Book Reviews
Politics in Color and Concrete: Socialist Materialities and
the Middle Class in Hungary. Krisztina Fehérváry. Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press, 2013. 288 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12347
KEITH M. MURPHY
University of California, Irvine
Style seems to occupy a niche place in the history of an-
thropological research, typically in domains closely asso-
ciated with aesthetics. Franz Boas (1955), for instance, de-
voted a fair amount of attention to style in his study of
so-called primitive art, which established the conditions
within which the anthropology of art was to develop over
subsequent decades. Style has also been a particularly
influential topic in linguistic anthropology and socio-
linguistics, where scholars have used it to explain how in-
dividual speakers manipulate various context-sensitive lin-
guistic features to project particular identities and connect
to broader social norms and expectations. Style also plays a
significant role in contemporary studies of fashion (Luvaas
2012) and music (Wilf 2013). While all of these areas of in-
quiry operationalize the concept of style in their own ways,
they do possess at least one common trait: a shared sense
that style is actually quite difficult to define, although most
of us know it when we see it. Which is to say that style mat-
ters, but how it matters, where it is “located,” and what actu-
ally comprises it are all still up for debate. In her remarkable
book, Politics in Color and Concrete: Socialist Materialities
and the Middle Class in Hungary, Krisztina Fehérváry offers
a possible solution to this quandary, and while the book is
centrally occupied with issues of style, it is inevitably about
so much more.
Politics in Color and Concrete is an ethnographic
excavation of Hungary’s transition from socialism to
capitalism—and the subsequent recultivation of a Hungar-
ian middle class—through a critical elaboration of the shifts
in aesthetic details that took place within that decades-
long trajectory. Rather than working within familiar po-
litical and economic frameworks to present Hungary’s
socialism-to-capitalism story, Fehérváry instead patterns
her analysis through five distinct but overlapping “aesthetic
regimes” that all helped stylize the politics of everyday life
in Hungary. The driving analytic in Fehérváry’s argument
is influenced by Peircean semiotics, and in particular the
AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 43, No. 3, pp. 560–586, ISSN 0094-0496, online ISSN 1548-1425. 
All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/amet.12347
concept of qualia, the actual instantiation of abstract quali-
ties in physical objects. The primary ethnographic setting is
1990s Hungary, although with detailed excursions both for-
ward and backward from that point, and Fehérváry grants
everyday objects an especially prominent role. What she
reveals over eight chapters, plus an introduction and epi-
logue, is that inasmuch as style is always linked to specific
aesthetic regimes, it is never reducible to those regimes, to
ideas, or to notable social actors. Nor is it merely ancillary or
supplemental to politics. Rather, style functions as an ever
present and infinitely scalable mediator of experience in
everyday life, conditioning complex affective relationships
between individuals and the broader social, cultural, and
political currents within which they live.
The first chapter introduces the study’s central geo-
graphic focus, the small city of Dunaújváros, a planned
socialist counterpoint to traditional urban centers like Bu-
dapest, originally designed to showcase a world of new pos-
sibilities under communism. Fehérváry tells the city’s story
from the vantage point of communism’s recent collapse in
the early 1990s, a period characterized by the precipitous
emergence of new forms of various kinds: a democratically
elected government, new consumer goods on store shelves,
new currency, and more. The central theme of the chap-
ter is the reconfiguration of “normal” in Dunaújváros—
and, by extension, Hungary—as capitalism enters and be-
gins dismantling old social orders and reorganizing them
into something new. The second chapter then transports us
back many decades to the immediate postwar era. Through
a stimulating account of Hungarian socialist realism, an art
and architecture style developed by the Soviets designed to
represent clearly—and in the process establish as “true”—
specific communist values, Fehérváry demonstrates how
the state mobilized city planning as an instrument for trans-
forming rural citizens into urban socialist subjects: a project
that, of course, never materialized in ordinary experience
quite as politicians and planners had intended.
The third chapter rescales focus onto the home, where
in the 1960s the “socialist modern” style contributed to cul-
tivating socialist subjectivity through interactions with ev-
eryday objects. As in other regions at the time, including
Scandinavia and other parts of Europe, as well as in the
United States, everyday goods like fridges, furniture, and
cars were central players in the development of politically
inflected modes of consumption in Hungary. Unlike in
countries conditioned by free-market ideologies, however,
C 2016 by the American Anthropological Association.

the Hungarian state exploited modernism’s promise of a
better life through things to construct a socialist utopia of
goods according to its own controlled logic.
But modernism’s promise faltered and failed in Hun-
gary, as Fehérváry details in chapter 4. The relative abun-
dance of consumer goods in the 1960s was mostly offset by
their overall poor quality, leading to what Fehérváry calls
“socialist generic” (5): a style characterized by objects and
buildings whose surfaces looked like modernist goods, but
that suffered in quality and durability. In short order people
began developing negative stances toward socialist generic
forms and questioning their role in reshaping society for the
better. Where the state had once promised a high-quality
world, the continued production of inferior goods and
housing pushed citizens to experience the state’s project
as decidedly lacking in value. The response to this, which
Fehérváry elaborates in the fifth chapter, was a reinvented
“natural” augmentation of modernist aesthetics with ro-
mantic indexes of Hungarian nationalism—rough wooden
window frames and sheepskins tossed on furniture; apart-
ments decorated with handicrafts, embroidery, and color-
ful textiles, some of which were mass produced. Such new
details radically transformed urban domestic spaces into
reconstituted rural Hungarian cottages, right inside mod-
ernist apartment blocks. And in so doing they offered indi-
viduals a mechanism by which to counteract in their every-
day lives the oppressive kind of politics the state imposed
on their aesthetic worlds. In the final two chapters, hav-
ing detailed the progression of these aesthetic regimes and
the ideological frameworks they aligned with, Fehérváry of-
fers critical analyses of the political-economic transforma-
tions to property, the family, the community, and the home
that took place in Hungary after the transition out of so-
cialism, and how all of these relate to each other and to the
state.
Politics in Color and Concrete has arrived during a mo-
ment in which many anthropologists are turning (or re-
turning) their eyes toward a range of related phenomena,
including material culture, materiality, and design, but it
stands out for a number of reasons. Fehérváry’s argument is
sophisticated and convincing, and it is uncluttered by ver-
bal ornament that might otherwise weaken its clarity. The
semiotic approach she has adopted powerfully accounts
for the multi-scalar nature of her object of inquiry, allow-
ing her to move from objects to discourses, from adver-
tisements to buildings, from sweeping historical moments
to the intimacies of domestic living, all without feeling
forced or contrived. Finally, the book itself is a wonder-
ful artifact, with many photos and full-color plates that to-
gether greatly enhance the picture Fehérváry is painting. In-
deed, because of these qualities, and more, Politics in Color
and Concrete is one of the best ethnographies of artificial
things—and Hungary, Eastern Europe, post-socialism, and
materiality—currently available.
Book Reviews  American Ethnologist
References
Boas, Franz. 1955. Primitive Art. New York: Dover.
Luvaas, Brent. 2012. DIY Style: Fashion, Music, and Global Digital
Cultures. London: Bloomsbury.
Wilf, Eitan. 2013. “Toward an Anthropology of Computer-Mediated,
Algorithmic Forms of Sociality.” Current Anthropology 54 (6):
716–39.
Landscape of Discontent: Urban Sustainability in Immi-
grant Paris. Andrew Newman. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2015. 253 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12348
JULIE KLEINMAN
Pennsylvania State University
Northeastern Paris is a densely inhabited urban environ-
ment crosscut by railroad tracks and encrusted with the
traces of a long history of urban renovation and politi-
cal struggle. Andrew Newman approaches this multifaceted
place from an original angle to grapple with large questions
about topics that range from sustainable development to
urban politics to tolerance and how diverse societies can
“live together.” He uses the Éole public park (Les jardins
d’Éole)—via the people, things, and processes that meet in
its (mostly ungated) interior—to bring that story of urban
change to life.
The park, located in the diverse working-class but
gentrifying area of northeastern Paris, was inaugurated in
2007 as part of the city’s attempt to develop green urban-
ism. Around it crystallized debates about inclusion and ex-
clusion, French citizenship, and marginalization based on
class, ethnic, and racial categories. Newman treats the park
as a lens for understanding some of the fundamental trans-
formations in urban life, French society, and political ecol-
ogy. Each chapter approaches one of these larger questions,
all contextualized by a helpful historical section that weaves
the patterns of urban history out of the voices of local
inhabitants.
The book achieves an admirable balance of analysis of
large-scale processes and careful ethnography. Newman’s
fieldwork included diverse actors and perspectives—from
local politicians to community gardeners to activists liv-
ing in the area to Parisian planners. Instead of focusing on
the bounds of the city and reinforcing the urban/nature di-
chotomy, Landscape of Discontent troubles these categories
and provides new approaches to urban ethnographic re-
search, allowing Newman to tackle key questions such as
whom urban parks are built for and whether urbanization
can ever be “green.”
Landscape of Discontent contributes to a broader trend
in recent research that both puts the “urban” in studies
of political ecology and also brings ecological questions
561
American Ethnologist  Volume 43 Number 3 August 2016
to bear on city life. This approach is necessary and un-
derdeveloped, especially in French urban anthropology. In
a chapter on sustainability projects, Newman situates the
park on the larger scale of global green development, where
projects that gain traction in the world of climate summits
often end up excluding poor residents of urban areas in a
celebration of green development.
The park also offers a stage on which these many ac-
tors “engage with difference” (98) and national belong-
ing, issues that Newman frames through the ideology of
French Republicanism. Landscape of Discontent makes an
important contribution to discussions of French Republi-
canism by providing an alternative to the work that sees
Republicanism as mostly a logic of exclusion. Newman
shows how urban projects such as the Éole park trans-
form Republicanism in practice. He examines how plan-
ners regulate difference through space while inhabitants
reframe the Republican project to further their own goals.
He makes a strong case for the need to be better attuned
to the “plural interpretations of the Republic,” such as the
case of a community garden project that cultivates the
encounter—not the erasure—of difference. Thus, “assimi-
lationist Republicanism”—the difference-erasing kind most
often invoked in contrast to multiculturalism—is not the
only version out there. By providing examples of “pluralist
Republicanism” developed by his interlocutors, Landscape
of Discontent offers a much more hopeful account of the
possibilities embodied in the French model without failing
to highlight the exclusionary effects of the more hegemonic
version of Republicanism.
Perhaps the most innovative chapter is another retool-
ing of a common trope in anthropological research: Fou-
cauldian questions of surveillance and discipline. The fact
that the park’s designs and the “welcoming and surveil-
lance agents” who control it connect the park to a grow-
ing surveillance society “is the beginning of the story, not
the end” (137). To tell the rest of the story, Newman delves
into the everyday modes of disciplinary power carried out
by both residents and the state. Calling these practices
“vigilant citizenship,” he emphasizes the multiple social
meanings and political projects involved in various forms
of surveillance. On the one hand, vigilance can serve the
“neoliberal remaking of the urban commons” that turns
public space into managed space devoid of insurgent pol-
itics (139). At the same time, vigilance may also help re-
produce the urban commons in a way that goes against
the logic of neoliberal and state surveillance, such as when
a French-Senegalese restaurant owner, Aminata, uses vigi-
lance to protect her West African clientele and the informal
market she built from the restaurant. Like Republican ideol-
ogy, surveillance and discipline are multivalent and subject
to novel reconfigurations.
Landscape of Discontent is a memorable recent
example of research that usefully puts anthropology in
562
conversation with urban theory and geography. With solid
footing in all of these fields, Newman elaborates on a vision
of the “urban commons” that is still alive and kicking
despite being under attack in the age of neoliberal attempts
at privatization. At the Éole park, urban citizenship is a
metonym for national belonging, and its many “designers”
are engaged in a constant process of reimagining what that
belonging means. In addition to being necessary reading
for anthropologists working on questions of immigration
and belonging in Europe, this accessible book should earn
a place on syllabi of urban anthropology, political ecology,
and citizenship. Anthropologists writing about sustainable
development, infrastructure, and cities will find much to
engage with here, especially in terms of methodological
innovations. Landscape of Discontent makes critical con-
tributions to these fields and opens up new conversations
on the relationship of the environment to urban life and
politics.
African Appropriations: Cultural Difference, Mimesis,
and Media. Matthias Krings. Bloomington: Indiana Univer-
sity Press, 2015. 311 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12349
BRIAN LARKIN
Barnard College
Columbia University
The study of African popular culture is rich and extensive
and follows a particular form. A distinct cultural practice is
examined in depth within a specific context: Swahili music
in Tanzania, popular art in the Congo, portrait photogra-
phy in Mali, popular theater in Nigeria, and so on. Out of
this form have emerged some wonderful monographs, but
it is perhaps the defining feature of African Appropriations
that Matthias Krings goes about his study in a completely
different way. Not only does he straddle different societies
(Nigeria and Tanzania mostly, but also Congo and South
Africa), he also ranges across a host of differing cul-
tural forms: spirit possession, music, graphic novels, film,
posters, 419 letters, photo novels, and stickers, among oth-
ers. The result is, and this should be stressed, a genuinely
innovative book unlike most others in either anthropology
or African studies.
Perhaps it is unsurprising Krings writes this way. He
is a coeditor of Global Nollywood, a book that takes a sin-
gle film form and examines its popularity across a range of
national contexts in Africa. There are hardly any studies of
cultural form that take such a comparative approach, and
African Appropriations uses comparison excellently to gen-
erate theoretical and ethnographic insights different from
what a single case study allows.

The theoretical anchor of Krings’s book is the con-
cept of appropriation—how African societies incorporate
the imaginative worlds offered by foreign media into their
own cultural practices, often taking from one medium and
transposing it into another. Colonial military parades are
turned into possession rituals; American films are Islami-
cized; James Bond is turned into an African photo novel.
For Krings, these remediations represent an engagement
with strangeness. Copying, he argues, allows one to “touch”
difference, to literally inhabit that difference by dress-
ing, walking, speaking, filming, or drawing like something
else. Krings roots appropriation in the concept of mimesis,
drawing on Michael Taussig, Plato, Walter Benjamin, Paul
Stoller, and Fritz Kramer among others, and he unites this
theoretical discussion with a range of examples to show the
breadth of ways that mimesis operates: at times it is sheer
pleasure in difference, at other times a form of critique, a
business tactic, or an attempt to command power.
The result of all this is a treasure trove of how differ-
ent African societies engage in forms of mimesis. There
are seven chapters, each examining a different mimetic
form, but even within individual chapters, Krings covers a
range of imitative practices. Krings translates directly from
Hausa and Swahili texts (films, novels, songs, graphic nov-
els), granting access to cultural forms otherwise unavail-
able to an English-language readership. Furthermore, he
usefully summarizes and engages intellectual debates from
French and German literature, adding them to more famil-
iar accounts from the Anglophone world. Cumulatively, this
approach makes African Appropriations both imaginative
and deeply scholarly.
Take, for instance, the opening chapter on spirit pos-
session. Krings focuses on the Wicked Major, a spirit from
the Babule pantheon. He traces the major’s first appari-
tion in 1920s Niger through to Jean Rouch’s encounter with
him in 1940s Gold Coast (later memorably recorded on film
in Les Maı̂tres Fous) and forward into the 1990s. This was
when Krings first came to converse with the major dur-
ing his own research on bori spirit possession in northern
Nigeria. Along the way Krings tracks down discussions
of the major in writings well known and less well
known, in English, French, and German—Finn Fuglestad,
Adeline Masquelier, Stoller, Nicole Echard, Rouch, Ralph
Faulkingham—arguing that the meaning and power of
the major change with historical generations. He asserts
that the West African engagement with stranger spirits
common to possession means that mediumship “is a
technology for the mediation of cultural difference” (31).
