Book Reviews
Police Encounters: Security and Surveillance in Gaza un-
der Egyptian Rule. Ilana Feldman. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2015. 207 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12271
LORI ALLEN
SOAS, University of London
Ilana Feldman is one of the foremost anthropologists
working on the Middle East today. In her latest book she
brings her formidable skills as historical anthropologist and
archival sleuth, theoretician and ethnographer, storyteller
and writer of crystalline prose to the analysis of Egyptian
rule over Gaza from 1948 to 1967. She focuses on policing
and security as “a field of both governance and action”
(3) in which Egyptian officials and Palestinians tried to
influence each other through spying, rumormongering,
moralizing, and snitching.
Feldman builds on Partha Chatterjee’s “politics of the
governed” by adding “security society” to his taxonomy
of civil and political society, in order to explore methods
of governing and forms of state-citizen relations during
the era of Egyptian military administration over Gaza.
Drawing on Foucauldian approaches to the relationship
of governmentality and subjectivity, Feldman shows how
this “security society” defined the approximately 250,000
Palestinian refugees who fled from the Zionist forces
that pushed them out of what became Israel in 1948 as
“potential problems and sources of suspicion” (15) for the
Egyptian state as well for each other.
Feldman has developed this picture of a little-known
era out of her research in the archives of the Egyptian
Administration and the United Nations peacekeeping force
that was deployed to Gaza in 1957. Along with interviews
with retired police officers in Gaza and memoirs, these
archival records reveal the nitty-gritty of daily policing that
Feldman uses to illustrate the Egyptian government’s reach
into every corner of Gazans’ lives. “[A]pplying for a job as
a teacher, establishing a social club, and traveling abroad
were all activities that generated investigation and report”
(32), as could the mere fact of being a student or a foreigner,
working at a printing house, and certainly being a member
of a political organization. By surveying records of the
countless events of police encounters—from interrogation
AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 43, No. 1, pp. 172–205, ISSN 0094-0496, online ISSN 1548-1425. 
All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/amet.12271
transcripts to reports on public opinion—holistically,
Feldman shows how a climate of suspicion, intimidation,
uncertainty, and fear pervaded Gazan life under Egyptian
rule.
This anxious atmosphere, in which anyone could
stumble accidentally into criminality because so much
could be illegal, led people not only to avoid organized
political activity, but also to contribute actively to a kind
of “community policing” by informing on each other. In
this pull and tug of the “security society,” “the people” were
constructed as “an object that required protection and that
could be a source of threat” (51). Social propriety was an-
other key feature that defined “the people.” Correct moral
behavior seems to have been a concern for everyone, the
governing and governed alike. Gazans called on the police
to lean on their neighbors when they thought someone was
behaving badly—taking pictures of girls or harassing young
women, for example—even if it was not strictly against the
law. Feldman’s book might suggest that there is historical
precedent to the moral policing by Hamas, which, since
it took over the government in the Gaza Strip in 2007, has
tried to ban women from smoking water pipes in public
and insisted that shop windows bare less mannequin skin.
How people, including children, get woven so seam-
lessly into the security web is a question not fully answered
in Police Encounters. The book makes clear that Gazans
knew they were being watched, and developed calculated
judgments about the uses and abuses to which they could
put the security society—to seek revenge, or to try to pro-
tect themselves from suspicion. But how did the existence
of widespread surveillance come to be known and its
hegemony take root so thoroughly? Were observations of
policing in public enough for the Egyptian government to
get the message of their all-seeing power across? Although
we see glimpses of contestation, against censorship and
for rights to organize, for example, Feldman makes clear
that many people had a certain desire for the security that
the policy provided, even if it was roughly imposed, and a
confidence in the police “as a proper and adequate space
of redress” (94). How those levels of knowledge and faith in
the power of the police are cultivated is a question of acute
relevance for today. Given that the Arab Spring sprang in
part from a situation in which there was almost universal
lack of faith in the police throughout the Middle East (a con-
dition shared by many racial and ethnic groups in Western
C 2016 by the American Anthropological Association.

countries, too), it is important to try to understand contem-
porary police-people dynamics with the great sensitivity
that Feldman has brought to this period in history.
Policing plays a fundamentally conservative function,
maintaining or imposing stability and order, preventing
the movement of people across borders, quashing the de-
velopment and communication of ideas that might lead to
desires for change, quelling political activity that might try
to alter the nature of the ruling order. This stabilizing aspect
of policing comes out very clearly in Feldman’s discussion
of the UN’s first peacekeeping force, the United Nations
Emergency Force (UNEF), whose mission was to “maintain
law and order” in Gaza after the war with the Zionist forces
(129). But as Feldman emphasizes, “security society” was
not entirely successful in holding people still or elimi-
nating political expression. And it could be manipulated,
becoming a tool for citizens to exert influence. When their
words on the street became reported public opinion, for
example, the government sometimes responded. The room
for maneuver on the security playing field, however, was
fairly limited, and controlling its effects was not so easy. But
the “variety of ways [Gazans] press[ed] their claims” (145)
is a consistent theme in Feldman’s portrayal. It would be
fascinating to know if the lessons that Palestinians learned
in navigating Egyptian security carried over to life under
Israeli occupation from 1967.
