Book Reviews
The Curse of Nemur: In Search of the Art, Myth, and Rit-
ual of the Ishir. Tigio Escobar. Pittsburgh: University of
Pittsburgh Press, 2007. 302 pp., illustrations, maps, photos,
index.
FRANCI WASHBURN
University of Arizona
NANCY J. PAREZO
University of Arizona
As founder and former director of the Museo del Barrio in
Asunción, Paraguay, Tigio Escobar is uniquely qualified to
write The Curse of Nemur, which offers insights into the nar-
rative myths and art of the Ishir, a small, indigenous culture
living within Paraguay’s Great Chaco plain. Working with
this group since 1986, Escobar states that he wrote the book
because he was “driven by the interest to understand a dis-
quieting culture and to support their demands for land and
freedom of worship” (p. 6). His goal was to find the culture’s
center as well as its inherent heterogeneity without falling
into the traps of romanticized primitivism or positing Ishir
culture as a model for or an example of a theoretical con-
struct. There are no conclusions in this book, only creative
possibilities.
Escobar’s way of understanding the Ishtar is not to
write an ethnography of their lifeways or to produce an eth-
nohistorical study of their reactions and adaptations to in-
vasion, colonialism, modernity, and capitalism but, rather,
to understand how aesthetic sensibilities manifest them-
selves in three cultural dimensions—art, myth, and ritual—
as an integrated, multivoiced but blurry, dynamic system.
He approaches his task through the lens of art criticism and
its emphasis on multiple readings and by focusing on artis-
tic acts not “in terms of an integrated event, explainable in
and of itself, but insofar as it intersects with other kinds of
acts and doings, lighting their way every so briefly” (p. 1).
He accomplishes this goal by approaching each dimension
from three angles (religion, shamanistic magic, and history)
and by circling around and around concepts, intersecting,
pulling back, and reintersecting worldview and philosophy
about power, sacredness, and beauty. In the process he of-
fers raw data (field notes and observations), his place in the
AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 36, No. 3, pp. 591–613, ISSN 0094-0496, online ISSN 1548-1425.  C 2009 by the American Anthropological Association.
All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2009.01181.x
narrative, Native voices, and periodic interpretations and
digressions.
As is common in indigenous studies, Escobar ap-
proaches the Ishir by assuming that Indigenous people are
“great artists and poets, creators of worldviews, inventors
of alternative ways and feelings and thinking in this world”
(p. 4), and that this cultural aesthetic is what helps them sur-
vive with dignity and healing in a world of incursions. He
uses a foundational text, which he calls the “Great Myth,”
to explain the origins of the world, morality, epistemology,
and all aspects of culture and behavior from the Ishir point
of view. But he does not treat this as a monolithic, stable
text. Escobar details dual versions of the Ishir creation story
along with related myths, and how that cosmology shapes
the art, aesthetics, and day-to-day lives of the Ishir. Peri-
odically, Escobar presents theoretical notes, commentaries,
and interpretive sections to help the reader’s cross-cultural
understanding.
The Curse of Nemur also includes related contextual-
izing and operationalizing material about the struggles of
the Ishir to survive in the modern world and their expe-
riences with Euro-Western influences that did not always
have the best interests of the Ishir in mind. An example of
the way myth and cosmology influence cultural practices,
cultural interpretations, and adaptation is evident in the
multiple meanings of color and design that the Ishir attach
to feathers, body painting, and clothing worn in both their
daily life and in their ceremonial practices. As an example
of the latter, Escobar analyzes the Ishir’s experiences with
Euro-Western influences, including information about the
necessity for them to earn their living by working for log-
ging companies that are in the process of destroying both
the cultural and geographic landscape of the Ishir. The book
does not present a marginalized people grasping onto the
last vestiges of a way of life, but it underlines the value of
indigenous culture as “not only a site of dispossession and
marginality but also as a place of creativity and ethnic self-
affirmation” (p. 4).
Escobar’s purposeful organization style can be discon-
certing at first. Those who choose to read this book would
be best served to avoid reading the foreword by Michael
Taussig until the reader has progressed at least halfway
through the book. While Taussig’s foreword does provide
insights into the work and encourages readers to explore
American Ethnologist  Volume 36 Number 3 August 2009
the material, his description of the book as “post-modern”
(p. xi) may, in fact, discourage readers who may expect a
fractured narrative, delay of meaning, and closure that re-
quires them to construct their own understanding of the
text. While the book’s organizational style may not fit es-
tablished forms of ethnographic writing, it is not postmod-
ern; it is clearly understandable, once one gets accustomed
to the style, and, perhaps, more so because Escobar in-
cludes field notes rather than simply drawing his narrative
from them, and personal anecdotes about his respondents,
the author’s personal reactions to their statements, and a
wealth of other information, interspersed with interpreta-
tion. The reader here is treated to a look at how an ethno-
grapher progresses through his work, how she or he comes
to understand the material available, and how that material
then shapes the ethnographer’s future readings and conclu-
sions about that material. This is not a postmodern work
but, rather, a text that uses what Escobar calls a wander-
ing style of ethnographic writing “around an elusive theme
attempting multiple, lateral, occasionally intersecting, and
generally unsystematic approaches” (p. 261), which, in this
case, enhances understanding rather than limits it.
While this book will be of general interest to most read-
ers who are fascinated with religion, art, aesthetics, and
cultural meaning, it will be of specific interest for those
readers who are concerned about the cultures and fates
of Central and South American Indigenous groups who
face rapid change and must of necessity adapt to this
rapidly changing world in which they find themselves.
Reason to Believe: Cultural Agency in Latin American
Evangelicalism. David Smilde. Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 2007. 262 pp.
ELIZABETH BRUSCO
Pacific Lutheran University
Permissible questions in the study of evangelicals in Latin
America have shifted significantly since the movement first
started gaining scholarly attention in the late 1960s. Early
on, scholars were primarily concerned about the impli-
cations of an imported religious movement for the trans-
formation of Latin American societies. Analysis was often
framed within a discourse about Western imperialism, and
converts themselves were suspected of false consciousness.
Since then, greater attention has been given to the particu-
larities of context as well as to the interpretations of evan-
gelicals themselves, with a resulting deeper understanding
of the movement. As variable as, for example, the politi-
592
cal implications of evangelicalism can be in different Latin
American settings (see, e.g., David Stoll’s groundbreaking
1990 book Is Latin America Turning Protestant?), there have
been a number of undeniable consistencies throughout the
region, especially in terms of the outcomes of evangelical
conversion for women, the family, and the creation of alter-
native masculine roles and identities.
Smilde’s book, based on participant-observation and
life history interviews, deals with the experiences of men
from Venezuela’s popular sectors within the years lead-
ing up to the Chávez administration. He tackles the vexing
question: If conversion to evangelicalism in Latin America
is so effective in solving people’s problems, why doesn’t ev-
eryone convert?
In a compelling review of theoretical literature, Smilde
lays the basis for viewing evangelicalism as a form of “imag-
inative rationality.” In this approach, he is attempting to
bridge the gap between interpretations of conversion fo-
cused solely on individual strategy and those based exclu-
sively on meaning and symbolism.
Smilde carefully documents and analyzes how his in-
formants use evangelical thinking to conceptualize what he
calls akrasia—a “weakness of will” underlying drug and al-
cohol addiction, or problems with gambling. Other trou-
bles plague Caraqueños of the popular classes—street vio-
lence, the culebra (vendetta attacks), economic insecurity,
emotional and health issues, and difficulties in marital and
other relationships, and Smilde shows how the men he in-
terviewed make sense of these issues within an evangelical
paradigm. Smilde, like many other observers of the move-
ment, has documented that conversion can result in self-
reform. But, for him, this conclusion leads to a second ques-
tion: If the convert decides to believe (for pragmatic pur-
poses), doesn’t that erode the external validity of the belief
system and, ultimately, the efficacy of belief to achieve these
ends? Smilde offers a philosophical discussion of the nature
of belief itself, drawing on the work of Jon Elster and histo-
rian of religion Jonathon Smith, among others. He skillfully
and systematically uses interview and testimony data to in-
form his argument and illustrate how memories of conver-
sion emphasize God’s role and deemphasize the role of the
convert himself.
In a similar vein, Smilde’s meticulous attention to the
words of his informants allows him to see that issues of
self and the family are not deemed (by Venezuelan evan-
gelicals) to exist outside of the realm of spirituality. Thus,
projects of personal transformation that focus on them are
not construed as “instrumental” within this conceptual sys-
tem. The same cannot be said for business success and the
prosperity gospel.
The section of the book on “relational imagination”
shifts to a consideration of how the imaginative reality that
is Venezuelan evangelicalism is limited and framed by the

individual’s particular network location. This goes a long
way toward explaining the question, “Why doesn’t everyone
convert?” Smilde starts from the point of view that not all
meanings are available to all people, or, put another way,
“not all culture is available in all contexts” (p. 153). A man’s
position within a social network, in particular his family,
will certainly influence choices he may make about conver-
sion in either direction. A man whose primary safety net
is a nonevangelical family is not going to have the same
freedom of choice or inclinations toward change as a man
who is, as network analysts would put it, structurally avail-
able. Smilde’s discussion of “modeling” and “ecological in-
fluence” provides an important contribution regarding how
indirect influences can affect the way the conversion pro-
cess works.
Smilde applies the insights of feminist theorists, espe-
cially Dorothy Smith and Carol Gilligan, to help understand
the reasoning of the men who participated in his study.
He concludes that his informants don’t exhibit “hierarchi-
cal reasoning” when thinking through problems but, rather,
“relational reasoning,” in which impact on concrete others
trumps abstract principles. For marginal men in Venezuela
(and probably elsewhere), social networks are key to sur-
vival, and, hence, it can be said that they think, at least in
this one respect, like women.
Smilde’s focus on religious conversion as a process or
project, rather than simply on the convert before and after
an event, is valuable. He well understands the importance
of “flat-footed, empirical research in particular historical
contexts” (p. 220) and describes his meticulous methodol-
ogy in two appendices. He carefully selected a sample of 84
evangelical and nonevangelical men, focusing his research
on two different churches in Caracas. As a male researcher,
Smilde found it was not possible to conduct one-on-one
in-depth interviews “behind closed doors” with female in-
formants, and so his conclusions pertain to male evangel-
icals, although in a few places he extends them to women
by inference. Smilde diligently used tape recording in his re-
search and includes verbatim transcripts in the text, not just
of interviews but also of interchanges he witnessed during
participant-observation. These are fascinating and result in
a much deeper appreciation for the religious worldview and
explanations of his informants.
This book is one of the best to be published on the
topic in the past several years. If it has a shortcoming, it is
the scant attention paid to the unique characteristics of ec-
static worship that define this movement. Smilde’s evangel-
ical informants are, as is common in Latin American, Pen-
tecostals. As Smilde deftly illustrates, converts have their
reasons to believe. But the extraordinary transcendence in
Pentecostal worship provides an impetus of its own that
infuses and ignites the conceptual system represented in
the words of testimonies and interviews and should not be
overlooked.
Book Reviews  American Ethnologist
Reference cited
Stoll, David
1990 Is Latin America Turning Protestant? Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Privatizing China: Socialism from Afar. Li Zhang and Ai-
hwa Ong, eds. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008.
viii + 282 pp.
YICHING WU
University of Michigan
The study of privatization and neoliberalism has become
increasingly more visible in anthropology and elsewhere.
Growing out of a similarly titled workshop held in Shanghai
in 2004, Li Zhang and Aihwa Ong’s edited volume is a highly
valuable contribution to this burgeoning field. This impres-
sive volume brings together 13 solidly researched and com-
petently written chapters to provide a fascinating presen-
tation of the complex and contradictory processes of the
production of social space and formation of power relations
in postsocialist China.
The questions posed in this collection are intriguing:
How do pursuit of private initiatives, expressions, and lives
coexist with political limits and state coercion? How are
neoliberal principles—manifested in private accumulation,
self-interest, and self-making—both reined in and enabled
by the state-socialist logic of control? And, how can free
markets, private property, and private pursuits flourish in
a state-socialist configuration? In their editorial introduc-
tion, Ong and Zhang argue that the major paradox in rela-
tion to contemporary China is that private freedom can in-
deed coexist with authoritarian state power. In arguing that,
they challenge the disembodied liberal conception of civil
society, which assumes that market liberalization would
inevitably challenge the state. Instead, the book seeks to
demonstrate how privatizing needs, desires, and practices
can articulate with authoritarian rule, and how the state
and the private sphere, government, and individuals may
be “engaged in the co-production of practices, values, and
solutions that usually do not have a liberal democratic
outcome” (p. 10).
The book consists of 13 contributions by scholars from
several disciplines—such as anthropology, geography, ur-
ban planning, political science, economics, each explor-
ing the issues relating to market, economy, politics, and
culture from a unique disciplinary and methodological
perspective. These studies show how the state is intimately
involved in the making of the new subjects through de-
veloping capacities of self-government, self-improvement,
593
American Ethnologist  Volume 36 Number 3 August 2009
and self-expression. These new subjects, in the apt words
of Ralph Litzinger in the afterword, “are at once private and
public, at once of the state and of society, at once subjected
to the histories of the socialist present (socialism from afar)
and to the neoliberal logic that the energies of the individ-
ual can be productively developed only through the pursuit
of economic self-interest in a free market” (p. 233).