How all this takes place changes over time. For French colo-
nialists, apparitions of the Wicked Major were laced with
critique of the colonial state, an argument Rouch extends
for the British in Les Maı̂tres Fous. Scholars have since come
to see the major as embodying colonial memories (Stoller),
but Krings argues that by the 1990s (after two decades of
Book Reviews  American Ethnologist
military rule) the major’s “soldierliness” had replaced his
Europeanness as an index of power, and colonial memo-
ries were distant indeed. What Krings reveals is that while
spirits and practices of imitation retained their connection
to forces of power, those relations are highly variable.
Krings has a roving eye for the odd and the ephemeral.
One example is Shaheed (Martyr), a Hausa film directed
by Zikiflu Mohammed, produced in 2002–3. It was spon-
sored by Ikhwan, a group associated with one of Nigeria’s
most radical Muslim clerics. Designed as a form of da’wa
to draw youths to Islamic renewal, it did so by creating
Islamically appropriate Hindi-film-style blockbuster song-
and-dance sequences. Krings argues that by copying from
Hindi film melodrama, Ikhwan were attempting to renew
Islam by drawing upon the power that comes from an en-
counter with strangeness. Another chapter, a tour de force
on James Cameron’s Titanic, examines four different reme-
diations of Cameron’s epic into a Hausa film, a Tanzanian
graphic novel, and Tanzanian and Congolese religious and
secular music—all for entirely different reasons.
The quality of chapters can vary in a book such as this,
as Krings has far more ethnographic experience in some
contexts rather than others. His writing on northern Nigeria
is uniformly excellent, whereas his engagement with other
settings (such as the popularity of the South African James
Bond–like photo novel character Lance Spearman) is less
rich. But this book works because the whole is more than
the sum of the parts and because his breadth of examples
allows Krings to make arguments about remediation and
mimesis that no one context can allow. In this sense Krings
expertly uses what comparison offers to steer us away from:
simplistic arguments about resistance or imperialism to
focus on the range of ways a single cultural practice can
be used.
Sensational Movies: Video, Vision, and Christianity in
Ghana. Birgit Meyer. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2015. 408 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12350
NAOMI HAYNES
University of Edinburgh
In her latest monograph, Birgit Meyer explores and elabo-
rates on several themes with which she has been concerned
for the last two decades, including religion, popular cul-
ture, and especially mediation. Meyer offers a rich account
of how locally produced video films both represent and
constitute the socioreligious landscape of contemporary
Accra. Anyone working in Anglophone Africa will be famil-
iar with the sort of films she examines. The Ghanaian video
film industry Meyer explores, along with its much larger
563
American Ethnologist  Volume 43 Number 3 August 2016
Nigerian counterpart (commonly known as Nollywood),
has impacted audiences far beyond its country of origin,
and I have spent many hours watching West African video
films with friends during my fieldwork on the Zambian
Copperbelt.
While this is primarily a book about movies, it is also
a book about religion, and more specifically Pentecostal
Christianity. Meyer is no stranger to the study of Pente-
costalism. Her first book, Translating the Devil (1999), is
among the most important accounts of African Christianity
produced in the last 30 years, and it is required reading for
anyone who wants to understand Pentecostalism’s runaway
popularity on the continent. One of the main differences
between Meyer’s earlier work and Sensational Movies is that
the latter is not concerned with formal Christian practice,
or even with people who are especially devout. This differ-
ence is by design, as Meyer’s emphasis here is not on theol-
ogy or ritual life, but rather on how Pentecostalism creates
what Matthew Engelke (2012) calls “ambient faith.” In Ac-
cra, as in many sub-Saharan African cities, Pentecostalism
is visible not only in numerous church buildings and bill-
boards advertising Pentecostal gatherings, but also in pop-
ular culture, including film. Meyer argues that attention to
how Pentecostalism shapes the lives of those who are not
especially religious is an important and neglected aspect in
studies of this form of Christianity, and her focus on this
issue is one reason this book is so compelling.
In order to show how Pentecostalism has shaped the
Ghanaian film industry, Meyer identifies several elective
affinities between the two. Both are democratic and eas-
ily accessible, for instance, and therefore also difficult to
control. In addition, both Pentecostalism and movies offer
what Meyer calls “extraordinary vision” (120) through which
the spiritual realities that intersect with the visible, physi-
cal world can be revealed and understood. Occult activity
dominates the plots of many video films, and it provokes
unease at the point of production and at the moment of
viewing. Devout Pentecostal believers who work in the film
industry must pray earnestly before portraying anyone en-
gaged in occult activity, as even pretending to sign a Faus-
tian pact carries the risk of entering into a relationship with
the devil. Although viewing such practices can be danger-
ous for similar reasons, it is also understood to be necessary,
as Pentecostals maintain that one must be aware of Satan’s
tricks in order to ward him off effectively. Then there is the
matter of viewing occult activity for the purpose of enter-
tainment; stories of witchcraft and Satanism are captivating
for many audiences, not just for Pentecostals, in part be-
cause such stories offer excellent opportunities for special
effects. Through this analysis, Meyer blurs the line between
religion and entertainment, as what counts as one or the
other varies greatly depending on whom one asks.
While Meyer’s main point in Sensational Movies is that
life in Accra is infused with religious understandings that
564
are mediated through video films, the book provides a much
more robust treatment of movie making than of movie
watching. Meyer offers rich and detailed discussions of the
central motifs of Ghanaian movies and of the history of
film production in Ghana, including the role of censorship
and government discourses of “Sankofa,” which sought to
renew public interest in “traditional” culture. What we do
not get much of is a picture of the people who view the
films that Meyer describes so carefully. She introduces us
to a group of teenage girls who are regular attendees at
a Pentecostal church and who often accompany Meyer to
the cinema. Meyer points to these girls’ habit of closing
their eyes and ears during portrayals of occult or sexual ac-
tivity as evidence of the Pentecostal desire to seal off the
body from dangerous spiritual influences, as well as the
power of movies to shape the person. We briefly meet a
few other film watchers, including a local tailor who helped
Meyer understand how video movies inform local fashion
trends. But these actors, whose worlds Meyer argues con-
stitute and are constituted by video films, never emerge
as solid figures. We get a better picture of the people who
produce these movies, and whose interest in making films
with strong moral themes stems less from personal religious
commitments than from the knowledge that this is what
will sell. But Meyer reveals the audience almost exclusively
through the films’ content, and so they never take shape as a
three-dimensional presence. This critique aside, the book is
nevertheless the most sustained and theoretically sophis-
ticated treatment of Christian popular culture in Africa to
emerge to date and an important contribution to studies of
religion and media.
References
Engelke, Matthew. 2012. “Angels in Swindon: Public Religion and
Ambient Faith in England.” American Ethnologist 39 (1): 155–70.
Meyer, Birgit. 1999. Translating the Devil: Religion and Modernity
among the Ewe of Ghana. Trenton, NJ: Africa World.
Moral Economies of Corruption: State Formation and
Political Culture in Nigeria. Steven Pierce. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2016. 286 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12351
DANIEL JORDAN SMITH
Brown University
Perhaps no explanation for Africa’s political troubles and
economic malaise has been proffered more ubiquitously
than corruption. With its long list of leaders who have en-
riched themselves while in office and the everyday hassles
of police extortion and bureaucrats seeking bribes, proba-
bly no single country has a worse reputation for corruption

than Nigeria. Yet most accounts of corruption as the cause
of Nigeria’s—and Africa’s—difficulties are overly simplis-
tic, reductionist, and strikingly uninformed about corrup-
tion’s social, historical, and moral underpinnings. Steven
Pierce’s Moral Economies of Corruption provides a rich
history and a nuanced account of corruption in Nigeria,
pushing back against the convenient notion that it is an
indigenous pathology to show not only its roots in history
(including, especially, British colonial governance), but also
the logics that underlie it.
Focusing particularly on northern Nigeria, the region
Pierce has long studied, the book is divided into two parts.
In part 1, the first three chapters trace the social and polit-
ical history of corruption in the region, from the advent of
colonialism, through the initial period of independence un-
til Nigeria’s civil war, and finally during Nigeria’s long stretch
of mostly military rule until 1999. Pierce demonstrates that
corruption changed over time; it did not involve or mean
the same things across Nigeria’s 20th-century history. Pre-
senting a series of compelling cases, the book shows how
during the colonial period corruption became an idiom for
the shortcomings of governance, even as indirect rule it-
self created many structural imperatives for official malfea-
sance. Once Nigeria achieved independence, a federal sys-
tem of governance gave rise to regional and ethnic political
competition in which control over unevenly distributed re-
sources animated corruption. Military rule, mostly uninter-
rupted from 1966 until 1999, coincided with the increasing
dominance of oil in Nigeria’s political economy, leading to
elite pilfering of the petro-state that characterizes Nigerian
corruption until the present. Fascinating—and, in Nigeria,
infamous—stories like the cement armada in 1974, when
the Nigerian government ordered 16 million tons of cement
from abroad that its port could not accommodate, or the
botched attempt in 1984 by the then military government
to kidnap and repatriate a former civilian minister and
vocal critic to face corruption charges, make for a gripping
read.
In part 2, Pierce offers two theoretically oriented chap-
ters. The first examines the concept of moral economy
as an analytic perspective to understand corruption. The
term enables Pierce to focus on how moral conduct is
evaluated socially and social conduct is judged morally.
As Pierce notes, in post-independence Nigeria “the oral
economy of governance has become a moral economy of
corruption” (178). Nearly all Nigerians agree corruption
is wrong, but they differ on who is corrupt because, of
course, moral judgments are affected by social ties and by
political costs and benefits. The second theoretical chap-
ter looks specifically at corruption in relation to the state.
Pierce interrogates, and often criticizes incisively, some of
the dominant paradigms for understanding corruption, in-
cluding well-known arguments from political science such
as the idea that corruption is a problem of weak states,
Book Reviews  American Ethnologist
or the notion—drawing on tropes about modernization—
that corruption is a phase in political and economic
development.
As his analysis moves toward the present, Pierce doc-
uments the close connections between Nigeria’s political
economy and patronage relationships, even as the ideol-
ogy of the modern bureaucratic state would have it other-
wise. The moral economy of corruption in Nigeria is one
in which the conduct of politicians and patrons is judged
socially based largely on how well power and (especially)
money are employed for productive social and political pur-
poses, rather than for purely selfish aggrandizement. The
multiple opportunities for Big Men to engage in the con-
spicuous redistribution of wealth are key moments in such
a moral economy. To be an effective patron or politician,
building and solidifying wealth in people (and thereby pres-
tige and political power), a man must strike the right bal-
ance between spending lavishly and doing it in a way that is
not perceived as intimidating or oppressing the very clients
and fellow elites he is trying to impress.
Pierce illustrates in great complexity and with laudable
precision how corruption became a topic of popular politi-
cal discourse. One constant from the colonial period to the
present is how accusations of corruption function as polit-
ical performance. Pierce shows brilliantly “the political and
cultural work done by people’s calling such a complex of ac-
tivities ‘corruption’” (5). Corruption as a critique is wielded
for political purposes, but as the author shows in multi-
ple cases, such accusations are only effective against people
vulnerable for other reasons.
Near the end of the book Pierce poses a fascinat-
ing question that he does not, I think, fully answer.
The question is why, despite widespread discontent with
corruption, Nigeria has experienced no popular upris-
ings against it. While one might argue that there have
been uprisings against corruption, Nigerians’ overall tol-
erance for it is noteworthy. The book suggests, implicitly,
that the moral economy associated with a politics rooted
in patron-clientism mitigates class conflict and inhibits
more widespread mobilization against corruption. In his
acknowledgments at the beginning, Pierce alerts the reader
to what I found to be a somewhat strange and unfortu-
nate decision: “because of the somewhat sensational sub-
ject matter of this book, I have for the most part structured
my narrative in a way that avoids oral history” (x). In fact, in
my reading, Pierce seems to draw on a significant amount
of oral history—and no small measure of participant obser-
vation. But perhaps more oral history and more attention
to ordinary Nigerians’ views and experiences would have
helped better explain average citizens’ relative acceptance
of corruption even as they obviously appear to be its main
victims.
As an anthropologist interested in the theoretical impli-
cations of Pierce’s history of corruption in Nigeria, I cannot
565
American Ethnologist  Volume 43 Number 3 August 2016
help reacting to his assertion in the conclusion that his ac-
count “points to radical particularism” (223). On this point
the author sells himself short. Moral Economies of Corrup-
tion is not only rich history, but also a theoretically insight-
ful analysis that has much to offer beyond its particularism.
Scholars interested in corruption in other parts of Africa,
and in other regions of the world, will find much to ponder
and appreciate.
The Government of Mistrust: Illegibility and Bureaucratic
Power in Socialist Vietnam. Ken MacLean. Madison: Uni-
versity of Wisconsin Press, 2013. 278 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12352
CHRISTINA SCHWENKEL
University of California, Riverside
Fieldwork rarely works out as planned. Ken MacLean’s am-
bitious historical ethnography of socialist state building in
postrevolutionary Vietnam is a potent reminder that even
when obstacles stand in the way of anthropological re-
search, new and unexpected paths can lead to equally pro-
ductive results. With keen interpretive and ethnographic
agility, MacLean has managed to turn that which initially
stymied his agenda—state bureaucracy—into an object of
ethnographic inquiry. The Government of Mistrust is an ex-
ceptional study of governance gone awry, of an erratic state
beset by failure and fragmentation. Ongoing efforts to ad-
vance the growth of socialism in the countryside meet a
similar outcome: the inability of the centralized state to gov-
ern rural areas and manage their productivity from afar.
Recent years have seen an increase in scholarly inter-
est in documents as bureaucratic objects. MacLean’s text,
with its focus on socialist bureaucratization and forms of
documentation, is destined to become a classic in this lit-
erature. In conversation with a number of scholars of the
state, the book sets out to study the types of documents
used to consolidate the power of Vietnam’s central party-
state. Planned economies require the centralization of doc-
uments about the countryside. And yet official directives to
gather such information resulted in decreased legibility as
provincial cadres either misunderstood or purposely misled
their superiors, leading to more directives, more paperwork,
and less legibility.
Drawing on an impressive range of primary and sec-
ondary sources, including interviews, ethnographic obser-
vation, and extensive archival material, the book traces this
repetitive cycle through time and space by analyzing legibi-
lity devices that fostered mistrust at all levels of administra-
tion. From a lack of information (leading to confusion about
how to interpret and apply policy) to deliberate fabrications
that obscured conditions in rural areas, MacLean illustrates
566
with intricate detail how officials in Hanoi struggled to con-
struct political legitimacy and establish a centrally planned
economy in the face of such “paper realities.”
The book’s three chronological sections span the peri-
ods before, during, and after agricultural collectivization in
northern Vietnam. MacLean deftly maneuvers across this
sweeping historical landscape, bringing a trained ethno-
graphic eye to a range of legibility devices used to build
socialism in the countryside. In the years leading up to col-
lectivization, he shows in chapter 1, the party organized
mass “emulation campaigns” to mobilize peasants by ap-
pealing to popular cultural forms that included folk singing
and poetry. Oral practices such as call-and-response at-
tempted to forge a class-based identity rooted in Marxist
notions of structural inequality rather than Confucian ideas
of fate. Chapter 2 highlights local bureaucrats’ use of field
reports to make the countryside more legible in the early
years of state socialism, when opposition to collectiviza-
tion was already fermenting. Written as arbitrary narratives,
field reports revealed a lack of training among lower-level
cadres for collecting and transmitting data to higher-level
technocrats. New administrative procedures were required
to better grasp the state of affairs outside Hanoi.