As police forces around the world are becoming
increasingly militarized and violently repressive of not
only political dissent but even citizens’ daily lives, more
anthropologists and other social scientists are turning their
analytical gaze to state security systems. Scholars and other
citizens should be spurred on to research these topics by
the emergence of programs like Prevent in the UK (Section
26 of the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015), which
requires specified authorities, including colleges and uni-
versities, to have “due regard to the need to prevent people
from being drawn into terrorism.” It has already been
misused to harass a student reading a book on terrorism
(he was enrolled in a counterterrorism master’s program),
and it is causing insecurity, suspicion, and distance among
students and teachers (Ramesh and Halliday 2015). Those
who take up this challenge will benefit from the perceptive
and sophisticated conceptual apparatus that Feldman has
developed in this volume, as will anyone interested in
social aspects of policing, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict,
and Egyptian history.
Reference
Ramesh, Randeep, and Josh Halliday. 2015. “Student Accused of
Being a Terrorist for Reading Book on Terrorism.” UK Guardian,
September 24. Accessed October 10, 2015. http://www
.theguardian.com/education/2015/sep/24/student-accused-
being-terrorist-reading-book-terrorism.
Book Reviews  American Ethnologist
Tamils and the Haunting of Justice: History and Recogni-
tion in Malaysia’s Plantations. Andrew Willford. Honolulu:
University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014. 318 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12272
SARAH BESKY
Brown University
Across the global South, corporations and states are “grab-
bing” rural land for the expansion of rubber and oil palm
plantations, but in the former plantation districts outside
of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, plantation owners are selling
off their land to real estate developers. The shrinking of the
Malaysian plantation economy has amplified the marginal-
ization of Hindu Tamils, who have worked these fields since
the late 19th century. In Tamils and the Haunting of Justice,
Andrew Willford documents how Tamils fight, first, to stay
on plantations after they close; second, to preserve their
community temples, which, along with their homes are
slated for demolition; and, third, to gain “compensation,”
which takes both material and nonmaterial form. The story
will be of most interest to Southeast Asian area special-
ists, scholars of the Indian diaspora, and, given Willford’s
theoretical leanings, psychological anthropologists and an-
thropologists of religion interested in questions of alterity,
historiography, and collective memory.
Willford’s study took place in the early 2000s, a time
when retrenchment was proceeding at a rapid pace, and
when Tamil collective memories of past injustices (and of
successful movements for compensation in the 1970s and
1980s that yielded workers favorable housing accommo-
dations and allowed them to maintain some community
cohesion) “haunted” those facing eviction. Senses of justice
among these marginalized Tamils go beyond the law. Justice
is a thoroughly spiritual concept. Community-based Hindu
temples became increasingly significant as sites of social
memory and social protest as well as ritual spaces amid a
shrinking community landscape, as first plantation homes,
and later these very temples, became slated for demolition.
The struggles over protecting sacred Hindu space amid the
ascendency of Islamic modernism shed light on how ethnic
and religious tensions heighten in moments of economic
transition.
Yet Willford steadfastly resists a straightforward
economic interpretation of justice. Instead, he seeks to
examine “the psychology of ethnic rationalization and . . .
a sense of victimization, an oftentimes volatile mix” (6).
Displaced Tamils seek compensation, but given the ways in
which religious space is being refigured under plantation
retrenchment, compensation is impossible to calculate
in straightforward terms. In attempting to work out what
form compensation might take, Tamils draw on a sense
of themselves in relation to Malay Others, developing,
173
American Ethnologist  Volume 43 Number 1 February 2016
according to Willford, a sense of historicity of both their
place in the landscape and of their own subjugation.
The story of retrenchment is told in fragments. Will-
ford moves from plantation to plantation, and from rural
temples to high-rise apartments. The fragmented narrative
reflects the fracturing of communities under plantation
retrenchment and ethnic marginalization at the hands of
the law.
He also offers an informative history of Malaysia’s plan-
tations and Tamils’ place within them. As in other British
colonial contexts, Tamils were brought to Malaysia because
the British believed them to be ideal (read: docile) “coolies.”
And as in other plantation contexts, the Tamil labor force
became permanently settled. Scholars of plantations will
recognize this story, as well as the ways in which Tamils
themselves narrate this history: how, as Willford puts it—
following Jacques Derrida—they create their own “archive.”