The chapters appear in two parts. The six chapters in
part 1, titled “Powers of Property,” explore the ways in which
ownership and control over property, land, business, and la-
bor power are involved in the production of new forms of
social differentiations and inequalities. These chapters ex-
amine the exclusionary practices and destruction of pub-
lic spaces in upscale urban neighborhoods (Zhang); the or-
ganizing efforts by urban homeowners against landlords to
protect their property rights (Read); the collusion between
the power of the state and the power of private property
(Hsin); the struggle over the control over revenue and in-
come in the context of China’s changing configurations of
landownership, finance, and taxation (Li and Sheffrin); the
introduction of transnational corporate codes of conduct,
labor management methods, and labor rights (Pun); the
appropriation of minority cultural images by transnational
capital and the associated rise of social stratification among
China’s peripheral populations (Schein).
Part 2, “Powers of the Self,” explores the new postso-
cialist biopolitics in relation to market, home, workplace,
and public culture, and the ways in which ethical prac-
tices of the self constitute new forms of self-governing sub-
jects. Chen’s chapter examines the privatization of biotech
knowledge in China’s fast-growing pharmaceutical indus-
try, focusing on consumption of wild animals in China’s
SARS outbreak in 2003. Zhan’s fascinating chapter analyzes
the complexities and ambiguities of middle-class identity
formation. Zhou’s chapter combines ethnographic observa-
tion on and historical analysis of Internet cafes to explore
the formation and mobilization of self in China’s boom-
ing cyberspace. Kohrman’s chapter is an account of the an-
tismoking campaign in the southwestern Chinese city of
Kunming, the capital of China’s “Tobacco Kingdom,” fo-
cusing on the ways in which regulatory practices together
with ideas relating to urbanism and modernity lead to the
emergence of a particular type of male subjectivity. And
Aihwa Ong’s and Lisa Hoffman’s chapters offer insightful
analyses of various self-fashioning practices of young urban
professionals who mediate multiple spheres of values and
sociopolitical interests: market freedom and statist author-
itarianism, the private and the public, the personal and the
political. They argue that privatization as technologies of
self-fashioning and self-ownership, instead of eroding the
socialist state, actually intersects with and paradoxically so-
lidifies the sovereign power of the state.
In diverging from conventional notions of neoliberal-
ization and privatization as profit-making activities limited
594
to the marketplace, the chapters in this book demonstrate
that they may also be understood as a subjectivizing pro-
cess that manifests in modes of thinking, managing, and re-
alizing of the self. In doing so, the notion of “neoliberalism”
is fruitfully expanded, from economic and political prac-
tices to symbolic meanings and semiotic processes. Called
“governing at a distance,” the neoliberal strategy underlies
a mode of governance that develops and mobilizes the indi-
vidual’s capacities for self-government, not by dismantling
the authoritarian state apparatus but, rather, by enclosing
the multitude of private choices and expressions within the
limits set by the state.
Collectively, these chapters capture important dimen-
sions of China’s ongoing socioeconomic, cultural, and po-
litical transformations and are cohesive and compelling
thematically. The contributors of the book refuse simplis-
tic narratives of a totalitarian state repressing the bur-
geoning civil society and seek to challenge the approach
that understands the politics of market capitalism through
the lens of a universal liberalism. What emerges is a re-
freshing perspective on the open endedness and fluidity
of China’s postsocialist condition, in which a wide range
of political, economic, and cultural possibilities are avail-
able for negotiation. The book is likely to become trend-
setting and exert long-lasting influence on future scholars,
not only in the China field but also in anthropological
scholarship on contemporary global transformations in
general.
Drugs, Thugs and Divas: Telenovelas and Narco-Dramas
in Latin America. O. Hugo Benavides. Austin: University of
Texas Press, 2008. 233 pp.
CYMENE HOWE
Department of Anthropology, Rice University
The breathless soap opera diva and gun-toting drug run-
ners that populate the melodramatic world of telenove-
las and narcodramas have risen to the category of pop
cultural obsessions in Latin America, and increasingly,
North America. In Drugs, Thugs and Divas, O. Hugo Be-
navides endeavors to understand political domination in
Latin America through the lens of these melodramatic pro-
ductions, finding that they embody ideologies of resis-
tance and semiotic transgressions of the hegemonic or-
der. He illustrates that the enthusiastic consumption of
these productions is intimately—if ambivalently—linked
to Latin America’s postcolonial condition. As the conti-
nent continues to grapple with immense social disparities
and economic challenges, the hyperdramatic telenovela
diva and the scofflaw narcotraficante sate a desire for

escapism and entertainment. But they also project new
ways of envisioning Latin American identities, both na-
tional and transnational.
Benavides’s book takes analytical cues from media
studies and cultural studies and discusses two interrelated
arenas where melodrama and Latin American social con-
ditions coincide. The first half of the book focuses on te-
lenovelas and presents a fine-grained reading of program-
ming created in Colombia and Brazil. Benavides describes
how these telenovelas attempt to revise colonial legacies
and guide postcolonial transformations, arguing ultimately
that it is through these consciously contrived images that
Latin American publics are better able to interpret them-
selves and their worlds. Benavides treats the nuances of
race and representation (particularly how indigenous and
African-descended peoples are portrayed and, often, omit-
ted), the complex and ambivalent constructions of sexual-
ity (overflowing in telenovelas and underplayed in narco-
dramas), and the performance of gender (often stereotyped
to the point of parody). The second half of the book sur-
veys the terrain out of which narcodramas grow, what Be-
navides calls a “narcosensibility” largely located on Mex-
ico’s northern border. Rather than detailed readings of films,
Benavides provides analytic portraits of contemporary so-
cial dynamics, literature (scholarly and fictional), and folk
saints. Narcodramas now dominate the Mexican film mar-
ket and, Benavides argues, work to present and propagate
a narcoidentity. Illegality is a key trope in narcoidentities
in which an “othered” protagonist is revered, antinorms are
valorized, elite categories of good taste are rejected, and the
real villain is the state. In keeping with the everyday non-
fictional drama that continues to unfold along the U.S.–
Mexican border—for example, transnational flows of peo-
ple, images, and capital—narcodramas represent an iconic
representation of postnational border subject whose law-
lessness is his (given the relentlessly patriarchal inclina-
tions of the narcodramatic genre it is always “his”) badge
of honor, his charm, and his appeal.
Telenovelas emerged in South America in the early
1960s to be followed by Mexican narcodramas in the 1970s.
During this same epoch Latin America saw a decline in state
sponsored and elite intellectual projects. Although explic-
itly coercive political relations and authoritarian regimes
are now diminished, Latin America must contend with neo-
colonial North–South relations, withered welfare states, ne-
oliberal statecraft, and the challenges of democratic gov-
ernance. Juxtaposing the popularity of escapism and the
often brutal conditions of Latin America’s political econ-
omy, Benavides argues that lived realities are indeed ne-
gotiated in, on, and through the screen of narcodramas
and telenovelas as vast numbers of Latin Americans tune
their channels, satellite dishes, and rabbit-eared televisions
Book Reviews  American Ethnologist
to melodrama. Because it exceeds “reality” in its overtly
indulgent portrayal of human emotion—whether the sex-
ual and romantic passions of the telenovelas or the vio-
lent excess of the narcodrama vigilante—melodrama, for
Benavides, illustrates how more subtle forms of political
domination and hegemony occur in quotidian ways. These
dramatizations are in and of themselves screens for life,
showing viewers the postcolonial condition in which they
find themselves: aware that the promises of revolution-
ary endeavor have failed to materialize, conscious of the
global inequalities wrought by borders, and keenly aware
of the frivolity of believing in political institutions that
have failed.
Benavides’s book is an important contribution to the
growing body of anthropological literature that endeavors
to understand media as an ethnographic object. With a
nuanced, poststructuralist interpretation of melodramatic
media spectacles, the book also draws from cultural stud-
ies’ strengths and the theoretical armature of Foucault, La-
can, and Martı́n-Barbero. Situated in Latin American, film,
and media studies, Benavides’s work seeks to understand
how the context of Latin American life—from border cross-
ing to patriarchal privilege—lures viewers into the fantas-
tical world of thugs and divas. Benavides’s book thus in-
vites readers to situate themselves in the imagined worlds
of the narcodrama and telenovela as lived experience on the
cusp of magical realism. While textual readings of telenove-
las are relatively abundant, what sets Benavides’s work apart
is the way in which he tethers the dramatic indulgences
of the genre to his analysis of postcolonial Latin Ameri-
can subjectivity, and to those sensible experiences of de-
privation that make the fictional world of the telenovela so
appealing.
Benavides relays the “methodological conundrums” he
faced, attempting to account for a lifetime of exposure
to melodrama and interest in the politics of Latin Amer-
ica. He carried out field research in 15 cities in Mexico
and Brazil (speaking with artists, students, and intellectu-
als) and conducting archival research. Partly because he
chose not to pursue the more traditional research meth-
ods of participant-observation and interviews, traces of
this fieldwork are, at times, difficult to locate in the text.
Readers seeking a more classic ethnographic approach will
likely find themselves appreciating the way in which Be-
navides is able to ethnographically narrate the telenovelas
he analyzes. However, the lived experiences of telenovela
and narcodrama viewers, their interlocution and dialogic
engagement with melodrama, the expertise and knowl-
edge production involved in the production of these me-
dia spectacles, and details of the economic conditions that
allow for their manufacture are not as developed as they
might be.
595
American Ethnologist  Volume 36 Number 3 August 2009
On Creating a Usable Culture: Margaret Mead and the
Emergence of American Cosmopolitanism. Maureen A.
Molloy. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008. x +
200 pp.
RICHARD HANDLER
University of Virginia
This concise, unpretentious monograph provides a fresh
look at Margaret Mead’s first four books in relation to wider
trends in American intellectual life. Molloy reads Coming
of Age in Samoa (2001a[1928]), Growing Up in New Guinea
(2001b[1930]), The Changing Culture of an Indian Tribe
(1932), and Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Soci-
eties (2001c[1935]) as reflections of developing modernist
discourses about nature and nurture, culture and the in-
dividual, and sex and gender in American society in the
1920s and 1930s. While she notes at the outset that Boasian
anthropologists contributed actively to literary–intellectual
discussions of American national culture, Molloy mainly
tracks Mead’s books as reflections (albeit uncannily pre-
scient ones) of larger discursive trends. Indeed, Molloy
remarks that “to locate Mead’s work in its intellectual and
cultural milieu . . . is simply to address Mead’s writings as
cultural artifacts—to anthropologize them” (p. 5).
Molloy’s primary thesis is that Mead migrated away
from a Boasian culturalist position (adolescent behavior as
a function of culture, not biology) to one in which “tem-
perament” was understood as a biological given. With this
development, Mead was moving in sync with powerful cur-
rents in American life, from optimistic calls in the 1910s for
Americans to remake themselves by remaking their culture
as one open to diversity and creativity, to the narrower, pa-
triotic, even xenophobic ideology that grew in strength in
the 1920s, championing a white nationalism understood to
be grounded in “Nordic” blood. Molloy argues that Mead’s
first four books represent fairly well-defined steps along the
path of this discursive development, from nurture to nature.
There are times when Molloy’s attempt to provide
one-on-one matches between Mead’s books and particular
stages of American intellectual trends seems strained. For
example, Molloy sees functionalism crystallizing in Mead’s
theoretical orientation in The Changing Culture of an In-
dian Tribe, yet as she herself notes, the idea of an inte-
grated, functionally (or organically) coherent society ap-
pealed to American intellectuals and nationalists during the
entire period covered in her book. Molloy attributes Mead’s
functionalism to her connection to William Fielding Og-
burn, on the one hand, and to Malinowski and Radcliffe-
Brown, on the other, without considering the influence of
Boasian configurationalism, a theoretical trend emergent
exactly at that time, and one that Mead claimed to have
shaped through her ongoing discussions with Benedict. In
596
sum, given the rather general chronology of these ideas, it
seems arbitrary to associate one book with one intellectual
moment or theoretical idea.
As is to be expected, Molloy sometimes misses the nu-
ances of anthropological theory and its intradisciplinary
history. But her larger perspective is productive. She po-
sitions herself at just the right distance from her subject,
not too close to become overwhelmed by the tribal details
of anthropology, but far enough away to be able to see
the discipline in its context in ways that anthropologists
themselves might miss. She declines “to evaluate the ac-
curacy of Mead’s ethnographies,” focusing instead on how
Mead “framed these interpretations in terms of her intel-
lectual heritage, the sociopolitical state of the United States
at the time, and her own intellectual trajectory” (p. 162).
This is a wise choice. Very few scholars have the special-
ized knowledge that would be needed to reanalyze Mead’s
ethnographic work. And, beyond that, American anthropol-
ogists will probably never come to terms with the legacy
of Margaret Mead. For almost half a century she was the
discipline’s public ambassador, and she did an enormous
amount of research and writing. Some of her work was bril-
liant, but much of it was banal or worse. She pontificated far
too often on things she knew little about, and, in retrospect,
much of what she had to say was confused (as Molloy thinks
Sex and Temperament was [p. 129]) or just plain wrong. But
sometimes Mead was right, and much of the time she had
the ear of the American public. Molloy’s book is as good an
account as there is as to why that was so.
References cited
Mead, Margaret
1932 The Changing Culture of an Indian Tribe. [n.p.]
2001a[1928] Coming of Age in Samoa: Psychological Study of
Primitive Youth for Western Civilisation. New York: Harper
Perennial Modern Classics.
2001b[1930] Growing Up in New Guinea: A Comparative Study
of Primitive Education. New York: Harper Perennial Modern
Classics.
2001c[1935] Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies.
New York: Harper Perennial.
Dreaming of a Mail-Order Husband: Russian-American
Internet Romance. Ericka Johnson. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2007. 194 pp.