While the book’s first section focuses on the strug-
gles to establish legitimacy during the war against French
colonialism, the second section shifts to the postcolonial
era. Here MacLean demonstrates the interdependence of
centralization of socialist rule and the standardization of
documentation. Chapter 3 illustrates how administrative
templates designed to optimize information through sta-
tistical data collection ironically led to even more illegibi-
lity as details were obscured and numbers forged, increas-
ing distrust between cadres. Next, addressing how distrust
became manifest in everyday acts of bureaucratic defiance,
MacLean turns to another bureaucratic device—household
labor agreements that village cadres implemented to com-
bat rising poverty and collectivization’s failure to improve
agricultural productivity. In hindsight, such “sneaky” agree-
ments signaled the slow undoing of the cooperative system.
For a leery Hanoi, it signaled the resurfacing of individual-
ism and capitalism.
Unauthorized contracts were not only a response to
centrally planned economy, MacLean observes, but were
also instrumental in shaping it. Lower-level bureaucrats
knew that household incentives motivated peasants more
than work-point systems rife with preferential treatment.
As concern about these unauthorized procedures mounted,
Hanoi technocrats turned to performance audits—the sub-
ject of chapter 5—to assess the functionality of cooper-
atives. Premised on distrust, audits represented another
bureaucratic effort to guide cadres in the arts of grow-
ing socialism. To regain control, the state deemed il-
licit management practices legitimate (and deviant cadres
exemplary). This shift back to small-scale production,

MacLean shows, set in motion the official dismantling of
collectivization.
The last section of the book traces the phasing out of
central planning through Đổi mới (Renovation) economic
reforms. In chapter 6 MacLean assumes an ethnographic
approach to studying “new village conventions” as a leg-
ibility device to raise the cultural standards of rural Viet-
nam. “Development” is shown to be a bureaucratic practice
aimed at civilizing the provinces by combining elements of
self-regulation and mass mobilization. Campaigns to create
“cultured families” and “cultured villages,” he argues, were
bureaucratic operations of power to make the countryside
sufficiently transparent to Hanoi.
MacLean’s impeccably researched book sheds light on
the fundamental role that documentation played in the
monumental task of building socialism in Vietnam. And yet,
the extension of central power over rural affairs through
massive amounts of paperwork and redundant bureau-
cratic procedures was mainly unsuccessful. One quibble is
that while much of the book takes place during wartime,
the war’s contribution to producing illegibility goes largely
unexplored. This minor point aside, The Government of
Mistrust is especially useful for scholars interested in the
materialities of bureaucracies by drawing attention to mun-
dane acts and objects of governance. It is also a rich re-
source for specialists of Southeast Asian history and, given
the range of previously inaccessible materials that MacLean
examines, Vietnamese state and party politics in particular.
Those with an interest in post-socialism will also find the
analysis of socialist governance a provocative case for com-
parison. In short, MacLean’s book is a remarkable accom-
plishment and a much-needed addition to the growing lit-
erature on state bureaucratization that until now has largely
focused on governance strategies in capitalist countries.
Rule by Aesthetics: World-Class City Making in Delhi.
D. Asher Ghertner. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.
252 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12353
AMI V. SHAH
Pacific Lutheran University
Scholars of development and poverty often focus their at-
tention on large-scale data and accompanying policies at
international and national levels. Yet, as D. Asher Ghertner’s
Rule by Aesthetics reminds us, all politics—and policies—
are local. Ghertner’s theoretically astute and revealing
ethnography takes us through the meetings of Delhi’s Resi-
dent Welfare Associations, a variety of court cases, and, ul-
timately, the reflections of the slum dwellers who have the
most to lose in a city that has turned to a future without
Book Reviews  American Ethnologist
them—to a city without slums and thus without those who
currently live in them.
Ghertner directly challenges views of Third World ur-
banism that render cities of the Global South as lacking or-
der and control. Instead, he argues, in the early 2000s, Delhi
came to be governed by visual “codes of appearance rather
than through the calculative instruments of map, census,
and survey” (4). “Rule by aesthetics” became the dominant
vector by which government did its work. With limited abil-
ity or will to conduct technocratic city-planning surveys,
Delhi’s aspirant middle class, bureaucracy, judiciary, and
media articulated and institutionalized a futuristic vision of
Delhi as a world-class city, replete with symbols of global
modernism (high rises, movie theaters, malls, and flyovers)
and conspicuously lacking visible signs of poverty. This
utopian vision became the policy goal of millennial Delhi
and, surprisingly, the shared vision of the slum dwellers
themselves.
Similar utopian visions exist across the world, as
demonstrated by calls to create “Cities without Slums,”
endorsed at the UN Millennium Summit in 2000. These
calls, however, focused heavily on statistical data regard-
ing rates of poverty, the number of slums of various types,
and policies designed (at least rhetorically) to simultane-
ously reduce the number of slums and improve the lives of
slum dwellers, largely through the provision of basic needs.
Delhi’s municipal bodies took a notably different approach,
moving toward policies of slum clearance instead of pro-
viding services. A fantastical reading of particular poverty
statistics, focusing on predictions instead of current reali-
ties, meant that economic growth, especially through spec-
ulative real estate, was seen as the key to realizing Delhi’s
utopian future and eliminating poverty. In a remarkable
twist, Ghertner reframes these poverty measurements and
the focus on growth through speculative real estate as an
aesthetic in and of themselves—an act of magic, myth-
making, and performance. Within this aesthetic, poverty
was represented as declining, and middle-class property
owners gained power as symbols of the future. Projected
possibilities trumped current crises.
The book acquaints us with the multiple layers in-
volved in the creation and institutionalization of a world-
class aesthetic in Delhi. With impressive ethnographic
depth, Ghertner traces the emergence of the world-class
aesthetic, the rise of middle-class power, the institutional-
ization of the aesthetic in the bureaucracy and judiciary,
and the resulting implications for slum dwellers. Begin-
ning with the Resident Welfare Associations, we learn how
the idea of participation—conventionally used in policies
for the poor—was used to revitalize these associations for
middle-class property owners, giving them unprecedented
access to officials and limiting avenues for political par-
ticipation by the poor. This “gentrification of state space”
(46) extended middle-class anxieties about and hopes for
567
American Ethnologist  Volume 43 Number 3 August 2016
urban space into Delhi’s governance structures. Here, pro-
posals to “clean” Delhi of slums and other visual signifiers
of poverty gained audience and importance. Slums—and
slum dwellers themselves—were classified as a nuisance
not only in public discourse but also through the judicial
reframing of nuisance laws. These municipal machinations
rendered slums illegal simply due to their unpleasantness—
a “nuisance” for middle-class landowners. Slum clearances
were thus not only demanded by the middle class and
ordered by the judiciary, but also justified through the
legal and aspirational manifestations of the world-class
aesthetic.
The last two chapters show us how slum dwellers faced
the demolition of their settlements. Studies of urban growth
in developing cities frequently highlight its effects on the
poor, and the increasing marginalization and vulnerabil-
ity they experience as municipal, private, and popular ma-
chinery work to render them invisible. These experiences
are marked by resignation. In contrast, Ghertner focuses on
the far reach of Delhi’s world-class aesthetic, demonstrating
that slum dwellers themselves incorporated this aesthetic
as part of their own future visions. He argues that this is
not a sign of resignation or the “end of politics,” but rather
“the starting point of politics” (128). Through the world-
class aesthetic, slum dwellers were able to assert their right
to belong in Delhi’s new future: “In other words, the con-
solidation of an aesthetic consensus does not resolve the
question of how the aesthetic ideal is to be reached or how
the city’s resources shared. In this ambiguity lies the possi-
bility for political change and reinterpretations of what the
world-class city should be” (157).
This potential for a different future, for the urban poor
to bend the trajectory (198) of the world-class aesthetic, of-
fers a profoundly different, and theoretically creative, read
on the implications of urban renewal for the urban poor.
While these conclusions are futuristic, and thus of course
speculative, more evidence here of the reclamations and
reenvisioning of the aesthetic by slum dwellers themselves
could deepen this argument. In addition, the book could
have done a bit more to contextualize Delhi’s politics in the
larger Indian context of urban renewal (under the Jawahar-
lal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission, as just one ex-
ample) and in light of increasing focus on the plight of slum
dwellers through both the Millennium Development Goals
and World Bank programs regarding informal settlements.
Rule by Aesthetics is a theoretically creative, persua-
sive, and deft articulation of the importance of local percep-
tions, hopes, institutions, and experiences in the creation of
cities of the future. It offers insight into the particular ways
through which urban governance is enacted, the hopes and
potentials for transformation articulated by slum dwellers,
and, most effectively, the modes and pathways of aesthetic
governance, highlighting the importance of ethnography in
understanding the workings of politics and policy.
568
Articulating Rapa Nui: Polynesian Cultural Politics in
a Latin American Nation-State. Riet Delsing. Honolulu:
University of Hawai‘i Press, 2015. 291 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12354
GIOVANNI BENNARDO
Northern Illinois University
In this rich narrative, Rapa Nui, or Easter Island as most
people know it, comes to life as a place where people, en-
vironment, and actions intertwine in a present that per-
spires the profound connections with its past. Rapa Nui is a
small island in the middle of the South Pacific, thousands of
miles from other Polynesian islands and from South Amer-
ica (Chile). The author reports a contemporary population
of 5,806. Only half though are of Rapanui descent; the rest
are mostly Chileans. The island environment is typically
subtropical, and the moai—giant basaltic tuff statues of
ancestors for which the island is famous all over the
world—punctuate its landscape.
Rapa Nui was settled around 1000 CE and hosted
a stratified society that changed from an ascribed to an
achieved status during the later centuries. It was discov-
ered to the West on Easter Sunday of 1722, hence its West-
ern name, Easter Island. As with many Polynesian islands, it
was raided by slavers in the middle of the 19th century, and
its population decreased from an estimated 3,000 to 900.
Missionaries also visited and settled on the island. Then, in
1888, during its short-lived period of glorious conquest in
South America, Chile annexed the island.
The Rapanui people, who insist that their chief only
conceded use of the land and not its ownership, never ac-
cepted the written treaty that sanctions Chilean annexa-
tion. The symbolic gesture often mentioned is that of the
chief giving grass to the Chilean representative and putting
some soil in his pocket, thus not transferring ownership of
the land. Nonetheless, the population who lived on many
areas of the land were moved into one settlement and
obliged to live there, while Chileans could exploit the land
for herding sheep and occasional farming.
Resistance to Chilean colonization took many forms
and changed in focus over the years. Riet Delsing clearly
shows the shift that occurred from an initial “we are the
same” (trying to obtain citizenship rights as Chileans) to
“we are different” (trying to state and maintain their diver-
sity as Polynesians and Rapanui and obtain control of their
language and land) (80). The apex of the active first stage of
the resistance was the 1964 revolt (61ff.). The results of the
second stage are still unfolding.
The relationship with Chile changed as the internal po-
litical situation changed on the mainland: for example, the
coming to power of Augusto Pinochet. Overall, the Chilean
government paid little attention to the Rapanui demands. It

is undeniable that over the years improvements have been
brought to the island, such as paved roads, health care, and
new economic activities. One change, though, was never ac-
cepted nor ever completely implemented: land reform. Af-
ter the collapse of Pinochet’s regime, the new government
launched an attempt to come to terms with the demands
of native populations, including that of Rapa Nui. The re-
forms focused mainly on the distribution of land and on
education that made the preservation and teaching of the
Rapanui language part of the curriculum (168ff.).
The Chilean unspoken principles and system of be-
liefs about ownership clashed with local forms. A wonderful
treatment of this theme permeates the fabric of the book’s
narrative. In Rapa Nui, land belongs to groups and specifi-
cally to kaiŋas (extended families) (178ff.). This communal
conception and management of land (which includes fish-
ing areas) contrasts deeply with the attempted introduction
of individual private property or the assignment of the own-
ership of plots of land to individuals. This fundamental dif-
ference is a Polynesian characteristic, not limited to Rapa
Nui, and thus making it of great interest to many of this
journal’s readers.
The Chilean government has tried several times to “re-
turn” the ownership of land to individuals, but very few
have taken advantage of such opportunities, and most still
openly advocate their right to use communally the land that
traditionally belongs to their extended families. They rec-
ognize such a concept as part of who they are as Rapanui
and more recently as Polynesian, especially after the visit of
the Hawaiian voyaging canoe Hokule‘a in 1999 (194–206).
The book clearly documents this struggle, and it is definitely
worth reading for such an insightful contribution.
I would also like to point out that this mental and
behavioral practice is rooted in another Polynesian char-
acteristic, that is, a preference for representing space us-
ing the absolute frame of reference—within which ego is
backgrounded and other-than-ego is foregrounded. This
preference dovetails with a communal conception of land
management and ownership in which the group (i.e.,
other-than-ego) is privileged over the individual (i.e., ego).
This preference generates the construction of other molar
cultural models, such as possession, traditional religious
beliefs, traditional navigation, kinship, and social relation-
ships. The foundational nature of such a mental construc-
tion makes it a most resilient trait, unlikely to succumb to
change, and the Rapa Nui example adds further support to
such a conclusion.
The detailed discussion of Rapanui concepts of prop-
erty is a welcome addition to the literature on this topic in
Polynesia. We witness the resilience of Rapanui people on
the issue of land ownership, that is, communal versus indi-
vidual property, and learn about the role that cultural con-
ceptualization of the world plays in the life of communities
of any size. Rapa Nui emerges not as a land of builders of
Book Reviews  American Ethnologist
exotic giant statues, but as a contemporary country in a
modern landscape of global economy and culture. Its peo-
ple are still struggling to obtain their deserved recognition
as a part of the Polynesian world with fundamental cultural
ways, including those about communal land ownership. I
am convinced that this book will function as a catalyst for a
near future in which such a right will be restored.
Revolt of the Saints: Memory and Redemption in the
Twilight of Brazilian Racial Democracy. John F. Collins.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. 463 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12355
JOHN BURDICK
Syracuse University
In 1985, UNESCO declared the poor working-class Pelour-
inho district of the city of Salvador, Bahia, an international
heritage site. As with other such UNESCO declarations, this
one crystallized and unleashed powerful economic, social,
and cultural forces. This is the context for John Collins’s
extraordinarily detailed and theoretically imaginative ex-
ploration of how elite and nonelite ideas of Afro-Bahian
history and identity coincide, collide, and mutually re-
fract in the decades both before and after the UNESCO
declaration.
Revolt of the Saints is built around a series of the-
matically driven, ethnographically dense chapters. In one
Collins examines the exquisitely complex relationships be-
tween poor residents of the Pelourinho and social scientists,
relationships shot through with mutual affection, mistrust,
and influence upon each other’s subjectivities. Of special
interest is the period of the 1960s and 1970s, when male so-
cial scientists, including anthropologists, came of social and
intellectual age by participating directly—sometimes very
directly—in the Pelourinho’s red-light district, defining their
subaltern objects of study as belonging to a holistic racial-
ized culture (a kind of Herskovits-Perlman hybrid), and
themselves as savvy, tolerant, worldly sophisticates. Resi-
dents, meanwhile, learned from social scientists the value
of the official Afro-Brazilian trait list, which they came to
view as quantifiable possessions and, eventually, as the ba-
sis for making claims to housing and other benefits of the
UNESCO heritage site. In another chapter Collins explores
battling vernacular views about the archaeological discov-
ery of human remains and material culture in the Praça
da Sé. In a tour de force of ethnographic description, he
examines how residents interpret the skeletons, variously,
as slaves, nobles, murder victims, priests, and vanquished
foes of the Portuguese colonizers. Popular commentary on
the mystery that shrouds the finds is a thinly veiled expres-
sion of resentment toward the state’s lack of transparency;
569
American Ethnologist  Volume 43 Number 3 August 2016
belief that buried treasure lies underneath the neighbor-
hood’s crumbling 18th-century houses reflects the sub-
altern conviction that the state will forever exclude the
poor from the immeasurable wealth that surrounds them.
