Reviews Amit, Vered (ed.). 2007. Going first class: new approaches to privileged travel and movement. Oxford and New York: Berghahn. vi + 163 pp. Hb.: $60.00. ISBN: 978 1 84545 196 7. The anthropological study of travel has never had it so good. With a revived focus on ‘studying up’ (Nader 1972), gone are the days of following large group tours on and off buses, sitting around a stage waiting for visitors to show up for a performance, or stealthily trailing behind exhausted migrant workers as they leave the factory gates to enter the dormitory walls. The volume under review eschews the commonplace distinction between labor migration and tourism travel in favor of exploring what happens, in a cosmopolitan worldview, when people travel for long-term engagements in relatively privileged socio-economic communities. While most of the case studies in the volume continue to focus on a type of labor migration, this is labor of the most distinguished, most well-paid kind: corporate expats living in Indonesia (Chapter 3), award-winning cinematographers shuttling between Mongolia, Poland, and Australia (Chapter 5), and ‘volunteers’ paying to work 30 hours a week at a retreat in Hawai’i (Chapter 9). As editor Vered Amit notes in her introduction, it is these very people and their communities on whom scholars are casting the theoretical net of ‘cosmopolitanism’ and yet, as the ethnographic case studies in this volume demonstrate, ‘the elites once so identified with [cosmopolitanism] . . . are not, it would appear, very cosmopolitan after all’ (p. 9). Expatriate wives describe their lives in Jakarta as a ‘bubble’; Japanese wives in middle-class American neighborhoods feel obliged to maintain a Japanese household to make the inevitable transition back to the ‘real world of Japan’ easier to bear when their husbands’ tenure abroad ends (Chapter 2). For this reason, this collection of chapters deserve to be widely read and discussed – together, they demonstrate the imperative for ethnographic research in conversation, but not necessarily in cahoots, with reigning critical theories of modernity and the contemporary world. The central argument is stated succinctly by Amit: ‘[w]hat drives all forms of movement are the potentialities unleashed by expectations and experiences of asymmetrical distinction’ (p. 8). The case studies trace the unfolding of these expectations and experiences in various contexts; of particular note are chapters by Meike Fechter on expatriate communities in Indonesia, Karen Fog Olwig on the structure of migration narratives by middle-class Caribbean families in the United States, Canada, and Britain (Chapter 6), and Caroline Oliver on the ‘aspirational mobility’ of elderly British retirees in Spain’s Costa del Sol (Chapter 8). While certain cases would benefit from more sustained ethnography, the absence of such details speaks to the difficulties of studying mobile subjects for whom travel is part and parcel of their socio-economic identities and life opportunities (the cinematographers interviewed by Greenhalgh are a case in point). To an extent, one may wonder how an anthropologist could do long-term fieldwork with such traveling subjects – what are the limits of anthropological theory when one’s informants and collaborators consider their travel experiences as temporary ‘glitches’ in the big picture of their lives unfolding? This brings to mind the renewed importance of Nelson Graburn’s theory on the ritualistic features of tourism (2001) and Julia Harrison’s Being a Tourist (2003), where the analytical emphasis is on the desire to travel, and the C 2008 European Association of Social Anthropologists. Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale (2008) 16, 1 99–135.  doi:10.1111/j.1469-8676.2008.00027.x 99 100 REVIEWS many steps involved in preparing to travel, rather than the travel experience itself. However, it is not for all travelers that such trips are temporary; certain studies in the collection challenge the idea of ‘privilege’ and confront the specter of class in modern mobility – chapters on ‘middle class migrants’ (Chapters 6 and 7) address these subjects from the perspective of more semi-permanent migration, or families and households who have more or less settled in their destinations. These chapters also strongly critique the notion of privileged travel; Torresan asks bluntly, ‘[i]s our perception of our own well-being as middle-class anthropologists influencing our discernment of who is or is not traveling under favorable conditions?’ (p. 106). Who really is going first class? Is it the ‘resident volunteers’ at the Hawaiian resort with more time, but perhaps a bit less money, than the paying guests who also stay there? The specific distinctions between certain forms of more privileged travel and migration remain, as yet, unanswered, although the case studies in this volume point to the increased necessity of examining these new types of travel (and settlement, if only temporary or by season) as they emerge in the modern world systems of labor and leisure. References Graburn, Nelson H.H. 2001. ‘Secular ritual: a general theory of tourism’, in Valene Smith and Maryann Brent (eds.), Hosts and guests revisited: tourism issues of the 21st century. New York: Cognizant Communication Corporation, pp. 42–50. Harrison, Julia. 2003. Being a tourist: finding meaning in pleasure travel. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Nader, Laura. 1972. ‘Up the anthropologist – perspectives gained from studying up’, in Dell Hymes (ed.), Reinventing anthropology. New York: Pantheon Books, pp. 284– 311. JENNY CHIO University of California Berkeley (USA) Arnold, David. 2006. The tropics and the traveling gaze. India, landscape, and science, 1800–1856. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press. 298 pp. Hb.: £28.99. ISBN: 0 295 98581 X. In the book under review David Arnold continues his exploration of colonialism in, and colonial discourses about, India, by concentrating on the ways in which European and British travellers, and especially travelling scientists, perceived and described the Indian landscape and its natural features. The ‘gaze’ in the title alludes to Foucauldian theories of power and subordination through the many processes of monitoring, and Arnold argues that this ‘scientific and scenic “travelling gaze” was itself an ordering, even disciplining, mechanism that edited as well elicited information and actively meddled in the construction of the knowledge it sought to shepherd and cajole into meaningful shapes and approved scientific forms’ (p. 31). Following from this, the book focuses on the way in which nature was represented through science, especially botany and furthermore, how these images of landscape, nature and environment constituted, shaped and articulated colonial science. The book is divided into six chapters in addition to a comprehensive introduction and a thoughtful conclusion. The first chapter, entitled ‘Itinerant Empires’, introduces the reader to various forms of travelling in the 19th century and the visual and textual representations these produced. Arnold argues that these representations mapped, ordered and subjugated the strange and the wild and created powerful images, which he explores in more depth in the two subsequent chapters. The second chapter, entitled ‘In a Land of Death’, draws attention to those experiences and representations which portrayed India as a land of death, illness, brutality and heathenism, ‘as a series of morally framed deathscapes’ (p. 76), for example in the depiction of Puri and its environs as India’s Golgotha (p. 70). In the third chapter, entitled  C 2008 European Association of Social Anthropologists. REVIEWS ‘Romanticism and Improvement’, Arnold turns to those images that presented India as a land of ruins, having fallen into chaos and decay, and therefore in need of the improving transformations that produce a peaceful and successful civilisation such as Britain itself had. Stressing the need for development and progress, these images were imbued at the same time with Romantic notions, which Arnold illustrates with an analysis of the concept of the jungle. The fourth chapter, ‘From the Orient to the Tropics’, investigates the creation of the concept of tropicality which is one of the central concepts of this book. Here Arnold works out the different pictures and qualities ‘the tropics’ evoked; they stood for luxuriant plant life, the jungle, fecundity, pleasure and plenty, but also for hardship, poverty and heathenism. He convincingly demonstrates how these images and concepts developed into the blueprint which determined the way in which colonial India was understood and consequently administrated and ruled. The fifth and sixth chapters (‘Networks and Knowledges’ and ‘Botany and the Bounds of Empire’) are mostly devoted to the personal and professional circumstances of two well-known botanists who explored and studied the plant life of the Indian subcontinent: William Hooker and his son Joseph Hooker. William Hooker never went to India, but was in contact with a number of professional and semi-professional botanists specialising in South Asia and, through regular mail contact, developed networks that Joseph Hooker later strengthened during his journey through India from 1848 to 1851; all of which resulted in Hooker’s masterwork Flora of British India (1875), which lists 14,500 different plants. In these two chapters, Arnold provides a vivid documentation and analysis of the personal and professional biographies of the Hookers, mainly based on articles, reports, travelogues, correspondences, letters, diaries and notes. He thus increases our understanding of how colonial botanical science of the time was shaped by such external factors as politics, the East India Company, neighbouring sciences  C 2008 European Association of Social Anthropologists. 101 and their paradigms, as well as personal contacts and family relations. The categorisation and cataloguing of plants made the strange familiar and tamed it; at the same time, this process differentiated India from the West. Moreover, and this is one of the core arguments of this book, the botanical appropriation and tropicalisation of India involved a Romantic evocation of the tropics, which was the scientific analogue of the process occurring in the travelogues of the time, even though the real India with its savannas and scrubby jungles did not completely match this image. Arnold goes on to argue that, by the middle of the 19th century, science in and about India as well as India itself, made a rapid shift (p. 228), as the Romantic spirit waned and ‘the scientific gaze was becoming less immediately dependent upon travel’ (p. 229). This book will appeal to both historians and anthropologists, not only because of its combination of depth, accurate description and theoretical analysis, but also because of its lively and enjoyable style. It will add substantially to our understanding of the history of colonial science as well as the history of India and, last but not least, it will enhance our own reflexivity. GABRIELE ALEX University of Heidelberg (Germany) Baca, George (ed.). 2006. Nationalism’s bloody terrain: racism, class inequality, and the politics of recognition. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. vi + 110 pp. Pb.: £7.00. ISBN: 1 84545 235 6. The underlying topic of the book under review is an account of the link between racism and nationalism in diverse regional areas. The eight short essays presented in this volume discuss ‘new’ practices of institutional racism that have risen in post-racist or multi-cultural nation-states despite dismantling officially sanctioned racism. As all the contributors maintain, the coexistence of racial reforms with deepening of racial and class inequality is not paradoxical but 102 REVIEWS inherently embedded in the politics of nationalism and multiculturalism. Viranjini Munasinghe compares racial myths of mixed blood focusing on the North American principle of hypodescent and on the social exclusion of East Indians from Trinidadian national identity. Joel Kahn elaborates the salience of race in nationbuilding in contemporary Malaysia while challenging the conventional view that Malaysian racism is a legacy of colonialism. Diane Austin-Broos describes how Australian multiculturalism and US civil rights discourse have used racial concepts to moralise the national order. Vijay Prashad shows how US neoliberal politics alongside colour-blindness have in fact made the Afro-North Americans’ integration impossible. Jason Antrosio gives a succinct account of the ideology of the neoliberal Colombian state making use of racialising practices and politics of recognition. Elizabeth Povinelli attempts to examine racialising practices through the concept of intimacy, of what she calls ‘the intimate event’. As George Baca, the editor of the volume, claims in his introductory essay, the book has been inspired largely by Hurricane Katrina’s devastating effects on one particular layer of New Orleans’ inhabitants, which illuminated the conflation of class inequality and racism. Theoretical inspiration has been fuelled by some of the scholars (Bruce Kapferer, Brackette F. Williams, inter alia), arguing that ‘racism and its passions are created by and subordinated to the nation’ (p. 3), or that it is the nation-state and its cultural politics that ‘provides the very terrain of racism’ (p. 7). At first glance, the underlying assumption of the book under review that the connection between racism and the nation is the substance of nationalism is seemingly difficult to oppose, given the fact that most people live in nation-states in the contemporary world, and that racism is still alive. But the view that nationalism is a necessary condition for racism appears rather schematic. Racism persistently crops up whenever the political and social circumstances make it functionally pertinent. Moreover, the attempt to reduce all differences – cultural, linguistic, etc. – to blood is a dangerous idea since it revives the long-discredited theory of the biological nature of race. Another problem rests on the way most of the contributors treat – or better to say, avoid treating – the term race. They largely tend to mix terms like race, ethnicity, culture, minority, as if the Others – both inside and outside the nation-state – are automatically another ‘race’. The terminological confusion culminates in the last essay ‘The End of Social Construction: What Comes Next?’, wherein John Hartigan Jr. makes a critique of the social constructionist stance on race fuelled by the ‘current evidence’ from ‘raciology’, that is medical studies providing evidence for a biological basis to race, and also by the enduring power of popular beliefs in race. His statement that ‘people can be quite usefully and fairly accurately grouped according to commonplace racial categories’ (p. 96) should not leave any doubts about the author’s intention to disengage ‘race’ from social sciences and place it in the close connection with biology. He challenges the commonly accepted premise in cultural anthropology that race is a discredited concept in biology since races are not biologically distinct. Paradoxically, he is the only contributor in the volume who avoids the vague differentiation between ethnic/cultural and racial groups by saying explicitly what race is and how it is classified, though he has to call for ‘vox populi’ claiming that ‘there are indeed races, such as “whites” and “blacks”’ (p. 104). Whatever social scientists write about race, they may be sure to face critique. Thus, despite the indisputably valuable contributions of some of the essays (by Antrosio, Munasinghe, Kahn, Prashad, Austin-Broos) to the debate on the new forms of racism, the central argument of the book on the conflation between racism and nationalism remains boldly open with more questions than answers. It seems somewhat hazardous to venture general propositions unless enough empirical research is conducted and comparisons are made. Yet, this tiny  C 2008 European Association of Social Anthropologists. REVIEWS collection of essays may serve as a welcome contribution to the better understanding of the complex issues on race and racism and of the diversity of racial conceptions surviving under new disguises. HANA HORÁKOVÁ University of Hradec Králové and University of Pardubice (Czech Republic) Bloch, Maurice. 2005. Essays on cultural transmission. Oxford: Berg. xii + 174 pp. Hb.: £55.00. ISBN: 1 84520 286 4. Pb.: £16.99. ISBN: 1 84520 287 2. This is a collection of nine essays; seven of which were previously published separately in books or journals. In the preface, Maurice Bloch explains that this collection is largely inspired by an effort to ‘bring together the ethnographer’s experience of a fieldworking anthropologist with his more fundamental considerations about the place of cognition within the historical process’ (p. IX). The first essay ‘Where did anthropology go? Or the need for human nature’ is a powerful call for an interdisciplinary approach to the subject. For too long, anthropologists have been wandering in the haze of imprecision between diffusionism versus constructionism, resulting in the loss of the only core issue available to anthropology – the study of human beings. Answers to anthropological questions are being provided by zoologists, literature scholars and psycholinguists. In this inaugural lecture, Bloch calls on anthropologists to reclaim their subject base, adopting a method he calls ‘position functionalism’ (p. 14). This, he defines as a commitment to ‘seeing culture as existing in the process of actual people’s lives, in specific places, as part of the wider ecological process of life, rather than as a disembodied system of traits, beliefs, symbols and representations’ (p. 16). ‘Ritual and deference’, the other new essay in this volume is a revision of an earlier argument that ritual was deferential to power structures – ideological and/or traditional. Anthropologists have long engaged with the  C 2008 European Association of Social Anthropologists. 