NICOLE CONSTABLE
University of Pittsburgh
I have two distinct reactions to Dreaming of a Mail-Order
Husband. On the one hand, I am tempted to sing the book’s

praises. Dreaming of a Mail-Order Husband is a quick and
compelling read, reminiscent of a hybrid genre somewhere
between memoir, fiction, and journalistic ethnography. It
lacks in-text citations and has minimal endnotes. It should
appeal to a crossover readership from undergraduates to
nonacademics—including men who are seeking or corre-
sponding with prospective Russian brides. Such readers will
learn something about Russia, about women’s motivations
for wanting to meet U.S. and other Western men, and about
the difficulties Russian women may face when they go to
live abroad.
The book is a direct, well-written, engaging depiction
of six Russian women and their experiences as they attempt
to meet a Western or U.S. marriage partner. Despite the
book’s subtitle, and despite the author’s academic training
in information technology, most of the women met men
by way of so-called mail-order bride introduction agencies,
but corresponded primarily through letters (i.e., snail mail).
Each of the main chapters centers on one main theme and
one woman, each of whom the author has interviewed at
least once. The writing humanizes and individualizes the
women, thus forming a subtle criticism of the notion of
a prototypical “Russian mail-order bride” while pointing
to broad generalities about the Russian context based on
the author’s experience in Russia as a student and as a
researcher.
Dreaming of a Mail-Order Husband provides some in-
sightful information about the Russian context that, as
a non-Russian scholar, I found most interesting. For ex-
ample, Johnson asserts that both Russian women and
their prospective husbands are critical of “feminism,” but
they are likely to have a different basis for their critiques.
Russian women’s definitions of feminism are based on So-
viet notions of feminists as women “who want to fly military
airplanes,” and their criticism of feminism, Johnson argues,
can be seen as an assertion of their heterosexual femininity
(pp. 37–38).
On the other hand, as an anthropologist who has writ-
ten about correspondence courtships and marriages in-
volving U.S. men and Filipinas or Chinese women, I find
the book somewhat frustrating. The two main reasons for
my frustration are the book’s minimal engagement with re-
lated anthropological literature on cross-border or corre-
spondence marriages (despite a claim that the book draws
on interdisciplinary scholarship including anthropology),
and the author’s minimal concern about her positionality
relative to her methodology. For example, although most of
the women with whom the author conducts interviews are
interested in meeting U.S. men, it is not until about a quar-
ter of the way through the book that I was sure the author
is American—a factor that has relevance, given many of the
men’s criticisms of U.S. women as “feminnazis” (p. 26).
Johnson poses the question of women’s motives for
such marital desires. She concludes that, among other
Book Reviews  American Ethnologist
things, Russian women place great importance in achieving
marital subjectivity in a context in which women’s chances
of (re)marrying—because of divorce, a child, or their age
(in Russian they are considered over the hill at 23)—are
low. These three factors are strikingly similar to other schol-
ars’ findings about women’s motivations for seeking for-
eign partners, but given the lack of comparative informa-
tion could be misread as unique to Russian women.
The chapter entitled “Tanya: Trafficking in Dreams”
could have benefited from deeper critical engagement with
other scholarly work. Whereas each woman is intended to
depict a unique point, Tanya’s story is an entree for Johnson
to discuss trafficking of Russian women. As a fictional-
ized story, the chapter might have worked, but as a schol-
arly piece it is misleading. Tanya goes to the United States
through a work visa opportunity, not as a bride or fiancée,
and in Johnson’s concluding chapter we learn that the fears
expressed by Tanya’s family and by Johnson were entirely ill
founded. Tanya worked as a waitress and met a U.S. man
whom she later married. Yet, rather than use Tanya as a ba-
sis for criticizing the ill-founded popular fears that conflate
correspondence marriages with trafficking, Johnson uses
this example of a migrant woman (who is not a bride and
who was not trafficked) as a pretext to reinscribe and re-
inforce popular fears and stereotypes about trafficking. Re-
cent anthropological work suggests that there is little evi-
dence of correspondence marriage as a form of trafficking
and points instead to an overall exaggeration and hyste-
ria around the topic reminiscent of earlier concerns about
“white slavery.”
Several other important ideas are not referenced and,
thus, give the impression of being the author’s own in-
sights or unique to the Russian case. For example, Johnson’s
discussion of “the political economy of desire” and
her description of women’s self-ascriptions of feminin-
ity (reminiscent of what other scholars have called “self-
orientalizing”) are not referenced. In her conclusion, John-
son asks why there are no Russian mail-order husbands.
The answer to this question begs scholarly engagement
with the ideas of “global hypergamy” and “mail-order hus-
bands” discussed by other authors.
Johnson’s earlier scholarly research in the former Soviet
Union was on gender and the spread of Internet technology
(a topic we learn little about in this book). In the course of
that work she encountered women who were writing to U.S.
men. Dreams of a Mail-Order Husband thus grew out of her
earlier experiences: “I found I could not stop thinking about
what the women I had met had said and done . . . the mate-
rial would not let go of me” (p. 6). She is to be congratulated
for writing a book that succeeds at the goal of going beyond
the “objectified and silenced” image of “Russian mail-order
brides” in popular media and on websites (p. 6). Had I en-
countered this book as a nonacademic study geared toward
a general readership, my criticisms would not be so harsh. It
597
American Ethnologist  Volume 36 Number 3 August 2009
is an intelligent and insightful book. Yet Dreaming of a Mail-
Order Husband raises deeper concerns about books that are
likely to appeal to broader audiences but lack adequate en-
gagement with a relevant body of scholarship and, thus, fall
far short of their academic potential.
Beyond Red Power: American Indian Politics and Activism
since 1900. Daniel M. Cobb and Loretta Fowler, eds. Santa
Fe, NM: School of American Research, 2007. 347 pp.
ANDREA SMITH
University of California, Riverside
Beyond Red Power attempts to disrupt the equation be-
tween Native political activism and the Red Power move-
ment. The editors argue that the manner in which the
Red Power movement in general, and the American Indian
Movement (AIM) in particular, has captured the political
and scholarly imaginary within the United States has ob-
scured the complexity and diversity of Native activism in
the late 19th and 20th centuries. This sizeable volume of
16 chapters attempts to contextualize the Red Power move-
ment within this broader terrain of Native activism.
The first section focuses on historical and legal ap-
proaches to the study of Native politics. The most helpful
chapter in this section is that of Fred Hoxie. He challenges
the representation of Native politics within scholarly liter-
ature, contending that Native politics are presumed to be
reactive rather than proactive, concerned only with tribal–
federal relations, and limited to formal relationships with
government entities instead of also extending to the cul-
tural field or personal domain. This intervention sets a tone
for the rest of the volume by expending the field of what we
would consider to be Native organizing and activism. In ad-
dition, the section is accompanied by a helpful diagram that
historically locates major events, policies and with relation-
ship to the Native movements at that time.
The second section, according to Daniel Cobb, at-
tempts to resituate the prevailing policy narrative of the
late 19th and 20th century—in which Indian policy shifts
from assimilation to self-determination, to termination–
relocation, to self-government—from the perspective of
Native organizations, individuals, and tribes that responded
to these policy shifts. He argues that “the persistence and
flexibility of both individual concepts of identity and collec-
tive notions of peoplehood could knock the so-called ‘pul-
verizing engine of progress’ off its tracks” (p. 59). As with
Hoxie’s previous chapter, Cobb as well as most of the con-
tributions in this volume, choose to highlight the role of
agency on the part of Native peoples with respect to the
598
development of Native policy. In this respect, this volume
seems to take a clear ideological stance within the continu-
ing debates within Native studies as to whether “encoun-
ters” or “colonization” is the best approach for studying
Native history. According to Cobb, this volume, borrowing
from James Axtell, positions Native history as acts of en-
counters that are “mutual, reciprocal–two-way rather than
one-way streets” (p. 57). This approach repositions Native
people as not simply passive victims of colonization. At the
same time, as Waziyatawin and Dian Million note, this ap-
proach can also serve as an apology for colonization—in
which acts of genocide and dispossession get recast as “mu-
tual.” Here, the analysis of Glen Coulthard could be help-
ful in resituating the debate. He notes that it is important
to look at areas of resistance, but one should also assess
the impact and the effectiveness of this resistance. In this
way, resistance does not become so analytically flattened
as to become meaningless. And in this volume, while there
is a tendency to celebrate resistance without a critical as-
sessment of its effects, some of the chapters do provide a
critical approach, particularly D. Anthony Tyeeme Clark’s
assessment of the Society of American Indians. This stand-
out chapter also provides a helpful intervention in how we
can assess the impact of Native activism by calling on schol-
ars to not just look at formal organizations or tribal govern-
ments but also to informal networks of Native activists that
make significant impacts on the lives of Native peoples in
ways that often go unnoticed in the historical record.
In the third section, the volume looks at diverse forms
of political activism in the contemporary moment. Issues
covered include Indian gaming, federal versus state recog-
nition, cultural revitalization, and land–mineral rights.
The strength of this book is its broad reach, both ge-
ographically and topically. At the same time, however, this
breadth contributes to some incoherency in the volume. It
is not always clear how many of the chapters fit into the pa-
rameters of the volume defined by the editors. The volume
claims that the chapters contextualize the Red Power move-
ment, but almost no chapters actually situate their analy-
sis with respect to Red Power. Particularly in the last sec-
tion, the volume seems to be a collection of motley issues in
Indian country rather than a coherent set of chapters con-
textualizing Red Power within a broader terrain of Native
activism.
In addition, despite the breadth of this volume, the
modes of political organizing tend to focus on those that
reside within a capitalist framework and that assume the
primacy of federal or state recognition. The result is that
the Red Power movement gets implicitly cast as the most
“radical” version of Native activism by which the modes of
organizing described in this volume are set against. This
tendency is probably the result of the fact that most of the
chapters focus on activism at the level of tribal governments
rather than on grassroots organizations. Consequently,

those forms of Native organizing that explicitly challenge
capitalism and the politics of state recognition (and that
would challenge AIM for failing to sufficiently do so) are
not covered in this volume. A focus on the indigenous
environmental movement (such as the Indigenous Environ-
mental Network) would have been a helpful way to dra-
matize forms of Native organizing that are explicitly anti-
capitalist. One chapter that does gesture in this direction is
Loretta Fowler’s comparative analysis of tribal sovereignty
movements, in which she assesses the relationship between
tribal governments and grassroots movements and its im-
pact on political vision and strategy. Readers could refer to
Glen Coulthard’s critique of the politics of recognition for a
complementary analysis to the work offered in this volume.
In addition, with the exception of a couple of chapters,
the volume does not sustain a gender analysis of Native po-
litical organizing. Therefore, the volume misses an oppor-
tunity to focus on forms of Native organizing that are fo-
cused on internal reform rather than on external claims for
recognition. Some attention to the antiviolence movement
in Indian country would provide a helpful lens for demon-
strating how some Native organizing uses a framework
of sovereignty to challenge internalized colonialism and its
resultant patriarchal ideologies within Native communities.
It should be noted, however, that a few chapters, such as the
ones written by Daryl Baldwin and Julie Olds, do focus on
cultural revitalization as political organizing, even if it does
not have a specific gender lens.
Of course, no volume can adequately cover the di-
verse ideologies, movements, and strategies within Na-
tive communities, which is a central intervention the book
is making. This book does not seek to replace the “Red
Power” paradigm for understanding Native activism with an
equally restrictive alternative paradigm. Rather, it opens up
this field in a manner that will undoubtedly encourage fu-
ture scholarly inquiry into new areas of research that may
not be directly covered in this volume. As a result, this vol-
ume is an invaluable contribution to the study of Native pol-
itics and political activism.
Globalization in Rural Mexico: Three Decades of Change.
Frances Abrahamer Rothstein. Austin: University of Texas
Press, 2007. 205 pp.
JANE L. COLLINS
University of Wisconsin, Madison
In 1996, the collaborative team of feminist researchers
known as J. K. Gibson-Graham wrote: “It is the way capital-
ism has been thought that has made it so difficult to imag-
ine its supersession.” The authors went on to suggest that
conceiving of alternative futures would be easier if we saw
Book Reviews  American Ethnologist
our current economic system as the site of multiple forms
of economy whose relations to each other are only partially
fixed and are always under subversion (1996, pp. 4, 12). In
her new book, Globalization in Rural Mexico, Frances Roth-
stein takes up Gibson-Graham’s project—challenging our
conception of capitalism as monolithic and omnipotent to
theorize it better. Globalization in Rural Mexico is a col-
lection of chapters drawing on Rothstein’s 30 years of re-
search in the community of San Cosme Mazatecocho in the
central Mexican state of Tlaxcala. This kind of retrospective
collection is often marred by the fact that the older work
feels a bit dusty and remains mired in outdated paradigms.
But Rothstein has done something different here. She has
gone back over her findings—previously reported in a num-
ber of scholarly articles and her 1982 book, Three Differ-
ent Worlds: Women, Men and Children in an Industrializing
Community—and has reanalyzed them in light of the new
economic relationships of neoliberal globalization. Over
the years, she has consistently traced the ways that wage
workers in rural Mexico self-provision. In this book she
shows the crucial role that their labor outside the capitalist
market plays in allowing households to cope with the new
flexible labor regimes of the global economy—and she sug-
gests that the ability to mobilize such support has liberatory
potential. In her words: “An unanticipated consequence of
the growth of flexible labor . . . is that many of the new
workers being drawn into wage labor today do not come
to consider it the only or best option for survival and re-
production. Consequently they can imagine a future that is
different” (p. 157).
To bolster this claim, Rothstein revisits her previous re-
search showing how networks of kin and community sus-
tained workers who entered the Mexican apparel industry
and other waged jobs in the 1970s. Self-provisioning sup-
plemented wages that were insufficient and mitigated the
risk of job loss. While these complex forms of labor outside
the market waned as households became more dependent
on employment, the residents of San Cosme did not aban-
don them completely, and, thus, were able to revive them
during Mexico’s economic crises in the 1980s. Rothstein ar-
gues that, during the economic downturn, people relied on
“lived experiences or recent memories of alternative prac-
tices” as they built alternatives to factory work (p. 11).