As such these views become vehicles for critiques of the
UNESCO project and worldview.
But, of course, the poor always find ways of fighting
back. In a particularly compelling chapter, Collins delves
into an episode when a poor resident of the Pelourinho di-
rectly challenges a social worker’s insistence that residents
refrain from defecating in the street. Offended by the im-
plication that her kind knows no better, an ex-prostitute
and recovering crack addict named Topa stands up and, in
an extraordinary moment of speaking truth to power, de-
clares that the social worker lecturing her on hygiene would
never allow her to use the facilities in her own middle-
class home. Directly implied in her challenge is the point
that she and her poor neighbors do not lack understand-
ing of where to defecate; they lack adequate housing and
plumbing. Although the social worker struggles to reinter-
pret the episode as evidence of the poor woman’s drug
addiction, Collins convincingly portrays the incident as
one of many small rebellions that destabilize the middle
class’s self-congratulatory vision of their activities in this
community.
Collins’s detailed ethnography makes two important
contributions to Brazilian studies and anthropology. First,
he enriches the discussion of Brazilian racial politics. The
conventional wisdom is that “race” in Brazil, as an emic
category, involves flexible situational judgments that clas-
sify people along a broad phenotypical continuum. This
system is generally contrasted with the “one-drop rule”
that prevails in the United States, in which ancestry figures
more decisively than the “mark” of visible color. By dig-
ging deeply into how the Bahian state, reinforced by the
UNESCO heritage process, has built its legitimacy on an
ideology of history and place, and by spending time with
working-class residents caught up in a struggle to make
claims on that state based on historically deep ideas of Afro-
Brazilianness, Collins is able to show how both state bu-
reaucrats and the people they seek to govern deploy a racial
logic that is as much organized around time, ancestry, and
narrative as around phenotype. This insight should push
scholars of race in other parts of Brazil to take a second
look at their own assumptions about the priority of “mark”
in Brazil’s racial system. Collins also makes a strong ar-
gument, with potential comparative implications, that the
Pelourinho heritage site should not be viewed as a simple
unilateral imposition by elites, but as a co-construction of
such elites with working-class Afro-Bahian intellectuals. His
finely granular ethnography shows, in particular, how so-
cial scientific claims get appropriated by subaltern claims-
making strategies within tourist-based urban revitalization.
In this regard, the work belongs to a growing body of
570
scholarship on the role of grassroots intellectuals in the
formation of heritage sites around the world.
The contributions the book makes to the scholarship
on heritage sites and on race in Brazil may be occasion-
ally clouded by Collins’s Melvillean inclination to expand
on every point he makes, going down avenues that some-
times prove slightly circuitous before looping back to his
main themes. While he might argue that this kind of den-
dritic writing is part of his message, I am concerned that
not all readers will be able to stay with him long enough
to get the point. That would be unfortunate. For those who
stay the course, the overall cumulative effect of Revolt of the
Saints is to draw the reader, step by step, ineluctably, into a
world both strange and familiar. This is a world that is both
partly lost and partly found, as the people in it find new
ways to survive by redeeming themselves. Collins’s subti-
tle is “Memory and Redemption,” and the phrase serves as
a nice summary of the book’s ethos, which, in challenging
the possibility of historical truth—the basis of all sorts of
rigid and essentialist identities—sees in that challenge the
seed of a new kind of sociality. For in the end Collins is mo-
tivated by a certain social vision, that is to seek a “shared
engagement with what we might be, rather than a search
for who we really are” (343).
The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility
of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. Prince-
ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015. 331 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12356
STEFAN HELMREICH
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Medieval Christian cosmology saw Christendom’s geo-
graphic margins as sites where the natural order might
yield up wonders, signs of possibilities still nascent in
the Creation. In The Mushroom at the End of the World,
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing takes us to today’s out-of-the-way
places, to the edges of capitalist encroachment, hoping
to find, in the midst of “blasted landscapes” (3), some-
thing still “strange and wonderful” (238). She seeks to learn
whether, in these subaltern terrains, there might exist point-
ers to “the possibility of life in capitalist ruins,” to oppor-
tunities for modest flourishing, both biological and social.
Tsing’s guides into these territories are matsutake mush-
rooms, mycorrhizal fungi that grow in disturbed forests and
that are prized as delicacies in Japan, China, and, increas-
ingly, the West. By tracking matsutake and their accompa-
nying people, trees, and landscapes, Tsing moves through a
supply chain that begins in depleted forests in the United
States, China, Japan, and Finland, continues through the
bubble economies of the Pacific Rim, and ends in gourmet

markets in Japan where matsutake arrives as a commod-
ity, set to be transformed into a gift that can generate
bonds among family or business associates. Matsutake take
Tsing to “the end of the world”—to far-flung places as well
as into our bleak contemporary moment, when the depre-
dations of capitalist extraction, industrialization, and hy-
perconsumption have come to have calamitous effects on
the biosphere. Like a medieval book of wonders, Mush-
room places disparate entities alongside one another: fungi,
Vietnam vet homesteaders, Lao-refugee-citizen mushroom
pickers, and post-Darwinian biologies. Whether the frayed
eco-edges of capitalism can be zones of redeeming wonder
is a question that will have Marxists, political anthropolo-
gists, and environmentalists arguing vigorously about this
timely and provocative book.
Tsing calls the ruins of capitalism—a space of “con-
taminated diversity”—a third nature. She updates for our
chastened time what medieval scholar Jacopo Bonfadio
named terza natura, nature improved by art (Bonfadio had
gardens in mind). Tsing’s third nature is a place not of
aestheticized world fashioning (nor of biodiversity ideal-
ized, as David McDermott Hughes [2005] has theorized the
term), but of struggles to eke out a living in precarious
landscapes. In a striking chapter about mushroom pick-
ing in Oregon, Tsing offers a story of how Mien, Hmong,
Lao, and Cambodian survivors of the US-Indochina war
and its sequels have arrived at foraging alongside white
US libertarian mountain men and undocumented Latino
migrants. She argues that what unites many pickers is
not their labor (unalienated or no), but rather enactments
of “freedom”—for Asian migrants, for example, freedom
from Southeast Asian ethnic oppressions, and for off-the-
grid whites, the reach of the US government. As matsu-
take move into channels of capitalist alienation—when
what is foraged is purchased at auctions—this uneasy mo-
saic of freedoms becomes, in retrospect, a relation of pro-
duction that enables commoditization. Tsing argues that
capitalism here operates through “salvage accumulation,”
not only by incorporating noncapitalist forms (as J. K.
Gibson-Graham taught us), but also by generating value
from its own ruins. A cynical reader might worry that
Tsing’s third nature is simple fodder for the terza natura
gardens of capital, with “freedom” a veneer over vexed eth-
noracial politics in the United States’ Pacific Northwest. A
more open-ended reading would attend to anarchic social
and organic forms as phenomena that might ever elude
finished valuation or host alternative, “latent commons”
(255).
The cautious optimism of the book is consonant with
much “multispecies ethnography,” the attempt to bring into
ethnographic representation agencies of animals, plants,
fungi, and microbes. Tsing has been a trailblazer in this
conversation and here joins it with multisensory methods,
analyzing the aromas of matsutake, foraged and grilled. She
Book Reviews  American Ethnologist
argues, too, that the “species” frame is too parochial to
capture mycorrhizal networks, “an infrastructure of inter-
species connection” (139). Tsing poses fungal webs as cor-
rectives to reductionist evolutionary tales that hold to cir-
cumscribed organismic or genetic units. She thus offers a
welcome opening for ecological and historical inquiries to
enrich one another. But although she is keen to avoid “bow-
ing down to science” (159) and argues, usefully, that science
is anyway not monolithic, the appreciative wonder that suf-
fuses her descriptions of matsutake science opens ques-
tions of what might have emerged from a deeper excavation
into the history and rhetoric of mycological knowledge, of
the sort Donna Haraway once offered for sociobiology and
Emily Martin for immunology.
The book delivers compelling science-studies-
informed environmental history in chapters examining
the compromised forests—pine, oak—in which matsutake
thrive. In Japan, matsutake-minded forest management
animated by nostalgic inventions of tradition remateri-
alizes peasant forestscapes (such satoyama offers a third
nature closer to terza natura). In Finland, the rational-
ization of pine forests turns out to make linear growth
patterns go haywire, leading forests to become matsutake-
supporting anti-plantations. In China, forests reemerging
from the Great Leap Forward support other matsutake
realms (Michael Hathaway will write of these in Emerging
Matsutake Worlds, contributing to a “Matsutake Worlds
mini-series” [ix] that will also see The Charisma of a Wild
Mushroom, by Shiho Satsuka, on Japanese mushroom
science). In Oregon, forests dispossessed by the United
States from Klamath tribes and injured by industrial logging
prepare soil for matsutake. These forests make history—
and not always under conditions of human choosing.
Correspondences among forests, nation-building projects,
and haunted histories flesh out a thicketed biocultural
anthropology; imagine the medieval cast of Victor Turner’s
Forest of Symbols overgrown by multispecies Marxism. If, as
Eduardo Kohn argues, forests think, they also live, and in a
political-economic world.
And a many-myceliated global one. Mushroom is an-
thropology of science that “does not take place exclu-
sively in the West,” tracing, to take one example, how “in
China, matsutake science and forestry are caught between
Japanese and US trajectories” (219). In following such poly-
glot world-making, Mushroom shows how both the “field”
and “fieldwork” manifest in patches, and it offers not world-
systems theory, but something like world-assemblage the-
ory. The text enacts Tsing’s long-standing critique of “scale,”
demonstrating that scales of analysis are never ready-made,
but always constructed and contested, in governance and
ethnography both. Tsing’s captivating ethnography shows
us a world far from medieval micro- and macrocosms,
ushering us instead into the realm of the mycorrhizal, where
ends—analytic and political—multiply.
571
American Ethnologist  Volume 43 Number 3 August 2016
References
Hughes, David McDermott. 2005. “Third Nature: Making Space
and Time in the Great Limpopo Conservation Area.” Cultural
Anthropology 20 (2): 157–84.
Kohn, Eduardo. 2013. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology
beyond the Human. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Cruel Attachments: The Ritual Rehab of Child Molesters in
Germany. John Borneman. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2015. 256 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12357
SARAH BETH KAUFMAN
Trinity University
For two years, John Borneman attended four group ther-
apy sessions per week for convicted sex offenders in Ger-
many, and he gained access to a repository of past cases
to examine how German courts imagine rehabilitation.
The courts order therapy for such offenders in Germany,
and the expectation is that therapy will do more than
merely change criminal behavior. To demonstrate rehabil-
itation, a “deeper” kind of therapy is required, relying on
the psychoanalytic model to discover and reorganize the
self.
In five substantive chapters, each revolving around a
case or two, Borneman gives us a typology of the therapeu-
tic processes that follow different types of child molesters.
These chapters are breathtaking in their erudition and the
awful poignancy of the humanity that we witness. Here are
people in truly wretched positions, simultaneously trying to
find words to understand their own horrendous childhoods
and the horrible pain they have caused others. Borneman
says that the challenge for him in this work was to “en-
gage ethically” with a population that is “widely consid-
ered a social evil” (207). In this, he is quite successful. The
book begins with a long chapter about a man named An-
dreas Marquardt, who has been rehabilitated and is now
on tour with his therapist, reading from his memoir that
the two wrote together. Marquardt was a notoriously cruel
pimp who abused many women over many years. With the
help of his therapist, Marquardt eventually came to un-
derstand that his rage stems from prolonged sexual abuse
by his own mother, and to realize his own cruelty. That
Borneman manages to decipher Marquardt’s humanity
despite his wretched acts is a testament to the power of this
ethnography.
Borneman also writes about less cruel subjects. We
read about “Reinhard,” for one, who befriends distressed
single women with children to help save them. He is not
cruel; in fact, before his arrest, he had a loving partner
and a job helping elderly people in need. With one
572
mother-daughter pair, however, he crossed a boundary
from care into sexual intimacy with the teenage daughter.
We learn that he is unable to feel love for strong women,
whom he finds threatening, as he was viciously beaten
throughout his own childhood. Borneman asks us to con-
sider what the label of “pedophile” does to Reinhard, but he
also demonstrates how the therapeutic process brings both
Marquardt and Reinhard to the important understanding
of what they may cost the young women and girls whom
they harm. Indeed, Cruel Attachments is most alive when
it analyzes the child molesters at the core of its story. To
understand Reinhard and Marquardt as complex humans,
rather than by their simple, stigmatized labels as “mo-
lesters,” is the payoff of the author’s intimate ethnographic
research.
I was quite moved by the book, but I wanted more
and different things from it. The title presumably refers to
a well-accepted psychological theory that emphasizes the
importance of attachment between parent and child. The
theory’s adherents argue that a child’s emotional health
depends on an initial close attachment between mother
(or mother substitute) and infant, which diminishes slowly
as the child grows. Molestation of a child by an adult
can throw the child’s delicate development into turmoil,
creating new attachments before they are developmen-
tally appropriate or corrupting a child’s ability to trust
in the primacy of emotional bonds. Thus, “cruel attach-
ments” might form. Borneman never explains this, al-
though he draws heavily on more obscure psychoanalytic
theory. This is a pattern in the book: the author introduces
provocative concepts linked with captivating field data—of
which there could have been much more—but often skips
the most salient explanations in favor of more far-flung
theorizing.
This can be explained, I think, by an issue in Borne-
man’s framing of his study. He sets up the book to be
an analysis of the courts’ demands as secular ritual, sit-
uated in Victor Turner’s work (59–66). Yet little attention
is given to the court process other than the therapy. The
ritual framing seems a bit of a red herring. Instead, the
selfhood project seems more at the core of Borneman’s
concerns as he follows his subjects through their strug-
gles to understand themselves in light of the courts’ de-
mands. Borneman discusses the importance of the self-
hood project in one of the series of “loose ends” that serve
strangely as the book’s conclusion. He argues that modern
ethnographers have neglected the study of the self, specif-
ically ethnography’s potential to illuminate an “interior-
ity that is accessible through talk and cultivated introspec-
tion and capable of transformation” (212). He notes Michel
Foucault’s influence, but neglects contemporary scholar-
ship that draws on this tradition to examine deviant sex-
ualities and criminal justice systems’ demands of their
subjects. In the United States, for example, Haney (2010)

studies court-ordered programs that mandate how women
reshape their desires, and Tiger (2010) does the same for
drug users and their addictions. Perhaps Borneman’s strug-
gle to ethically deal with such a despised group pushed
him too far in penning a study that stares squarely at the
selfhood project of molesters. Might this have proved too
uncomfortable?
Regardless, there are many reasons why this book is im-
portant. For one, Borneman sets up a challenge to Claude
Lévi-Strauss’s principal interpretation of the incest taboo.