103 concept of ritual, pondering in particular over the content and meaning of these communicative acts. In an earlier publication (1974), Bloch had argued that attempts to decode the precise meaning of rituals were disingenuous. In this later work, Bloch identifies deference – or rather an extreme form of ‘conscious deference’ (p. 136) – as the central character of the process. The fact that the remaining essays have been published elsewhere, ‘often in somewhat obscure places’, does not devalue a collection that offers an opportunity to engage with the major themes of Bloch’s work in one volume. I thoroughly enjoyed the essay on trees and why they are good to think with. Oak trees have a strong historical significance here in Derry/Londonderry and throughout the Celtic world. Trees have symbolic functions in many societies and this essay sets to explore the connections and differences between humans and trees. Bloch suggests that ‘it is the universality in the conceptualization of “life” that explains the universal aspect of plant and tree symbolism’ (p. 36). Readers will like the article on ‘commensality (the action of eating together) and poisoning’. This essay considers the differential significance of communal sharing of various types of food such as meat and popcorn. The commensal dimension of sacrifice (an old theme in anthropological and religious fields) is also given attention here. The fear of poisoning emerges strongly throughout the essay, reminding readers that while the act of sharing food may be an expression of kinship or community, it may also draw one into eating with those with whom one may be in conflict. Bloch is well-known (and sometimes criticised) for his engagement with other disciplines. One of the most intriguing (and challenging) essays in this volume is his analysis of the concept of memes – which many anthropologists have ignored. In an attempt to ‘clear the decks’ on an issue championed by Dawkins and others, Bloch argues for a unified approach from social and cultural anthropologists to the challenge offered by memeticists. The chapter is entitled 104 REVIEWS ‘a well-disposed social anthropologist’s problems with memes’ and Bloch clearly sets out the benefits of a concept of memes as a ‘wonderful teaching device for the student who wants to learn about human beings in general’ (p. 87). But beyond that, their value as a concept is extremely limited. Moreover, the issue is potentially misleading, as memeticists propose a fundamental similarity between memes and genes, and an evolutionary approach to the transmission of cultures. Bloch argues that cultural transmission is hardly a simple matter of passing on ‘bits and pieces’ of cultural life. Instead, it involves an act of recreation on the part of the receiver. While memeticists have not convinced him that memes actually exist in reality, social and cultural anthropologists have (in their refusal to engage with the arguments) become more theoretically vague and pretentious. Other thought-provoking essays in this volume focus on subjects such as Malagasy carvings and religious beliefs. Two essays are co-authored. Both Gregg Solomon and Susan Carey were involved in the contribution on ‘what is passed on from parents to children’. This cross-cultural, cross-disciplinary investigation draws on fieldwork in Madagascar and raises many interesting questions on the process of cultural transmission. The final contribution ‘Kinship and Evolved Psychological Dispositions’ is co-authored with the French anthropologist Dan Sperber and revisits anthropological thinking on the relationship between the mother’s brother and the sister’s son in patrilineal communities from a historical and contemporary perspective. Overall, academics and students will find this book a particularly valuable introduction to the work of this controversial French–British anthropologist. The themes which have dominated his research are all represented here. Each essay is self-contained with its own set of references, including references to earlier writings of Bloch in these fields. There is a very fine index at the back of the volume. The writing style is clear and accessible and the subject matter goes far beyond the subject boundaries of anthropology. Reference Bloch, Maurice. 1974. ‘Symbols, song, dance and features of articulation or is religion an extreme form of traditional authority’, Archives européenes de sociologie 5: 55–81. MÁIRÉAD NIC CRAITH University of Ulster (UK) Bloom, Maureen. 2007. Jewish mysticism and magic: an anthropological perspective. London and New York: Routledge. xvii + 231 pp. Hb.: £ 65.00. ISBN: 978 415 42112 6. Ce livre examine des sources anciennes de la littérature hébraı̈que, en commençant par les Ecritures juives, notamment l’Ancien Testament, puis les commentaires rabbiniques, c’est-à-dire le Talmud, avant de s’appuyer sur des textes juifs plus récents. A partir de ces textes, l’auteur souhaite montrer l’émergence et l’évolution de certains thèmes et pratiques de la tradition juive, en rapport aux rites sacrificiels hébraı̈ques anciens, à la nature de la relation des juifs à leur Dieu et au développement de la magie et du mysticisme rabbinique. A travers le temps, l’aspiration des juifs à accéder à une intime relation avec leur Dieu a nourri une aspiration à approfondir et à affiner des théories et des pratiques permettant d’accéder au divin. Les traditions ésotériques des mystiques de l’Antiquité tardive ont ensuite été transformées par des savants et rabbins influents, pour donner naissance à une réflexion kabbalistique née en Espagne au 16ème siècle, puis au courant Hassidique, dans l’Europe de l’Est du 18ème et 19ème siècles. Il faut toutefois noter que Maureen Bloom se concentre ici sur la période ancienne et, par conséquent, a délibérément choisi de laisser de côté la Kabbale et le Hassidisme. Ainsi, ces thèmes datant d’au moins deux millénaires représentent, pour l’auteur, des éléments qui encore aujourd’hui ont conservé leur pertinence et restent visibles  C 2008 European Association of Social Anthropologists. REVIEWS dans le judaı̈sme contemporain; la construction culturelle et symbolique, sous-jacente à ces textes, permettrait ainsi de comprendre l’usage, de nos jours, au sein de la diaspora et en Israël, d’amulettes ou de cartes où sont inscrites des formules faisant appel aux noms d’Abraham, de Jacob, de Sarah ou de Rachel et que l’on trouve dans les chambres d’enfants, sur les murs et fenêtres des maisons et des entreprises, et mêmes dans les véhicules. Le livre offre une introduction riche et détaillée des racines du judaı̈sme antique (chapitre 2) et de ses sources écrites (chapitre 3), qui se révèle utile à bien des égards pour en comprendre les origines et premiers développements. Puis le cadre théorique de cette analyse de textes bibliques est présenté (chapitre 4), interrogeant les notions de magie, de religion et de science, sans doute trop brièvement tant le thème est riche de travaux anthropologiques. Bloom évoque ensuite différents thèmes essentiels à la compréhension du judaı̈sme ancien: la question du lieu en tant que sanctuaire, temple et synagogue (chapitre 5), la relation au divin (chapitre 6), la frontière entre sacré et profane au principe des notions de pureté et d’impureté rituelles (chapitre 7) et les pratiques, c’est-à-dire le sacrifice et la prière (chapitre 8). Le troisième volet de l’ouvrage traite tout d’abord de la question du corps telle qu’elle est abordée dans le Talmud (chapitre 9), avant de présenter l’évolution de la pensée mystique juive sur la nature de Dieu dans la littérature des Hekhalot et la Merkavah (chapitre 10). On regrettera quelque peu que les imprécations, incantations magiques inscrites sur des bols et amulettes, ne soient traités en détail que dans les chapitres qui précèdent l’épilogue (chapitres 11 et 12), tant l’usage de ces objets semblait pouvoir être au cœur de la réflexion anthropologique entreprise par l’auteur sur la magie dans le judaı̈sme. A nos yeux, l’explication de coutumes d’aujourd’hui par une lecture de textes anciens, employée par Bloom, prête à discussion, dans la mesure où cette approche tend à donner une image fixe et pérenne d’une ‘tradition’ quelque peu essentialisée, ce qui ne  C 2008 European Association of Social Anthropologists. 105 laisse que peu de place aux dynamiques évolutives d’interprétation et de réinterprétation des textes que l’histoire nécessite (mais le judaı̈sme contemporain, il est vrai, n’est pas l’objet de ce livre qui ne vise pas à proposer une perspective diachronique). De même, l’approche dite anthropologique de ce livre pose des difficultés, puisqu’il est méthodologiquement impossible de rendre compte des pratiques et croyances réelles des Juifs dans l’antiquité. Il nous semble que les textes ne permettent pas (ou peu) de savoir comment celles-ci étaient comprises et par qui — qui avait accès aux textes? Dans quelle mesure existait-il une certaine latitude d’interprétation? Comment l’autorité des textes s’était-elle imposée et régulée? — autant d’éléments qui manquent, nous semble-t-il, d’une véritable analyse anthropologique de la magie et du mysticisme juif ancien. En d’autres termes, le texte ne nous dit rien, ou très peu, de son usage et de l’évolution de cet usage en fonction des enjeux sociaux du moment. Ici encore, il s’agit de la manière dont on entrevoit la tradition, comme ayant une certaine permanence et une certaine essence, ou comme un processus dynamique de constantes interprétations renouvelées et contextualisées. La référence à la Kabbale dans le champ politique israélien d’aujourd’hui, avec lequel l’auteur choisit de clore son ouvrage, en est un parfait exemple. VÉRONIQUE ALTGLAS University of Cambridge (UK) Cherneff, Jill B.R. and Eve Hochwald (eds.). 2006. Visionary observers: anthropological inquiry and education. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. 304 pp. Pb.: £17.99. ISBN: 0 8032 6464 9. Ce volume réunit huit contributions, pour la plupart inédites. Chaque participant à l’ouvrage s’est intéressé à la vie et à l’oeuvre d’un ou deux anthropologues, dont certains éminemment connus tels que Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict ou Margaret Mead. Parfois, la contribution se fonde sur l’existence de contacts personnels comme dans le cas de 106 REVIEWS Virginia Young qui utilise ses notes prises dans les cours de Ruth Benedict à l’Université de Columbia dans les années 1940. Ce livre nous propose une relecture originale des parcours intellectuels et politiques de neuf anthropologues, nés essentiellement dans la première décennie du vingtième siècle et qui ont passé toute ou la plus grande partie de leur carrière aux États-Unis. En parcourant la table des matières, se pose dans un premier temps la question des critères de choix qui ont permis aux éditrices de rapprocher le trio renommé sus-cité avec des anthropologues bien moins connus, au moins en Europe, comme Gene Weltfish, Hortense Powdermaker, Jules Henry, Ruth Landes, Solon Kimball ou Eleanor Leacock. À part la filiation intellectuelle – Boas forma Mead, Benedict, Landes et Weltfish par exemple – le fil rouge qui unit les chapitres de ce volume est le thème de ‘l’éducation’, comprise dans un sens très large. La majorité des anthropologues étudiés se sont engagés à un moment donné de leur vie dans ‘l’éducation’ populaire, c’est-à-dire qu’ils (ou elles, puisque six sont des femmes) se sont efforcés de faire connaı̂tre leurs idées à un public plus vaste que les étudiants qui suivaient leurs cours ou les collègues qui lisaient leurs publications scientifiques. Regna Darnell présente par exemple l’oeuvre de Boas en tant qu’ ‘intellectuel’, n’hésitant pas à prendre des positions politiques à contre-courant de l’opinion publique de son pays d’adoption, les Etats-Unis; nous apprenons que Boas revendiquait la neutralité des États-Unis dans la première guerre mondiale, qu’il dénonça le traité de Versailles et qu’il s’est opposé aux activités d’espionnage que certains anthropologues menaient au Mexique dans les années 1910 sous couvert de recherches ethnographiques. Dans la suite logique de sa théorie culturaliste, Boas s’est insurgé contre les politiques racistes, antisémites et eugéniques, et avant tout contre celles qui seraient adoptées par son pays d’origine, l’Allemagne. Il rédigea ainsi dès 1938 un manifeste dénonçant le nazisme, signé par plus de mille universitaires américains. Certains des anciens étudiants de Boas suivirent son exemple en militant pour la cause antiraciste. Mead, Benedict et Weltfish, tout comme Hortense Powdermaker (formée par Malinowski), ont publié des livres à grande diffusion, visant un public jeune ou non instruit, des manuels pour l’enseignement secondaire ou des pamphlets à destination des soldats américains, prônant la tolérance interraciale. Plusieurs contributions de l’ouvrage font entrevoir le positionnement délicat de certains de ces anthropologues devenus ‘éducateurs du public’: tantôt ils collaborent avec l’état, comme Benedict et Mead qui rédigèrent des études sur les ‘caractères nationaux’ des peuples ennemis pour l’Office of War Information à Washington, ou comme Weltfish et Benedict qui ensemble écrivirent un pamphlet antiraciste pour l’armée américaine en 1943, tantôt ils entrent en conflit avec l’État: la distribution du pamphlet en question fut rapidement arrêtée parce qu’il contient des résultats d’études comparatives jugés trop favorables aux Noirs américains. Parfois encore, leurs carrières universitaires souffrirent de ces prises de position: on interdit à Boas de donner une partie de ses cours à Columbia en raison de ses opinions pacifistes pendant la première guerre mondiale, et Weltfish perdit son poste au sein de la même université en 1953, année où elle fut interrogée par la commission McCarthy. Les auteurs de l’ouvrage – et ceci concerne surtout la deuxième moitié du volume – présentent également des travaux d’anthropologues portant sur l’éducation des enfants et adolescents, donc l’éducation comprise dans un sens plus traditionnel. Benedict s’intéressa ainsi aux ressorts de la motivation en comparant le rôle de la compétition, de l’insulte et du sentiment de honte dans plusieurs cultures. Mead et son mari Gregory Bateson menèrent des enquêtes sur les contextes d’apprentissage à Bali grâce à une méthodologie innovante faisant appel à des séries de photographies. Powdermaker, Henry, Landes, Kimball et Leacock furent des pionniers de l’ethnographie en milieu scolaire.  C 2008 European Association of Social Anthropologists. REVIEWS Dans différents lieux, ils étudièrent les attitudes des élèves noirs ainsi que les comportements des enseignants vis-à-vis d’eux. Au gré des chapitres de Visionary Observers, des projets novateurs animés par les anthropologues étudiés sont mis en lumière: Ruth Landes forma ainsi des jeunes enseignants californiens dans les années 1950 à devenir ethnographes de leur propre environnement social; Gene Weltfish organisa dans les années 1960 un projet pédagogique insolite durant lequel ses élèves firent des fouilles archéologiques puis restaurèrent une maison ancienne. On peut reprocher aux éditrices de ce volume une certaine redondance entre leurs présentations des contributions et les articles eux-mêmes. Cependant, étant donné que les deux types de textes sont somme toute biographiques, les répétitions s’avèrent inévitables. Par ailleurs, des renvois internes entre les chapitres auraient pu être ménagés. Certaines digressions paraissent peu utiles, telles que les huit pages expliquant les théories de Boas et de Dewey au milieu du chapitre consacré à Gene Weltfish. La critique la plus sévère qui peut être adressée au projet tout à fait louable de Cherneff et Hochwald concerne le fil rouge censé lier les chapitres entre eux, à savoir les contributions des anthropologues à ‘l’éducation du public’ ou à la recherche ethnologique sur l’éducation. Ce fil aurait paru moins fragile si tous les auteurs en avaient fait le guide rigoureux de leur questionnement au long de leurs analyses. In fine, il échoit au lecteur de faire la synthèse entre les études individuelles. On restera notamment sur la forte impression laissée par l’engagement militant de Boas et des boasiens, observateurs parfois visionnaires de leur société et de la politique internationale (d’où le titre de Visionary Observers), mais qui n’étaient pourtant pas dépourvus d’une certaine myopie, comme certains contributeurs le soulignent: ainsi, Boas se mobilisa peu pour les intérêts politiques des Indiens du Nord-Ouest américain, et Mead ne s’exprima pas davantage sur les tests nucléaires américains menaçant les populations du  C 2008 European Association of Social Anthropologists. 107 Pacifique qui lui avaient pourtant fourni ses principales données ethnographiques. ANNE FRIEDERIKE MÜLLER Académie d’Orléans-Tours (France) Comaroff, Jean, and John Comaroff (eds.) 2006. Law and disorder in the postcolony. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. x + 357 pp. Hb.: $70.00/£44.50. ISBN: 0 226 11408 2. Pb.: $28.00/ £18.00. ISBN: 0 226 11409 0. What do people mean when they write or talk about ‘the postcolony’? Is the postcolony so monolithic a phenomenon that it deserves to be referred to in the singular (a usage that flies in the face of the general postmodern trend to pluralise terms that were until recently singular – ‘histories’, ‘modernities’, femininities, etc.)