The community of San Cosme has long been tied to
the fortunes of the global apparel industry, yet few of its
denizens worked for maquilas supplying global brands.
More often, they have labored in locally owned factories or
home enterprises under complex systems of subcontracting
to produce clothing for Mexico’s national market. Paradoxi-
cally, as the income of working-class Mexicans deteriorated
over the 1980s, an opening was created for the community’s
low-cost garment production (a niche increasingly filled in
recent years by Wal-Mart). Goods produced at the very bot-
tom of the wage scale, Rothstein argues, were in demand
599
American Ethnologist  Volume 36 Number 3 August 2009
among workers whose wages were rolled back under ne-
oliberal globalization. The people of San Cosme could pro-
duce garments cheaply because they used family labor and
grew much of their own food. Rothstein decries the self-
exploitation of these practices, demonstrating clearly that
the residents of San Cosme suffered under global neolib-
eral policy shifts. But she observes that the self-provisioning
practices that unstable and insufficient work require have
contradictory effects. “Most analysts of flexible accumula-
tion have stressed the advantages . . . for capitalists and the
disadvantages for workers,” she writes. “We need to also
look at the disadvantages for capitalists and the advan-
tages for workers” (p. 155). Residents of San Cosme invested
their skills and meager earnings in small garment shops.
They renewed the social relations on which these shops de-
pend through more frequent and elaborate celebrations of
life cycle and community rituals. And they were able to do
so because they retained an alternative vision of how eco-
nomic life might be organized. These practices do not iso-
late or completely protect them from the vicissitudes of the
larger economy, but they provide a larger measure of con-
trol over one’s fate than factory work. The reconstruction
and reinvention of such practices and the networks that
sustain them, Rothstein argues, provide a “fertile environ-
ment for the maintenance of old and the development of
new hybrid and/or alternative discourses and imaginaries”
(p. 139).
Rothstein supports this guardedly optimistic theoriz-
ing with ethnographical detail culled from 30 years of con-
nection to San Cosme, covering the transformation of rit-
ual kinship and communal obligations, the emergence of
locally run garment workshops where labor process and
credit are organized by relations of kinship, and chang-
ing patterns of migration and consumption. She links
these village-level processes to a long-term perspective on
Mexico’s development successes and challenges and to the
global policy shifts within which they occurred. In the
1970s, both Rothstein and the residents of San Cosme as-
sumed that community relations would continue to de-
teriorate as individuals were drawn into wage work and
“modernity” arrived. Rothstein’s longer-term perspective
shows the waxing and waning of these forms of self provi-
sion in relation to changing patterns of capital accumula-
tion and shifting national and international political agen-
das. Reading this account can bolster our spirits in two
ways. First, it shows the durability of ethnography, even as
interpretive paradigms shift and we discern new meanings
in our observations. Second, the book’s remarkable sugges-
tion that hard-scrabble survival tactics may be looked at
from another angle—as a form of prefigurative politics—
offers new answers to the question posed by Gibson-
Graham: how can we begin to imagine and construct alter-
natives to processes of capitalist globalization that are often
imagined as all-encompassing and all-powerful?
600
References cited
Gibson-Graham, J. K.
1996 The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique
of Political Economy. Pp. 4, 12. Oxford: Blackwell.
Rothstein, Frances Abrahamer
1982 Three Different Worlds: Women, Men and Children in an
Industrializing Community. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Taino Indian Myth and Practice: The Arrival of the
Stranger King. William F. Keegan. Gainesville: University
Press of Florida, 2007. xvi + 256 pp., illustrations, 11 tables,
glossary, notes, bibliography, index.
STEPHEN D. GLAZIER
University of Nebraska, Lincoln
In this seminal study, William F. Keegan—curator of
Caribbean archaeology at the Florida State Museum and
professor of Anthropology at the University of Florida—
explores how epic stories surrounding the encounter be-
tween Christopher Columbus and the Taino have resonated
in over 500 years of history, myth, and oral tradition.
Keegan’s study focuses on the 1494 capture and murder
of the Taino cacique Caonabo. From events surrounding
Caonabo’s capture and death, Keegan weaves a complex
narrative addressing salient aspects of Taino political and
social organization, rituals, beliefs, and mythology.
This study represents an attempt to weave the writ-
ten past together with the archaeological record, both
of which—as Keegan readily acknowledges—are filtered
through the archaeologist (p. xiii). In contrast to much ar-
chaeological writing, Keegan includes himself and other re-
searchers (like Shaun Dorsey Sullivan) prominently in his
narrative and gives much needed attention to how archae-
ologists and historians play a role in the creation, interpre-
tation, and analysis of archaeological and historical “facts.”
It is impossible, Keegan asserts, to keep historians out of
history and archaeologists out of archaeology. He cogently
advocates a more comprehensive philosophy of archaeol-
ogy in which myths, primary texts, and archaeological data
converge to provide richer and more complex reconstruc-
tions of the human past.
Keegan incorporates data often neglected—or pur-
posely ignored—by archaeologists. He is very much con-
cerned, for example, with Taino mythology and how myths
inform the archaeological record and vice versa. His ju-
dicious reading of the early Spanish chroniclers (Oviedio,
Las Casas, and Pane) and his thorough command of the
archaeological evidence combine to provide new insights
concerning the legendary encounter of the Spanish and
the Taino cacique Caonabo. The main basis for Caonabo’s

political power, Keegan contends, can be traced back
to a single archaeological site (MC-6) on the Middle
Caicos Island of the Bahamas. MC-6 constitutes the largest
known village site in the Caribbean. Keegan makes a very
convincing case for MC-6 as Caonabo’s village of origin, but
there can be no one-to-one correspondence between vil-
lage size and political prominence. In aboriginal Trinidad,
for example, village location—not village size—proved to
be the key predictor of political success. But aboriginal
Trinidad lacked centralized political authority comparable
to Taino political organization.
In chapter 1, Keegan introduces the widespread legend
of the “stranger king.” He explores the legend’s meanings
with respect to both Christopher Columbus and Caonabo.
Both Columbus and Caonabo possessed mythical qualities,
and a dynamic interplay of myth and reality colored both
their lives. The idea of a “stranger king” has been found
in many cultures, most notably in Sophocles’s play Oedi-
pus Rex. The basic structure of the story is much the same:
a foreigner comes from afar; he marries the king’s daugh-
ter or wife, and then he deposes (by murdering) the king.
Keegan suggests that during the first years of European con-
tact, Columbus and Caonabo both became unwittingly in-
volved in a contest to determine which of them would be-
come the next “stranger king.”
Chapter 2, “The Legend of Caonabo,” recounts early
historical evidence surrounding Taino–Spanish interac-
tions with special attention to Columbus’s second voyage.
On his second voyage, Columbus returned to Hispaniola
and found that the men he had left behind to establish a
settlement at La Navidad were now dead and the settle-
ment had been abandoned. A rival of Caonabo, the cacique
Guacanagari, informed the Spanish that it was Caonabo
who was responsible for the deaths. A military expedition
was sent to capture Caonabo, and Keegan asserts that the
Spanish considered the capture of Caonabo “a defining mo-
ment in the conquest of the New World” (p. 51).
In the late 15th and early 16th centuries, Taino ter-
ritory encompassed most of what is now Haiti, the Do-
minican Republic, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Bahamas.
Keegan provides a comprehensive overview of archaeolog-
ical excavations conducted over this vast area, with spe-
cial attention to the Bahamas. He gives a succinct yet de-
tailed summary of major excavations at the MC-6 site and
a number of other Middle Caicos sites as well (e.g., MC-8,
MC-10, MC-12, and MC-32). Then, he offers an innova-
tive theoretical framework that goes beyond the prevail-
ing notion of archaeologists as “objective” observers. In-
spired by Bruno Latour’s Pandora’s Hope (1999) Keegan
adopts chaos and complexity theory for the analysis of
Spanish–Taino encounters. If any terms can be used to ex-
plicate the strained relations between 16th-century Span-
ish and the Taino, chaotic and complex seem the most
apt. Keegan correctly points out that territorial boundaries
Book Reviews  American Ethnologist
were highly malleable and that ethnic distinctions among
Island-Arawaks (Taino) and Island-Carib were hotly con-
tested. Many islands of the Greater Antilles might best be
described as “frontiers” (Figueredo 1978). Terms like Carib
and Arawak should not be seen as opposing ethnic cat-
egories but as part of a broad continuum of local identi-
ties and shifting political alliances; for example, when early
chroniclers published word lists compiled in specific vil-
lages, these lists do not represent ethnic or tribal identi-
ties. Native word lists were compiled from whoever hap-
pened to be in that particular village at that particular
time.
Chapter 4, “Kinship and Kingship,” meticulously ex-
plores some of the major tenants of Taino political organi-
zation. Keegan suggests that Taino social structure was flex-
ible enough to allow for an outsider, a “stranger king,” to
rise to power through an interconnected network of “avun-
culocal chiefdoms” (see William F. Keegan and Morgan
Maclachlan’s 1989 article “The Evolution of Avunculocal
Chiefdoms: A Reconstruction of Taino Kinship and Poli-
tics”). Taino kinship rules, Keegan asserts, forced previously
dispersed males into a single location. This, he contends,
set the stage for long-distance trade and solidified alliances
through marriage exchanges. In the Taino case, “avunculo-
cal chiefdoms” situated a cacique’s sisters in one village as
members of their mother’s clan and sisters owed primary al-
legiance to their mother’s brother (their uncle) who resided
in yet another village. Of course, such a system could eas-
ily have resulted in social paralysis rather than territorial
expansion.
Keegan’s concluding chapters outline his (and Shaun
Dorsey Sullivan’s) extensive archaeological research in the
Turks and Caicos Islands. Sullivan mapped the site in
the 1970s, did intensive surface collection, and conducted
limited excavations, while Keegan—who conducted more
extensive excavations in the 1980s—did faunal and soil
analysis. Keegan concluded that MC-6 is a late prehistoric
site occupied from about 1300 C.E. to the time of contact.
He suggests that the site was occupied year round, and
identifies the cacique’s Caonabo’s residence as Structure
VIII. MC-6’s layout, Keegan contends, is typical of Lucayan
sites. Material remains from the site consist of undecorated
Palmetto ware, stone and shell beads, and carved shells. He
argues on the basis of a preliminary spatial analysis that the
MC-6 site was deliberately laid out to depict principles of
Taino cosmology. Structures are associated with unique as-
tronomical alignments (e.g., the double rainbow) that sym-
bolize a cacique’s power.
This study successfully synthesizes over 25 years of
painstaking, innovative research and constitutes a much
broader perspective on Taino myth and society than that
offered by previous studies. Keegan’s prose is clear and con-
cise, and his interpretations are erudite, original, and highly
provocative.
601
American Ethnologist  Volume 36 Number 3 August 2009
Reference cited
Figueredo, Alfredo E.
1978 The Virgin Islands as an Historical Frontier between
the Tainos and the Caribs. Revista/Review Interamericana
8(3):393–399.
Latour, Bruno
1999. Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Keegan, William F., and Morgan Maclachlan
1989 The Evolution of Avunculocal Chiefdoms: A Reconstruc-
tion of Taino Kinship and Politics. American Anthropologist
91:613–630.
American Karma: Race, Culture, and Identity in the In-
dian Diaspora. Sunil Bhatia. New York: New York University
Press, 2007. xi + 270 pp.
LAURA KUNREUTHER
Bard College
Sunil Bhatia’s American Karma is an exploration of the
significance of race and ethnicity among middle- and
upper-class Indian professionals in the Connecticut sub-
urbs. Writing as a “cultural psychologist,” Bhatia draws on
the ethnographic methods of anthropologists to compli-
cate universal models of acculturation and assimilation that
characterize psychologists’ approaches to immigration. Sit-
uating the struggles and privileges of this diasporic com-
munity within their experience of American concepts of
“race” serves as an important corrective to such psycholog-
ical models that tend to interpret “culture” and “ethnicity”
as variables that a person can choose to embrace or dismiss.
As a book that engages in issues like race and the ambiguous
nature of identity, significant to other diasporic communi-
ties, it is a welcome addition to the field of diaspora studies.
In Bhatia’s initial two chapters, he lays out the key the-
oretical and methodological issues he seeks to address in
the book. Bhatia situates the subjects of his study as post-
1965 immigrants, who benefited from the Immigration and
Naturalization Act that facilitated the immigration of many
more migrants from the Global South. Prior to this act, Bha-
tia briefly discusses, there was one other significant wave
of Indian immigration: the Punjabis, who worked on lum-
ber mills and railroads of the Pacific West at the turn of the
20th century. Immigration virtually halted after 1917, when
laws passed that banned Asians from entering the United
States until 1946, when Indians were given the right to be-
come American citizens. In response to labor shortages and
the civil rights movement in the 1960s, the 1965 Act passed,
which enabled highly qualified, skilled workers to enter the
United States. Professional Indians, particularly those in the
field of information technology, thus began to seek class
602
and status mobility in the United States. As an effect of the
1965 Act, these professional Indians began to embrace the
myth of the “model minority”—a group of migrants who
have been particular successful within the United States—
a myth that occludes their own privileged position prior to
arriving in the United States. Bhatia’s aim is to complicate
models of acculturation that rely on ideas like the “model
minority” by turning to Bakhtin’s notion of “voice” and the
dialogical self, in which there are differing and often con-
tradictory ideas about assimilation or acculturation within
a single person.