Where Lévi-Strauss emphasized the taboo’s regulation of
marriage and exchange between groups, Borneman sug-
gests its primary importance is its influence on relation-
ships between generations: parents and children. Second,
Borneman points out a fundamental problem with the way
the criminal courts in Germany treat child molesters. He ar-
gues that the courts demand a change in the self of an of-
fender, while mainstream discourse tells the offender that
pedophilia is a characteristic at the very core of one’s be-
ing, and therefore unchangeable. Third, Borneman does
the seemingly impossible. Through the revelations of his
data, he humanizes child molesters in a way that we might
expect from only the most dedicated psychotherapist. He
also shows how the system’s demand for a spoken narra-
tive about a sexual event involving a child potentially dam-
ages the child over and above the act itself. He forces us to
consider an almost unbearable question: might it be bet-
ter for children to be used sexually without having to talk
about it? By bringing children into court cases as witnesses
to their own abuse, are we asking them to participate in two
potentially abusive adult arenas rather than just the one?
From molester to reader, he makes us all empathetic and all
complicit. These are not small tasks.
References
Haney, Lynne. 2010. Offending Women: Power, Punishment, and the
Regulation of Desire. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Tiger, Rebecca. 2010. Judging Addicts: Drug Courts and Coercion in
the Justice System. New York: New York University Press.
Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma, and Survival in
Wartime Iraq. J. Martin Daughtry. Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2014. 360 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12358
NOMI DAVE
University of Virginia
The Iraq war has been studied through various lenses, in-
cluding military history and tactics, poetry, anthropology,
moral theory, and gender relations. Listening to War is the
first volume to explore the war as sonic phenomenon; in so
Book Reviews  American Ethnologist
doing it details the lived, felt, heard experience of war for
both civilians and soldiers. With sensitivity toward his sub-
ject, J. Martin Daughtry makes a powerful case as to why
sound matters in a context of unthinkable, often unspeak-
able, violence.
Daughtry begins the book with a thought-provoking
claim: that through the experience of the belliphonic—
the spectrum of sounds produced by war—both Iraqis and
Americans in the war were enculturated into a common
environment. As Daughtry notes, social scientists often ex-
amine violence through the lens of identity. Yet for those
who have lived through war, the sounds it produces create a
particular set of shared and extreme experiences and com-
monalities. At the same time, Daughtry emphasizes that
the interpretations and impact of these sounds vary enor-
mously depending on the subject. Thus while US soldiers
hear the sounds of military convoys as part of their everyday
wartime routine, Iraqi civilians listen intently with panic,
anxiety, and fear. This difference is painfully illustrated in
an anecdote that Daughtry retells. When an Iraqi civilian
told a US general that the noise of low-flying military air-
craft was frightening and damaging to those within earshot,
the general replied that Iraqis should retrain themselves to
hear the helicopters as “the sounds of freedom” (46). The
sound is shared, yet the two experiences of its listening are
incommensurable.
After introducing the various sounds of war and the
zones of belliphonic listening, Daughtry devotes much of
the middle section of the book to outlining a schema for
understanding the experience of war sounds. Through the
frames of auditory regimes, sonic campaigns, and acous-
tic territories, Daughtry elaborates on the parameters of
listening to war, thus providing analytic precision to de-
scriptions of sensory experience. At the same time, as one
can imagine, the most moving and compelling parts of
the book involve firsthand testimony from those who lived
through war. Some of these statements are achingly tragic,
such as when an Iraqi man, Tareq, tells the author that
“It is a painful feeling when you leave your home [in the
morning] and you don’t know if you will come back alive
or not, it is not an easy thing, especially to a civilian.
Because I am a civilian, not a soldier” (96). Through di-
rect accounts such as these, Daughtry reveals the com-
plex personhood of those whose stories and experiences
he retells. While long-term ethnography within Iraq was
impossible for obvious reasons, Daughtry combined meth-
ods such as virtual ethnography and archival work with an
impressive range of interviews of Iraqi civilians in Jordan
and the United States, as well as US soldiers in Iraq and
back home, and uses their words and recollections to great
effect.
Music also played a role in the war, which Daugh-
try addresses in the last section of the book, considering
both the listening practices and experiences of US soldiers,
573
American Ethnologist  Volume 43 Number 3 August 2016
as well as the particular difficulties facing Iraqi musicians.
In between the various chapters of the book, Daughtry
also intersperses what he calls fragments—moments of de-
scriptive detail, anecdote, first-person narrative, in which
particular moments of wartime listening are retold. He dex-
terously frames these memories and narratives within his
overall argument. At the end of one such fragment, he poses
a set of compelling questions: “What is it like to listen for the
enemy with a body suffused with adrenalin? What is it like
to know that making a single sound could result in your im-
mediate death? How valuable is music as a tool for calming
down in the face of violence and vulnerability? How insidi-
ously powerful is music as a carrier of traumatic memory?”
(109). By leaving these questions unanswered, Daughtry
allows them to breathe and to take up the space they rightly
deserve.
Daughtry grounds his book in a number of schol-
arly disciplines, including ethnomusicology and the field
of sound studies. At times, work in sound studies can fea-
ture a rather celebratory tone, as scholars and commenta-
tors seem to revel in their liberation from ocular-centrism.
One of the many strengths of this book, however, is its will-
ingness to examine the limits of sound, both the things it
does and does not do. Thus the belliphonic here is terri-
fying, profoundly damaging, and often inescapable. More-
over, as Daughtry notes, “Sound in the tactical zone was a
valuable resource, but amid the fog of war it often proved an
inadequate one” (92). Sound is not always a way of know-
ing and understanding the world. At times it blocks and
bludgeons, erases and eradicates.
Daughtry is also at pains to examine his reasons for
studying the war as sonic experience, as well as his ap-
proaches and arguments in investigating violence. He ad-
dresses at length the ethics of his project and is frank about
not always being convinced by his own answers. In one
instance, he proposes a challenging argument about the
“omnidirectionality” of violence—that violence is inflicted
upon and damages everyone involved, including both vic-
tim and perpetrator. Having set it out, he acknowledges
his own ambivalence toward the idea, yet nonetheless ul-
timately succeeds in expressing his underlying point of the
perverseness of violence. At times, his approach verges on
being almost too measured and cautious, and the reader is
all too keenly aware that he wishes to present a balanced
picture rather than take a moral or political stance, even
when—perhaps in spite of—describing the acute injustices
and traumas of war.
Overall, however, the book is packed with insight and
nimbly parses its difficult subject with writing that is beau-
tiful, lucid, and refreshingly free from jargon. Listening to
War profoundly contributes to our understandings of war
and violence by rigorously attending to the experiences of
those “complex persons who populate the abstractions of
regime, campaign, and territory” (273).
574
In the Absence of the Gift: New Forms of Value and Per-
sonhood in a Papua New Guinea Community. Anders Emil
Rasmussen. New York: Berghahn, 2015. 199 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12359
DAVID LIPSET
University of Minnesota
While great swaths of societies go unstudied, ethnographic
research somehow builds up in certain regions. This book
is a modest study of one such place, namely, Mbuke village
on the south coast of Manus Island in Papua New Guinea
(PNG). Research began in Manus with Margaret Mead and
Reo Fortune’s work in Pere village in the late 1920s and con-
tinued in the early 1950s when Mead and Ted Schwartz
studied the famous cargo cults led by Paliau Maloat. The
present work makes some use of these studies but more
importantly picks up on subsequent work: by Achsah and
James Carrier on nearby Ponam Island in the late 1970s,
then by Ton Otto and Berit Gustafsson in the 1980s and
1990s, and then, most recently, Steffen Dalsgaard.
Anders Rasmussen’s contribution to this remarkable
corpus of ethnography is based on fieldwork done in 2006–
12 in Mbuke, as well as in Port Moresby, the national capital
of PNG, where a sizable diaspora of Mbuke villagers reset-
tled. His capably written, straightforward book is primar-
ily concerned with their remittance economy in the con-
text of local-level debates about the concept of community.
Mbuke villagers petition their urban kin who hold jobs as
civil servants, lawyers, academics, and other white-collar
employ in the new postcolonial economy. The money ap-
parently flows into the village at such a rate that the vil-
lage is known, at least to some, as the “ATM of the south
coast” (28) of Manus. At the same time, parents send their
uneducated young daughters to work as domestics in the
capital, both to keep them out of trouble at home and also to
try having them “marry up” with an educated Mbuke busi-
nessman who might then be called on to remit money.
Aside from these and other delightful ethnographic
findings, Rasmussen makes a rather conventional theoret-
ical excursion into the construction of value and identity,
initially from the perspectives of methodological individ-
ualism and then from the usual, requisite references to
the leading contemporary theoretical lights in Melanesian
anthropology, including Marilyn Strathern, Roy Wagner,
and Chris Gregory, among others.
However, in my view, the author misrecognizes the
main theoretical point of his project, which is rather to
explain, from a kind of Weberian viewpoint, why Melane-
sian culture trumps stratification in one particular time and
place in modern PNG. Why, specifically, does the employed
and educated middle class living in town feel obliged to
remit money to their rural kin?

They do not do so because they want to do and be good
in this world to find salvation in the afterlife, à la Weber’s
Calvinist capitalists. Instead, they do so for appropriate,
Melanesian reasons. They want to appear as good in this
world of kin-based reciprocities. They receive requests over
mobile phones, by voice or by text—requests called singaut
in Tok Pisin—from parents, children, siblings, and other
kin. This is, by the way, a key omission in the ethnography.
Nowhere does Rasmussen systematically work out how ex-
change is supposed to work normatively in the Mbuke kin-
ship system. Whom may one ask for money, and whom is
one forbidden to ask? Also missing are specific and concrete
examples of remittances. All we are told is that money is not
put to use for ceremonial exchange, which has largely ended
in Mbuke society. Instead, we are given to understand that
it is generally used for family needs, spent on subsistence,
house building, or outboard motors, rather than to fulfill
descent-related obligations to clan.
So why do middle-class kin remit money to rural rel-
atives? Their main motive is a desire to maintain explicit
recognition of their status in village society, to be “seen” (as
the Mbuke idiom has it) by kin, particularly should they re-
turn to retire there at some point, when kin will become
useful. They fear being stigmatized back home—as greedy
or selfish—to such an extent that they will even start to
worry when they receive no requests from the village for
a while. What is more, gossip is viewed as mystically dan-
gerous; curses by kin can cause career problems, failure in
school, and wasted money, just as a donation, and a conse-
quent expression of gratitude, a kind of blessing, may pro-
tect one’s health and longevity. Some middle-class Mbuke
people even view new requests for money as a return for
money previously given—because those requests affirm the
donor’s moral standing.
But constant appeals inevitably become irritating and
stressful. In town, people change their SIM cards or do
not answer calls from known numbers. In villages, wealthy
families hide food and lie about possessions, because it is
culturally “impossible” to refuse requests from close kin,
entitled as they are to take whatever they want without ask-
ing. The abiding value and the ethos of reciprocity being
what they are, rural trade stores regularly succumb to debts,
which cannot be called in.
The pressure of singauts from kin—and fear of the gos-
sip and curses of kin—has led to an interesting enterprise.
Middle-class Mbuke people started making contributions
to a community-wide holding company they founded that
then allocated funds to local-level projects, such as buy-
ing a cargo ship or building health clinics and schools. The
holding company’s parent, a village-based association, also
started cooperative business ventures. Both struggled. De-
spite a (well-studied) history of cooperatives in the 1960s,
and the cargo cult leader Paliau Maloat’s advocacy of a non-
kin-based notion of “community,” these projects had to
Book Reviews  American Ethnologist
contend with the dispersed authority of semiautonomous
clans and families. People suspiciously questioned whether
particular individuals and their kin-based factions were
benefiting, rather than the common good. Accusations
circulated that company directors were misappropriating
money or that youth were selling the sea cucumbers they
harvested to Asian buyers rather than to the village-based
company. Even Rasmussen stirred the pot when he spon-
sored the construction of a new “community” outrigger
canoe to transport students between the village and school.
The empirical question of remittances in relationship
to concepts of community in Mbuke is, as I say, an aspect
of a larger theoretical problem that is foregrounded by the
postcolonial regional context: namely, the rise of stratifica-
tion amid an abiding ethos of tribalism and reciprocity. This
is surely one of the cutting-edge issues in the new Melane-
sian sociology that is beginning to emerge in the south-
west Pacific. More despite Rasmussen’s theoretical predilec-
tions than because of them, his new ethnography is a
welcome addition to this small, but steadily productive,
corpus of work.
Multiethnic Korea? Multiculturalism, Migration, and Peo-
plehood Diversity in Contemporary South Korea. John
Lie, ed. Berkeley, CA: Institute of East Asian Studies, 2014.
344 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12360
NOBUKO ADACHI
Illinois State University
This fascinating volume on personhood—or peoplehood, as
the editor and authors call it—explores the tremendous, al-
though largely unnoticed, multiethnic and multicultural di-
versity of today’s South Korea. After experiencing an en-
forced Japanization from 1910 to 1945 while the Korean
peninsula was a colony of Japan, since World War II South
Korea, both as a society and as a government, has fostered a
strong sense of nationalism based on “pure-bloodedness”
and the Korean language. For example, under the Park
Chung Hee dictatorship (1962–79), hanji (Chinese charac-
ters that were used to write Korean until the advent of a
national “alphabet” and were still used in various forms
like personal names) were completely eliminated from pri-
mary school curricula by 1971. However, in the late 1990s
South Korean policy makers started promoting the idea
of tamunhwa (multiculturalism) as Korean products from
cars to electronics began to become a major force in the
world economy. Yet nationalism remained strongly rooted
in Korean society, and the new economic success did not
dispel widespread discrimination and xenophobia against
multiethnic and multicultural populations.
575
American Ethnologist  Volume 43 Number 3 August 2016
In a cogent theoretical introduction, editor John Lie,
a sociologist specializing in the Korean diaspora, exam-
ines some of the germane factors in the dominant folk no-
tions of ethnicity and race in South Korea. Unlike in North
America, there is still a sense in South Korea of the nation
being a singular people who share a common language,
customs, and “pure Korean blood.” In short, South Koreans
assume that they look alike, act alike, speak alike, eat alike,
and share the same worldview and ideology (one heav-
ily influenced by Confucius). The 12 chapters, carefully di-
vided into four parts, basically expand on this theme, qual-
itatively and quantitatively, showing recent and continuing
transformations of South Korean society.
In the first part, the authors of the four chapters ask
if South Korea is—or can ever be—a true multiethnic or
multicultural society. For instance, Timothy C. Lim ap-
proaches this theme from multiculturalism in the media.
The second part consists of four studies on the various
struggles of migratory workers in South Korea. The actual
remarkable plurality and diversity of South Korea is ex-
plored in three papers in part 3, where we see the presence
of a plethora of different social and ethnic groups, such as
Filipinos, Africans, and Korean Americans. Under increased
globalization, for example, there are increasing numbers of
international marriages and children of international mar-
riages (such as marriages of Korean men to Filipino women)
as described by Minjeong Kim. In the final section, Jack Jin
Gary Lee and John D. Skrentny compare today’s multiethnic
Korea with other nations and find, oddly enough, surprising
similarities.
While Lie’s organization of the volume is useful for
understanding various aspects of multiethnic and multi-
cultural issues in South Korean society today, I think this
book’s special strength is its discussion of the Korean con-
cept of race and ethnicity. By taking a more broad perspec-
tive than simply saying that “ethnicity” is reduced to culture
and “race” to phenotype, this book successfully avoids the
narrowing down of social issues to physical traits (like the
black-white dichotomy often seen in the United States).