? And if the postcolony is a coherent (if pathological) global phenomenon, how exactly might it be identified in the recent socio-political transformations in places as seemingly disparate as Brazil, Cameroon, Chad, Indonesia and South Africa? Is the postcolony best understood as a transitional phase or as a new global (dis)order? Finally, what is the relationship between the postcolony (generally associated with everything wrong in the state and society today) and democratisation (meant to highlight all that is good in the post cold war era)? These are the questions that Jean and John Comaroff address in their introduction to this important volume, and which the subsequent contributions go on to examine in detailed case studies. Rosalind Morris exposes the spectre of sexual violence in post-apartheid South Africa, a spectre she analyses in terms of a political discourse on (and of) the lost generation of youth who brought the ANC to power but now find themselves unemployed and unremembered. In an extreme example of the ways in which the language of rights and democracy is perverted by the state, Teresa Caldera exposes the ways in which the Brazilian police wield the notion of human rights as an impediment to public security 108 REVIEWS that prevents them from exterminating their enemies: precisely those, in many cases, who are involved in social movements advocating the rights of slum-dwellers. Her analysis of the latter’s hip-hop lyrics shows that they ironically do not address ‘democracy’ or ‘rights’, identifying instead with the American ghetto. Nancy Scheper-Hughes again presents us with the relation of the urban poor to the police in Brazil with her frank recounting of her experiences over many years of working with the shantytown victims of police and vigilante death squads. Highlighting the paradox of the postcolony, Scheper-Hughes shows that the paramilitary death squads emerged after the end of the military dictatorship in 1985 at the same time as the state was promulgating a new discourse of enlightenment and child rights. Patricia Spyer presents the events surrounding the civil conflict between Christians and Muslims in the Indonesian Moluccan Islands that took place between 1999 and 2002, emphasising that these religious identities, as with comparable conflicts around the world, were not so much the cause as the consequence of the conflict. Peter Geschiere then continues his exploration of the emergence of witchcraft as a juridical phenomenon in Cameroon, comparing it very fruitfully with the similar emergence of witchcraft accusations as an emergent obsession in post-apartheid South Africa. Using official witch finders to identify witches by occult means, the Cameroonian judiciary’s attack on witchcraft is oxymoronic. In South Africa, the impetus seems to be to prevent rather than to instigate witch hunts, but again the end result is counterproductive. In both cases, the nebulous anxieties of the postcolony (and democratisation) are reified in the person of the witch, resulting in social movements that threaten the legitimacy of the state. From the northern extremity of Cameroon, Janet Roitman provides an exceptionally revealing investigation of cross-border smuggling and banditry that provides further evidence of the inextricability of the state from criminal enterprises that are normally seen as a threat to its existence. Presenting personal accounts collected from smugglers and robbers, Roitman traces the discursive linkages these actors make between the violence of the state against its citizens and the legitimacy of their own illegal but ‘licit’ enterprises. The eighth chapter by Comaroff and Comaroff, and the ninth by Achille Mbembe both serve as thoughtful afterwords to the collection. The evidence presented in this book, which brings the critical potential of the analytical model of the postcolony to the fore, is that democratisation and criminality, restructuring and insecurity, privatisation and pauperisation, progress and warfare go hand-in-hand round the world not by coincidence, nor by accident, but because the realignment of the geo-political fault lines following the end of the cold war has instituted a global process of which the human miseries exposed in this collection are but local manifestations. For this reason, the postcolony is not only a condition restricted to the countries that gained their independence in the last century, but also a predicament fomented by and reciprocally affecting those metropolises from which they severed their colonial bonds but with which they are still inextricably caught up. Not only is this collection a measure of the paradigm of the postcolony, it is also an engaged work of political anthropology set to have a lasting and salutary impact on the discipline. NICOLAS ARGENTI Brunel University, London (UK) Cruces Villalobos, Francisco. 2006. Sı́mbolos en la ciudad. Lecturas de antropologı́a urbana. Madrid: UNED Ediciones. 127 pp. Pb.: €6.14. ISBN: 84 362 5291 8. In this book, Cruces Villalobos brings together five articles, published previously in anthropology journals, to provide a tool for students who are taking their first steps in the subject of Urban Anthropology. The aim is to show students two ways of looking at the subject: on the one hand, the book offers a  C 2008 European Association of Social Anthropologists. REVIEWS complete vision of the problems, limits and theoretical possibilities of Urban Anthropology; on the other, it provides examples of a meticulous ethnography that illustrate in a simple way the symbolic and ritual analysis carried out in different urban settings. The book’s chapters can be divided according to this dual vision: Chapters 1, 2 and 5 deal with theoretical and methodological questions, while Chapters 3 and 4 look at two ethnographic research projects carried out in Madrid and Mexico, which attempt to take us closer to analytical possibilities offered by the specific vision of Urban Anthropology. All in all, despite being written for teaching purposes, this book provides an interesting and condensed approach to the discipline of Urban Anthropology. In accordance with the abovementioned division, the first chapter provides a rough presentation of how the discipline has taken shape (object, development, etc.). According to the author, ‘Urban Anthropology refers to a tradition of ethnographic studies in and about cities that began to become institutionalised from the 1960s onwards with the generalized processes of urbanization and de-colonisation that took during World War II in those states where anthropologists usually carry out their work’ (p. 15). From here onwards, the chapter embarks on a brief journey through the origins and heritage of urban study, from the classics to the analysis models, passing through the contributions made by anthropologists in this field and its institutionalisation as a discipline in the 1980s. Along this journey, Urban Anthropology provides a rich and complex approach to the Urban. Chapter 2 is decidedly more theoretical and discusses the concept of ‘ritual’. The debate on this term has generated an important amount of literature in the anthropological tradition and the author shows us the potential of applying it to our daily contexts. To do so, he introduces the problems associated with ritual (semantic over-extension, secularisation of content and alternative categorisations) and at this point  C 2008 European Association of Social Anthropologists. 109 he recovers the concept as a model of process and of the performative conceived as a watered-down form of sacredness. To the extent that ritual still makes its appearance and its meaning is that ritual is a category that is still a valid tool for interpreting contemporary societies. Finally, Chapter 5 lays out some of the methodological problems that urban anthropologists are faced with when working in the field. The Urban v. the Rural, which is nowadays a questionable dichotomy, serves to discuss the difficulties of the indefinite nature of the anthropologist’s social position and the peculiarities of the context of interaction. Hence the title of the chapter: ‘An Intruder in your City’. Chapters 3 and 4 provide illustrative examples of the entire theoretical approach. Chapter 3 takes an analytical look at the celebrations in honour of San Antón, patron saint of animals, in the district of Hortaleza (Madrid) during the 1990s. The peculiar procession of animals that circles the church dedicated to the saint every year on the 17 January in the city centre is the starting point for the author’s symbolic analysis of the city. This urban procession is a consequence of the revival, in the 1980s, of a number of celebrations that had fallen into disuse. In it, it is possible to see the modern reworking of the tradition and the evocative power of the symbolic forms. As the author states, animals in the city continue to be ‘good for thought’. Chapter 4, for its part, takes as an ethnographic object the protest marches that became more and more frequent in Mexico City in the 1990s. The marches serve as a pretext for the analysis of the transformations that took place in the public space in contemporary cities on the basis of their capacity for generating culturally significant images. On the basis of the marches, the author puts forward an analysis of the fragility of urban order, the transformation of the limits between the public and the private, and the increasingly theatrical and festive nature of public protest. All in all, the book offers an initial and interesting approach for those who are 110 REVIEWS starting out in the field of Urban Anthropology, proposing an anthropology of the city, centred upon our ethnographic tradition and heritage, rather than on an anthropology in the city. BEATRIZ SANTAMARINA CAMPOS University of Valencia (Spain) Early, John. 2006. The Maya and Catholicism. An encounter of worldviews. Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press. xvi + 311 pp. Pb.:$59.95. ISBN: 0 8130 3025 0. Le but de cet ouvrage est d’expliquer l’intégration des rituels catholiques dans le système religieux maya, en d’autres termes de rendre compte de ce que l’auteur appelle ‘l’anomalie’ de l’insistance des Mayas pour inclure dans leur ‘matrice rituelle’ la messe célébrée par un prêtre catholique ladino (non maya, créole). A la fois (ex-)prêtre jésuite et anthropologue, l’auteur se trouvait sans doute dans une position avantageuse pour aborder le sujet. Si les arguments ne sont pas tous nouveaux, Early a le mérite de présenter une synthèse de matériaux ethnographiques et historiques pour l’ensemble de l’aire maya en s’appuyant en outre sur ses propres observations effectuées au début des années 1960 dans la région de Zinacantan (dans le cadre de l’ambitieux Harvard-Chiapas Project) et à Santiago Atitlan au Guatemala (où il mena des études démographiques pendant les années 1970). Le texte est agréable à lire, très didactique, mais parfois un peu répétitif. L’iconographie est belle et les indexes sont exhaustifs. La délimitation un peu vague de la fin de la période couverte – des premiers contacts violents du XVIème à la seconde moitié du XXème siècle – n’est pas à mon avis assez explicitée et mériterait d’être argumentée (elle exclut en fait le mouvement de néo-évangélisation et de conversions religieuses des dernières décennies, mais cela est passé sous silence). En introduction (première partie) l’auteur se démarque de l’hypothèse du syncrétisme en notant que cette notion n’explique pas la structure de la nouvelle religion qui serait issue de l’interprétation indigène du catholicisme. L’argument s’organise ensuite en quatre parties. En exposant d’abord ‘l’anomalie’ (deuxième partie), l’ethnographie du déroulement des fêtes patronales dans le village de Zinacantan met en exergue l’insistante demande maya quant à la participation d’un prêtre catholique (chapitres 2 et 3), dont l’auteur donne différents exemples historiques (chapitre 4). Les raisons de cette exigence seraient à rechercher dans les ‘logiques culturelles’ (troisième partie) et l’interprétation des victoires espagnoles comme étant l’œuvre des saints, considérés par les May as comme les divinités tribales des Espagnols. D’où l’utilité de les inclure dans le contrat de réciprocité (ou covenant) avec les dieux préhispaniques (chapitres 5-7). L’auteur argumente de manière convaincante que cette assimilation des saints par la continuité des représentations cosmologiques a été facilitée du fait que, jusqu’au milieu du XXème siècle, seule une minorité des Mayas était réellement convertie au catholicisme (quatrième partie). Bien plus que dans cette affirmation elle-même, l’originalité réside dans la démonstration. L’argument s’appuie sur des notions théologiques précises et une compréhension pratique des limites logistiques et stratégiques et des contraintes démographiques, linguistiques et culturelles du travail d’évangélisation (statistiques à l’appui). Early définit ainsi des critères clairs – mais peut-être trop restrictifs – de ce que serait une véritable conversion. La dernière partie répond à la question initiale à partir d’un éclairage riche en exemples sur la perception maya de la chrétienté espagnole. Compris dans le cadre de la cosmologie maya – panthéiste d’après Early – comme ‘émanations supplémentaires de la force cosmique’ (p. 205), les saints sont donc devenus nécessaires (chapitre 12) d’où  C 2008 European Association of Social Anthropologists. REVIEWS l’exigence de les servir par le biais de la messe, du baptême et du prêtre catholique ladino (chapitre 13) éventuellement suppléé par les spécialistes des rituels mayas (chapitre 14). L’avènement du christianisme serait donc compris comme celui d’un nouveau cycle de dieux dans la métaphysique maya. Bien que de tels arguments puissent parfois paraı̂tre quelque peu ésotériques, Early insiste – à fort juste titre – sur les motivations pragmatiques et les implications pratiques tout à fait quotidiennes de l’adoption des rituels catholiques (le baptême, par exemple, comme acquisition du statut de sujet de la couronne d’Espagne et comme rituel chamanique pour protéger le nouveau-né d’influences pathogènes). Enfin, la nécessité du prêtre ladino s’explique du fait que celui-ci est le mieux à même de s’adresser aux saints, ceux-ci étant eux-mêmes des ladinos. Bien qu’à titre comparatif l’auteur fasse à juste titre référence aux études sur la région nahua (notamment celles de Gruzinski et de Léon Portilla), on peut s’étonner de l’absence de certaines références, notamment des travaux de d’A. López Austin dont les analyses renforceraient l’argument de l’auteur concernant la condition humaine et l’obligation de réciprocité envers les dieux (chapitre 5). On regrette aussi l’absence de référence aux travaux de l’école ethnographique française sur la région maya (en dehors de Ricard). Par ailleurs, il eût été intéressant que l’auteur propose des pistes pour un prolongement de son analyse et de ce qu’elle pourrait apporter à la compréhension des évolutions religieuses plus récentes autour des divers cultes évangéliques et de la néo-évangélisation catholique. Quoi qu’il en soit l’ouvrage est tout à fait pertinent, au-delà des spécialistes ethnologues ou historiens de la région mésoaméricaine, pour tout lecteur qui s’intéresse aux dynamiques coloniales, à l’étude comparative des religions et aux processus de métissage et de recomposition culturelle. NICOLAS ELLISON University of Aberdeen (UK)  C 2008 European Association of Social Anthropologists. 111 Eschenbruch, Nicholas. 2007. Nursing stories. Life and death in a German hospice. Oxford: Berghahn. xii + 135 pp. Hb.: £60. ISBN: 1 84545 151 1. Le mouvement des hospices (hospice movement) a aujourd’hui abouti à la création d’institutions reconnues pour la spécificité de l’encadrement de fin de vie qu’elles proposent dans différents pays d’Europe occidentale. Ancré dans l’idéal moderne de l’autonomie individuelle et dans la catégorie biomédicale d’incurabilité (traduction française qui semble la moins mauvaise pour dying), ‘le mouvement des hospices s’est donné pour objectif de rendre les malades en phase terminale capables de vivre une fin de vie auto-déterminée et digne’ (p. 7). Soutenu également par les travaux de sciences sociales sur le ‘déni de la mort’ des sociétés occidentales contemporaines (qui connut ses heures de gloire de la fin des années 1950 à la fin des années 1980), ce mouvement ne s’implanta en Allemagne que progressivement à partir des années 1980, et surtout dans les années 1990 (p. 9-10). Ayant mené une enquête par observation participante et entretiens dans un hospice allemand désigné ici comme l’‘hospice Stadtwald’, Nicholas Eschenbruch livre avec Nursing Stories une ethnographie fine et très réflexive de ce monde social particulier. En soulignant qu’il offre une ‘connaissance située’ socialement (p. 15-16) et en explicitant la place d’adjoint du personnel soignant qu’il a occupée pendant ses enquêtes, il insiste sur l’articulation entre son ethnographie et ses réflexions anthropologiques. A l’hospice Stadtwald, la rupture avec les catégories de l’hôpital apparaı̂t clairement dans l’organisation de l’espace et du quotidien: de la moquette remplace le linoleum, les animaux de compagnie peuvent être acceptés, l’heure des repas n’est pas imposée, les infirmières (et les infirmiers) ne portent pas d’uniforme. . . La pratique des infirmières est orientée vers le ‘bien-être subjectif’ et la dignité des patients, autant que vers le soulagement de leur douleur physique. Pourtant Eschenbruch souligne aussi les 112 REVIEWS paradoxes de l’idéal d’autonomie des patients professé par les infirmières, face par exemple aux patients cherchant une plus grande autonomie encore et une implication minimale du personnel soignant dans leur vie, les infirmières pouvant alors se sentir frustrées. Le plus dur pour celles-ci en effet est le contact avec les patients demandant trop d’attention, et avec ceux manifestant trop peu, ou pas, de reconnaissance au personnel soignant: les commentaires (stories) qu’échangent entre eux les membres du personnel sont ici essentiels, et permettent de faire face à ces situations en leur donnant du sens et en s’encourageant mutuellement. En effet, les infirmières cherchent aussi à faire vivre aux patients des ‘expériences positives’, et tentent assez systématiquement pour ce faire d’établir une ‘complicité thérapeutique’ (therapeutic emplotment) avec ceux-ci en les aidant à fumer une cigarette, à continuer à manger ce qu’ils aiment. . . Enfin, dans le dernier chapitre, Eschenbruch évoque les pratiques d’accompagnement des patients dans les derniers moments de leur vie, l’attitude des proches face à la mort, et la place contestée (au sein du personnel soignant) de la cérémonie d’adieu organisée au décès de patients ayant passé un certain temps à l’hospice, rite dont l’adaptabilité au profil du défunt ‘est encore en affinité’ avec la façon ‘réflexive et individualiste’ de vivre sa fin de vie qu’entend promouvoir l’hospice (p. 105). La conclusion prend essentiellement la forme d’une synthèse très efficace de l’ouvrage. En fait, Eschenbruch s’engage dans cet ouvrage dans une ‘anthropologie narrative’, comme il le dit lui-même, et analyse finement la construction du sens, la forme et les logiques des interactions dans l’hospice dans lequel il a travaillé. Mais cette anthropologie narrative est aussi une microsociologie qui s’intéresse assez peu au passé des acteurs (personnel soignant, patients) pour interpréter, par exemple, la ‘réussite’ ou l’‘échec’ relatif des relations avec tel ou tel patient. Si le contexte historique qui a vu émerger le mouvement des hospices est fort bien restitué, après la mise en perspective historique initiale, il n’est plus fait référence que de façon assez imprécise au statut ou à la trajectoire sociale de certains patients pour rendre compte de leurs résistances à s’engager dans le type de relation que cherchent à promouvoir les infirmières. L’anthropologie narrative d’Eschenbruch n’est certainement pas une sociologie dispositionnaliste, et sa proposition finale selon laquelle le ‘monde de la vie est construit dans l’interaction sociale’ (p. 119) peut aussi sonner comme une occultation du caractère structuré (et pas seulement structurant) des interactions sociales. L’ouvrage n’en présente pas moins une ethnographie très fine de ce que peut être la fin de vie dans un hospice et un modèle d’explicitation des conditions de production des données. JOËL NORET Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique (Belgique) Evans, Gillian. 