Bakhtin’s concept of “voice” and the “dialogic self”
serves as a key inspiration throughout American Karma,
described most fully in chapters 3 and 4. In both chap-
ters, Bhatia unravels the various nodes of difference (racial–
cultural) and ambivalence that construct a diasporic In-
dian professional self. Chapter 3 outlines the ways in which
Bakhtin’s notion of “voice” challenges “a static, core, un-
changing self” by drawing attention to the voice of “other-
ness” professional Indians in the diaspora experience from
dominant U.S. culture (p. 117). Most strikingly, I sensed
how these professional diasporic Indians’ own privilege and
class status felt compromised when confronted with Amer-
ican racism in their children’s classrooms, in their gated
communities, and in their jobs. Thus, it would have been
especially revealing to also discuss in detail the “voice of
privilege” that struggles alongside the “voice of otherness,”
both constituting this particular diaspora subjectivity. Bha-
tia notes that “many of the participants had good, profes-
sional, well-paying jobs and were well aware of their priv-
ileges, for others, the consequences of being different and
being Indian were severe” (p. 151). I wanted to hear more
about how people were aware of the privilege, and how this
knowledge affected their experience and narratives of cul-
tural or racial difference. How do suburban elites relate to
the laboring class of Indians in the diaspora? To what degree
do they mutually reinforce racial stereotypes in the United
States to distinguish themselves as class superiors?
Chapters 4 and 5 begin to tackle the ambivalent ex-
perience of racial difference. Here Bhatia describes how
professional Indians in suburban Connecticut circumvent
racial stereotypes by emphasizing sameness, universality,
and merit as the primary basis on which they and their work
is judged. Given that most of his subjects are scientists this
is, perhaps, no surprise. Very few, for example, reflect on
their social position (no doubt generations deep) prior to
coming to the United States as a key factor in their success,
a fact Bhatia occasionally mentions. When one of his sub-
jects declares that racism is part of human nature, the man
then quickly removes himself from any such accusation by
claiming that he, like his fellow colleagues, does not think
this way because they are cosmopolitans. Such statements
call for greater reflection on the way social factors like caste
and class make their way into the everyday discourse and

practice of these professionals. To what degree are the un-
spoken habits of class and caste central to their frequent
discourse about universal knowledge, core humanity, merit,
or sameness between scientists? These questions, unfortu-
nately, lay at the margins of Bhatia’s analysis.
In chapter 6, Bhatia continues the theme of “enigma of
brown privilege,” and shows the ways in which the profes-
sionals he spoke with emphasized their closeness to white
culture and their distance from “blackness” (p. 185). In an
attempt to counter psychological universal models of ac-
culturation, Bhatia argues that professional Indians in the
diaspora negotiate the voices of “assignation,” which de-
nounce them as racial others, and the voices of “assertion,”
in which they themselves assert cultural sameness. Despite
the intent to complicate psychological notions of self, the
designations of “assertion” and “assignation” depend on an
already defined individual self that either asserts itself or in-
corporates the assignations of others. This seems quite dif-
ferent than Bakhtin’s dictum that “every voice is half some-
one else’s,” in which the “self” itself is always already made
up of other’s discourse. Here is one clear tension in the
ethnographic, cultural approach Bhatia adopts and the field
of psychology from which he writes.
Finally, chapter 7 addresses the classic dialectic be-
tween life in the diaspora and the imagined or real connec-
tions to “homeland.” For most of these professionals, the
“return” to India is not imagined as a real one, though most
visit India with their children almost every year. As in many
diasporic communities, we see that the home becomes the
space for the re-creation of “homeland” culture, helping to
constitute a “double-consciousness” that Du Bois has so fa-
mously written of the African American experience.
While the material in American Karma was fascinat-
ing, I found that the ethnographic observations (based
primarily on direct interviews) were not always pushed
deep enough, and the analysis of class privilege was strik-
ingly absent. Bhatia’s turn toward ethnographic methods
is nonetheless a laudable move to complicate psychologi-
cal universals and toward understanding the ambiguities of
this professional class identity that cannot be simply classi-
fied as assimilation.
Rebel between Spirit and Law: Ahmad Zarruq, Sainthood,
and Authority in Islam. Scott Kugle. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2006. xii + 305 pp.
EMILIO SPADOLA
Colgate University
Islamic modernists, along with anthropologists of Islam
(Geertz and Gellner, among others), have generally con-
Book Reviews  American Ethnologist
sidered Sufi saint veneration irreconcilable with juridical
thought. Recent studies of pre- and early modern Muslim
saints, however, describe a more nuanced history of their
interdependence. Scott Kugle’s reading of the life and works
of Ahmad Zarruq (1442–94)—“the prime exemplar of Ju-
ridical Sufism” (p. 36)—adds historical and analytical sub-
stance to the literature. Kugle’s text moves between the
15th and 21st centuries, between a particular history and
a social theory of sainthood; it weaves this Moroccan-born
Sufi’s story into the Islamic political and spiritual currents
of the day, and it challenges some tenacious ethnographic
assumptions.
A good portion of the text (chs. 3, 4, and 5) examines
Zarruq’s thought in relation to his life, from the waning days
of the Marinid dynasty in Fez, to Cairo and Mecca, and,
finally, to Misurata, Libya. Orphaned shortly after birth,
Zarruq found temporary refuge in competing Sufi circles
of Fez. In a state madrasa he studied juridical or “Usuli”
Sufism, an intellectual school binding Sufi devotion to Is-
lam’s legal “roots,” the Qur’an, the Prophet, and his pious
cohort. Outside of school Zarruq devoted himself to a mag-
netic Sufi leader of rising shurafa’, Sufis claiming political
authority based on their descent from the Prophet. In 1465,
when shurafa’ overthrew the Marinid rulers, Zarruq con-
demned the revolt on juridical grounds. Such rectitude was
dangerous: branded an enemy of the new regime, Zarruq
fled his natal city for the east. Through pilgrimages to Tlem-
cen and Mecca, devotion to a saint in Cairo, and study at
al-Azhar, Zarruq eventually reestablished his name, forg-
ing a textual call “to reform Sufi communities from within”
(p. 134). Contemporary responses to Zarruq’s work, how-
ever, were mixed: he gathered disciples east of Morocco,
but his episodic returns to Fez yielded few converts and
much contempt. He died in 1494 amongst his disciples
in Libya.
For Kugle, Zarruq’s enduring significance derives on
the one hand from his juridical Sufi reformism, and, on the
other, from his counterexample for ethnographers and cur-
rent anti-Sufi modernists and jihadis. Indeed, speaking to
the current geopolitical climate, the author is forthright in
advocating a Zarruqian “integral Islam” that welcomes Sufi
devotion, that binds together islam (conforming to God’s
will) and iman (faith in God and the Prophet) on the broad
base of ihsan (sincere virtue).
The author sees Zarruq’s integral Islam as the basis of
his reformism, which, in sum, called for Sufi communities
to coalesce around only those Sufis first trained as jurists.
In this effort, the saint gave precedence to law: He “insisted
that his disciples be jurists first, then Sufis (rather then Sufis
first, then jurists)” (p. 138); Sufism, he argued, is “not sound
without jurisprudence” (p. 131). Kugle neglects to address
the evident difference between “integral” equivalence and
Zarruq’s clear privileging of law. But his fine portrait of shar-
ifian Morocco helpfully explains the saint’s stance: As an
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American Ethnologist  Volume 36 Number 3 August 2009
Usuli, Zarruq meant to bind Sufi practice to law; as a Sufi in
Fez, he called on law to guard saints from the corrosive will
to power. Put simply, saints could touch Sufis, but no saint,
sharifs included, should “expect to directly influence issues
of public order” (p. 139). Little wonder, then, that Zarruq’s
call fell on deaf ears in Fez.
Kugle is a graceful writer and a thorough historian;
his portrait of Zarruq draws on the saint’s letters and
manuscripts, on Zarruq’s Sufi predecessors’ works, on
early modern commentaries by critics and disciples from
Morocco to the Mughal Empire, and on more recent (18th-
21st-century) modern assessments of his work. Kugle has
also read a good range of secondary sources in the anthro-
pology of religion. His challenge to anthropology takes issue
mainly with Geertz. Like Vincent Cornell, he rejects Geertz’s
notion of “Baraka” as a mystical power or gift “possessed”
by saints (p. 100); sainthood, he argues, is social. It should
be noted that baraka for Geertz was eminently cultural
and, above all, symbolic, yet Kugle’s emphasis on sacral-
ity in circulation—“the cultural logic of sanctity” (p. 29)—is
salutary.
Sainthood, he writes, accrues via the social circulation
and recognition of relics or “secondary objects”: “the places
they reside, things they touch, clothes they wear, or even
parts of their bodies” (p. 30). As scholars from Goldziher
on have argued, the Muslim saint is a medium—and needs
other media, if only the eyes of his audience. Kugle, how-
ever, assimilates “cultural logic” to these “secondary ob-
jects” and to political power generally (p. 104). The saint’s
privileging of law over devotion, and his claim of exception
from society (p. 37) permits him not only to rebel against
sharifs but also “to rebel against the cultural logic of sanc-
tity” (p. 155). Culture, apparently, is devotion cut loose from
law. The shortfall of this theory, in this reader’s view, arises
from Kugle’s willingness to follow Zarruq and exclude law,
Zarruq himself, his writing—and, finally, texts in general—
from the social and “cultural” forces of circulation. He does
highlight the centrality of text to saints: “They are all in-
cluded in the textual genre of hagiography. They all ‘made
it’ across the boundary of distinction” (p. 33); and Zarruq’s
own texts circulated widely (p. 154). That sanctification of
hagiography among other relics, of hagiography as unique
among relics, must be considered part of the 15th-century
Moroccan cultural logic, not beyond it.
Kugle has written a fine history of an intriguing political
moment. His focus on the antipolitical Zarruq refines Cor-
nell’s model of the Muslim saint as one whose proximity to
God brings worldly power; and his vivid portrait of the shar-
ifian “revolution” is a gift to scholars of Morocco’s still-ruling
sharifian monarchy. Kugle, whose other work concerns the
materiality of saints’ bodies, might have addressed the ma-
teriality of hagiography. This concern, however, arises in
admiration of this book’s erudition and the author’s po-
tential. To the benefit of anthropologists of Muslim soci-
604
eties, and of religion more widely, he has provided sure
historical footing to better grasp contemporary sainthood.
Kyǒngju Things: Assembling Place. Robert Oppenheim.
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2008. x + 281 pp., illus-
trations, notes, references, index.
RACHAEL MIYUNG JOO
Middlebury College
In Kyǒngju Things, Robert Oppenheim offers an account of
the material political realities that emerge around cultural
artifacts and the role of these objects in shaping social re-
lations in Kyǒngju, South Korea’s preeminent culture city
(p. 1). By things, the author refers to “actual physical arti-
facts, knowledge objects and conceptual forms, routinized
procedures, and techniques, and subjectivities” (p. 11). Op-
penheim demonstrates how a number of things, such as the
high-speed railway, historical artifacts, landscapes, tapsa
(practices of landscape study), ethical ideas of “Kyǒngju ap-
propriateness,” activist subjectivities, and civic and state or-
ganizations interacted within debates around preservation
and economic development in Kyǒngju during the mid to
late 1990s. The text details how participants in Kyǒngju’s
projects of preservation and development use and inter-
vene in things, and how these things emerge as “interactive
stabilities” that “channel political possibilities and effects”
(p. 3).
Oppenheim demonstrates the role of things in crafting
understandings of place, in debates and decisions on land
use and preservation, and in the imagining of Kyǒngju’s
futurity. Kyǒngju emerged as a site of national impor-
tance with Park Chung Hee’s establishment of the Kyǒngju
Tourism Comprehensive Development Plan in 1971. The in-
stitution of archaeological and technocratic regimes around
the collection of national “cultural treasures” during this
period changed the relationship between the national citi-
zenry and objects. Kyǒngju objects were interpreted as rep-
resenting a glorious national past that legitimated the gov-
erning power of the regime. While the national government
continued to claim control of land and cultural objects, the
role of Kyǒngju citizens and local government shifted dra-
matically with the nationwide 1995 transition from cen-
tralized state rule to local self-governance. This text details
shifting politics around things and place during this pe-
riod of localization by tracking the debates over preserva-
tion and development by a variety of Kyǒngju stakehold-
ers, including intellectuals, activist organizations, religious
groups and figures, filial groups, politicians, and commer-
cial interests. The text offers an important case of how
policies implemented after South Korea’s democratization

(1987) worked in sites beyond Seoul, and how political de-
bates around local citizenship played out in the interrela-
tionship between people and things.
The author presents an incremental account of
Kyǒngju’s ontological politics beginning with the estab-
lishment of Kyǒngju as a site of national significance in 1971
and concluding with controversies around the proposed
construction of a high-speed railway through Kyǒngju
(1995–97). The first section, “Models” (chs. 1 and 2), de-
scribes the formation of ideals and templates for action
that prefigure the debate around the railway (p. 17), in-
cluding the establishment of citizens’ organizations around
Kyǒngju festivals and the emergence of ideas about ethi-
cal participation. The next section, “Levers” (chs. 3 and 4),
evokes the “techniques and objects through which the co-
herence of the railway routing was built more thoroughly”
(p. 17) by discussing the emergence of local expertise and
local advocacy on behalf of Kyǒngju objects and landscapes.
The final section, “Assemblies” (chs. 5, 6, and 7), demon-
strates how the ideas and practices detailed in earlier sec-
tions come together in a railway plan (p. 17). This final
section discusses the complicated processes of negotia-
tion and collaboration that ultimately result in the suc-
cess of a plan set forth by a coalition of Kyǒngju activist
groups. Through this cumulative approach, Oppenheim de-
tails how people and things “as human and non-human
agents . . . act on and with one another” (p. 13) by tracing
the complex actor networks involved in political decision
making.