According to several authors in this volume, the Korean
concepts of ethnicity, race, and nation are all intertwined,
and the concept of peoplehood is a more robust theoretical
concept to use when discussing identity in South Korea. For
example, Nora Kim reports that when the number of for-
eign people residing in South Korea reaches a few percent-
age points, the media report this as South Korea becoming
a multicultural society (71), but this may be only a pub-
lic face. And while there are growing numbers of children
of mixed cultural heritage living in Korea, they are gener-
ally seen negatively as being of mixed, rather than Korean,
blood. Being not of pure Korean blood, they cannot carry
Koreanness (61, 68). But whatever “Korean blood” is, it is
not just a biological issue. Korean adoptees in international
families, as Eleana Kim notes, and Korean Americans, as
576
Sue-Je Gage notes, are in the same situation as are mixed-
heritage children. Even though they are biologically Korean,
since they grew up outside Korea, they are no longer “pure.”
And several other authors (e.g., Nadia Kim) also explore
how the South Korean government is dealing with transna-
tional migrant workers. Gage claims that Korean ethnicity is
really based on physical affinity, language, food, ideology,
and gender (because Korean society is patrilineal).
Jin-Heon Jung reports that North Korean refugees are
not seen as pure Koreans in South Korea. Lie remarks that
this is because so-called racial differences in postmodern
South Korean society also reflect issues of social class. This
had previously been seen in Korea: the chasm between no-
bles and peasants in the past rendered the two groups as lit-
erally two distinct races or peoples (5). Keiko Nakayama also
discusses this class-conscious kind of view of race. She com-
pares the notion of the supposed monoethnicity of Japan
with the plight of low-skilled transnational migratory work-
ers in South Korea. Hae Yeon Choo also examines these
workers, ethnographically comparing the social and eco-
nomic status of Filipino, as well as North Korean, migratory
workers.
Once transnational migratory workers begin arriving in
a society and their children start staying longer, the host so-
ciety faces a number of issues regarding education. Nancy
Abelmann and her colleagues study the supposedly multi-
cultural curriculum that teacher-training universities have
been offering in South Korea since 2009. But these authors
show the real effect of this curriculum is to acculturate chil-
dren into South Korean society, rather than integrating dif-
ferent cultures into South Korean society and making it a
multicultural nation.
In his introduction, Lie argues that race and ethnicity
are dynamic notions that locate populations in the process
of politics and social history. The other authors take this
idea and carry it to some surprising conclusions. The result
is both a theoretically and ethnographically important vol-
ume, and it is a must-read for those studying Korean culture
or East Asian societies. It also will be of pertinent interest to
people studying ethnicity and race who want to add a com-
parative perspective to that which dominates the literature
emerging from societies in the West.
“Getting By”: Class and State Formation among Chinese
in Malaysia. Donald M. Nonini. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univer-
sity Press, 2015. 348 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12361
ERIC C. THOMPSON
National University of Singapore
Donald Nonini’s “Getting By” is a critique of cultural-
determinist analyses of overseas, diaspora Chinese

communities. Such accounts, Nonini argues, valorize
nostalgic notions of patriarchal family-run businesses,
suppress analysis of gender and class dynamics, and
presuppose that the subjects they invoke think and act
as they do on account of some ethno-racially essential
“Chinese” characteristics. By contrast, Nonini’s carefully
considered narrative of Chinese in the Malaysian town of
Bukit Mertajam makes a cogent argument that “Chinese
society”—organized around a segmentary lineage system—
is not so much a cause as an effect of the forces shaping the
worlds of Chinese business owners, petty entrepreneurs,
and working men and women alike. The general theoretical
framework Nonini adheres to is a cultural-Marxist one, in
which both material political-economic forces and ideolog-
ical (i.e., cultural) ones are equally at play. In writing against
notions of an essential “Chinese culture,” he illustrates
instead how certain practices and styles, which in Malaysia
and elsewhere are read as “Chinese,” are dialectically
produced under particular conditions.
While it is common for dissertation projects to result in
the publication of a book, it is less common for the book
to be more than 30 years in the making. Nonini’s work
shows how (not merely that) long-term, intimate engage-
ment with a particular community can yield far more in-
sightful analysis than a book hastily produced under the
pressure of job markets and tenure clocks. The book both
demonstrates and argues for historical ethnography and
methods of participant observation that reveal the “em-
bodied pedagogy” of subjects—such as working-class truck
drivers—whose knowledge may not be explicitly linguisti-
cally articulated. Nonini instructively maps out how, from
the 1970s onward, his “naively positivist” (23) approach
to understanding the Bukit Mertajam trucking industry,
mainly through the eyes of owners and managers (towkays),
gradually gave way to a more nuanced, critical study of class
struggle under conditions of pro-Malay (and anti-Chinese)
racialist state policies. Through the 1980s and into the first
decade of the 21st century, Nonini followed up his research
among trucking towkays with a study of truck drivers. For-
tunately, Nonini was able to stave off what he character-
izes as the near disaster career-wise of not producing a
book from his dissertation through other historical work on
the Malay peasantry and Chinese transnationalism, while
allowing this project to develop more slowly into its present
form.
Throughout the book, Nonini moves over multiple con-
texts of differently positioned subjects, historical moments,
and particular public and subordinated instances of con-
flict and dispute. He amply demonstrates how the politi-
cal economies of a racialist state, developmentalism, and
globalization intersect with a discursive, ideological terrain
of class, race, and gender recognition, misrecognition, and
lack of recognition to produce “Chinese society” in Bukit
Mertajam and, by extension, in Malaysia generally. These
Book Reviews  American Ethnologist
include extraordinary moments of labor organization in the
late 1970s, the “golden age” of (unorganized) labor in the
1990s, temple worship, and mundane “coffee shop” gos-
sip and griping. The picture, in the end, seems a rather
bleak one, and contemporary events offer little in the way of
hope that the fate of Chinese—particularly the “dismissed”
masses of working men (and women)—will improve any-
time soon. Yet this makes the historically embedded story
Nonini tells all that more important and urgent in social
analysis of Malaysian society today.
Nonini’s excellent and ethnographically grounded
analysis speaks in important ways to anthropological and
other social science literature on class struggle, formation
and dialectics, the state and governmentality, and the es-
sentialization of Chinese and other ethnoracial diaspora
communities. While Nonini’s analysis focuses primarily
on class struggle and racialist state practices, it also use-
fully details the intersectionality of these with gendered
practices and masculinist discourses. It does not, unfor-
tunately, make much attempt to situate the book’s argu-
ment in relationship to other existing anthropological lit-
erature on Malaysia: for example, the work and arguments
of anthropologists Tan Chee-Beng, Sharon Carstens, or Jean
DeBernardi on Chinese communities in Malaysia; Sham-
sul A. B. on the bumiputera (indigenous, Malay) state
formation; Wan Zawawi Ibrahim on class struggle and for-
mation; Andrew Willford and Richard Baxstrom on Tamil
Indians’ struggles for recognition; Michael Peletz on gender
and masculinity; or Yeoh Seng Guan on urbanization and
contested spaces (to name just a few contemporary ethnog-
raphers of Malaysia). It may be unfair to criticize the present
book overly harshly on this account, as ignoring most of the
other anthropological work taking place in this hypermod-
ern and perversely heterogeneous nation is largely par for
the course, in favor of speaking more directly to “global”
(some would say Western) theory on the basis of Malaysian
material.
The above criticism notwithstanding, Nonini’s “Getting
By” is an exceptionally good ethnography. It should be a
must-read for any scholars doing serious work on Chinese
overseas, diaspora communities—whether in Malaysia or
beyond. It brilliantly demonstrates the need to move be-
yond simplistic culturally determinist notions of transcen-
dental “Chinese characteristics” and toward empirically
and historically grounded explanations of “Chinese soci-
ety” that take discursive, ideological power and political-
economic forces seriously in equal measure. In this respect
Nonini convincingly demonstrates the explanatory power
of his general cultural-Marxist perspective. “Getting By”
does not contain the sort of catchphrases that have made
James C. Scott’s similar, Southeast Asia– and Malaysia-
based analyses of class struggle travel so well across our
theoretical landscape (“weapons of the weak,” “moral
economy,” “hidden transcripts,” etc.). Yet Nonini’s work
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American Ethnologist  Volume 43 Number 3 August 2016
contains, if anything, a more finely nuanced account of
class struggle that should be a required touchstone for such
theorizing as scholars move forward in this terrain. Finally,
“Getting By” is highly recommended to a general anthropo-
logical audience as a very readable ethnography, highlight-
ing the best of ethnographic theory-building, tacking be-
tween (and critical of ) poles of overly linguistically oriented
discursive post-structural analysis at one end and overly
positivist structural analysis at the other.
Youth Politics in Putin’s Russia: Producing Patriots and
Entrepreneurs. Julie Hemment. Bloomington: Indiana Uni-
versity Press, 2015. 261 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12362
SVETLANA STEPHENSON
London Metropolitan University
When Russia embarked on its transition to market democ-
racy, many believed that when a new generation of young
people who had not grown up in the Soviet Union came
of age, an open and democratic society would also come
into being. Nobody predicted the arrival of a generation
of young people who, as public opinion polls show, are
among the most enthusiastic supporters of Vladimir Putin’s
authoritarian regime and its conservative and nationalist
ideologies. Indeed, they are called “Putin’s generation.”
Their strong desire for political belonging via identification
with the state leadership seems to fuel their participation in
the plethora of state-run youth organizations that emerged
under the Putin-Medvedev administrations, just as these
organizations seem to reflect and shape rise of nationalist
feeling.
What has been missing from this narrative so far is an
understanding of the complexity of the relationships be-
tween the state and its supporters. In her new book, Julie
Hemment refuses to see Putin’s youth as mere foot soldiers
of the regime, eagerly consuming its propaganda and ready
to attack anybody who stands in opposition to the country’s
leadership. In her account, young people, even while sup-
porting the state, emerge not as passive recipients of its ide-
ologies, but as active and often pragmatic actors who share
a wide range of motivations, from a search for belonging to
a desire for individual advancement.
Hemment explores several state-run youth move-
ments, paying special attention to Nashi (Ours), a highly
controversial project that is often seen as a training ground
for pro-Putin political activists. Her in-depth analysis of
Nashi’s youth mobilization campaigns is based on dialogue
and discussion with young people and participant obser-
vation at a youth camp. Her research took place away
from Moscow (where Nashi’s leadership is based), at a
university in Tver, where she had developed a long-standing
578
program of collaboration with local academics and stu-
dents. Participatory research makes it possible to move
away from stereotypes and achieve a nuanced understand-
ing of young people’s motives as they decide to join (or in-
deed to leave) organizations.
Hemment’s interviewees display little evidence of
staunch ideological commitment to the movements’
causes, nor are they pro-Putin fanatics. Some seek friends
and romantic attachments. Others simply understand the
rules of the game in modern-day Russia all too well. In
a country where, as a result of the neoliberal economic
project, life chances are highly unequal, in order to get
ahead in life one needs much better social resources than
most of these provincial youngsters have. They feel that
traditional vehicles of social mobility such as university
education or employment-based careers are outdated.
They need connections and “sponsorship,” preferably from
the state or state-associated corporate businesses. The
regime both dispossesses young people and offers them a
supporting hand. Join the organization, promise Nashi and
other state-run movements; show that you have good ideas
for some business or social “project” or other, and you will
be given the necessary opportunities to get ahead. We will
get you into “a social lift” (elevator)—a peculiarly Russian
term for social mobility that implies that once you are in
this magic elevator, it carries you up without much effort
on your behalf. You will be able to “commodify your talent,”
to use a slogan from the Seliger 2009 youth camp.
But as Hemment shows very clearly, young people
themselves are far from being a collection of cynical social
climbers. Many want to do something worthwhile with their
lives and help other people. Female research participants in
particular tended to see Nashi and other organizations as
offering them an opportunity to contribute to society. Some
sought support for projects helping children’s homes, hos-
pitals, or war veterans and were often frustrated by the bu-
reaucracy involved. Many joined because they were simply
curious. Some became disappointed and left.
Hemment shows that while young people tried to use
the state, the state also tried to use them. Seen initially
as allies against a potential “colored revolution” (like the
Orange Revolution in Ukraine), young people were later
encouraged to participate in Dmitry Medvedev’s modern-
ization drive and then in various patriotic and nationalist
campaigns. The movements offer members an ever-shifting
kaleidoscope of identities and ideas, some derived from
the Soviet past, others modern and coming with familiar
Western vocabularies. One of the book’s main strengths is
Hemment’s original and persuasive comparison of how—
both in Russia and in the West—neoliberalism, while de-
stroying organized state support for the poor and needy,
celebrates individual empowerment, human capital, social
entrepreneurialism, and volunteerism and promotes them
in various youth-oriented projects.

A more bizarre side of the Russian youth projects is the
sexualization of activism. Despite the traditional, pronatal-
ist drive promoted by the state and the church, recreational
sex has a central place both in the youth camps (where
young people are encouraged to make liaisons ostensibly
leading to quick marriages) and beyond. Putin is treated
as a sex idol and the embodiment of patriarchal authority.
As the sexual energies of youth are being channeled into
the service of patriotic causes, it would have been easy to
see alarming fascistic connotations if not for the irony and
humor that are thankfully never far below the surface in
Russia.
Another side to the youth movements that the author
mentions but does not focus on (possibly because other au-
thors writing about Nashi have already covered this) is pop-
ular vigilantism. The movements encourage their members
to fight social deviance through, for example, anti-littering
campaigns, “actions” against public alcohol consumption,
or, in a more sinister way, symbolic or physical assaults on
those perceived as “enemies of Russia.” Hemment writes
about the “carnivalesque” and “ludic” spirit animating such
behaviors (also present in alter-globalization movements),
and sees violence as largely attributable to rogue elements.
Yet enjoyment of violence by ordinary people finding them-
selves, at least for a time, in positions of power is a consis-
tent and deeply disturbing feature of Nashi and other simi-
lar youth movements in Russia, and it is hardly marginal to
their activities.
That said, the book’s greatest strength is that it moves
away from alarmist or overly deterministic accounts, from
saying that Russia is doomed by its anti-democratic politi-
cal traditions and history. Its young generation is not a So-
viet generation, nor is it mindlessly following the current
regime’s propaganda. Young people face many of the same
challenges as their peers across the modern world. This fas-
cinating book presents a highly original account of the sim-
ilarities between youth policies in Russia and around the
world, and gives us a novel, grounded analysis of Russian
provincial youth. It is a welcome and major contribution to
the study of comparative youth policies.
The Making of an African Working Class: Politics, Law,
and Cultural Protest in the Manual Workers’ Union of
Botswana. Pnina Werbner. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2014. 320 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12363
LINCOLN ADDISON
Memorial University
How do we move beyond the idea of class as some-
thing imposed by political economy, and recognize instead
Book Reviews  American Ethnologist
how workers actively construct class identities? This
question—framed initially by E. P. Thompson—is taken up
with renewed vigor by Pnina Werbner in The Making of
an African Working Class. Through an ethnographic fo-
cus on the Manual Workers’ Union (MWU), the largest
public sector union in Botswana, Werbner argues that
workers construct a distinctive class identity that draws
on both local norms and cosmopolitan ideals. Werbner
demonstrates that even though the majority of workers in
Botswana are not unionized—indeed, most eke out liveli-
hoods in the informal economy—the MWU plays a cru-
cial role in upholding the welfare state for the benefit of all
citizens.
Much like the MWU leadership, which regularly tra-
verses Botswana’s vast countryside to meet with its
dispersed membership, the book covers a lot of ground.