2006. Educational failure and working class white children in Britain. London: Palgrave Macmillan. xii + 205 pp. Hb.: £50.00. ISBN: 978 1 4039 9216 1. Pendant dix-huit mois, Gillian Evans a vécu au coeur du milieu ouvrier du quartier de Bermondsey dans le Sud-Est de Londres et a su exprimer ses expériences et ses observations dans un style captivant dans cet ouvrage. Une grande partie de celui-ci se lit comme un Bildungsroman qui voit la transformation de l’auteur – une femme ‘posh’ (bourgeoise, à peu près) – en femme ‘common’ (ou populaire), et qui apprend à en apprécier les avantages. La problématique affichée des recherches d’Evans est cependant l’échec scolaire des enfants (blancs), et en particulier des garçons, issus de la classe ouvrière. L’auteur se propose de comprendre, par le biais d’un travail de terrain dans et autour d’une école ‘en échec’, pourquoi la reproduction sociale continue d’exister outre Manche malgré l’accès gratuit et obligatoire à l’enseignement depuis plus de cinquante ans.  C 2008 European Association of Social Anthropologists. REVIEWS Un rapport de l’Inspection des Ecoles cité par Evans rappelle qu’en 2005 le contexte familial et le niveau de formation des parents, surtout des mères, sont déterminants pour la réussite scolaire des enfants. Ce constat, basé sur des statistiques, est remarquablement bien illustré par les observations de l’anthropologue. Dans la maison de Sharon, une mère ouvrière du quartier, par exemple, les bons résultats ou même l’assiduité à l’école ne font pas partie des attentes auxquelles les enfants sont confrontés. Comme Sharon, beaucoup de parents du quartier n’ont pas la patience d’aider leurs enfants dans le lent apprentissage de la lecture ou dans leurs devoirs. L’ethnographie d’Evans permet pourtant de dégager d’autres causes de l’échec scolaire. Les enseignants du quartier sont tout à fait conscients d’un nombre de raisons matérielles qui aggravent leur situation: le manque de moyens, les effectifs trop grands des classes, les programmes trop lourds à achever au cours d’une année scolaire, au détriment des élèves faibles qui n’arrivent plus à suivre, les effets d’une certaine ségrégation du fait que les parents les plus ambitieux du quartier choisissent d’autres écoles, plus performantes, pour leurs enfants, de sorte que les plus faibles et les plus difficiles se trouvent concentrés dans l’école du quartier. Avec beaucoup d’empathie, Evans démontre que les garçons considérés comme ‘perturbateurs’ par les enseignants ont tout à fait l’envie d’apprendre et la capacité de se concentrer sur une tâche, mais qu’ils dirigent toute leur énergie vers une compétition permanente pour le maximum de prestige aux yeux des autres enfants. Cette formation et reformation continuelle des peer groups se joue pendant les matchs de foot dans la cour de récréation autant que dans les couloirs et halls d’entrée des tours ou dans la rue où il s’agit d’exceller dans d’autres formes de compétition (bagarres, négociations, collection d’objets convoités). En salle de classe, ce ne sont pas les performances scolaires, mais les prouesses verbales vis-à-vis les enseignants ou les camarades intimidés par eux qui procurent du prestige aux garçons.  C 2008 European Association of Social Anthropologists. 113 Evans se demande comment remédier à cette situation – toute cette énergie de compétition, ne pourrait-elle pas être canalisée vers des buts plus scolaires? La question reste sans réponse, tandis que l’expérience de l’ethnographe semble suggérer qu’un système de tutorat individuel et discret à la maison pourrait aider bon nombre de ces garçons ‘perturbateurs’ à avancer dans leur apprentissage, Evans ne donne pas ouvertement son appui à cette solution. Le dernier mot est laissé à un ancien braqueur du quartier, réformé après avoir purgé sa peine en prison, qui conclut que Bermondsey est un ‘shithole’ et qu’il vaut mieux élever ses enfants ailleurs. Le fait que le livre se termine par cette conclusion pessimiste et quelque peu surprenante, non commentée par l’auteur, c’est-à-dire sans véritable conclusion, est sans doute symptomatique d’un problème plus fondamental de l’approche d’Evans. L’auteur confesse dans une note (p. 176, note 2) qu’elle avait choisi de produire son ethnographie avant d’entamer la lecture approfondie des travaux existants; étant ainsi ‘naı̈ve’ à dessein, elle espérait arriver à des conclusions nouvelles. Or, une prise en compte des questionnements existants de la sociologie et de l’anthropologie de l’éducation (on pense notamment aux travaux de Bourdieu sur l’éducation, dont les problématiques sont souvent proches des préoccupations de l’auteur) aurait d’abord permis d’affiner le questionnement initial, puis d’aiguiser les analyses entreprises par l’auteur en établissant des comparaisons. En fait, la confrontation des résultats ethnographiques tout à fait intéressants avec la recherche existante n’a jamais véritablement lieu, d’où probablement l’absence regrettable d’une conclusion à ce livre. Sans doute encore plus que de proposer des réponses à la question de l’échec scolaire, Evans a produit une ethnographie remarquable du quartier londonien de Bermondsey, un quartier populaire dont le lecteur apprend à apprécier le mode de vie en suivant les péripéties de l’ethnographe. Inspirée par les travaux de Christina Toren, 114 REVIEWS Evans montre admirablement bien comment on ‘devient’ un habitant de Bermondsey: il s’agit entre autres de s’approprier le territoire d’une certaine manière, d’utiliser un certain langage (grossier), de faire preuve d’un certain humour (grivois) et d’exposer des signes extérieurs (bijoux, vêtements) comme il faut. On vient à regretter que ce mode de vie ‘traditionnel’ de Bermondsey soit en voie de disparition, menacé par la poussée centrifuge du marché immobilier londonien et par la gentrification des quartiers populaires qui s’ensuit fatalement. ANNE FRIEDERIKE MÜLLER Académie d’Orléans-Tours (France) Ferguson, James. 2006. Global shadows. Africa in the neoliberal world order. Durham and London: Duke University Press. x + 258 pp. Pb.: £13.99. ISBN: 978 0 8223 3717 1. La question que se pose l’anthropologue américain, spécialiste de la Zambie, J. Ferguson est une question récurrente de l’anthropologie africaniste: les anthropologues peuvent-ils, doivent-ils parler de l’Afrique de manière globale et générale tout en conservant une perspective anthropologique? Y-a-t-il un sens à parler de la crise africaine, tout particulièrement en anthropologie? On pourrait répondre affirmativement car, à un certain niveau de la réalité discursive, l’Afrique existe et la globalisation du continent justifie une certaine généralisation ou un mode de comparaison raisonnable. L’ouvrage réunit huit articles précédés par une introduction: à part deux textes qui remontent à 1993 et 1996, tous les autres sont postérieurs au 11 septembre 2001, ce qui situe l’ouvrage dans le registre symbolique, et, à l’exception des deux derniers, ils ont déjà fait l’objet d’une publication. Par rapport aux publications précédentes de l’auteur, cet ouvrage est quelque peu décevant. Ainsi le chapitre 5 qui est le plus long, (Chrysalis: la vie et le décès de la Renaissance africaine dans un journal internet zambien) est-il essentiellement une analyse textuelle, certes contextualisée, mais qui ne peut aller très loin dans son approche d’anthropologie sociale, de cadres – dont certains vivent à l’étranger – on-line. Pensons également au chapitre 6 sur le conflit entre le mimétisme et l’appartenance, dont le point de départ est encore l’analyse d’un texte: la lettre de deux enfants guinéens décédés dans le train d’atterrissage d’un avion volant vers l’Europe en 1998. Néanmoins un anthropologue peut se retrouver dans sa conception de la globalisation: le capital traverse le monde mais ne le recouvre pas; les formes globales d’inclusion coexistent avec des formes globales d’exclusion, elles ne sont pas mitoyennes et constituent des enclaves. Le continent africain est par conséquent constitué de taches ‘globales’ discontinues, qui correspondent le plus souvent à des lieux d’extraction minière, qui remettent en cause les notions mêmes d’Etat-nation et de territoire public. De plus, ces enclaves sont le plus souvent protégées par des armées privées, mercenaires et non nationales: les Etats ont délégué, abandonné ou se sont fait retirer de fait leurs prérogatives légitimes de maintien de l’ordre. L’exemple choisi est le cas du pétrole angolais (voir le chapitre 8: Gouverner l’extraction: les nouvelles spatialisations de l’ordre et du désordre dans l’Afrique néolibérale). L’analyse est pertinente mais nullement originale et malgré ses compétences zambiennes, J. Ferguson ne nous montre pas en quoi cette problématique globale a des incidences sur le travail de terrain, d’autant plus que les informations utilisées ne proviennent pas de l’anthropologie. Pourtant une telle perspective en patchwork pourrait sans doute s’appliquer aussi aux passés ‘coloniaux’de l’Afrique: les forts de la traite transatlantiques, les ports et les lignes ferroviaires de la pénétration coloniale, les périmètres réservés au développement ‘expérimental’ ne constituent-ils pas des lieux parfois isolés sans synergie globale sur l’environnement social? La globalisation désarticulée selon Ferguson est en fait une caractéristique historique et sociale fort ancienne et l’ordre néolibéral pourrait se  C 2008 European Association of Social Anthropologists. REVIEWS résumer tout simplement par l’apparition de quelques types de ‘sites’ nouveaux. Les autres chapitres portent sur les socialismes africains (notamment tanzanien), l’ajustement structurel, la société civile et ce que l’auteur appelle les topographies transnationales du pouvoir. L’anthropologue déplore, à juste titre, le faible nombre de travaux anthropologiques sur ces réalités, mais s’il connaissait mieux les travaux francophones, il découvrirait que l’anthropologie sociale du développement, de ses appareils, de ses ONG et de ses administrations locales y constitue une orientation classique depuis plus d’une dizaine d’années. Il est certain que les catégories dominantes africaines des appareils d’Etat, et celles occidentales des organisations internationales, en tant que catégories également dominantes des sociétés africaines, ne sont absolument pas étudiées. S’interrogeant enfin sur la modernité, il évoque les ‘vertus globales’ des mondes criminels et des modes illicites d’accumulation. Pourtant une considération scientifique, morale et même politique traverse tout l’ouvrage, et c’est elle qui sauve l’auteur et nous interpelle fortement. Selon Ferguson en effet, les anthropologues, pour sauver l’Afrique des critiques d’arriération et de sous-développement, dont elle est l’objet récurrent, valorisent depuis déjà de nombreuses années les qualités nouvelles, au niveau des comportements, mentalités et cultures, créées par le changement social et la modernisation. En fait les sociétés sont en train d’inventer leurs propres modernités et leur historicité serait tout aussi moderne que celle de l’Occident ou des pays émergents. A une différence près à propos de laquelle l’auteur apporte des anecdotes et des exemples savoureux: celui des niveaux et genres de vie. Les Africains sont peut-être ‘modernes’ mais ils sont encore pauvres, très pauvres et loin de partager ce qu’ils avaient compris de la modernité: l’aisance de la consommation, de l’emploi et de la protection sociale (la Zambie des années 1950-60 restant un exemple parfait de ce paradigme d’il y a plus d’un demi-siècle).  C 2008 European Association of Social Anthropologists. 115 En s’attachant au ‘culturel’ sans le recontextualiser dans l’économique bassement matériel, quotidien, collectif ou individuel, les anthropologues oublient la moitié de la question. Cette ombre est attachée à l’Afrique parce qu’elle resterait encore largement inconnue et même inconnaissable. La culture c’est aussi l’inégalité et l’aspiration à une vie décente et l’anthropologie ne doit pas oublier cette autre moitié de la question. JEAN COPANS Université Paris Descartes (France) Gingrich, Andre, and Marcus Banks (eds.). 2006. Neo-nationalism in Europe and beyond: perspectives from social anthropology. New York and Oxford: Berghahn. vii + 303 pp. Pb.: £25.00. ISBN: 1 84545 190 2. The present book introduces an anthropological perspective on the analytical inquiry of neo-nationalism. As such, it adds to the complexity of the ongoing debate in the field. In Part I the editors, Andre Gingrich and Marcus Banks, elaborate a number of theoretical and methodological aspects of neo-nationalism, emphasising not only the communalities it shares with older nationalism, but also what essentially distinguishes it from these earlier versions, and implicitly makes it appear as new. Thus, Gingrich presents the political context, and the main characteristics of neo-nationalism in Western Europe. His ideas are further developed by Banks in an essay that focuses on the performance of neo-nationalism in the British context; concomitantly, his contribution details some methodological standpoints for its, analysis. Part II consists of essays that focus on Western Europe. Analysing the political impact of the integralist idea of a nation-wide imagined kinship, Marianne Gullestad argues for its centrality in the rearticulation of Norwegian ethnic nationalism. Furthermore, Peter Hervik monitors the rise of a new wave of nationalism in Denmark between 1992 and 2001. He observes that national elections and referendums may function as catalysts for 116 REVIEWS hostile discourses and policies against people of an ethnic minority background. In the same context of parliamentary elections, Thijl Sunier and Rob van Ginkel analyse the rapid emergence and fall of nationalism in the Netherlands, concentrating their academic inquiry on Pim Fortuyn, its charismatic leader. With neighbouring Belgium as a case study, Rik Pinxten addresses the issue of Belgian neo-communitarianism. He argues that economic globalisation and cultural and ideological traditions need to be taken into account when investigating neo-nationalism and its relationship to democracy. In turn, Thomas Fillitz details in his essay the impact of the Freedom Party and its nationalist agenda on Austrian politics. He scrutinises the party’s conception of pan-German cultural community, as articulated by the activity of Jörg Haider between 1986 and 2000. Fillitz aptly observes that the political mainstream eventually appropriated some of the party’s ideological cornerstones. Investigating the political landscape across the Alps, in Italy, Jaro Stacul observes the dynamics of identity and interrogates the meanings of neo-nationalist political positioning. The province of Trentino is at the centre of his anthropological inquiry; he questions the limitations of an overarching Italian neo-nationalism, noting the emergence of a neo-localist trend, mostly active in the Northern provinces. Monitoring the French politics, Gerald Gaillard-Starzmann details the uneasy relationship between the French political establishment and the radical Front National Party, observing the gradual approach of the aforementioned to the French right, and the subsequent mutation of some of its extreme viewpoints into the mainstream. Providing an integrative framework, Part III looks at the neo-nationalist manifestations from a European viewpoint. Paying special attention to the relationship between the nation and its fatherland, a recurrent theme in the neo-nationalist discourse, Gertraud Seiser uses Austria as an example for her analysis of the opposition of the native farmers to the Common European Agricultural Policy. Subsequently, Maryon McDonald discusses the translation of the newly developed nationalist manifestations at the EU level, and observes how they colonise the available political interstices between the pro-European discourses that allow for critique from within the European construction. Part IV offers a global perspective on the development of neo-nationalism, evidencing its emergence in such diverse geographic settings as India and Australia. The rise of neo-nationalism is investigated by Mukulika Banerjee in the context of Indian politics. She aptly interrogates the extent to which nationalism can accommodate the neoparticle, and she argues that in the Indian context religious fervour can be seen as a defining attribute of the new nationalist wave. In turn, Bruce Kapferer and Barry Morris scrutinise the sudden ascendancy and subsequent fall of Pauline Hanson and the politics of new right on the Australian mainstream political stage. They observe the similarities the Australian right shares with its European counterparts, and concomitantly point at the contradictions that underlie Australian egalitarianism. Ulf Hannerz sums up the findings in his Afterthoughts. Using the Swedish example of failed nationalism, he draws some general conclusions on the nature of the new wave of nationalism. He notes that these parties, under the leadership of charismatic people, manage to populate the mainstream political agenda with their anxieties about cultural homogeneity, equality and economic protectionism. The present book constitutes, I would argue, an outstanding insight into the development of nationalism at the dawn of the third millennium. Its richness lies precisely in these social anthropological views that the contributions detail. It opens a fruitful dialogue between anthropologists and political scientists, and I would warmly recommend it to those interested in widening their academic perspectives. OVIDIU CRISTIAN NOROCEL Helsinki University (Finland)  C 2008 European Association of Social Anthropologists. REVIEWS Grasseni, Cristina. 2007. Skilled visions: between apprenticeship and standards. Oxford and New York: Berghahn. viii + 226 pp. Hb.: $75.00. ISBN: 9781845452100. This collection begins where the critique of visualism in anthropology left off, by reconsidering how the discipline approaches vision. As Herzfeld argues in his epilogue, anthropologists seem almost embarrassed by the prominence of vision in their own practices and in the lives of those they work with. Here, the centrality of vision is embraced through an emphasis on an education of attention in which skill is developed through processes of apprenticeship taking place within communities of practice. The volume comprises nine chapters divided into three sections focusing on ecologies of practice, positioning gestures of design and schooling the eye in science and medicine. All take on the problem of what constitutes skill, how it is acquired and how it is demonstrated. Willerslev takes as his starting point Merleau-Ponty’s assertion that vision puts the world at a distance. Using this distinctive capacity to contrast vision with other senses, he explores its significance for both Yukaghir hunters and anthropologists in enabling both mimesis and detachment. Vision, he argues, is integral for both self-creation and identity because it maintains separation whilst engaging with those that are ‘other’. Grasseni explores how Italian farmers’ perceptions of cattle are mediated and learnt through varied devices, including advertising material and children’s toys. These provide ideal models enabling children to grasp the hegemonic aesthetics of their community of practice. Ronzon meanwhile, takes an ecological approach to the visual skills of Italian drag queens, describing how their environment ‘affords’ artists with resources to work with or against in creating biographically drawn characters. A visual appreciation of ‘camp’ emerges through both discussion and visual activity. Part two focuses on the role of technology, both old and new, in mediating  C 2008 European Association of Social Anthropologists. 