Kyǒngju Things presents an important ethnographic
account of a new mode of ethical citizenship that has
emerged since South Korea’s democratization. Rather than
assuming the existence of a predetermined citizen-subject,
Oppenheim offers an important way of thinking about how
people and things come into being through their mutual
constitution and collocation. The interrelation of people
and things shaped a kind of politics of place that shaped and
depended on notions of “Kyǒngju appropriateness.” Prac-
tices of local knowledge garnered through tapsa informed
a particular mode of experiencing place. Through projects
of care, citizens’ groups assumed a sense of custodianship
and responsibility for objects. Furthermore, local spokes-
people used local expertise to assert agency over definitions
of place, and this use of local knowledge became leverage
for making specific kinds of claims about how land should
be preserved and developed.
The “models” of ethical citizenship and the “levers” of
local expertise are brought together in a discussion of the
high-speed railway line controversy. As a symbol of glob-
alization, a high-speed railway line through Kyǒngju was
touted as an economic boon to the area by state developers
and local backers. However, the routing of the train line be-
came a point of intense controversy, as the initial proposal
was seen as having the potential to destroy historical and
Book Reviews  American Ethnologist
spiritually significant artifacts. A virtual stalemate in the de-
bate between “preservationists” and “developers” was over-
come through the collaboration of a variety of Kyǒngju ad-
vocacy groups who offered a multifaceted plan to address
a polarized debate. By drawing on ideas of local expertise
and ethical responsibility, a coalition of Kyǒngju activists set
forth a plan that brought together diverse and contradictory
interests, rather than simply defending or rejecting the orig-
inal proposal.
In Kyǒngju Things, Oppenheim offers his own tapsa of
Kyǒngju political culture in the mid to late 1990s. He traces
the networks of connections between various actors—
people and things, and how they operate within asym-
metries of force in debates around democratization and
development. Oppenheim demonstrates how a political an-
thropology might take objects seriously by demonstrating
how objects matter at different times and in different sit-
uations. While further consideration of the effects of the
Asian financial crisis might have demonstrated just how
local and national projects were connected to the volatile
global economy, this account can be inferred through other
texts on this matter. The value of the text lies in its detailed
accounting of the assemblage of forces that shape debates
around Kyǒngju’s past and future.
Fiddling in West Africa: Touching the Spirit in Fulbe,
Hausa, and Dagbamba Cultures. Jacqueline C. Djedje.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. 337 pp.
KWASI AMPENE
University of Colorado, Boulder
Fiddling in West Africa is a culmination of Jacqueline
Djedje’s lifelong study of the fiddle in West Africa, which
has so far resulted in a dissertation, over a half-dozen jour-
nal articles, and contribution of chapters in multiauthored
books. Djedje’s engagement with this subject has led her on
a wide-ranging intellectual journey into the realms of his-
tory, ethnicity and musical identity, religion, gender, social
status, tradition and modernity, style analysis, and organol-
ogy. Compared to other geographical and subject areas in
Africa, the fiddling tradition is unusually underrepresented
in African Musicology (p. 7), and, as a result, Djedje should
be applauded for her landmark publication. She divides her
text into four broad chapters, and within these chapters she
probes into the intricacies of the fiddling tradition among
three disparate cultural areas in West Africa, namely, the
Fulbe in Senegambia, the Hausa in Nigeria, and the Dag-
bamba in Ghana (p. 8). As the author explains, her choice of
a “multi-sited ethnography” as a methodological construct
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American Ethnologist  Volume 36 Number 3 August 2009
is to avoid “using the findings from one ethnic group or so-
ciety to generalize about the whole” (p. 8). It is also meant to
discourage the wrongly assumed notion that West African
music is “homogenous, as opposed to a locus of diverse cul-
tural and performance traditions” (p. 10).
In chapter 1, the author maps out the geographical, his-
torical, and cultural landscape of what historians refer to as
the Sudan and rightly circumscribes Sudanic West Africa as
the site for her discussion. In creating a broad historical and
topographical portrait, Djedje skillfully draws together large
amounts of information in a variety of ways. These range
from sketching a history of Sudanic West Africa to matters of
the “fiddle’s” classification, distribution patterns, physical
features and construction, learning and playing techniques,
performance contexts and cultural significance, and, finally,
song types and performance style (pp. 11–42).
Because of the complexity of demographics in the
Senegambian region, Djedje articulates a compelling nar-
rative that identity construction is central to the Fulbe
(p. 54). The author makes it abundantly clear that the Fulbe
in this region use many instruments; however, it is the
nyanyeru (the fiddle) and the various performance con-
texts and associated traditions that “signifies and distin-
guishes the Fulbe from other cultures in the region” (p. 65).
The immediate neighbors of the Fulbe include the Wolof,
the Mande, and other groups resulting in ethnic identities
that are “constantly in flux” because of “interactions, inter-
marriages, and overlapping social histories” (p. 43). More-
over, the Fulbe are widely dispersed in West Africa, from the
Senegambia to Cameroon. Noted for their dynamism and
uncanny capacity to adapt, absorb, and integrate the fea-
tures of other societies into their culture and identity, the
Fulbe participates in the globalizing forces of a pluralistic
environment. The forces include the empires of the West-
ern Sudan (7th to the 16th century), European colonization
in the late 19th to early 20th century, and the postcolonial
reality in the 21st century. Minimal representation of Fulbe
music in scholarly writings contributes to the author’s con-
cern about Fulbe identity. At best, the Fulbe are mentioned
as part of music of the Gambia or Senegal. The only bright
side of all these, according to Djedje, is that Fulbe music is
afforded a balanced representation on commercial sound
recordings (pp. 59–60).
Unlike the Fulbe, identity construction is less of an is-
sue with the Hausa in northern Nigeria; rather, it is the con-
flicting attitudes about the goge (Hausa fiddle), the com-
paratively low social status of professional goge musicians,
and the leading role of goge in traditional religious worship
of Bori spirits that are central to our understanding of the
goge tradition in Hausaland (ch. 3). Known as “iskoki” in
Hausa, the worship of Bori spirits, which involves spirit pos-
session, predates the introduction of Islam in the 11th cen-
tury and although, presently, Islamic beliefs override tra-
ditional religious beliefs in urban centers, “Bori continues
606
to be the dominant religion in the rural areas of northern
Nigeria” (pp. 103–104). Like European Christianity, Islam is
a foreign religion imposed, through jihads and other means,
on indigenous populations in West Africa. As a foreign re-
ligion, Islam does not entirely address the spiritual needs
of indigenes, and that is why the Hausa in urban cities still
incorporate spirit possession in their religious practice. By
participating in Bori, goge musicians are responding to the
“spiritual and emotional needs” of those who have been
sidelined by the imposition of Islamic religion (p. 142). It
is noteworthy that the ambivalence of the majority Islamic
converts and the schism between the rural and urban re-
ligious practitioners has not diminished the patronage of
goge musicians. In a society in which individuals would
not express their opinions in public, the Hausa depend on
goge musicians to compose topical songs and through their
public performances, comment on moral and social issues,
express opposing views about government programs and
policies, and keep government officials and administrators
in check (pp. 141–142). Besides iskoki, freelancing goge mu-
sicians perform in nightclubs as a way of making a living
and surviving the capitalist economy in Nigeria.
Unlike the Fulbe nyanyeru and Hausa goge, the
Dagbamba gondze in northern Ghana is associated with
chieftaincy, thus elevating gondze musicians to a higher so-
cial plane (ch. 4, p. 169). Whereas history of the fiddle is less
documented and not well known by Fulbe and Hausa musi-
cians, the history of Dagbamba gondze is “widely known by
the musicians and others in the community” (p. 169). What
is more, the gondze use history to legitimize their profes-
sion. Since the gondze is a court instrument, Djedje’s narra-
tive is built around the institution of chieftaincy in Dagbon,
particularly the Ya Naa’s (King’s) court in Yendi, the head
of gondze in Bimbilla, the Tsimsi Tsugu festival, recitation
of royal genealogy, singing praise songs in honor of Dag-
bamba kings, and community celebrations associated with
life cycle of royals and nonroyals. Sadly, the chieftaincy dis-
pute, which began in 1960 as a result of a dispute in royal
succession in Dagbon, has seriously affected the gondze
(p. 197ff.). Also known as the Yendi skin crisis, the dispute
has had serious ramifications for the learning and transmis-
sion of knowledge about gondze (pp. 208–209). Like the cit-
izenry, the dispute has divided gondze into two camps and,
thus, created a gloomy picture for the future of gondze in
Dagbamba.
For a work of this profundity and magnitude, the over-
all clarity and consistency in Fiddling in West Africa is
astounding. It is, in part, because of the structure of chap-
ters 2 through 4. Invariably, the launching pad to the be-
ginning of each chapter is a brief introductory paragraph
that sets the stage for the culture area, followed by a pro-
totypical context for the particular fiddle, for instance: “The
Nyanyeru in Performance” (pp. 43–45), “The Goge in Perfor-
mance” (pp. 103–113), and “The Gondze in Performance”

(pp. 169–175). Having triggered the interest in her read-
ers with the above teaser, Djedje then delves into a de-
tailed history of the particular culture and relevant topics
about the nyanyeru (pp. 47–77), goge (pp. 114–151), and
gondze (pp. 175–220), respectively. For the last section in
each chapter, the focus is on music analysis under the gen-
eral rubric, “Form and Stylistic Feature of Songs” (pp. 77–
102, 151–168, 221–241). Here, style analyses are combined
with the profiles of three musicians in each culture area
to explicate how “sociocultural factors affect performance
style” (p. 153). The idea of focusing on the biographies and
activities of individual fiddlers in each music culture res-
onates with the current paradigmatic shift in the human-
ities and other disciplines as we reconsider our notion of
“culture.” This new paradigm presupposes that it is through
the activities of individuals, their responses to historical
currents, and the choices they make that, eventually, they
express shared culture. Additionally, Djedje combines the
voices of fiddlers and experts with her own reflexive voice
throughout the book. For each chapter, the author draws
on a wide range of complementary literature, maps, pic-
tures, and extensive endnotes (more on endnotes later) to
enhance her discussion. Additional enhancing materials in-
clude the appendix, which is a comprehensive listing of
the one-stringed fiddle in West Africa, a comprehensive
list of references, a discography and videography, a thor-
oughly written index, and a two-CD compilation of mu-
sic examples that are available online for purchase. Rec-
ognizing the sheer number of ethnic groups, even in West
Africa, with fiddling traditions, Djedje makes a passionate
appeal to scholars, in the concluding section, for “com-
parable studies on fiddling” in other parts of the African
continent for “a fuller understanding of the fiddling’s mul-
tiple identities within Africa and a continental African
perspective” (p. 250).
Despite the strength of Fiddling in West Africa, there
are some issues for consideration. For instance, readers may
find it difficult to understand Djedje’s motive for combining
issues of identity with stylistic analysis of songs. For the title
of this section: “Music and Identity: Profiles of Three Fulbe
Fiddlers,” and similar captions in chapters 3 and 4, are con-
trary to her statements in the preceding paragraph that she
was going to analyze three different songs to mirror the list
of features on pages 77–78, 151–153, and 221–223. Readers
may find issue with this whole idea of providing taxonomy
of “form and stylistic features of songs” because such an ex-
ercise leads to gross generalizations. Instead, it would have
been helpful for Djedje to transcribe a song, followed by
music analysis to point out the said features. In the scheme
of things, I find myself wondering if the profiles of the three
Fulbe, Hausa, and Dagbamba fiddlers did not belong to an
earlier section in their respective chapters.
Book Reviews  American Ethnologist
Another issue is that some of the chapters have pre-
viously been published elsewhere and, although, the au-
thor acknowledges it in the main text and in the reference,
she failed to inform her readers whether the present book
or chapters are contractions or expansions of previously
published material. A case in point is Djedje’s contribution,
“The Fulbe Fiddle in The Gambia: A Symbol of Ethnic Iden-
tity” in Turn Up the Volume! A Celebration of African Music.
Published in 1999 and edited by Djedje, most of the top-
ics and pictures echo her discussion in the present book
and a word of caution to her readers is not entirely out of
order.
Finally, although endnotes are vital to a book of this
nature, some readers may find the author’s use of endnotes
to be fairly excessive. In most cases, the endnotes disrupt
the reading and it would have been beneficial for the au-
thor to incorporate most of them in the main text. There
are several instances where readers are sent to the end-
note in two or three consecutive sentences as in endnotes
9 and 10 on page 114 and endnotes 18 and 19 on page
124 to name a few. The last issue is the author’s use of the
umbrella term fiddle for the nyanyeru, goge, and gondze.
Although Djedje argues convincingly for her choice (see
endnote 4, p. 257), I feel that prioritizing the English des-
ignation over existing indigenous terms negates a crucial
theme in her book that West African music is not homoge-
nous but diverse (p. 10). It is, precisely, the heterogeneity of
cultures in West Africa (and the rest of Africa) that makes the
music exciting and at the same time challenging for schol-
ars to seek for alternate ways of representing the music. The
term, fiddle, also begs the question: what is in a name? For
Djedje should have probed further into the values, ideas,
and the etymology behind the choice of names in Fulbe,
Hausa, and Dagbamba for an instrument with similar fea-
tures. Since the 1970s, and through the remarkable works
of some scholars, we have been able to replace terms like
“finger or thump piano” with the indigenous name, mbira.
When it comes to drums, we have a long way to go as we
continue to use descriptive terms including talking drums
for some types of drums. For until we, as scholars, make the
conscious, and rightfully so, effort to lead the way in using
indigenous designations for instruments, the true meaning
and understanding of the music cultures of Africa will be an
illusion.
