1 1 1 0      R E V I E W S
Penny Harvey, Christian Krohn-Hansen and
Knut G. Nustad (eds.) 2019. Anthropos and
the material. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press. 272 pp. Pb.: US$26.95. ISBN:
978-1-4780-0286-4.
This book explores the role of uncer-
tainty in the relationship between
humans and non‐humans. Describing
global issues, criticising certain analytical
traditions, blurring ideological frontiers
or imagining a new methodology, uncer-
tainty crosses over all its chapters to the
point of becoming a ‘methodological
commitment’ (p. 20).
Four chapters examine the sublimat-
ing dreams and invisibilising asymme-
tries of concrete dramatic material and
social relations producing uncertainty.
Hoëm’s inquiry into the planetary scale
of the proliferation of ruins in an atoll
society shows the other side of the
dream of a dematerialised free‐market
capitalism described by Martin’s chapter
on Bitcoin. Following Krohn‐Hansen’s
call for an ethnography of the struc-
ture of contemporary capitalism, these
chapters describe how conscious human
intervention remains central in global
exchange relations (and protests against
material ruinations). But human inter-
vention is also central in tacit and unar-
ticulated oblivions of global ruination.
Neither Norwegian salmon industry
official documents that Law and Lien
read nor the ceremonies they partici-
pate in are able to reconcile growth with
unsustainable stewardship; fundamental
South American fishing and soy indus-
tries remain simply ignored or reduced
to an unknown correlation in order to
allow salmon industrial growth to carry
on.
Other chapters examine the uncer-
tainty that derives from the criticism
of one of contemporary capitalism’s
founding dichotomies. Melhuus’ exam-
ination of contemporary state‐produced
acts of kinship and Nustad’s explora-
tion of the conflicting understandings of
both what the landscape is and how its
material potential should be exploited
illustrate this blurring of the nature/
culture dichotomy. Following Nustad’s
suggestion of exploring how different
local practices and policies enact diverse
environments (instead of persisting on a
representational idiom), De la Cadena
states that ‘what territory is and what
kind of relations make it … would
depend on the world that is pronounc-
ing the term, the relations that it emerges
from’ (pp. 37–8). Furthermore, she
describes an ‘agrammaticality’ (p. 50): a
‘being with the land’ that is ‘impossible
to detach or break apart’ (p. 49) since it
would involve ‘practices of life that may
… make people the relatives of rivers’
(p. 37) and it would exceed ‘the possi-
bilities of modern humans and mod-
ern nature as well as modern relations
between them’ (p. 37).
Non‐humans also have a central
role in Tsing’s and Harvey’s attempts
‘to build conceptual and analytical rep-
ertoires that neither erase the human
nor render humanity as an abstract cat-
egory’ (p. 4). Uncertainty about how
issues ‘configured beyond the human
scale’ (p. 2) – such as that of Flikke’s
air as an analytic space – inflect our
comprehension of the human lies at
the core of their search for a method-
ology to study non‐humans and the
vitality of the non‐organic. Tsing looks
for a method to appreciate dynamic
‘forms of ontological multiplicity in
which humans are not the only ones
with apparatuses of agential cuts’.
Paying attention to ‘nonhuman rela-
tional apparatuses’ and rejecting the
‘irrationally magnified fear of positiv-
ism’, she asks how we could ‘learn to
notice lively encounters among non-
human beings’ (p. 222). Instead of
© 2021 European Association of Social Anthropologists.

limiting ourselves to human knowledge
apparatuses that make up the frame
through which we approach multiplic-
ity, Tsing aims to grasp interactions of
non‐humans with other non‐humans
that ‘make agential cuts, in the sense of
introducing apparatuses that shape the
emergence of matter and the material’
(p. 225). How to ask about response
and interaction without neither identi-
ties nor ontological unity among non‐
humans ‘in multispecies relations in
which consciousness and intention’ (p.
225) do not predominate? Tsing pro-
poses to think with ‘assemblages’: sets
of ‘coordinations across various ways
of beings’ (p. 231) in which one part-
ner can operate very differently than
another and without mutual legibility.
Harvey takes uncertainty even fur-
ther: from the non‐human to the ‘affec-
tive force’ (p. 144) of the non‐organic.
Aware of ‘the unpredictability of mate-
rial processes’ (p. 156), she explores
the complex and processual materiality
that unfolds through multiple relational
encounters: ‘how it is that stone and
concrete do (and do not) assume vital-
ity in human affairs, in ways that are not
captured by the framing of animacy’ (p.
144).
Finally, it is worth noticing this
compilation’s ‘awareness of the con-
stitutive presence of uncertainty’ (p.
2) – uncertainty as the product of ruin-
ation, uncertainty about the funda-
mental dichotomies used by its main
agents and uncertainty as a challenge
to take seriously non‐human assem-
blages – ends up advocating a healthy
and much‐demanded slowing down of
thought.
JUAN JAVIER RIVERA ANDÍA
Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos
(Peru)
jjriveraandia@gmail.com
© 2021 European Association of Social Anthropologists.
R E V I E W S      1 1 1 1
Ball, Christopher. 2018. Exchanging words:
language, ritual, and relationality in Brazil’s
Xingu Indigenous Park. Albuquerque, NM:
University of New Mexico Press. 288 pp. Hb.:
US$49.95. ISBN: 9780826358530.
This book aims to understand how Wauja
people of the Xingu Indigenous Park
construct their relationships with specific
human and non‐human beings, which
range from powerful spirit‐monsters to
ethnic trading partners. In correspon-
dence, while the first chapters present the
inner dynamics of the Wauja collective,
the final sections stress its entanglement
with the non‐Wauja world.
Relationships among humans are
addressed mainly through (male) lead-
ers’ speeches as they are pronounced in
public rituals. Their long and complex
speeches – which are contrasted with
‘Women’s speech’, considered as ‘gossipy
and unreliable’ (p. 15) – are addressed both
to humans and non‐humans and follow
a strict etiquette: ‘this admonition, sum-
moning, reporting, and scheming, with
the Wauja chief speaking variously for the
ancestors, other village representatives,
and the Wauja collective, and to his people,
his chiefs, the visitors, their patrons, etc.’
(p. 28). Ball points out two entangled and
complementary features of these speeches.
On the one hand, they appear as dialogic
and permeated by a continuous outward‐
looking engagement with others, a ‘linguis-
tic ideological cannibalism’ (p. 115) whose
‘altercentric ideology’ would orient chiefs’
speeches’ default goal of communication
toward taking the perspectives of others.
On the other hand, Ball highlights that the
way in which these speeches’ spatialisa-
tion, meter, and content together establish
a mesh of speaking subject and addressee
positions is characterised by a ‘multivoiced-
ness’. That is, they perform a simultaneous
dialogue with diverse interlocutors.
Subsequently, addressing chiefs’
speeches as an axis between grammatical
coding and cultural classification, Ball