117 vision and developing skill. Cohn examines how medical imagers ‘play’ with images in order to create desired results. He reveals the dialogical process through which images are created, challenging the objectivity of scientific reports. In these processes, seeing and knowing are not separate but combined and blurred in rarely articulated ways. Gunn produces a fascinating comparison of learning amongst artists, anthropologists and architects that, more than other chapters, reflects on the ethnographer’s experience in both learning skills and learning about skills. Skill is thus envisaged as the basis for knowledge, not its enacting. It is through the skills of drawing and writing that thoughts are made visible and new connections emerge. Turnbull provides an intriguing comparison between Beck’s systematised London Underground map and the building of Chartres Cathedral, both of which represent attempts to form a coherent whole out of disparate elements. It is thus only in hindsight that ‘design’ emerges out of the varied actions of a motley assemblage of individuals. The final part considers the acquisition of skilled vision and its performance. Saunders’ investigation into radiologists’ practices in the ‘CT suite’ explores the role of abduction in assessing radiological images. Skill is demonstrated by fitting images retrospectively to general rules to provide a diagnosis. Bleichmar’s study of 18th century naturalists focuses on the use of books in providing an education of attention through the systematic comparison of related forms. A naturalist’s vision was thus trained to be selective and hierarchical and also relied on the colonialist collection of objects. Roepstorff makes a bold attempt to convey the skill of neuroscientists. This chapter is striking in explaining the skill involved in ‘reading’ a brain scan by illuminating a series of scans through the exegesis of a practitioner, which provides a narrative that renders the on-screen blobs meaningful. Whilst the reader cannot become skilled in viewing these, Roepstorff demonstrates the possibility of articulating the contextualisation of scans by an expert viewer. 118 REVIEWS I found the volume to be consistently stimulating and was excited by a new visual anthropology dwelling not in the image but in how people actually look and see. I would like to have read more about the particular methodological problems presented by vision. How does the anthropologist understand skilled vision and how do they ‘see’ how somebody else sees? At times I was somewhat frustrated, as perhaps the authors were, of the limitations of representing skilled vision within the narrow framework of short articles allowing little space to develop an appreciation in the reader of what it is to be skilled in seeing within a particular context. Once an anthropologist has grasped an appreciation of skill, how is this then represented to their audience? But this is an important and timely volume that does much to further our understanding of vision. It will be of great interest to researchers and students concerned with studies of sensory perception. ANDREW WHITEHOUSE University of Aberdeen (UK) Keane, Webb. 2007. Christian moderns: freedom and fetish in the mission encounter. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. xiv + 323 pp. Pb.: £13.95. ISBN: 0 520 24652 7. In 1902 the Dutch Calvinist Reformed Free Church sent its first missionary to Sumba, a small island in the eastern part of the Netherlands Indies, where the colonial administration had allowed it to start the Christianisation of the inhabitants who still adhered to their traditional ancestral religion. When Keane was there for his research in 1985–1987 and again in 1993 approximately half the population were members of the Christian Church of Sumba, which had become autonomous in 1947. Initially conversion had been a slow process, not least because the Dutch missionaries wanted to be sure that new adherents were fully committed to what they believed to be the most authentic form of Christianity in existence, including an earnest desire to convince others. Keane himself witnessed many highly articulate debates between these Indonesian Calvinists and followers of the traditional religion. Although Keane gives the impression that the study of Christianity was not what he had come for, he took up the challenge to explain what was happening in these encounters. He published several articles on this topic, apart from a monograph on the role of customary poetic language. Six of these essays are presented in modified form in the second half of the volume under review. In the first half Keane considers the larger framework within which his Sumbanese experiences may fit, touching upon such topics as the global influence of Christianity, the relationship between Calvinism and Euro-American modernity inspired by the Enlightenment, and historical developments in Indonesia during the 20th century. In this part of the book he has to rely on selected secondary sources and lacks the space to explore alternatives. However, when it comes to his theoretical perspective, Keane’s argument is a model of careful reasoning. He claims no more than he can account for. The originality of his approach allows him to concentrate on an extended discussion of the issues involved, rather than having to justify his interpretation of some existing theory. A key concept is ‘semiotic ideology’, ideas people have about the language they use, as well as about other material means of communication. Such an ideology is about the relationship of words and things with persons. The materiality of the former may contrast with agency and freedom of the latter, but much depends on which other beings, apart from humans, are believed to possess agency and on the power attributed to words. Keane sees clear parallels between the way Calvinism articulates its view on these matters and the more or less taken for granted assumptions of modernity, which is wholly secular in outlook. Keane borrows from Latour the concept of ‘purification’, the drawing of a clear line between human agency and natural determinism. Both Calvinism and secular  C 2008 European Association of Social Anthropologists. REVIEWS modernism insist on this separation in order to protect individual autonomy against the threat of the materiality of signifying practices. Hence Keane can define ‘fetishism’ as the ‘imputation to others of a false understanding of the division between human and nonhuman, subject and object, an error that threatens human agency’ (p. 27). Another common aspect of their respective semiotic ideologies is the emphasis on sincerity and its moral connotations. Sincere speech reflects exactly what one thinks. This privileges the referential function of language. To catch the causal effects of a semiotic ideology he introduces the term ‘representational economy’ to indicate that words, things and persons are situated dynamically within the same world with one another. But he makes clear that he does not want to ‘portray a totalizable world in which everything is accounted for’ (p. 33). For Keane each side of the missionary encounter ‘extends away in numerous directions’ (ibid.). Because this kind of analysis seems to work so well on Sumba, a first reading of his book is very persuasive. Still, it may well be that the tools Keane fashioned cannot easily be adopted by others as he does not give an explicit methodology on how to construct semiotic ideologies from the observation of signifying practices. Moreover, to the extent that one is conscious of the role of a specific ideology, one can choose between alternatives if they are available. The kind of person one is supposed to be, or more specifically ideas about agency, would then depend on situational selection. This, at least, is the outcome of anthropological research into medical pluralism. Keane’s approach seems to exclude the possibility of a similar religious pluralism, which may not be important on Sumba, but appears to be widespread elsewhere. JAN DE WOLF Utrecht University (The Netherlands) Kovats-Bernat, Christopher J. 2006. Sleeping rough in Port au Prince. An ethnography of street children and violence  C 2008 European Association of Social Anthropologists. 119 in Haiti. Gainsville: University Press of Florida. xvi + 233 pp. Hb.: $59.95. ISBN: 978 0 8130 3009 8. Sleeping rough in Port-au-Prince explores how street children negotiate their suffering in a setting that has become increasingly brutal over the past decades. Through a perceptive ethnography detailing children’s everyday social and economic activities on the streets, Kovats-Bernat demonstrates that street children take part actively in social and symbolic processes through which they produce and reproduce culture. The analysis is premised on a theoretical notion of adolescent identities stressing the dialectic of others’ expectations of a child’s personhood and the child’s own perception of his/her selfhood and autonomy. Grounding this notion in the Haitian context, KovatsBernat highlights the importance of civil society and the state in delineating what is expected of street children socially. Their self-identification is oriented primarily to other street children, while their sense of autonomy is expressed in relations with adults, children living at home, other street children and the state. Strangely absent in this contextualisation is a distinction between people in general and those closer to a child whose expectations may influence his/her identity formation at different times, e.g. biological or social parents, siblings and close friends. Each of the main chapters elucidates new aspects of children’s street lives. The first two chapters contextualise the use of urban space in Port-au-Prince, whose vibrant informal economy transforms streets into pools of trade and services. Here the boundaries between domestic and public spheres are porous and public space has been nicknamed the peoples’ living room in local vernacular. For children this space implies a risk of getting stuck, of being entangled in the liminal sites of unstructured spaces, exposed to marginalisation and exclusion. Chapters 3 and 4 describe the changing political economy of violence in Haiti, from the emergence of paramilitary gangs 120 REVIEWS instrumental in political repression to fragmented groups of armed youth preying on ordinary citizens. By routinely detaining street children as part of their fight against gangs, Haitian police fuel a negative image of the children, linking them to random brutality. As a contrast, Kovats-Bernat highlights that most street children undertake a range of minor economic activities and occasionally beg and resort to petty crime. Street children do nevertheless reproduce a certain degree of violence within their own ranks. Hostilities concerning minute economic territories are usually solved in fist-fights and verbal abuse, but may escalate to razor cuts and so-called sleeping wars, in which the adversary is maimed while asleep. The intention behind such attacks is economic: by scaring away an enemy from the territory in question, conflicts are resolved quickly and do not undermine the children’s livelihoods. Chapter 5 looks at the rise and fall of children’s empowerment in Haiti and describes the life cycle of the orphanage Lafanmi Selavi. What started as a pro-poor ideology of meeting street children’s basic needs and teaching them their rights ended as a fierce rebuke when the children stood up in a political manifestation against deteriorating living conditions. Kovats-Bernat argues that the conflict around Lafanmi Selavi has had long-term repercussions for street children who have since been misrepresented as violent and troublesome. This book is a good example of how well ethnographies can illustrate complex phenomena. Children’s experiences and the intricacies of their realities are still new foci in anthropology. Especially the presentation of individual street children’s histories provides a spectre of nuances that opens up to additional interpretations and areas where Kovats-Bernat could have taken his analysis further and perhaps also extended his inquiry. In my view, the role of street children’s relationships with their families is underrated. Despite the fact that some children visit parents and relatives occasionally and save up to give them symbolic gifts, Kovats-Bernat does not pursue that line of inquiry to discover how children conceptualise material aspects of asserting their identities vis-à-vis their families. He appears to get stuck in a typology of families prone to produce street children, and in a Western view on children’s work according to which work in public spaces inevitably is a first step towards living on the street. This conceptualisation of families is far less nuanced than the conceptualisation of children’s street lives, amongst others because the choice of informants does not extend beyond the street. Moreover, street children are treated as one category, and yet the age at which they leave home may be key to understanding their family relationships and agency. Mature adolescents may set out to find work because they want to contribute to the domestic economy, not necessarily pushed by parents. They may want more autonomy and choosing the streets may stem from a rejection of being treated like a child. In short, they negotiate their identity in the space between others’ expectations of them and how they would like to be seen. Secondly, the conceptualisation of children’s work does not take into account the general use of public space. Moving about in the peoples’ living room is not an anomaly in Haiti and contradictory adult practices beg for a more nuanced analysis. The ethnography shows abundantly that while street children are misrepresented in public discourses and unduly harassed by state agencies, people – including police officers – support the children by employing them, paying for various services or giving them alms to buy food ‘because they work to eat’. Children’s work is thus seen as a virtue in making them acceptable persons. These nuances would have helped to show how street children negotiate their suffering. Additionally – but perhaps not possible considering the political situation at the time of Kovats-Bernat’s field research – it would have been interesting to follow how the Lafanmi Selavi project impacted on children’s agency back on the streets after its demise.  C 2008 European Association of Social Anthropologists. REVIEWS Exactly because of its aptness for reading into the ethnographic material and adding to the analysis by angling it differently, I recommend this book for undergraduate and graduate teaching with particular emphasis on methodology or child/youth studies. DORTE THORSEN The Nordic Africa Institute Uppsala (Sweden) Lock, Margaret and Judith Farquhar (eds.). 2007. Beyond the body proper. Reading the anthropology of material life. Durham and London: Duke University Press. 688 pp. Pb.: £20.99. ISBN: 978 08223 3845 1. Hb.: £57.00. ISBN: 978 0 8223 3830 7. Le corps est entré légitimement au sein de l’anthropologie il y a près d’un siècle. On évoque volontiers à ce propos l’effort pionnier de Marcel Mauss et sa célèbre formule ‘le corps est le premier et le plus naturel des instruments de l’homme’ (1966: 372). Si la voie ‘technologique’ initiée par la figure de l’homme total guide aujourd’hui encore un certain nombre de travaux parmi les plus intéressants, une autre conception de l’anthropologie du corps trouve sa pleine expressiondans ce recueil: il s’agit de montrer qu’au delà de l’évidence apparente de son caractère discret et biologique, le corps se décline selon différentes définitions concurrentes, en fonction des acteurs et des contextes historiques et culturels. En réunissant et commentant quarante-sept (extraits de) contributions précédemment publiées dans le domaine des faits sociaux du corps, dans cet ouvrage les anthropologues nord-américaines Margaret Lock et Judith Farquar engagent le lecteur dans cette direction. La tâche, délicate, est conduite par deux spécialistes de questions de médecine au sein des mondes contemporains, un intérêt que l’on retrouve en forme d’aboutissement de l’ensemble. En effet, sous les dehors apparemment modeste d’une somme critique de textes abrégés – multipliant les disciplines de sciences humaines et les thématiques – l’ouvrage progresse au fur et à mesure des  C 2008 European Association of Social Anthropologists. 