Once we get past these concerns, we realize that Fid-
dling in West Africa furnishes substantive and intelligent
answers to various questions about the nature and pur-
pose of fiddling in Fulbe, Hausa, and Dagbamba. Djedje
makes a significant contribution to ethnomusicology with
far-reaching impact across disciplinary boundaries. Fid-
dling in West Africa is an invaluable resource for students
and scholars, as well as the general public.
607
American Ethnologist  Volume 36 Number 3 August 2009
Reference cited
Djedje, J. C., ed.
1999 The Fulbe Fiddle in The Gambia: A Symbol of Ethnic Iden-
tity. In Turn Up the Volume! A Celebration of African Music.
Pp. 98–113. Los Angeles: University of California, Los Angeles
Press.
Abalone Tales: Collaborative Explorations of Sovereignty
and Identity in Native California. Les W. Field. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2008. 208 pp.
SHAYLIH MUEHLMANN
University of California, Berkeley
Abalone Tales is one of the inaugural volumes of Duke Uni-
versity Press’s series entitled “Narrating Native Histories,”
which aims to foster a rethinking of conventional method-
ological frameworks for locating work on native histories
and cultures. Les Field and his collaborators have written
a rich and multifaceted account of abalone’s profound im-
portance to native tribes of northern California. Motivated
by the premise that certain animal entities embody cultural
meaning and significance, the author and contributors ex-
plore how abalone provides insight into native identities
and struggles for sovereignty in northern California.
For thousands of years, abalone, a large mollusk
species native to California’s coastal waters, has been used
by Native peoples for food, as the material basis of adorn-
ments and fishhooks, and as a central feature of traditional
narratives. Abalone Tales weaves together perspectives from
a variety of different contributors who provide multiple and
often divergent interpretations of the contemporary mean-
ings and historical roles of abalone. Field’s cocontributors
include the chair and members of the Muwekma Ohlone
Tribe, a Point Arena Pomo elder, the chair of the Wiyot tribe
and her sister, several Hupa Indians, and a Karuk scholar
and performer. The diverse combination of voices and gen-
res provides a complex ethnographic rumination on the
place of abalone in processes of cultural revival and iden-
tity formation among Native peoples of California.
The book is organized into three parts, with each sec-
tion exploring connections between sovereignty, identity,
and the relationships between native communities and
abalone. Part 1, “Artifact, Narrative, Genocide,” examines
the place of abalone in the histories of the Muwekma
Ohlone and Wiyot tribes. The first chapter narrates the
struggle for federal recognition by the Muwekma Ohlone
Tribe analyzing the place of abalone artifacts in this strug-
gle. The chapter also examines the role of anthropological
work in the tribe’s erasure from both from the anthropolog-
ical record and bureaucratic recognition. For the Wiyot of
Humboldt Bay, in contrast, abalone has played a significant
608
role in the tribe’s cultural recovery from the 1867 massacre
at Indian Island. In chapter 2, tribal chair Cheryl Seidner
and her sister Leona Wilkinson both speak about the story
of Abalone Woman, a mythic being who, in traditional nar-
ratives, is killed by her lover and transforms into abalone.
The chapter discusses the relevance of this tale as a part of
Wiyot cultural heritage, which can contribute to healing the
traumas of the past.
Part 2, “The Meaning of Abalone: Two Different
Abalone Projects,” continues with the theme of abalone as
a cultural trope. The chapters incorporate the voices of two
native intellectuals who discuss the centrality of abalone
narratives to their own tribes’ search for sovereignty. In
chapter 3, readers are introduced to Florence Silva, a Point
Arena Pomo elder, and her knowledge of abalone as a food,
an entity in narratives, and a material for regalia. Chapter 4
is written by the Karuk scholar and performer Julian Lang
and offers his perspectives on the significance of abalone
narratives within the larger project of revitalizing the Karuk
culture.
Part 3, “Cultural Revivification and Species Extinc-
tion,” narrows in on specific questions regarding the role of
abalone in regalia and narrative as well as a source of food.
Chapter 5 focuses on the Hoopa Valley reservation. Integrat-
ing story telling by Vivien Hailstone and Darlene Marshall
and interviews about Abalone Woman, the chapter high-
lights the fusion of traditional and contemporary interpre-
tations of regalia and narrative in the context of resurgent
cultural forms in the Hoopa Valley. Finally, chapter 6 com-
bines interviews and anthropological analyses of the de-
cline of abalone species and the trope of extinction among
California’s unrecognized tribes.
A sobering and powerful insight that emerges over the
course of the book is a glimpse of the impact that western
“extinction tropes” have had on native groups in California.
Field offers a devastating appraisal of how anthropologists
have historically been involved in processes of cultural ero-
sion of Indian identities as well as implicated in the failure
of some tribes to gain official recognition. This point res-
onates with Field’s collaborators’ contributions that draw
out interesting contrasts between the tribes struggling with
legacies of genocide and erasure and those less burdened
by these processes.
A related theme that recurs among the various voices in
Abalone Tales is the idea that tribal sovereignty is insepara-
bly linked to issues of cultural identity and revival. Identity
is not essentialized in these discussions but instead formu-
lated as constantly transforming in the context of express-
ing social being within relations of power (p. 9). Field argues
that for Indian tribes in the United States, identity forma-
tion has been constrained by three distinct forces: The ex-
perience of colonialism, the persistent state-led efforts to
define the meaning of Indian identity and police its bound-
aries, and, finally, the complicit and sometimes contentious

relations between anthropologists and Indians over defin-
ing these identities.
In keeping with the theme of the series, the book is a
self-conscious work of dialogical ethnography. Perhaps as
a necessary corollary, the result is a slightly uneven narra-
tive without a unilinear argument. Instead, views and ex-
periences of abalone are refracted through Field’s own or-
ganization of the text. Field’s engagement with the dialogic
project raises old questions about what it means to “elimi-
nate” the authoritative voice of the anthropologist in ethno-
graphic narratives, or whether it is even possible in the first
place. But Field is careful not to overstate claims that he
achieves such elimination. Rather than obscuring his role in
the text, Field makes explicit his motivation for the project,
his organizing voice, and the power of his choices in themes,
focus, and collaborators. One of the most compelling as-
pects of the book is Field’s elegant narration of his care-
ful and self-reflective progression through this process. This
volume is an important contribution to scholarship on in-
digenous politics and cultural revival in native California
and will be of great interest to anthropologists engaged
in methods of collaborative ethnography as well as native
communities interested in the tools of anthropology.
The Arab Jew: A Postcolonial Reading of Nationalism, Re-
ligion, and Ethnicity. Yehouda Shenhav. Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2006. 280 pp.
REBECCA L. TORSTRICK
Indiana University South Bend
Yehouda Shenhav begins personally to introduce readers to
the “dilemma” of Arab Jews in Israel, his subject. His Iraqi
father, we learn, made a career working for Israel’s intelli-
gence community. Shenhav notes his father and his friends
were a “nature reserve” for the new state, which stripped
Arabness from many while allowing a few to continue liv-
ing as Arabs “by license” (p. 3).
Much has been written about the tenuous position-
ing of Mizrahim in Israel and the identities ascribed to and
roles allowed “Arab Jews” by the Israeli state. As a found-
ing member of the Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow, Shen-
hav has noted in “Bond of Silence” that if Arab Jews were
recognized as a collectivity by Israeli society, that society
would have to reframe and reorganize many of its cen-
tral premises. In this current book, Shenhav departs from
this corpus by examining an earlier, prestate encounter be-
tween Zionism and the Iraqi Jewish community. His goal
is to elucidate why “the location of Arab Jews in Israel [is]
so complex, so emotional, and such dangerous territory”
(p. 9).
Book Reviews  American Ethnologist
His chosen case, laid out in chapter 1, is the settlement
established in 1942 by male workers of the Solel Boneh
construction company—built not in Palestine, but near
Abadan on the Iran–Iraq border. Hired by the Anglo-Iranian
Oil Company to build and maintain oil-refining facilities,
the workers remained in the region for three years un-
der British imperial auspices. The legal settlement provided
cover for the illegal entry of Zionist emissaries who traveled
to cities throughout the region where Jewish communities
were found to urge them to immigrate to Palestine. A histor-
ical “terminus a quo,” it was in Abadan that Zionism began
to systematically explore how to implement the million-
person immigration plan for Arab Jews. Shenhav explores
the networks through which Zionist nationalism worked
in this “third space” of Iraq—a place neither Diaspora nor
Eretz Israel. He notes its colonial dimensions—while the
Solel Boneh workers were not “colonists,” they were part of
a larger British colonial presence. The essential dichotomy
was that workers saw themselves as more akin to the British
than local Jews (the “others”), yet they were trying to recruit
these “others” as kinsmen to support the Zionist nationalist
cause by immigrating. As he notes, the Solel Boneh work-
ers themselves represented Bakhtinian polyphony: some
workers were there as true workers while others were emis-
saries disguised as workers; some true workers supported
the cause by teaching Hebrew or forming youth groups in
their spare time while others actively opposed and sabo-
taged national activity.
In chapter 2, Shenhav develops a “phenomenology of
colonialism” using Foucault’s concepts of “heterotopia” and
“heterochrony” to frame the differing perceptions of space
and time held by local populations, British colonial authori-
ties, and the Zionist workers. He explores the fluid constitu-
tion of Arab Jewish identity there within the frame of orien-
talization. Was Abadan a colony, as many workers called it,
invoking a European space, or a “moshava,” a Zionist space?
Was the proper “human material” sent there to realize the
nationalist mission? Who was a Jew and how was he differ-
ent than an Arab? In marking the “otherness” of the Jews of
Iraq, Solel Boneh’s emissaries were also attempting to “re-
cruit the ‘other’ into its ranks” (p. 71). They spoke of local
Jews in disparaging terms: “They can be turned into ‘hu-
man beings,’ but we shall not be able to accomplish that
task without the help of the people of the Land” (p. 72).
Although the emissaries recognized that local Jews were
“different” than Arabs, they could not articulate that differ-
ence; only locals could differentiate between Jews, Arabs,
and Christians.
In chapter 3, Shenhav demonstrates, using Latour, how
Zionism hybridized and purified the Arab Jews, as they be-
came both religious and Zionist. Hybridization occurred
as the Zionist leadership in Palestine adapted the earlier
mechanism of the shadarim, emissaries who went on reli-
gious missions to seek support for the Jewish community in
609
American Ethnologist  Volume 36 Number 3 August 2009
Palestine, to national ends in spreading the Zionist message
and recruiting immigrants. At the same time, those new net-
works were “purified” by marking them as distinct from the
parasitic practices that they replaced. In Iraq, secular Zion-
ist emissaries bitterly complained about the lack of proper
religiosity of Iraq’s Jews because they hoped to build on that
religiosity and love for Eretz Israel. They projected religios-
ity onto Iraq’s Jews in order both to de-Arabize them and to
nationalize them.
In chapter 4, Shenhav explores debates over popula-
tion exchanges, the right of return, and reparations. He il-
lustrates how the Israeli state created a linkage between
the 1948 Palestinian refugees and the Arab Jews who immi-
grated to Israel as a mechanism to block the Palestinians’
call for right of return. He continues this line of reasoning in
chapter 5, where he explores how the World Organization
of Jews from Arab Countries (WOJAC) attempted to con-
tribute to the state’s agenda by claiming rights to property
left behind in Arab countries to transfer those rights to the
state, which could use them to counterbalance Palestinian
demands for reparations. As WOJAC attempted to recapture
historical memory and advance its claims as an ethnic orga-
nization, it laid bare a nationalism that had created ethnic
difference only to deny it, thus splitting the national logic
and exposing its messiness.
This is a theoretically dense book but well worth the ef-
fort to work through. In the end, I found myself wishing I
could read this work written from the Iraqi Jewish side of
contact. How did they understand the Solel Boneh workers?
Did they “Occidentalize” the Zionists while simultaneously
yearning to recognize them as kin? The true tragedy is that
we will never know. The generation that lived through these
times as adults is almost gone, their memories dying with
them. Shenhav, at least, makes us ponder what they might
have shared, if asked.
Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of
Sincerity. Adam B. Seligman, Robert P. Weller, Michael J.
Puett, and Bennett Simon. New York: Oxford University
Press, 2008. 229 pp.
MATT TOMLINSON
Monash University
At the core of this book stands the claim that ritual and “sin-
cerity” are counterposed. Ritual, the authors write, is “per-
formative, repetitive, subjunctive [‘as if’], antidiscursive,
and social,” whereas sincerity is “indicative [‘as is’], unique,
discursive, and private” (p. 115). The authors—two anthro-
pologists, a religious studies scholar, and a psychiatrist—
propose that this tension is generated in all societies and
610
in all areas of social life, not only religion. The marriage
of anthropological, literary, and psychoanalytic insights in
a compact volume is welcome. In some ways the book it-
self can be seen as a ritual text, repeating its theme through
bounded variations as it gestures toward larger truths, with
the authors taking on a wide range of ethnographic, histori-
cal, literary, and musical examples to show how this tension
is worked on but never resolved.
Despite its insights and erudition, I found the book
frustrating for several reasons. First, the warrant for the au-
thors’ argument is that we exist in a “broken” world, and
they seem to take it for granted that readers will agree.
By “broken,” they mean such things as “fundamentally
fractured and discontinuous,” ambiguous, incomplete, and
artificially bounded (pp. 11, 44–47, 99, 112). In describing
the world as broken, they acknowledge that they are ar-
ticulating an understanding grounded in specific cultural
contexts, namely, ancient Confucian and Jewish scholar-
ship (pp. 11, 180). They use this understanding to disturb
scholarly tendencies to seek resolution and completeness,
which is useful, but they take the understanding to be self-
evident and universal, although it is neither. Calling the
world “broken” is an ontological claim that many would dis-
agree with (see, e.g., Michael Scott’s recent monograph on
Arosi polyontology).