Werbner analyzes the union from many different angles: the
significant place and opportunities it affords women (over
50 percent of members are women, and many have leader-
ship roles), the role of rural values and religion in shaping
union activities, the ambiguous relationship of the ruling
party to the union, and the legal battles with government
over the MWU-led strikes in 1991 and 2011. These multiple
angles expand the scope of the book so that readers learn
about not only the labor movement, but also much of the
modern political history of Botswana. While the narrative
is usually theoretical or historical, Werbner makes good use
of ethnographic vignettes, life histories, and biographies of
individual unionists, giving the text an intimate feel despite
its broad scope.
A major contribution of this book is its illustration of
how the value of sereti, or respect, informs worker subjectiv-
ity. Werbner emphasizes how sereti is a dialogical concept,
involving both self-understanding and public recognition.
To maintain their legitimacy, union leaders must embody
the values associated with sereti, such as honor, dignity, re-
sponsibility, and self-control. When the government seeks
to impose austerity measures or to retrench workers for en-
gaging in illegal strikes, workers accuse the government of
violating the norms of sereti. This point is important be-
cause it demonstrates a connection between countryside
and the city. Proletarianization does not imply a complete
break with a rural way of life.
While the book demonstrates how the rural informs the
urban, we learn little about how the urban informs the ru-
ral. Werbner asserts that subsistence agriculture is on the
decline in Botswana (24). But other evidence in the text sug-
gests that rural life and the access to land remain very im-
portant. Several informants invest their wages in rural land-
holdings and express an interest in growing crops. As most
MWU workers have no access to unemployment insurance
and only very small pensions, such rural investment rep-
resents a pivotal security and retirement strategy. Despite
this significance, we learn very little about the impact of
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American Ethnologist  Volume 43 Number 3 August 2016
investment on rural life, or more broadly on the relation-
ship between the MWU and rural politics and customary
leaders. To bring full circle Werbner’s point regarding how
rural norms inform working-class consciousness, the anal-
ysis should trace how union activities in turn influence
processes of agrarian change.
Another important contribution of the text relates to
the role of Christianity within the labor movement. Werb-
ner demonstrates that Christianity and the MWU are deeply
connected: union members pray at the start and close of
meetings; they sing hymns during protests and demon-
strations. She speculates that, similar to the social gospel
in the 19th century, Christianity allows union members to
claim a “divine sanctification of their labour rights” (143).
Werbner indicates that union members belong to differ-
ent churches, but she provides few details. In other orga-
nizational settings, denominational differences provide a
basis for competing factions and rivalries. So, it would be
useful to know more about the role of denominational dif-
ferences within the union: What enables people to look
past such differences and recognize commonality in their
faith and political struggle? Another question relates to how
Christianity not only facilitates union mobilization, but also
places limits upon it. The Christianity espoused by union
members emphasizes economic justice, but it may also
involve a conservative attitude toward sexuality and gen-
der roles. Christianity may be empowering in some re-
spects but constraining in others, by setting boundaries
around what kinds of issues get taken up and who gets
included.
One final question relates to the subject of the book
itself: What is the relevance of studying a public sector
union like the MWU at a time when unionized jobs are
so rare, particularly in Africa? For Werbner, the MWU rep-
resents a diagnostic case through which one can trace
the development and articulation of a distinctive working-
class identity. But while the MWU comprises lower-status
unionized workers (cooks, cleaners, porters, messengers,
etc.), it still constitutes a labor elite when compared to the
majority of the population confined to the informal sec-
tor. The extent to which the working-class identity articu-
lated by the MWU actually trickles down to people work-
ing in the informal sector is something of a gap in the
text.
The questions noted above in no way diminish the
force of Werbner’s main argument—that there is a vernac-
ular way of being a worker in Botswana that draws on ru-
ral idioms, local beliefs, and universal labor rights. Rather,
these questions are a reflection of the impressive scope of
the book, which covers so much terrain. Overall, the text
represents a major contribution to political and legal an-
thropology. It would be excellent for graduate and advanced
undergraduate courses dealing with Africa and labor
studies.
580
Wrapped in the Flag of Israel: Mizrahi Single Mothers and
Bureaucratic Torture. Smadar Lavie. New York: Berghahn,
2014. 153 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12364
YULIA EGOROVA
Durham University
Wrapped in the Flag of Israel is an engaging and insightful
autoethnography in which Smadar Lavie explores the expe-
riences of Mizrahi single mothers in Israel. Lavie is a Mizrahi
and a single mother. She draws on her own experiences and
the 2003 Single Mothers’ March on Jerusalem, led by the
activist Vicky Knafo, to argue that bureaucratic tribulations
experienced by the Mizrahi single mothers in Israel can be
equated with pain.
On a more general level, Lavie addresses the paradox of
the Mizrahi community staying loyal to the state that, she
asserts, has repeatedly discriminated against them through
its bureaucratic practices. Lavie reminds the reader that al-
though only 15 percent of world Jewry are Mizrahi (Eastern-
ers), the majority of them live in Israel, where they account
for 50 percent of the population. She also explains that in
Israel, in everyday Hebrew, Mizrahi has become a catch-all
term for communities stemming from the Middle East and
South Asia.
Lavie sets out her overall framework of analysis in
the introduction by putting the Single Mothers’ March in
correlation with the cease-fire between the Israel Defense
Forces and Hamas. She explains that in 2003 the Israeli
State decided to reduce welfare allowances for single moth-
ers with an amendment to Hok HaHesderim (Arrangements
Law) that was the reason for Vicky Knafo’s march. The
amendment took effect on exactly the same day that Is-
rael and Hamas declared cease-fire, which meant a relief
in the middle of the Al-Aqsa Intifada of 2000–5 and an
opportunity for the march to attract the attention of global
media.
The remainder of the book discusses different theoret-
ical and ethnographic aspects of the Mizrahi single moth-
ers’ experiences. Chapter 1 considers the broader context
of the Single Mothers’ March by offering a sociopolitical ty-
pology of single mothers in Israel and a historical overview
of Mizrahi women in mandatory Palestine and Israel. The
chapter sets out to explore why Mizrahi single mothers sup-
port right-wing anti-Arab politics while at the same time
protesting right-wing economic policies. Lavie traces this
phenomenon back to the role of the Zionist left political
parties, which established the intra-Jewish racial forma-
tions in Israel that drew implicitly racial distinctions be-
tween Jews of European and Mizrahi origin. Secondly, the
author argues that this support also stems from what she
describes as the Mizrahi sense of belonging to the Zionist

state, which results in their community setting itself apart
from the Palestinians and citizens of other Middle Eastern
states who share their perceived phenotype and regional
culture. In discussing these issues, the book makes an im-
portant contribution to the literature, demonstrating that
throughout the history of Israel, the olim (Jewish immi-
grants) of European descent have retained their privileged
socioeconomic position and maintained claims to cultural
superiority over communities coming from Asia and the
Middle East. It also adds to a growing body of research
that discusses issues in the racialization of the Mizrahi and
Sephardi communities, both in Israel and in Europe (e.g.,
Arkin 2009; Egorova 2015; Hodes 2014).
Chapter 2 skillfully examines how the reality of the
Israel-Palestine conflict overshadows Mizrahi identity pol-
itics, because both Israeli and international media por-
tray the conflict in terms of hermetically sealed binary
oppositions, an approach that does not leave space for
reflection on intra-Jewish divides. The chapter unsettles
this representation by talking about both the racialist and
gendered dimensions of what Lavie describes as “bureau-
cratic torture” in Israel (21). The author also explains
that in this autoethnography, she deliberately employs the
mode of victim narrative, going against the tendency of
some academic accounts in postcolonial studies to “be-
stow agency upon victims that silences their victimhood”
(23).
Chapter 3 offers what the author describes as the
“subaltern theory of the interrelationships between bu-
reaucracy and torture” (23), presenting the encounter be-
tween the representative of the bureaucracy and the single
mother as a self-perpetuating ritual-like process in which
the mother is put at a severe disadvantage. Chapter 4 of-
fers an analysis of the background and the consequences
of the 2003 amendment to the Hok HaHesderim, which
was at the heart of Vicky Knafo’s campaign, and chapter 5
presents a rich autoethnographic analysis of a Mizrahi
mother living on welfare. The final chapter discusses the
end of the Knafo protests and its relationship to suicide
bombings.
Wrapped in the Flag of Israel is an important ethnogra-
phy of Mizrahi women and an excellent addition to anthro-
pology of Israel.
References
Arkin, Kimberly A. 2009. “Rhinestone Aesthetics and Religious
Essence: Looking Jewish in Paris.” American Ethnologist 36 (4):
722–34.
Egorova, Yulia. 2015. “Redefining the Converter Jewish Self: Race,
Religion, and Israel’s Bene Menashe.” American Anthropologist
117 (3): 493–505.
Hodes, Joseph. 2014. From India to Israel: Identity, Immigration,
and the Struggle for Religious Equality. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s
University Press.
Book Reviews  American Ethnologist
Walking Where Jesus Walked: American Christians and
Holy Land Pilgrimage. Hillary Kaell. New York: New York
University Press, 2014. 288 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12365
CAITLIN FINLAYSON
University of Mary Washington
Hillary Kaell’s Walking Where Jesus Walked sheds a fasci-
nating light on the individual experiences of Christian pil-
grims from the United States as they travel to the “Holy
Land” of Israel and the Palestinian territories and return
home. Whereas most other studies on pilgrimage empha-
size the travels and ritual performances of pilgrims, Kaell’s
work embeds the pilgrims’ experience within the context of
home by including both pre- and post-trip interviews to un-
cover how the travelers contextualized their journeys and
the spiritual impacts of the trips on the pilgrims’ lives.
Kaell’s text is organized to parallel the pilgrims’ jour-
neys, beginning by exploring imagined understandings of
the Holy Land and then moving to the pilgrims’ experi-
ences before, during, and after their trips. Throughout the
text, she weaves three themes: “the intersection of religious
pilgrimage and commercial leisure, the interplay between
global travel and relationships at home, and the dynamic
tension between transcendent divinity and material evi-
dence” (4). In this way, she frames the pilgrims’ experiences
in terms of these dichotomous and often paradoxical rela-
tionships. For example, the pilgrims conceptualize God as
transcendent as well as present in the material landscape
of the Holy Land. To explore these themes, Kaell, who de-
scribes herself as a Jewish Canadian, perhaps to put some
distance between herself and her interlocutors, engages in
a mix of archival work and surveys to supplement what
she gathers from conversational interviews and participant
observation.
It is clear from Kaell’s research that the experience of
American Christians undertaking a pilgrimage to the Holy
Land is profoundly transformative, beginning with their
idealized or imagined understandings of the landscape of
the region. Many pilgrims developed mental pictures of the
Holy Land from Bibles and religious artwork, and they were
surprised when they encountered the actual landscape that
was often at odds with their preconceived notions. Further,
most American pilgrims are older women, and, as Kaell
noted, they were often at a time of transition in their lives.
Some had experienced divorce or had been widowed, while
others were caring for aging parents. The author frames a
thoughtful narrative around these pilgrims, shedding light
onto their unique situations and interpretations.
One of the most insightful chapters in Kaell’s text is
her investigation of religious feeling. Although she would
have benefited from situating this exploration within the
581
American Ethnologist  Volume 43 Number 3 August 2016
burgeoning literature on affect and emotion, Kaell thought-
fully explores the ways in which pilgrims feel a sense of
spirituality and the ways in which tour providers can ma-
nipulate these feelings. Feeling like a location was “au-
thentic” (84), for example, often seemed to matter more
than whether or not the location was historically accurate.
Moreover, the chapter raises an interesting paradox in that
pilgrims generally do not want to feel that a location is
“touristy”—one pilgrim described the Jordan River as “‘Dis-
ney World on crack’” (130), for example—and yet with so
many pilgrims traveling to the locations, an infrastructure is
needed to handle such an influx of people. It is unlikely that
any pilgrim will be alone on a stretch of quiet, untouched
desert.
Kaell investigates both American Catholics, who have
primarily been the focus of research on religious pilgrim-
age, and Protestants, who are more salient for the American
experience but are less commonly studied. Interestingly, the
author finds that the act of pilgrimage connects with larger
theological shifts within the Catholic Church following the
changes made by Vatican II. Pilgrims are more likely to un-
dertake Bible study upon returning, for example, as well
as to discover a distinct sense of personal empowerment
that is more typical of the Protestant faiths. Both Catholics
and Protestants undertake pilgrimage within a larger com-
plex of commercial activity, from tourist providers to
vendors, with each often catering to the particular theolo-
gies of the two groups. The central chapters on evangeli-
cal feelings of place, Catholic pilgrimage, and the commer-
cialization and commodification of pilgrimage would have
benefited significantly from the inclusion of additional pho-
tographs to illustrate these core themes. While some pho-
tos are included, they at times seem tangential to the main
argument. In a discussion of the modern church aesthetic,
for example, photographs of churches in Arizona are in-
cluded, but the discussion of the commodification of pil-
grim culture would have been richer for the reader if pho-
tographs of some of the locations described were included.
The author’s primary contribution to pilgrim literature is
in the full-circle investigation of pilgrims once they return
home. This study positions pilgrimage as transformative,
rather than as reaffirming preexisting spiritual beliefs. For
pilgrims, the journey to the Holy Land makes the Bible tan-
gible, and the proclamation by tour providers that the trip
will change pilgrims’ lives seems self-fulfilling, as few come
away unchanged.
At times, Kaell’s emphasis on the individual’s reli-
gious experience misses the broader religious and geopo-
litical context within which these pilgrimages occur. She
notes that Christian pilgrims seek to avoid conflict while
traveling, for instance, and yet there is little mention of
a deeper theological reason behind the aversion to con-
flict. Including a comparative exploration of similar phe-
nomena in other faiths—such as the Islamic understanding
582
of ihram, a state of sacred behavior engaged by Muslim pil-
grims performing the hajj that forbids, among other things,
quarreling—would have similarly contextualized the expe-
riences of the pilgrims she studied. The broader socio-
economic characteristics and effects of pilgrims are likewise
marginalized. However, this is perhaps a common char-
acteristic of research that emphasizes individual religious
expression; in undertaking a deeper understanding of the
pilgrims as individuals and privileging their unique per-
spectives, one may overlook the broader context within
which these journeys are taking place. As Kaell notes,
however, the importance of individual experience is often
marginalized in pilgrimage research, and it is understand-
able that the author chooses to tip the scales in the direc-
tion of an area worthy of such deep and thoughtful atten-
tion. Overall, Kaell presents an illuminating glimpse into the
experiences of pilgrims before, during, and after their jour-
neys and a thoughtful exploration of the ways pilgrims ne-
gotiate and renegotiate their religious understandings.
When the World Becomes Female: Guises of a South
Indian Goddess. Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2013. 314 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12366
ROBIN OAKLEY
Dalhousie University
Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger offers us a kaleidoscope of the
rich ritual worlds in Tirupathi, AP, India. In that region the
Venkataswarva (Vishnu) Temple is among the most visited
religious pilgrimage sites in the world and is a major part of
the economy. She focuses on the Taayyagunta temple ded-
icated to Gangamma, where men dress up to take on the
goddess’s form for a series of rituals, oriented toward de-
stroying the idea of the aggressive male and culminating
in a symbolic beheading. Flueckiger pays attention to the
aesthetics of these rituals, which she views as mainly un-
dertaken in the context of the Sanskrit epics. Her long-term
interactions in the region as far back as 1992 allowed her
to learn Telugu. They also give her the advantage of time
and perspective, as she has seen Tirupathi town expand
enough to touch smaller villages: decades ago, she says, it
would have been a luxury to travel to those villages by rick-
shaw. She provides a great deal of material on her fieldwork
practices and how she accessed her informants, noting that
she retained friendships with them long after the fieldwork
concluded.