121 sections qui le composent, selon une organisation logique qui rend sa lecture intéressante au-delà de la pertinence de chacun des essais qui le composent. Il s’ouvre sur les extraits les plus anciens et l’entrée difficile du corps dans les sciences sociales naissantes (partie 1). A l’exception notable du cas des techniques du corps théorisées par Mauss, le corps se trouvait alors réduit au statut de symbole naturel, bon à penser dans l’économie des représentations sociales. Ce schéma, excluant l’expérience au bénéfice de l’esprit, éprouve ses limites dans la philosophie continentale d’obédience phénoménologique (partie 2) et le modèle de l’incarnation (‘embodiment’). Cette dynamique du faire corps sera reprise à son tour par l’anthropologie (partie 3) en vue de se constituer en alternative au modèle dominant du corps moderne élaboré par la bourgeoisie du 19ème siècle. Parallèlement, l’analyse se donne les moyens d’interroger avec une plus grande acuité, sensorielle notamment, la nature du quotidien (partie 4), théorisé comme un espace vécu dont les conditions de l’enchantement trouvent leurs origines dans de singuliers corps à corps. Ainsi équipée, l’anthropologie dispose dès lors des outils nécessaires pour décrire l’ensemble des rapports sociaux à l’œuvre dans la définition (symbolique et expérimentale) des corps. C’est tout d’abord le questionnement de la condition matérielle de la domination qui devient possible (partie 5), depuis la remise en cause de l’hégémonie des modèles bourgeois européens jusqu’à l’analyse des dynamiques de marginalisation qu’elle présuppose. Dégagé de certains a priori, il devient alors possible de considérer les mécanismes de négociation des identités en jeu dans ces contextes, tels qu’ils se jouent dans la problématique des genres (partie 6). L’apport de Foucault est à ce titre déterminant, qu’il s’agisse de montrer l’historicité des catégories sexuées ou leur production discursive, tant dans le sens commun que dans le développement des sciences biomédicales. Le corps marginalisé est véritablement au cœur de la réflexion (partie 7) et, avec lui, le pluralisme des formes 122 REVIEWS d’expériences en marge des modèles imposés. A l’inverse, on peut chercher à donner corps aux mécanismes de l’aliénation capitaliste (partie 8) et aux conséquences physiologiques et identitaires de la discipline des corps inhérente à l’organisation spatio-temporelle de l’industrie. Le corps, lui-même, devient produit de consommation, inscrivant ses transformations dans des logiques d’échanges symboliques et matériels. Qualité appréciable de ce recueil, les situations décrites montrent que les processus de domination n’épuisent pas à eux seuls ce qui se joue réellement. La dernière section de l’ouvrage, consacrée à la négociation de la définition du corps dans la formation et la critique des biosciences (partie 9), montre ainsi que la technologie n’est pas seulement l’aboutissement d’un processus de normalisation, mais qu’elle contient en substance d’importants dilemmes moraux. Les catégories qu’elle mobilise font alors l’objet de négociations qu’il faut considérer pour comprendre ce qui se joue derrière l’univocité trompeuse des notions de corps ou d’esprit. Considéré dans sa globalité, Beyond the body proper est bien plus qu’un panorama raisonné au cas par cas, chaque section faisant en effet l’objet d’une présentation critique soignée, accompagnée de suggestions de lectures supplémentaires. Il s’y défend au contraire une certaine conception de l’anthropologie du corps: un ‘nouveau matérialisme’, élaboré aujourd’hui par un nombre croissant de chercheurs dont plusieurs ont la parole ici. Ils ont pour point commun de questionner la multiplicité des définitions ‘du corps’en jeu dans différents contextes socio-historiques, en privilégiant la réalité et la dignité des expériences qui se jouent alors. En raison de ce souci d’inscrire les textes choisis dans une réflexion plus approfondie, la lecture de ce recueil s’avère passionnante, notamment pour les étudiants, à qui il est naturellement destiné, en sciences sociales et en sciences biomédicales. On regrettera dès lors – mais était-ce bien le lieu? – l’absence de perspective critique dans la présentation de ce nouveau matérialisme. En effet, de la matière elle-même il ne reste parfois que peu de chose dès lors que se trouve privilégiée la contingence historique et sociale des définitions du corps normal au détriment de ses spécificités physiques. L’absence de retour sur l’actualité des techniques maussiennes est à ce titre tout à fait significative. Avec cela, disparaı̂t une part du projet initial de l’anthropologie des origines, c’est-à-dire de comprendre la spécificité du corps comme moyen, et non objet, de la pensée sociale. Finalement, à trop chercher au-delà du corps même, ne risque-t-on pas d’enlever au corps sa consistance, au risque de ne plus être en mesure de penser l’homme dans sa totalité? Références: Mauss, Marcel. 1966 (1936) Sociologie et anthropologie, Paris, PUF. OLIVIER WATHELET Université de Nice-Sophia Antipolis (France) MacDonald, Margaret Read. 2006. Ten traditional tellers. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 200 pp. Pb.: £12.99. ISBN: 0 252 07297 9. MacDonald has provided a valuable contribution to the study of oral narratives and storytelling by focusing on the people who tell stories over the folklore. The author is herself a professional storyteller and author of dozens of books for adults and children. After a short introduction, ten chapters introduce ten people of diverse backgrounds, united only by their interaction with MacDonald as she participates in the world storytelling circuit. Each chapter opens with a half-page description of the socio-cultural context, followed by a page introducing the person. The bulk of each chapter consists of transcribed interviews MacDonald held with the storyteller and ends with a couple of stories from the storyteller’s repertoire. We learn about their childhood and how they experienced storytelling and got into telling  C 2008 European Association of Social Anthropologists. REVIEWS stories themselves. All of these people are self-reflective and articulate. Many have been publishing books and scholarly articles for decades, and all but one chapter ends with a selected bibliography of the most important publications by each storyteller. The first chapter is about Vi Hilbert, a respected elder of the Coast Salish Upper Skagit tribe, who has been telling and publishing stories for several decades. She is committed to sharing and spreading the fame of her culture and even founded her own press as a venue for her own and many others’ books. Curtis DuPuis, in Chapter 10, presents a sharply contrasting example. He is a member of the Chehalis Tribe and restricted from publishing the stories he learned from his elders by the strict traditionalist sense of property rights of his wider family. He may tell his stories in sundry venues, and even allow two to be published in this scholarly volume, but he may not disseminate widely the stories that properly belong to the family of Hazel Pete. Two chapters provide examples of the power of stories and storytelling for overcoming great personal and socio-economic obstacles. Roberto Carlos Ramos was given to an orphanage in urban Brazil by his parents when he was five years old because they couldn’t feed him any more. He quickly became the ‘problem kid’, running away hundreds of times, until a French social worker took him at age 13 and adopted him. She and a storytelling cook in one of the orphanages are credited with saving his life, and now he uses stories he learned as a child combined with autobiographical vignettes in a performance style so engaging that some audience members don’t remember that he performed them through an English interpreter while in Washington. Makia Malo was banished to the leper colony in Hawaii when he was diagnosed with Hansen’s disease. Although medicines have halted the progression of the disease, he lost his sight, was scarred, and is confronted with the social stigma. Like Ramos, Malo’s performances and writings inspire youth to aim higher without moralising.  C 2008 European Association of Social Anthropologists. 123 Several of the storytellers are explicitly engaging text and oral performance. The Lao Buddhist monk, Phra Inta Kaweewong, has been writing down oral stories for publishers in northeastern Thailand and learning and transcribing old stories written on palm-leaf texts since the 1950s. Similarly, Lela Kiana Oman of Nome has been writing and publishing Eskimo stories and legends so that they will be preserved for future generations. Leonard Same is a university professor in New Caledonia, with over a dozen books and articles published, and he tells stories in formal and informal settings, struggling with the problems of translation from his native language into French and transcription of oral performances into books. The final chapter on tradition is a nice discussion of tradition and art, drawing primarily on Henry Glassie’s ideas of tradition as dynamic, drawing upon the past as a resource for making the future and not codified in stone. Thus, readers (and audiences at the kinds of events where these ten people often perform in ‘traditional storytelling’ festivals) should understand that the tradition behind traditional tellers is the material, out of which good storytellers shape exciting performances that engage the imaginations of audiences, and not pre-packaged not codified, unchanging items simply handed down from one generation to the next like buckets of water. The reader, however, is left on his own to make connections between the politics of tradition evident in Hilbert’s iconoclastic dissemination of stories versus DuPuis’ conservativism. The fascinating issue of literacy and orality is not systematically discussed, but only brought up occasionally by some of the individual tellers. Ten Traditional Tellers is a solid contribution to the popularisation of folklore and brings needed attention to some wonderful storytellers, but it does not seriously engage many problems that interest readers of this journal. ALEXANDER D. KING University of Aberdeen (UK) 124 REVIEWS Makris, G.P. 2006. Islam in the Middle East: a living tradition. Oxford: Blackwell. x + 348 pp. Hb.: £55.00/$74.95. ISBN: 1 4051 1602 1. Pb.: £17.99/S29.95. ISBN: 1 4051 1603 X. Given the explosive growth in books on things Islamic, the Greek anthropologist G.P. Makris felt a need to carefully position his book. However, in vindicating yet another addition to a rapidly expanding literature, the author exaggerates the dearth of anthropological and ethnographic approaches to the study of Islam. Apart from the author’s mention of the contributions by Eickelman and Gilsenan, the gap that Makris ostensibly seeks to fill has already been filled by Frederick Denny’s seminal introduction to Islam. Also on a more specialist level there is more available than ‘a handful of articles or occasional book’ (p. 4). Important contributions to the study of Middle Eastern Islam as a living tradition, including practices and rituals, have been made by, for example, Unni Wikan, Willy Jansen and Marjo Buitelaar (who is later acknowledged for her rich ethnographic description of Fasting in Morocco). In another geographical area – Southeast Asia – anthropologists even took the lead in redefining the way Islam is studied there, when the findings of Bowen, Hefner and Woodward challenged the approach of eminence grise Clifford Geertz. This does not diminish the value of Makris’s contribution. Drawing on the concept of ‘discursive tradition’ as developed by the ethicist Alasdair MacIntyre and anthropologist Talal Asad, a narrative alternating between the well-defined doctrine of a world religion and the local and translocal levels on which it is lived forms the red thread which holds this book together. It enables Makris to present the production of Islamic orthodoxy as the indeterminable outcome of continuous negotiations. Before moving to the substance of an anthropological approach to the study of Islam, the author provides also a framework for understanding a few key terms used throughout the book. Juxtaposing the ‘West’ and the ‘Middle East’ as historical and cultural constructs objectified through discourse, Makris contrasts his open and dynamic understanding of these designations to Huntington’s ‘crass essentialism’ (p. 6). In regards to globalisation, he draws attention to its constitutive trends of cultural fragmentation and modernist homogenisation which simultaneously shape global reality. The framework is completed by a fourth term: secularisation. Here Makris’s own background has influenced his choice for the definition formulated by the Eastern Orthodox Priest Alexander Schmemann, rather than more obvious ones provided by sociologists of religion. Following a conventional overview of Islamic history in the first chapter, the next one commences with a consideration of four doctrinal foundations of Islam: Qur’ān, Prophetic tradition, the consensus of the Muslims, and the principle of reasoning by analogy. It is somewhat odd that Makris blames other analysts for their ‘poor and legalistic’ understanding of Islam as an orthopraxy rather than an orthodoxy when he limits his own discussion to these four sources of Islamic jurisprudence. Makris’s subsequent discussion of the community of believers or umma seems a bit too challenging for what claims to be an introductory text. The rest of the book hinges on the impressive third chapter: ‘Authority and Knowledge’. In his discussion of traditional Islamic scholarly learning and education, Makris highlights the system’s inherent ‘structural fluidity’, paying attention to both its content and institutional features which together constitute the world of the religious scholars or ‘ulamā’. Drawing on recent studies by Zeghal and Moustafa, and using a vocabulary borrowed from Lévi-Strauss, he presents an intriguing account of how the ‘Textual Inundation’ (67ff.) that potentially threatens the vitality of (segments) of the living umma is now being offset by the bricolage of new Muslim intellectuals, and a new oral tradition introduced by preachers using audio-visual media. Here Makris relies  C 2008 European Association of Social Anthropologists. REVIEWS primarily on the work of Charles Hirschkind, a student of Asad (who also provides Makris with many of his theoretical cues). The edifice that is the ‘House of Islam’ is gradually completed in the remaining five chapters. Of particular interest in the discussion of the ‘Five Pillars’ is the author’s sketch of the complex interrelations between zakāt (alms-giving), attempts to define an ‘Islamic economics’, social welfare, the role of NGOs, and the closely related issue of coming to terms with the notion of ‘civil society’. The same Chapter 4 provides also ample material taken from anthropological research into the Ramadān Fast. Africanists will appreciate Makris’s identification of the hajj as a factor in the migration of West Africans towards the continent’s central and Red Sea regions. The quarrying of fieldwork data is continued in the next chapter on Islamic mysticism or Sufism. Here, Makris points to its constituent function in the ‘totality of the Islamic experience’ (p. 142), complementing the dimensions of theological and legal discourse. Chapters 6–8 are dedicated to Islamic reformism and Islamism. Based on the work of Roff (incidentally again an expert of Southeast Asian Islam), again Makris takes care to underscore the comprehensive and supranational as well as the local aspects of these trends affecting the whole of the contemporary Muslim world, which can be said to revolve around five key areas of concern: the question of the Islamic state; the relation with the West; defining the enemy; a hostile attitude towards Sufism; the place of individualism and the position of women. Although it would have benefited from a concluding chapter, as it stands Islam in the Middle East provides a comprehensive introduction to a living religious tradition that is currently at the centre of much international attention. CAROOL KERSTEN King’s College London (UK)  C 2008 European Association of Social Anthropologists. 125 Mimica, Jadran (ed.). 2007. Explorations in psychoanalytic ethnography. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. ix + 245 pp. Pb.:$ 25.00/£ 15.00. ISBN: 978 1 84545 402 9. Souhaitant se démarquer des débats spéculatifs sur les relations entre anthropologie et psychanalyse, ce volume collectif, dirigé par l’anthropologue australien Jadran Mimica, réunit dix études ayant pour ambition de montrer l’intérêt de la psychanalyse en anthropologie et, en particulier, d’éclairer la pratique ethnographique. Il rappelle d’ailleurs en introduction la double exigence qui fonde ‘l’ethnographie psychanalytique’ pour l’étude des profondeurs de l’esprit humain suivant une dialectique du singulier et de l’universel: l’expérience personnelle de terrain et de la cure. Mais ce qui domine invariablement les contributions, c’est une théorisation psychanalytique qui n’est pas forcément informée par un travail de terrain (ni même, par une visée clinique) et lorsque c’est le cas, les matériaux sont recodés et rendus opaques plutôt que producteurs de concepts anthropologiques et d’intelligibilité. Outre un politologue et un spécialiste des religions, les auteurs sont anthropologues et/ou psychanalystes. Il est donc possible de distinguer deux grands groupes de textes: Le premier groupe se compose de quatre articles centrés sur l’analyse du transfert/contre-transfert dans la relation ethnographique. Cette dimension est mobilisée dans l’article des anthropologues suisses Florence Weiss et Milan Stanek, qui s’appuient sur un travail déjà ancien (Conversations au bord du fleuve mourant, Ethnopsychanalyse chez les Iatmouls de Papouasie/Nouvelle-Guinée, Genève, Zoé, 1987) pour dégager, sur la base d’une conversation avec une femme, le sens de la cérémonie du Naven. En croisant parenté et cosmologie, Jadran Mimica propose également une interprétation phénoménologique et psychanalytique de la relation père-fils chez les Yagwoia (Papouasie/Nouvelle-Guinée) en 126 REVIEWS s’intéressant, plus spécifiquement, aux rêves d’un homme après la mort de son père. Dans un style encore plus narratif et centré sur la personne de l’anthropologue belge, René Devisch retrace les quatre grandes étapes subjectives de sa carrière. De tous, l’article de Waud H. Kracke est peut-être le plus lisible et informatif, même si sa thèse consiste à défendre la possibilité d’interpréter le sens subjectif des ‘culture pattern dreams’ (e.g. une figure surnaturelle apporte un message au rêveur) des shamans parintins du Brésil qu’il étudie. Le second groupe, de loin le plus complet, se compose de réflexions générales sur le malaise dans la civilisation, la pratique thérapeutique et son rapport à la culture ou, plus platement encore, sur des généralités qui n’ont rien d’anthropologique. La dimension narrative est également très présente dans l’esquisse biographique du psychanalyste indien Sudhir Kakar et la mise en perspective de la psychologue brésilienne Renata Volich Eisenbruch ou du psychologue australien Craig San Roque. Plus distrayants qu’informatifs, les articles du politologue James M. Glass, de l’historien des religions Dan Merkur et du psychiatre Shahid Najeeb ressemblent à des exercices exégétiques et surinterprétatifs, tantôt sur un registre spéculatif, tantôt sur un registre poétique. . . Au terme de la lecture, des questions fondamentales demeurent pourtant sans réponses: à quelles conditions une ethnographie psychanalytique est-elle possible? En quoi l’appel au terrain et à l’analyse du transfert/contre-transfert constitue-t-il une traduction méthodologique pertinente de la psychanalyse et de son cadre pratique dont la visée, n’est certainement pas la connaissance, mais une clinique du trouble? Plus radicalement encore, pourquoi l’anthropologie aurait-elle besoin de s’équiper d’une théorie