
conclusions. Chapters 8 and 9 are so inadequate and so riddled
with imprecise statements that I do not know which faults to
highlight. To take just two, the population pyramid displayed in
figure 8.1 is meaningless unless the absolute numbers are con-
verted to proportions. If the absolute numbers in any age group
have increased or decreased over time, that tells us little about
what has happened to the "demographic transition"; inciden-
tally this term, the demographic transition, too is both incor-
rectly defined in the single paragraph devoted to it and wrongly
located in time: it greatly predates the Caldwell 1976 reference
to which it is attributed.
Indeed, this problem of using absolute numbers to draw con-
clusions pervades the book. Chapter 11 (the chapter with the
largest numberof tables), for instance, has 15 of its 18 tables pre-
sented with absolute numbers. I have no argument with the very
small sample sizes in the book; small sample sizes can be inno-
vatively analyzed to enrich the qualitative findings that are the
anthropologist's strength. What is missing here is a real handle
on the relation between the qualitative and quantitative findings.
My second example concerns the unsatisfactory measures of
natality and mortality used in chapters 8 and 9. These measures
(as well as their haphazard presentation) tell us virtually nothing
about what has happened to Badaga fertility and mortality. The
Crude Birth Rate is a measure that is useful for little more than
accounting purposes; at the very least the author could have used
hisdata to look at completed family sizes in different age cohorts
of women. Similarly, simple questions on children ever born
and children surviving could have given us a fairly good means
of recording declining mortality.
I know I have already exceeded my two examples of careless
demography. But I cannot resist also stating my frustration with
so many other sweeping statements in these chapters—that the
demographic transition is a function of rising incomes; that the
changes in the absolute levels of men and women in different
age groups in the four villages demonstrate the "marriage
squeeze," which explains the rise in dowry; that the anomaly be-
tween the small decline in thechildbearing period in one village
and its large decline in fertility can be attributed to chastity be-
fore marriage. What this anomaly actually suggests is that fewer
births are occurring within the same reproductive interval, that
is, there must be an increase in the gap between births overtime.
This possible connection is never made and is therefore never
followed up with information on patterns of contraceptive use in
this unusual village.
Many other interesting possibilities are similarly not fol-
lowed up. Take the finding that infertility seems to be signifi-
cantly higher in the higher status groups. Could this be related to
higher levels of consanguinity in these groups? Or the finding
that the most conservative village seems to have had the largest
decline in fertility. Could this be attributed to more and better