Second, the authors use the term sincerity to denote an
“as is” orientation to the world in opposition to ritual’s sub-
junctive “as if,” but the distinction seems overdrawn. They
locate sincerity in movements that supposedly reject ritual’s
formal aspects, from Protestant reformers stripping away
Catholic ornament to punk musicians abusing themselves
onstage. Although they acknowledge that they are using the
terms ritual and sincerity as ideal types, and that the cate-
gories interpenetrate, the authors push the distinction hard,
especially in the book’s earlier chapters. Consideration of
Webb Keane’s recent work on the semiotic ideology under-
lying Protestant ritual attempts to create sincere orienta-
tions could advance the authors’ argument while perhaps
tempering its overstatements (such as their unsubstanti-
ated reference to “the tendency of modern societies to reject
ritual and diminish its usage” [p. 46]).
Third, one of the book’s strengths—the authors’ adven-
turous use of examples from a wide range of historical and
cultural contexts—is undercut by their use of invented ex-
amples that prove the opposite of what they are supposed
to. An example from page 117 exemplifies the problem. The
authors begin by criticizing scholars who use survey data
on prayer to evaluate a public’s “religiosity.” They point out
that “such surveys make no distinction in types of prayer.”
This is surely a fair observation, but to illustrate their point
they write:
The Protestant housewife, mixing her cake batter while
praying for a good visit with her friend, with whom she

has had some difficulty and to whom she will serve
the cake, receives the same ‘sociological’ significance
as the Jew praying ma’ariv (evening prayer) or the Mus-
lim at jum’a (Friday prayer). Aside from the ideological
aspects of such categorization, it is simply poor social
science. The Christian is, phenomenologically speak-
ing, doing something very different from her Jewish
and Muslim counterparts. She is engaging in a volun-
tary, discursive, indicative, and very private act. She is
sincere. The Jew and Muslim instead undertake a per-
formative, repetitive, subjunctive, sometimes antidis-
cursive, and social (even when done alone) act. They
are doing ritual.
Objections come thick and fast: first, this housewife is not a
person but a stereotype, Maude Flanders made even more
cartoonish thanks to the imagined detail of the cake bat-
ter. Second, each of the characteristics listed for Jewish and
Muslim prayers applies to her, too. She is performatively
acting to ensure the success of her visit. She has presum-
ably prayed like this before, and her present action gains
force from the repetition of previously “answered” prayers.
Her prayer is subjunctive, as she asks God for an “as if”
scenario in which her past difficulties disappear in the fu-
ture. She probably adheres to nonlinguistic (“antidiscur-
sive”) prescriptions for successful prayer, turning off the ra-
dio, closing her eyes, and so forth. Finally, when she prays,
she feels least alone, developing a social relationship with
divinity that creates intense emotional bonds. My third ob-
jection is that the authors put the reader (well, me, anyway)
in the position of arguing like this with silly invented exam-
ples, which themselves are examples of poor social science.
Finally, the authors’ style of writing detracts from the
force of their argument. In their preface, the authors con-
gratulate themselves on the success of their collaboration.
I agree that they have been truly collaborative: remarkably,
considering the number of authors and their different back-
grounds, the book sustains a single authorial voice. Along
the way, however, minor but irksome logical errors creep in,
as when the authors write, in their discussion of a classical
Chinese text, that “the world is inherently fragmented: there
is no foundation, there are no overarching sets of guide-
lines, laws, or principles” (p. 34). But the term fragmenta-
tion implies that there must be a foundation to crack apart.
And this book follows the unfortunate trend of overusing
the term precisely, using it to mark the parts of their argu-
ment that depend most on general assertions rather than
precision (see pp. 26–30).
Despite these criticisms, this book deserves notice as
the product of interdisciplinary dialogue. Scholars of rit-
ual and performance will appreciate the authors’ attempt to
weave together anthropology, history, religious studies, and
psychology in a single pattern—even if the resulting pattern
is far less crisp and coherent than the authors depict.
Book Reviews  American Ethnologist
References cited
Keane, Webb
2007 Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission En-
counter. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Scott, Michael W.
2007 The Severed Snake: Matrilineages, Making Place, and
a Melanesian Christianity in Southeast Solomon Islands.
Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press.
Authors of the Storm: Meteorologists and the Culture of
Prediction. Gary Alan Fine. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2007. 294 pp.
CAITLIN ZALOOM
New York University
Weather surrounds us and generates a continuous series
of questions about the future. What should I wear today?
Will my airplane land safely and on time before the thun-
derstorm hits? Will the hurricane touch down in my city,
or scrape the coast and head out to the ocean? Answers
to both such mundane and consequential problems de-
pend on the science of weather prediction. Gary Alan Fine’s
ethnography, Authors of the Storm, illustrates how forecast-
ers, or operational meteorologists as they are known more
formally, construct their predictions, and, in turn, lead their
audiences through the uncertainties of the day-to-day en-
vironment. Fine follows weather forecasters at work in the
offices of the National Weather Service (NWS), one of the
federal government’s most respected and least controversial
projects. The NWS supplies weather information for local
news stations, air traffic control, and the military. Each of
these ventures relies on meteorological predictions to direct
human activity: from the everyday choice of a commuter to
drive or take the train to decisions on airplane groundings,
the NWS produces knowledge of the future that shapes the
flow of our technoscientific society.
Authors of the Storm skillfully employs the techniques
of shop floor ethnography, illustrating how meteorologists
construct their predictions. Fine leads his readers through
the routines, emotions, and time pressures that character-
ize meteorological work. Empirically, this is new ground for
organizational research, but familiar issues arise for readers
in the anthropology and sociology of work and occupations.
For instance, weather forecasters confront the conflict
between workers’ skills and the juggernaut of technology.
Operational meteorologists worry that, like their factory
counterparts, machines will replace them. Although knowl-
edge workers are often set apart from factory laborers, dis-
placement by machines is central to the daily concerns
of both.
611
American Ethnologist  Volume 36 Number 3 August 2009
Which can forecast better, humans or models? This
question of machine accuracy versus human skill sits at
the center of forecasting practice. Facing this challenge, the
forecasters’ relationship to their work turns on a question
of legitimacy, both the legitimacy of their own skill and the
legitimacy of their science more broadly. It is, of course,
common to hear disparaging remarks about the accuracy of
weather forecasts. The meteorologists draw on the author-
ity of science to support their claims and, at the same time,
self-consciously negotiate their place at its fringes. How-
ever, the weather room is a very specific kind of shop floor,
one that exemplifies critical problems at the heart of con-
temporary knowledge work.
Fine introduces meteorology as an example of a “pub-
lic science,” or one that engages primarily with a lay audi-
ence and not with other specialists. He offers the key insight
that weather forecasters’ efforts to garner authority at the
edge of the scientific field actually shapes weather forecasts
and the production of the future. “Public science” is also an
apt description of meteorology because it links science to
governance, placing predictions of the future at the heart
of modern endeavors to know and direct human activities.
Today’s dubious economic environment has made forecast-
ing more prominent than ever as federal strategies turn on
the answers such predictions offer: Will the recession turn
into a depression? How long will the economic downturn
last? From the floor of the NWS, where operational meteo-
rologists do their work, Fine generates insights that probe
more general questions about how such predictions are
made.
In Fine’s skillfully produced ethnography, the weather
room stands in for a range of contemporary fields whose
main object is the prediction and control of the future. The
meteorologists’ daily routines illuminate the contemporary
quest for knowledge. In particular, they place the identifi-
cation and reduction of risk at its center. Uncertainty al-
ways constitutes a problem for such systems, and the future
is the most radically uncertain of terrains. Theorists such
as Anthony Giddens and Niklas Luhmann have located the
uncertainties of the future at the core of modernity, where
technological tools create their own uncertainties and haz-
ards. By showing his readers how weather is, in part, such
a technological artifact, Fine engages with these promi-
nent concerns for anthropologists of modernity and science
and technology. Authors of the Storm is an important and
compelling case study that deftly joins theoretical insights
and ethnographic detail to show readers how the future is
made.
612
Solovyovo: The Story of Memory in a Russian Village. Mar-
garet Paxson. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center
Press, 2005. 388 pp.
JENNIFER PATICO
Georgia State University
Margaret Paxson’s Solovyovo is—and is not quite—what
its subtitle describes it to be: “the story of memory in a
Russian village.” The book, based on in-depth participant-
observation and interviews in the mid-1990s, presents in
arresting imagery the everyday life of a northwestern Rus-
sian village the author calls Solovyovo. It paints the kind
of memorable tableaux that one might expect from a tal-
ented novelist, and in this sense it indeed weaves a kind
of story: a wide-ranging one that includes calendrical prac-
tices and holiday celebrations, healing practices, the mean-
ings attached to local landscapes, and both Orthodox and
folk forms of religiosity, spirituality, and engagement with
otherworldly powers. Yet this story’s plot is far from straight-
forward, as the ethnography resists presenting any easily
summarizable account of what happened in Solovyovo in
the 20th century—or, more to the point, of how all this was
remembered at the century’s end.
Most notably, this is not a story about how the end
of socialism impacted Solovyovo’s villagers. Although Pax-
son is careful to place them with respect to many events
and institutions (pre-Soviet through post-), the collapse as
“big bang” is notably absent here. Nor is this a story about
the continuity of primordial peasant values or Slavic souls.
Paxson points out that scholars and pundits have presented
two broad kinds of answers to the question of “what comes
next” for Russia: one that assumes that a universalizing,
all-absorbing capitalist marketplace will pull Russia into its
vortex and transform it into something culturally familiar
to the West, and another that relies on essentialized notions
of cultural identity to imply that Russia and Russians will
never really change (pp. 5–6). While recent ethnographers
of Russia have presented subtler pictures of postsocialist
change than those, Paxson moves further by eschewing any
“before and after” narratives at all. Instead she dwells on
lived, daily practices of remembering in which multiple
historical experiences echo, paying particular attention to
how these memories are attached to both physical spaces
(such as forests and other local landscapes) and symbolic
ones (“landmarks” of memory including calendars and rit-
ual observances). The specific points of reference—from

recollections of Soviet collectivization to individuals’ sto-
ries of contact with otherworldly powers in the woods sur-
rounding their village—come into and out of focus, spilling
out in different directions and reconverging at other mo-
ments in the book. This can be slightly dizzying, but it re-
flects the author’s view that practices of memory are lay-
ered, somewhat inertial, and not necessarily coherent.
For instance, in a particularly provocative chapter
(“The Red Corner,” ch. 7), Paxson considers the physical
and symbolic space of the “red corner,” where icons have
mingled with representations of tsars and party leaders in
village homes over time. The red corner provides a con-
crete context for attending to how a range of seemingly
competitive—but in many ways mutually resonating—
figures of authority, protection, inspiration, and domina-
tion figure in villagers’ day-to-day talk about past, present,
and future. Paternalistic, sometimes vengeful national lead-
ers share space in the village imagination with similarly
mercurial Orthodox saints and “trickster beings” (p. 262) as
people sort out how to deal with problems (economic, agri-
cultural, health related, psychological) and ponder to whom
they should turn for assistance. In practice, the answer to
this question is not singular but reflects a multiplicity of
pasts and memories: “Komu obratit’sia? Tuda. Whither does
one turn? There, to that mixed and manifold place” (p. 262).
This reading of the red corner exemplifies the book’s over-
arching argument “that memory is cumulative and layered,
and, yes, weighty” (p. 9).
What are the implications of this view for our under-
standing of postsocialist transformations at large, or of
rural lives more specifically? Ultimately, Paxson suggests
that because social memory “is supported by repeated
social actions that take place in some of the most mean-
ingful . . . spheres of life: language and metaphor, narrative,
ritual, religion, commemoration,” it is “stronger and more
resilient than it appears . . . desire, whether brutal or
benevolent, is not enough to re-cast the actions that carry
and reproduce memory” (pp. 346–347). Paxson seems to
Book Reviews  American Ethnologist
suggest, then, that Solovyovo’s villagers and their frames
of reference are to some extent beyond the reach of the
politicians, economists, or nonprofiteers who might wish
to remake them. While new social memories are bound to
accrue as large-scale economic and political structures shift
(and Paxson recognizes that privileged sites of memory
such as the red corner “can become charged with massive
political power,” p. 262), it appears that these will neither
thoroughly penetrate village imaginations nor settle as
superficial veneers on essentially unchanging sensibilities.
Rather, they seem likely to take up residence alongside the
specters that already occupy the corners and pathways of
the local landscape.
The strength—and for many readers, I suspect, the
difficulty—of this book lies in the density of its voluminous
details. Paxson is unapologetic about this stylistic choice:
So much has been said in ringing, essentializing tones,
about the relative malleability and slavishness (or brave
persistence of bullheaded stubbornness) of Russian vil-
lagers . . . I see this attention to detail not as an ethno-
graphic indulgence, but as the one way in which the
picture of memory—at a bird’s eye distance from the
forest to the trees—can be mapped. [p. 216]
Each chapter is lengthy, each a thick, often poetic, and
sometimes meandering rendering of the concerns (“Radi-
ance,” “Healing,” “Calendars”) that animate village life. One
must read attentively to track Paxson’s analytical points in
each chapter and to keep hold of them to see how the
threads ultimately come together. This makes the book per-
haps more appropriate for professional and graduate-level
audiences than for most undergraduates (this may be par-
ticularly true given that the narrative moves frequently and
nimbly around a broad theoretical terrain, from anthro-
pological classics such as Victor Turner to Russian literary
and folklore analysis). Engaged readers, however, will find a
great deal of value and subtlety in Paxson’s story.
613