du mental pour produire ses connaissances? Ce programme de recherche implicite se doit de démontrer à la fois sa fécondité pour résoudre des problèmes anthropologiques majeurs et l’impossibilité de se dispenser d’une théorie du mental. Et pourquoi la psychanalyse plutôt qu’une autre théorie? Ce postulat paraı̂t également évident pour les auteurs. Or, à cette étape de la réflexion, illustrer, classer ou recoder un phénomène avec la psychanalyse n’a aucun intérêt théorique. SAMUEL LÉZÉ EHESS, Paris (France) Önder, Sylvia Wing. 2007. We have no microbes here: healing practices in a Turkish Black Sea village. Durham, NC.: Carolina Academic Press. xxv + 304 pp. Pb.: $40.00. ISBN: 978 0 89089 573 3. Ce livre offre un récit vivant, enthousiaste et engagé du mode de vie partagé par les villages turcs bordant la Mer Noire. Ecrit dans un style personnel, il est extrêmement bien fourni en anecdotes, extraits d’entretiens et références à des études de cas menées par d’autres anthropologues. L’insertion de l’auteur sur le terrain en tant qu’épouse d’un homme provenant des villages étudiés a permis des échanges confiants qui font la richesse du livre. Ceci contraste avec d’autres ethnographies, moins privilégiées parce que leurs auteurs n’avaient pas de liens de sang. L’ouvrage est organisé d’une manière traditionnelle mais efficace pour se plonger au cœur de la Turquie profonde, présentant 9 chapitres qui évoluent d’une mise en situation générale à une description plus précise des pratiques de soins de santé au sein des villages. Ils sont groupés en deux parties: La première partie (les 5 premiers chapitres) propose une présentation globale du système de fonctionnement des villages turcs de la Mer Noire. Le premier chapitre précise d’abord la terminologie employée dans l’ouvrage. Le terme ‘tradition’ est ici utilisé comme un processus marquant une dialectique entre le passé et le présent, entre ce que les gens savent et ce qu’ils apprennent par la transmission d’une génération à l’autre et d’un individu à l’autre. Le terme n’est pas utilisé dans le sens d’une ‘façon de faire démodée et fixe’ (p. 28). Le terme ‘clinique’est opposé à celui de ‘traditionnel’ et évoque une certaine localisation des pratiques (dans des  C 2008 European Association of Social Anthropologists. REVIEWS institutions telles que les cliniques), un entraı̂nement du personnel (impliquant une connaissance de la théorie biologique de base), des costumes portés (uniforme de l’infirmière, blouse du médecin) et l’usage de certaines technologies (thermomètre, stéthoscope, médicaments). Les chapitres suivants discutent de la place des femmes: le passage du nid familial de la jeune fille à la maison de son mari, parfois située dans un village lointain; le respect et les services dus à sa belle-mère; la division du travail entre les sexes; la mise en place de réseaux afin d’avoir toujours des proches sur qui compter; l’importance de la religion et des croyances (notamment l’‘evil eye’ ou mauvais œil) dans la façon de concevoir le monde et la santé; le rôle important des femmes dans la santé de leur famille dont elles sont tenues responsables et leur monopole dans la pose de diagnostics. La seconde partie (les 4 derniers chapitres) précise les pratiques de soins de santé mises en œuvre dans les villages. D’une part, on découvre les processus de guérison traditionnels: l’expertise particulière d’un ‘bone setter’ et le prestige qui lui est associé, les remèdes transmis oralement par les dames plus âgées que l’on appelle ‘aunties’ (tantes) et les conseils glanés au cours de rendez-vous improvisés autour d’un thé, qui privilégient l’usage de concoctions à base de plantes et l’utilisation d’incantations. D’autre part, on assiste à la montée en puissance de la médecine clinique, qui se traduit notamment par un nombre accru de visites à des professionnels de la santé installés dans les villes, par davantage d’accouchements à l’hôpital, ainsi que par l’installation dans les villages d’un centre de santé financé par l’Etat et imposant des pratiques occidentales (telle que la vaccination obligatoire pour les jeunes enfants). Cependant, on regrette que la progression des chapitres n’aboutisse pas à un chapitre conclusif qui systématiserait les interactions entre les pratiques de soins traditionnelles et cliniques. En effet, l’objectif présenté par l’auteur en introduction était une description du système de santé en action  C 2008 European Association of Social Anthropologists. 127 ainsi qu’une démonstration de la négociation des nombreux choix offerts aux patients suite à la co-existence de pratiques traditionnelles et d’une médecine clinique. Hormis quelques extraits d’entretien présentant des bribes de connexion entre les deux systèmes de soins, il n’y a pas de montée en généralité qui permettrait d’appuyer l’argument de l’auteur. La thèse d’une interaction au quotidien n’est donc pas défendue de manière convaincante à notre sens. Le titre, à cet égard, est également peu explicite du propos soutenu par l’auteur. We have no microbes here laisse davantage penser que le système de la médecine clinique a peu de prise sur les pratiques locales. Ce qui est aux antipodes de l’argument de Sylvia Wing Önder. En conclusion, ce récit nous offre un périple savoureux au sein de la Turquie rurale, et, alimenté d’extraits d’entretien pétillants, dresse un portrait de femmes riche en couleurs. Cependant, il ne remplit pas l’objectif qu’il s’était fixé dans l’introduction: démontrer l’interaction des systèmes de soins de santé. On attend donc avec impatience une suite à cette introduction. BARBARA BOVY FNRS-Université de Liège (Belgique) Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris (France) Osgood, Cornelius. 2006. Winter: the strange and haunting record of one man’s experiences in the Far North. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Republished by Bison Books. 264 pp. Pb.: .11.99. ISBN: 0 8032 8623 6. This is a republished edition of the 1953 autobiographical novel by the famous Yale-based ethnographer Cornelius Osgood. The novel documents the first full Arctic winter experienced by the ethnographer in 1928 on the shores of Great Bear Lake in Canada’s Northwest Territories, and the novel is marketed by Bison Books as a sincere and accurate account of a lonely whiteman enduring difficult conditions in a stark and 128 REVIEWS beautiful landscape. As such, it follows in the footsteps of a quite large genre for this region of the world including autobiographical accounts by Douglas Leechman, Angus Graham and anticipates the work of Farley Mowat and Rudi Wiebe. This novel is distinct for its clear writing and engaging portraits of local settlers and to a lesser extent the enigmatic native characters representing the ‘Athapaskan tribe’ now better known as the Sahtu First Nation. The foreword to this second edition, provided by Alaska-based adventure writer Nick Jans, vouches for the authenticity of the author’s experience. It seems that the author’s descriptions of his clumsy attempts to work with food or fish, or to struggle with sled dogs rings true to those who chose the Arctic as their home whether they be in Fort Norman or in Juneau Alaska. At this level I would also agree that the book is both candid and accurate. The ironic and yet caring way that Dene people teach bush skills have not changed much in 80 years even if my own apprenticeship was with skidoos and kickers. Re-reading the book now as an anthropologist who once lived in the region, I was struck by the author’s painstaking descriptions of technique – an interest that would later be elaborated in his classic works on Ingaluk material culture and on the Han and Peel River Kutchin [Gwich’ins]. As the author of the foreword notes, the descriptions of how to set a net under the ice and of the ecological and technical logic behind running sled dogs are particularly well illustrated in this volume. They serve as good proxies for understanding regional technical traditions, even if the accomplishments are labeled as the author’s own knowledge. What is valuable in this account is the way that extremely subtle hints either from neighbours or from startlingly intelligent sled dogs lead the author to a full understanding of how to travel and survive in this region. There is plenty here to question standard models of ‘cultural transmission’. Here people and animals seem to whisper the things a person must know to survive. It is not quite fair to portray this book as an account of one isolated man’s attempt at survival, as one reads in the foreword and book jacket. For most of the winter, the author lived in the company of a caring if reticent group of settler fishermen. What is striking about the book today is how well it captures the fabric of Sahtu Dene and Mackenzie Metis culture in the region. The book provides a good guide to understanding the depth at which technique crossed cultural boundaries, and was shared. Today one gains a clear picture of regional fur-trapping society held together by hybridity and mutual aid. The heart of the book’s plot lies in a slowly building atmosphere of mistrust and jealousy in two fur trading communities – a rendition that rings true in this account and one that is difficult to find in Hudson’s Bay Company ledger books or letters from this period. What is also striking, if not unsettling, is the ease by which this ethnographer readily accepted settler stereotypes of First Nation peoples people being eager to overhunt (‘slaughter caribou for their tongues’) or to be caught up in superstitious ritual. Of course, since this is a fictional account, it is not clear the degree to which the author-asethnographer actually believed these stereotypes (or instead was simply trying to portray a character). Since these stereotypes are not gently ridiculed by events in the book (unlike his misadventures in harnessing dogs) one has to assume that as of 1953 he still thought them to be true. Given the furious debate now surrounding Shepard Krech III’s recent book, it would seem that doing one’s first fieldwork among Mackenzie Dene provides no immunisation against ethnocentrism. The publisher promises that the text is an accurate reproduction of the original edition. There is no index. The author of the foreword warmly approves the text’s sincerity although it seems that he knows little of the region (he makes several mistakes in place names and in evoking context) or even Osgood himself (who is styled as a Victorian). What would have made a valuable contribution to the book would have been a short study of the  C 2008 European Association of Social Anthropologists. REVIEWS aims of Osgood’s original research, which was apparently funded by the Government of Canada at a time before the invention of the Emergency Ethnology Programme. An explanation of why Osgood’s expedition was a ‘failure’, as stated on the book jacket, would have given the readers valuable context to a little known period in the author’s life. DAVID G. ANDERSON University of Aberdeen (UK) Pink, Sarah. 2006. The future of visual anthropology: engaging the senses. London: Routledge. xii + 166 pp. Pb: £19.99. ISBN: 0 415 35765 9. The book is noteworthy for the debates it raises about the future of visual anthropology and for the analytical structure of the author’s arguments and statements. In the preface, Pink explains that the book arose from her concerns with ‘issues related to how visual anthropology is situated (and mis-situated) in relation to mainstream anthropology and in wider inter- or multidisciplinary contexts across the social sciences and humanities’ (p. xi). Pink tackles questions such as ‘how theory and practice might be combined to produce a visual anthropology that has a strong profile in and outside the academy and communicates effectively to both audiences’ (p. 3). The book is structured in five parts that allow a proper analysis on three levels of argument construction (theory–practice–theory), and at the same time never misses an opportunity to underscore the connections and interdependencies among these levels. Part one comprises two chapters. Chapter 1 starts with a dense analysis of the beginnings of visual anthropology and its early interests in sensory experience and the use of new visual technologies for research and representation. This is followed by a concentrated section that lays the groundwork for the debate about the opportunities and challenges of visual anthropology in the 21st century that will be explored later in the book. Chapter 2 focuses  C 2008 European Association of Social Anthropologists. 129 on the interdisciplinary issue within visual research, the ‘common interests’ of researchers who come from different disciplines – ‘reflexivity, collaboration, ethics and the relationship between the content, social context and materiality of images’ (p. 22) and the permanent awareness of the differences between subdisciplines. Thus the need for a certain openness must be combined with more grounded information about the ‘history of ideas in one another respective discipline and their historical development’ (p. 38). Part two explores visual anthropology within mainstream anthropology through its approach to sensory experience. In Chapter 3, Pink’s aim is to ‘re-think the potential role of audiovisual media in researching and representing sensory ethnographic contexts’ (p. 42). In pursuing this goal she brings into the debate her theoretical and ethnographical research developed in Spain and England on certain topics such as gender, identity and sensory home, and some insights from the anthropology of experience and intercultural cinema. She underscores the potential of multimedia texts that ‘combine’ image and word to ‘represent sensory experience and make explicit the anthropological theory’ (p. 58) by taking into account the limits of visual methods and by grounding the research with theoretical arguments that allow anthropological statements. Chapter 4 offers the empirical basis necessary to mould proper statements regarding new links between fieldwork and theory, research and representation by acknowledging the potential and limitations of film and writing and by highlighting the positive contribution of hypermedia as ‘anthropological text’. Using empirical data from her own research, the author opens the path for a critical examination of hypermedia as a way of ‘bridging’ word and image. In the third part of the book, Pink explores the Visual engagement as social intervention (Chapter 5), by offering a critical analysis of applied visual anthropology practice. She highlights the gains of anthropologically informed projects that use 130 REVIEWS visual methods for social intervention purposes and their valuable contribution to the development of academic visual anthropological practices. Although Pink emphasises that ‘isolation’ characterises practitioners within this field, she acknowledges the distinctive identity of applied visual anthropology based on her analysis of existing works and highlights the potential of visual anthropology (largely discussed in Chapter 7), linking it with the public responsibility of anthropologists. By analysing several hypermedia projects developed within academia or applied visual anthropology, in Chapter 6 Pink tries to reveal the potential of these multimedia and interactive texts to ‘create the stronger links with writing and in doing so re-situate video within anthropology’ (p. 128). The last chapter concludes by emphasising the main ‘roles’ of visual anthropology for the 21st century: offering renewed forms of comparative anthropology, drawing a conduit for the public responsibility of anthropologists, and making a distinctive contribution to the interdisciplinary field of social sciences. The value of Pink’s book lies in its critical and provocative approach to the future of visual anthropology. Therefore, one may consider the volume as a primary bibliographical contribution to the on-going debates on visual anthropology for the 21st century. GABRIELA BOANGIU Institute for Socio-Human Researches “C. S. Nicolaescu-Plopsor”, Craiova (Romania) Santamarina, Beatriz. 2006. Ecologı́a y poder: el discurso medioambiental como mercancı́a. Madrid: Catarata. 141 pp. Pb.: €12.00. ISBN: 8 4831 9283 7. According to Beatriz Santamaria’s book Ecology of power, the last decades have witnessed a long process by which the environmental phenomenon is being normalised and institutionalised, due to the inactivation of the subversive mechanisms of this phenomenon. Therefore, the controversial nature of ecology has been pushed aside. Both symbolic ecology and political ecology have been transforming their discourse on the environmental issue in the last decades, bringing in and producing new discussions, which, according to the author, rather than being novel, are a part of a long homogeneous tradition, reinforcing inequality and increasing the growing trend towards an unbalanced world. On the one hand, this book strives to present a plurality of non-symmetrical discourses existing in the globalised world. On the other, it also illuminates the grounds on which the normalised and hegemonic ecological point of view is based, identifying the different mechanisms that impose a one-way-only political and economic reasoning. In other words, it tackles the implications of spatial, capitalist and modernist domination for the prominence of this universal and homogenous ecological discourse of the latter decades. The environment is basically shown as a political category, produced by diverse institutions, showing a reduction and shift of interest from the natural world to an exclusively cultural one. To understand how the dominant point of view is created it is necessary to focus on how cultural systems establish dynamic mechanisms to apprehend the world and discriminate in it, resulting in a definition of reality. In this sense, for the author, the processes of resistance, normalisation and institutionalisation are fundamental to explaining how the environmental phenomenon has been defined and how it has been built and legitimised in our cultural life. The new asymmetrical discourse is thus shown to be legitimised through the construction of a hegemonic ecological message via different strategies that hide the real nature of the environmental phenomenon, namely its controversial dimension and its capacity to transform. Therefore, the environmental issue hides, through concealment and systematic denial, the hegemonic practice of exclusion. This  C 2008 European Association of Social Anthropologists. REVIEWS means that it does not recognise the need to radically change our political and economic system and intends to resolve all problems by carrying out small palliative actions. The field of intervention has in the process become inefficient and the message most strictly politically correct. In consequence, they have both become useless, as they deny the present access to legitimate means for collective action and construction of the future through environmental education and technology. Finally, according to the author, re-structured capitalism, neo-liberalism and globalisation are only different faces of the same source of power that transforms people, societies and nature into simple market goods. Making culture more natural and nature more cultural has become a normalised instrument underlining that progress is much more than a simple ideology legitimising asymmetrical power relationships, imposing its products, objectives and truths. The hegemonic point of view and its particular political and economic rationality – its productivity, domination and cost-benefit logic – has turned nature into a marketable good. Far from being a circumstantial issue, as a collateral effect in nature, the environmental topic is an obvious symptom of degradation which ought to imply a radical change in our political and economic system. Environmental and social degradation are two sides of the same coin, the outcome of a new imperialism that leads to and lends legitimacy to genocide and ecocide without limits. For the author, the environmental issue allows us to reflect on the world we live in through presenting its problems, dangers, risks as well as our responsibilities. MARIA ALBERT RODRIGO University of València (Spain) Strecker, Ivo and Jean Lydall (eds.). 