Flueckiger presents the people who worship the god-
dess and participate in her rituals to satisfy her ugram (fe-
rocity) from the point of view of Kaikalas (weavers), Acharis
(goldsmiths and ironworkers), Chettis and Balijas (traders),

and Madigas (leather workers) residing in or near Tirupathi
town. Among the worshippers are those who are able to
“bear” the goddess for a time to satisfy her and in turn
be protected from disease and hardship. The ethnography
has an excellent balance between scholarly materials and
accessible writing. It reads at times like a novel because
the individual worshippers are so present on the page as
we learn about their life histories and witness them in rit-
ual activities that make the goddess beautiful and feed her
and her congregants. Via these participants we grasp a rit-
ual landscape in which women are understood to be es-
sentially more powerful in fundamental ways than men.
For this reader, the most powerful aspect of the analysis is
in regard to gender. Most beautifully depicted are the stri
veshams (when men become the goddess during the jataras
[rituals] by dressing in goddess clothing and jewelry), which
give men a chance to experience women’s shakti (power).
Men understand women to have shakti that is more power-
ful than men’s and extremely destructive. The veshams are
not as “disruptive” as those in the “American” contexts, and
men become the goddess by putting on clothing and jew-
elry, not through possession or embodiment. Their “male”
gestures remain: the act of putting on the clothes is enough
to render them into manifestations of Gangamma, and their
wives and others will honor them by touching their feet
during the jataras. Some men do this year after year for
decades.
Flueckiger calls into question Judith Butler’s contention
that nothing lies behind the gender performance; in this
case, the males who take on the stri veshams are rendered
into the goddess, and the existence of masculinity lying
underneath it is not questioned—it is there. I think that
she overestimates the role of photography in the construc-
tion of identity or that she could have dealt more explicitly
with the fact that until recently, only the privileged in In-
dia would have had access to photography. There are many
men who took on the stri veshams throughout their lives in
villages but who lack photographic proof, so their render-
ings are bound to oral history and perhaps in the ongoing
performances of plays, as well as at jataras. But I agree that
the photographs ought to be viewed as agents suggesting
possibility and impossibility of identity.
The author should be highly praised for acknowledging
the relative freedom experienced by so-called “left-hand”
castes and the reality of women’s shakti as understood and
feared by men and women alike. She also identifies another
kind of freedom, one that women who marry the goddess
can experience, as they experience a kind of refuge and
agency in the public domain. This book is a powerful and
timely reminder that the supposed gender norms all too of-
ten taken in the West as a universal norm (and this includes
the assumption of universal male patriarchy) are on shaky
ground. It is also a reminder that gender mainstreaming
efforts, again particularly emerging out of the West, often
Book Reviews  American Ethnologist
lack cultural or cultural sensibilities to investigate the mul-
tidimensional actual content of gender elsewhere, as Gargi
Bhattacharyya (2008) has also powerfully promulgated.
She also departs from Don Handelman’s (1995) as-
sumption of the ritual rationale behind goddess jataras as
the destruction of the male and the epistemological supe-
riority of the male. Instead, she analyzes it as the destruc-
tion of an aggressive male in particular. Handelman took
the goddess’s point of view, whereas Flueckiger attempts to
present the way the people experience the goddess.
She also encounters many Tamil people who migrated
to Tirupathi to worship or service the goddess. She puts
these people in the spotlight a number of times and notes
the Tamil new year’s insertion into the ritual cycle, but she
does not tackle head-on the broader temple cartography
of the larger region—that Tirupathi was part of the Madras
Confederacy, its shared history prior to that, or the possibil-
ity that some of what she witnessed may have been linked
to the voluminous Tamil epics in some ways.
Generational and social change are strong themes of
the book, as they show the transformation of rituals and
practices into middle-class and Brahmanic norms. While
the numbers of participants in rituals for Gangamma are in-
creasing, the content preserved in the public domain tends
to downplay the role of the stri veshams. The Pongal offer-
ings, animal sacrifices, and so on are somewhat erased, but
this might perhaps only reflect that to which visitors are
privy and that which they choose to preserve in their im-
ages. If there is an erasure through images on the Internet,
this ethnography counters it by highlighting Gangamma in
a highly readable and pleasant style that would certainly
satisfy the ugram of the goddess herself.
References
Bhattacharyya, Gargi. 2008. Dangerous Brown Men: Exploiting Sex,
Violence and Feminism in the “War on Terror.” London: Zed
Books.
Handelman, Don. 1995. “The Guises of the Goddess and the Trans-
formation of the Male: Gangamma’s Visit to Tirupathi and the
Continuum of Gender.” In Syllables of Sky: Studies in South
Indian Civilization, edited by David Shulman, 283–337. New
Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Cultures of Energy: Power, Practices, Technologies. Sarah
Strauss, Stephanie Rupp, and Thomas Love, eds. Walnut
Creek, CA: Left Coast, 2013. 360 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12367
GÖKÇE GÜNEL
Columbia University
Cultures of Energy, edited by Sarah Strauss, Stephanie Rupp,
and Thomas Love, is an expansive book that serves as a
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American Ethnologist  Volume 43 Number 3 August 2016
good introduction to topics in anthropology of energy. The
book spans five parts (composed of 16 chapters and five di-
alogues) that map and explore how anthropological tools
can help examine and perhaps disrupt the existing conver-
sations on energy. Taking inspiration from Laura Nader’s
1970s call, the book suggests that humans need to under-
stand the social context in which energy problems are cre-
ated, experienced, and resolved, and accordingly provides
descriptions and analyses of these various contexts. The
volume appropriately ends with an afterword by Nader.
The opening section, “Theorizing Energy and Culture,”
introduces the reader to the main conceptual tools of
the project. Perhaps most important among these tools is
the idea that humans need to shift their understandings
of the future and come to terms with the fact that the future
may not be characterized by unprecedented growth and
technological complexity. The authors demonstrate how
the ideals of economic growth are incommensurate with
natural laws, such as entropy.
The second part, “Culture and Energy: Technology,
Meaning, Cosmology,” concentrates on American energy
landscapes, charting the definitions of energy among New
Yorkers, the perceived inevitability of oil and gas drilling
in Alaska, wind energy development in Wyoming, and fi-
nally the rise of a network of energy consultancies, mainly
emerging from North America and Western Europe. One
important takeaway from this section is how humans, es-
pecially in the Global North, manage to distance themselves
from the sources of energy, taking resources for granted and
lacking awareness regarding the consequences of their con-
sumption habits. Arthur Mason’s chapter on energy con-
sultancies provides a refreshing perspective on how experts
create knowledge in this context of indifference, having a
decisive and irreversible impact on energy markets.
“Electrification and Transformation” takes the reader
to the Global South, presenting commentary on electricity
in Peru, rural Tanzania, and Zanzibar. In contrast to ear-
lier sections, this collection of articles illustrates how in-
frastructures of electricity remain visible, and it proves that
indifference to such infrastructures should be considered
a sign of privilege. The authors then unpack how electric
infrastructures have transformed life in these locations. A
powerful insight here is how infrastructure operates at mul-
tiple scales: allowing children to do schoolwork in their
homes, while also generating a sense of modernity, develop-
ment, and belonging to a global community. When the in-
frastructures of energy begin to stall, however, consumers,
specifically in Tanzania, begin to rely on informal gray-
market methods and quick short-term calculations, thereby
altering their relationships to the future.
Next, the book investigates how energy infrastructures
impact human health and environments, and how those in-
frastructures draw attention to the sometimes marginalized
effects emanating from the sites of production. The workers
584
who partake in energy production have no choice but to re-
main aware of how energy comes to life. Accordingly Jes-
sica Smith Rolston calls for research about “the specific
working conditions of different [energy] industries” (223)
as a means of exploring the futures those energy industries
trigger. The following chapter relatedly shows that experts
working on biofuels in Brazil deal with very different sets of
challenges.
The final section, “Energy Contested: Borders and
Boundaries,” concentrates on the issues of visibility/
invisibility in a more explicit manner. In a thoughtful con-
tribution, Gisa Weszkalnys discusses the “magical power” of
oil and seeks to foreground the material qualities of a sub-
stance that is usually rendered immaterial or invisible. By
attending to the potential of oil, she extends the conversa-
tion from the previous parts of the book on the diverse futu-
rities of resources. The pieces on the Gulf of Mexico by Lisa
Breglia, Thomas McGuire, and Diane Austin shed light on
the politics of the border and oil’s seeming “disrespect” of
boundaries, and provide further insights into the daily life
of offshore drilling and production.
All the chapters not only share a topical focus on en-
ergy, but also traverse some of the same thematic terrains.
Mason, Rolston, and Derek Newberry deal with expertise,
exploring the worlds of energy consultants, coal miners,
and biofuel professionals. In developing this emphasis
further, the book could have offered more insights about
the production of energy policy and showed how these
processes are contested by progressive grassroots or-
ganizations, which promote alternative environmental
imaginaries. Michael Degani and Weszkalnys attend to the
temporal qualities of resources, demonstrating how energy
infrastructures spawn diverse futurities. At the same time,
the conversations at the end of each section help build a
debate on the anthropology of energy and foreground the at
times implicit stakes of the project. For instance, in one of
the conversations Tanja Winther compares centralized and
decentralized energy infrastructures, fueling an interesting
discussion on the political and social differences between
the two types of systems.
Cultures of Energy offers rich analyses of energy in-
frastructures in the Americas and Africa, yet other parts
of the world remain unrepresented. For instance, some of
the most influential work on energy has emerged from the
Middle East, and yet the chapters in this book do not dis-
cuss the region’s complex relationships to resources. On the
other hand, the volume manages to bring together a diverse
array of energy infrastructures, ranging from biofuels and
wind turbines to offshore drilling. Nuclear power, always a
contentious point of debate among those interested in re-
sources, is omitted from the book, perhaps to imply that it
will not be part of the future energy mix. Overall, the vol-
ume is a welcome addition to the field and will be useful
in prompting further debate on energy infrastructures and

expanding the impact that anthropology has in the making
of energy futures.
International Volunteer Tourism: Critical Reflections on
Good Works in Central America. Katherine Borland and
Abigail E. Adams, eds. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
227 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12368
LAUREN MILLER GRIFFITH
Hanover College
Having spent two years working in a faculty development
office, I am well aware that service learning and study
abroad are hot trends in higher education. Put them to-
gether, and you should have the magic combination to
please administrators, students, and other “stakeholders”
(e.g., parents). Indeed, as several of the authors in this vol-
ume suggest, international study abroad tours are valu-
able recruitment tools and, as such, are encouraged by
many university administrators even when they are not
in the best interest of the international communities they
claim to serve. As an anthropologist who codirects a study
abroad program in Belize, I have mixed feelings about these
initiatives. While I agree that they can have great poten-
tial to transform students’ outlook on the world, I worry
about the paternalistic overtones of poorly executed ser-
vice projects. Not ready to abandon the project entirely,
I was heartened by the nuanced exploration of interna-
tional volunteer tourism that the authors of this volume
undertook.
Katherine Borland and Abigail Adams start their con-
tribution with the image of a horde of white, middle-class
tourists (often wearing garishly colored matching T-shirts)
who are en route to Central America, full of good inten-
tions, ready to change the world one remote village at a
time. I have seen many groups like this. I have also seen
them on their return flight—sunburned, perhaps a bit thin-
ner than when they set out, and full of satisfaction with
their contributions. One of my students even spotted some
with shirts reading, “I Survived a Short Term Mission Trip
to Honduras!” Surely meant to be funny; I cannot help but
wonder how the people “served” by these missions would
feel about having their guests boasting about “surviving”
the very same conditions that are the backdrop for their
everyday affairs.
This book does not lambaste missionaries or stu-
dents for their ethnocentrism. Indeed, it treats their work
with a great deal of sensitivity. As anthropologists, we
preach cultural relativism and sometimes justify cultural
practices that border on unacceptable from a human
rights perspective—yet we often fail to extend that same
Book Reviews  American Ethnologist
graciousness to members of our own society. While critical
of practices that perpetuate stereotypes and paradoxically
disempower the communities they aim to serve, the authors
are nonetheless supportive of the individuals who take up
the cause of global citizenship and service.
Borland anchors the book with a chapter on the his-
tory of humanitarian engagement in Latin America. She re-
minds us that under the guise of helping, the United States
has interfered in the political, economic, and social trajec-
tories of many Latin American countries. It is not that the
idea of “service” or “helping” is necessarily bad or pater-
nalistic; it is the way in which service is executed that de-
termines its outcomes. When the state uses individual acts
of service as an excuse to deny responsibility to its people,
service can become the handmaiden of neoliberalism. Re-
gardless of where one stands politically, this chapter (and
indeed the whole volume) is useful because it reminds read-
ers of how their individual service projects fit into larger
sociopolitical frameworks.
Father Fernando Cardenal’s reflections on the libera-
tory education projects he organized in Nicaragua are in-
spiring. His chapter raises questions about how our own
positionalities vis-à-vis the people we serve shape our ef-
ficacy. When we, as privileged outsiders, have the option
of fleeing uncomfortable or dangerous situations, is it ever
really possible to understand the precariousness of life on
the margins? This is a question anthropologists have been
asking themselves since at least the 1980s, but it is an im-
portant one to bring to bear on our work as leaders of study
abroad programs. While I personally am wary of exposing
my students to too much uncertainty in the field (a posi-
tion echoed in the chapters by Borland and Steven Jones),
it occurred to me when reading this chapter that profes-
sors should make students aware of how they are being
sheltered from the more dangerous and unpleasant aspects
of life in these communities. Sharing these decisions with
students and having blunt conversations about the every-
day hardships and dangers associated with living in poverty
(e.g., increased exposure to disease-causing agents, lim-
ited access to healthcare, crime) may help students avoid
romanticizing the seemingly simple lives of the poor.
William Westerman begins his chapter by describing
his “conversion experience,” an encounter with a Salvado-
rian refugee that drew him into political activism. Yet his ex-
periences as an activist in the 1980s differ markedly from
the kinds of service that have become so popular in Latin
America today. In the 1970s and 1980s, Americans who
served as witnesses to the human rights abuses in Latin
America were interested in solidarity and pushing for struc-
tural transformations. Today, we see a “softened” form of
civic engagement. Westerman raises the question of what,
exactly, students and academics can do to help the com-
munities they visit. The answer is not as simple as it might
seem.
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American Ethnologist  Volume 43 Number 3 August 2016
As several of the authors point out, most academics
have no special talent when it comes to the manual la-
bor of building homes or painting schools (perennial fa-
vorites of international study abroad leaders). Indeed, it
might be better for professors and students to send the
money they would have spent on travel abroad so that lo-
cal laborers who have the requisite skills could be hired
to do these projects themselves. There are certainly some
projects that benefit from foreign students’ work—for ex-
ample, David Muñoz’s engineering project in the Colinas
de Suiza, Honduras—but others seem a bit self-indulgent
in light of these authors’ critiques. Despite the flaws of
typical international volunteer trips, the authors of this
volume remain hopeful that cultural exchanges can result
586
in lasting, meaningful transformation for all parties in-
volved, not just the privileged Westerners who choose to
go abroad. When Western visitors cast off their paternal-
istic inclinations to “help” these communities, local resi-
dents are able to claim the role of international educators,
which restores dignity to their involvement in such pro-
grams. Appearing several times in the volume is the idea
that perhaps service projects themselves should be tabled
in favor of creating the kinds of learning experiences for
travelers that would enable them to see how their actions
(as consumers, as voters, etc.) affect their fellow global cit-
izens. They might not be as satisfying in the short term as
building a house, but their long-term effect would be much
more enduring.