2006. The perils of face. Essays on cultural contact, respect and self-esteem in southern Ethiopia. Berlin: Lit Verlag. x + 417 pp. Pb.: €29.90. ISBN: 3 8258 6122 8. The southern region of Ethiopia is most complex in terms of peoples, languages and  C 2008 European Association of Social Anthropologists. 131 cultural expressions. In the South Omo district alone, of which this book concerns, more than 20 different languages are spoken and each group have distinct cultural traditions and varying social, economic and political institutions. The South Omo district was one of the last areas to be put under (colonial) state administration during the Scramble for Africa, as it was conquered and incorporated by the armies of Emperor Menelik II at the end of the 19th century. The histories and cultures of the South Omo have always been peripheral to the master narrative(s) of the centralised Ethiopian state, and they still are even after the reconfiguration of Ethiopia into an ethnic federal system. The impressive collection of papers contained in this volume, however, will surely serve as a scholarly correction to this neglect. The point of origin for this study is exactly the changes brought about by replacing the centralised Ethiopian state with an ethnic federal system, through a new Constitution adopted in 1994 which abolished former cultural hierarchies and puts all ‘nation, nationalities, and peoples’ as equal. How do the people of South Omo remember their past, and what conceptions do they entertain of each other are the research questions guiding this collection of papers. Furthermore, how are cultural images of the ‘other(s)’ formed and changed through culture contact? The editors, Ivo Strecker and Jean Lydall, the former a professor of anthropology and the latter an anthropologist and award-winning film maker, have researched the cultures and peoples of the South Omo valley for more than three decades. They bring together 14 contributors well versed in the complex cultural settings of south Ethiopia, in order to explore the dangers inherent in cultural contact, and more specifically how notions of pride, honour, name and self-esteem come into play as people negotiate their identity, as individuals or collectives. They succeed admirably in this endeavour. The book is divided into two parts – four papers with a theoretical or comparative 132 REVIEWS orientation and ten empirical case studies – of which the latter is organised into three sub-themes. In part one, a brief theoretical introduction on perspectives on cultural contact is followed by two comparative studies on naming traditions and kinship. The section ends with an exposé of the social-political relevance of the notion of ‘face’ (by Ivo Strecker), which is also the key metaphor of the anthology. The first group of papers in the second part of the book addresses ‘pride and resistance in the wake of conquest’, as they analyse how local peoples in South Omo experienced the early stages of exploration, conquest and ‘colonisation’. The second group of case studies concerns ‘combat, friendship and respect between equals’ and examines processes of identity negotiation that arise from encounters between various groups. The last section of papers has a gender perspective as it examines ‘women’s quest for self-esteem’. Here cultural contact is understood as the socio-cultural tensions arising from contact between men and women. The volume contains an impressive range of articles highlighting the ethnic variety of southern Ethiopia. Although they vary in methodological approaches and theoretical ambitions, they all speak on the same topic of ‘culture contact’ and issues of self-esteem, which makes the volume surprisingly coherent and focused. However, considering the rather short introduction to such a voluminous anthology, a concluding chapter could have taken the argument of the volume to a broader Ethiopian context and a more theoretical level. For instance, Ivo Strecker mentions in his introduction the case of Hamar contact with neighbouring groups, and how ethnic ‘boundaries’ may facilitate contact in one context and distinctions in another. This ‘revised’ notion of ethnic boundaries and how they actually may enable the construction of cross-cultural relationship is something Fredrik Barth and Anthony P. Cohen have theorised on in several recent publications (see, for instance, Cohen 2000). Such a perspective could have been used to facilitate a more rigorous and robust theoretical framework to the current volume. Likewise, the South Omo cases presented do also speak to practices among the dominant Ethiopian groups and how they organise and perceive their inter-ethnic relations, in terms of conflict and peace. As such, the cases presented in the anthology do not represent any cultural ‘periphery’. This shortcoming does not at all devalue the importance of the volume. Its great strength, beyond its ethnographic contribution, is the interdisciplinary value of the analysis presented. The historiography of conquest from local perspectives as outlined in several contributions stand as an important corrective to the master narrative of Abyssinian ‘civilising’ missions to include peripheral groups under the domain of the Imperial Crown. Furthermore, the case studies presented on the dynamics of cultural contact and self-esteem give valuable insight into how comparative dynamics at a macro level is understood and negotiated, both in relation to the struggle between dominating groups within Ethiopia, as well as to broaden our understanding of the bilateral conflict dynamics between Eritrea and Ethiopia. The perils of face will thus serve as a valuable contribution to Ethiopian studies, and will be recommended reading for scholars from varying disciplines, as well as policy makers preoccupied with understanding cross-cultural conflict dynamics and peace settlements in the region. Reference Cohen, Anthony P. (ed.) 2000. Signifying identities: anthropological perspectives on boundaries and contested values. London/New York: Routledge. KJETIL TRONVOLL University of Oslo (Norway) Svašek, Maruška. 2007. Anthropology, art and cultural production. London and Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press. vii + 264 pp. Pb.: £17.99. ISBN: 0 7453 1794 4.  C 2008 European Association of Social Anthropologists. REVIEWS ‘What is art?’ is the introductory and also omnipresent question in this synthetic anthropological work on art, artefacts, aesthetics and cultural production. In the first part of the book we can follow an exhaustive analysis of conflicting definitions of art and aesthetics in anthropology from evolutionism to contemporary theoretic approaches that were influenced by postmodern paradigmatic shift. This part of the book is comparable to teaching texts, providing a rather detailed overview of anthropological approaches to art combined with comparative fragments from theory of sociology of art, cultural studies and art history. Introduction to anthropological perspectives on art brings the reader to an important, but hardly new conclusion: there is no applicable anthropological theory of art, but predominantly generalising approaches and one-way answers to the key question ‘what is art’. Although Alfred Gell proclaimed his object agency theory as the first anthropological theory of art, he, as the majority of theoreticians before him, produced similar ‘short-cuts’. Most theories of art have so far been based on case studies from ‘classical’ anthropological fieldwork in non-western societies, and the focus was only on one part of process of art, either on an object, production or consumption. At the same time scholars claimed that their approaches have a cross-cultural and universal scope. It is thus more than understandable that Svašek stresses the essentiality of finding alternatives to those approaches. Similarly to other scholars, especially those working in the field of sociology of art (Bourdieu, Becker and others), Svašek defines art as a social process, and argues for an anthropological approach, which highlights the notion that experience and perception of art are influenced and shaped by sociopolitical processes and individual life histories. Instead of considering art as a universal category, she stresses the processual nature of artefact/object production, interpretation and experience in fields of power, and identifies different factors that influence people’s experience and understanding of art. Thus, as an alternative  C 2008 European Association of Social Anthropologists. 133 to the established anthropological paradigm she proposes a processual relativist approach to art production. In the second part of the book Svašek further develops this approach, and illustrates it with a variety of cases. This second part, entitled ‘Objects, transit and transition’, is divided into six chapters, four of which are discussions on different aspects of art, followed by a case study and a concluding chapter. Svašek’s approach is object-based, but she equally incorporates and emphasises other parts of an art world, that is producers, consumers and distributors of artefacts. Significance of objects in everyday life and their ability to evoke emotions is demonstrated with an analysis of processes of commoditisation and aestheticisation. According to Svašek, objects reproduce the agency of their producer and most powerful among them even urge people to re-act upon them. Nevertheless, relative efficacy of an object is related to social construction of art. How art production, consumption and most importantly distribution are linked to political, economic, religious and other social and cultural dynamics is highlighted in all four main chapters. In this regard markets and museums are especially under scrutiny. Svašek also compares art and other categories of non-art objects such as craft, kitsch, pornography and propaganda and thus shows that the boundaries between them are shifting or are very blurred. Here she again tackles social construction of art. Finally, Svašek explores the processes and effects of producing art, as well as collecting and exhibiting it in local, national and global contexts. Processual relativist approach to art and artefacts is therefore substantiated with the variety of cases that include Aboriginal paintings, Inuit soapstone carvings, works of contemporary African artists, political monuments in former communist states, flags in Northern Ireland, or pornographic art in the Red Light district in Amsterdam, to name a few. Although this book does not provide a radically new anthropological theory of art, it is a rare and therefore most welcome 134 REVIEWS anthropological piece of writing, striving to provide a more correct and possibly more efficient understanding of a complex world of art. At the end of the book we do not get the answer to the question ‘What is art’, but the book clearly signals that there can only be multiple answers, as well as pluralism of approaches to multi-layered concepts such as art. In Svašek’s words: ‘The definition of art and its boundaries is thus a process that needs to be understood by examining artistic discourses and practices against the background of long-term historical change’ (p. 219). KRISTINA TOPLAK Institute for Slovenian Emigration Studies, Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Ljubljana (Slovenia) Varzi, Roxanne. 2006. Warring souls: youth, media and martyrdom in post-revolutionary Iran. Durham and London: Duke University Press. 304 pp. Pb.: £13.95. ISBN: 0 8223 3721 5. Warring souls is the most interesting book analysing youth cultures in post-revolution Iran that I have read. There have been quite a few attempts to describe the huge youth generation of contemporary Iranian society in the English language during the last decade (e.g. Alavi 2005; Basmenji 2005; Moaveni 2005; Nafizi 2004), but unfortunately these popular paperbacks seldom succeed in their venture: searching for the nature of Iranian culture, language, religion and society. In other words, it is very difficult to describe today’s Iranian youth without leaning on simple stereotypes that characterise images of Iran in the mainstream Western world press. The temptation to exoticise and alienate Iranians with reference to political ideological discourses is big, and an extensive anthropological fieldwork is the main scientific technique to avoid a priori patterns and get close contact to the youth in question. And this is exactly what Varzi did as the first Fulbright grant awarded researcher in post-revolution Iran. Her book is based on ethnographic research conducted in Teheran and other Iranian cities between 1991 and 2000. Warring souls is a tour de force that presents novel theoretical perspectives regarding the influence of the Islamic revolution, the Iran–Iraq War and the media (especially visual media) on today’s urban middle-class youth’s culture, lifestyle and future prospects. Varzi describes the ‘revolutionary’ symbolic and intellectual discourses of Iran – the philosophy that Iranian children learn at school – which the Iranian theocratic system has constructed and reproduced for almost three decades now. This is a part of Iranian history and society usually missing in European and North-American interpretations of this controversial and isolated state between Iraq and Afghanistan. Varzi provides a brilliant analysis of martyrdom and demonstrates how remote some Iranian meanings are from Western concepts as individuality, independence, freedom, death and nation/state. Varzi argues that by concentrating on images and the performance of proper behaviour, the government’s campaign to produce model Islamic citizens has affected the appearance of religious orthodoxy, and that the strictly religious public sphere is partly a mirage masking a profound crisis of faith among many Iranians. The ‘crisis’ among young Iranians is anyway only evaluated vaguely, leaving the reader with many questions and large generalisations ignoring internal differentiations – age, sex, class, local identity, religious identity, etc. – in Iranian society. The book, composed of ten chapters (including introduction and conclusion), has a subtitle ‘youth, media and martyrdom in post-revolution Iran’. The strong focus on media, with thorough representations of Iranian movies and television series, makes the book a cultural study with limited priority to the empirical fieldwork with informants and participant-observation. The book is not a classic social anthropological monograph  C 2008 European Association of Social Anthropologists. REVIEWS but rather a rich text mixing many sources of data – media, literature, myths, pictures, interviews, etc. – in its ethnographic mission. Varzi has, with more success than many other authors, unveiled the complexities and contradictions that characterise Iran today, and Warring souls is a must-read for youth and media researchers interested in the societal developments in Iran. The problem when writing about contemporary Iranian society is that society changes quickly and not always as predicted. Nobody knows about the future. The power struggle between liberal/reformist and conservative/religious factions is naturally influencing the youth generation’s cultural freedom and way of life. Backlash follows progress follows backlash. Warring souls, with its focus on media, symbols and myths, does not really investigate the foreign influence (political, economic, cultural) on Iranian society. The book has its strength in the analysis of Iranian culture through media, literature and education. But Varzi is indeed conscious of the global character of modern media. A strong separation of public and private spaces; modern media technologies like the satellite, the Internet, faxes, and radio; and strong ties to a large expatriate community in the West makes it impossible to stop the non-Islamic world from infiltrating the clergy’s project –  C 2008 European Association of Social Anthropologists. 135 and what the clergy blame, correctly, for a failure in policy. (p. 174) Warring souls is an outstanding addition to the anthropological literature on Iranian youth in a schizophrenic age with lost hopes and paradoxical signals from the leaders of society. Varzi demonstrates how powerful the symbols, images and rituals of the revolutionary elite have been in Iran, even if young people today don’t trust and believe in this. They, however, have to pretend – at least in public – to support the system. As Ayatollah Khomeini says in a quotation on the first page of Varzi’s book: ‘The holy prophet said: “Affliction caused by the tongue is worse than that caused by the sword. Among all the things the tongue deserves to be imprisoned longer than anything else.”’ References Alavi, Nasrin. 2005. We are Iran. London: Portobello Books. Basmenji, Kaveh. 2005. Tehran Blues Youth Culture in Iran. London: SAQI. Moaveni, Azadeh. 2005. Lipstick Jihad: A Memoir of Growing up Iranian in America and American in Iran. New York: Public Affairs. Nafizi, Azar. 2004. Reading Lolita in Tehran. A Memoir in Books. London: Fourth Estate. FIROUZ GAINI University of Faroe Islands (Faroe Islands)