Tamil claims to land, which Willford discusses at length
in their relationship to recognition, stem from an almost
Lockean notion of property. Tamils helped construct
the plantation landscape, yet contemporary Malaysian
law does not recognize former land use as a significant
rights-based claim. In the eyes of the law, Tamils are merely
laborers—or, more precisely, ex-laborers. The search for
compensation, in other words, becomes a method of recon-
stituting a community that is being legally erased. In one
of the book’s most compelling examples of mobilization,
SUARAM (Suara Rakyat Malaysia, or Malaysian People’s
Voice) activists aided Tamils seeking to keep their land as
developers swallowed it up to build high-priced residential
subdivisions. SUARAM worked to identify sympathetic
judges who might draw on principles of English common
law in hearing Tamil land claims. These judges might
possibly recognize that “land use was being capriciously
driven by a real estate market created, ironically, by the
labor of those being displaced by it” (126).
The book moves from struggles for compensation and
recognition on plantations to descriptions of riots and
increased ethno-religious animosity as Tamils resettle off
the plantations. Willford pushes for a view of ethnic tension
as fundamentally rooted in a profound uncertainty about
identity. In one of the book’s more tightly woven ethno-
graphic set pieces, Willford takes us inside the high-rise
apartments that house former plantation laborers. It is
here—as in so many other instances of slum resettlement
around the world—that the state’s betrayal of its laboring
poor minority is rendered spatially palpable. As they deal
with the loss of garden space and community buildings
provided on plantations, Tamils struggle with how to
incorporate religious space into tower blocks. How to
reconstitute the Hindu temples destroyed on the old plan-
tations to make way for mosques that now serve residential
subdivisions? Whose icons will be re-created, and whose
temples will be consolidated when space is at a premium?
174
This book, then, is a story of how Tamils lost their
homes and temples, how they were resettled into high-rise
ghettoes that fractured their communities, and how that
ghettoization fueled ethnic violence and marginalized
them within very the nation-state where they live and
which they have called home for generations. Willford
uses lengthy explications of Derrida and Jacques Lacan to
situate these dispossessions. Doing so, he attempts to tell
a story—which would be familiar to scholars of ethnic and
racial politics in India or even the contemporary United
States—in a way that goes beyond staid narratives of struc-
tural violence. Fully engaging Willford’s argument, however,
requires a fairly deep familiarity with Continental literary
and psychoanalytic theory. For this reason, the classroom
appeal of the book may be limited, even though the story
of how economic dispossession becomes conjugated with
ethnic and religious marginalization is a timely one.
Land’s End: Capitalist Relations on an Indigenous Fron-
tier. Tania Murray Li. Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2014. 225 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12273
SUSAN M. DARLINGTON
Hampshire College
Rural poverty exists worldwide and is expanding. Explana-
tions of the causes of poverty often focus on the impacts
of outside forces, especially large capitalist companies and
their agents. At the same time, efforts to deal with this
poverty and related problems largely focus on economic
growth. In Land’s End, Tania Murray Li complicates this
picture for the highlands of Central Sulawesi, Indonesia.
In twenty years of research through several visits to the
Lauje region of Sulawesi, Li observed dynamic layers of
intertwined changes in both social and land relations that
led to some people in the highlands prospering while many
others were cut off from access to land and opportunities
to earn a livelihood. The value of her analysis is that the
voices of these people are considered in terms of their
own explanations of the changes, the places in which they
had agency and choice, and the ways in which they found
themselves without real options. She unpacks the history
of the emergence of capitalist relations in the highlands in
order both to critique development schemes (mainstream
and alternative alike) for not paying attention to the com-
plexities of this history and to understand the highlanders’
roles in this process.
Li does not present a single factor as a primary cause
for the rise of poverty among the highlander population.
Nor does she establish the highlanders as passive victims
of capitalist growth. Instead she examines their choices
and the multiple factors at different points in time that

contributed to why individuals behaved the way they did.
In doing so, she does not idealize an indigenous past in
which people had harmonious relations with the land and
took care of each other within the community. Rather, Li
demonstrates the hardships of life for different groups of
Lauje, from the coast to the middle highland to the inner
highlands, and the desires that emerged as they came into
contact over time with various outsiders, from traders to
the Dutch colonists to missionaries to the central Indone-
sian government. Lauje were not an isolated, homogenous
indigenous group, but a fluid congeries of people linked
through language and kinship. She calls Lauje settlements
“neighborhoods” in order to stress their fluidity, and while
she focuses on the people who live in three of these neigh-
borhoods in the middle highlands, Li places their situations
and choices within the broader social and economic
changes that occurred across the region.
Li lays out these changes over time, following patterns
of economic and environmental evolution. Each chapter
assesses an aspect of these changes, beginning with the
historical relations that existed for the two centuries before
1990, when Li first went to the Lauje highlands. From the
macro she moves to the micro, exploring the relations
of what she calls “work and care” during a period when
the highlanders had plenty of land and grew their own
food. Individuals had access to land for their own use, and
there was plenty of opportunity to open new areas in the
primary forest. Individuals, even within families, owned the
products of their work but shared responsibility to care for
kin and neighbors in times of need.
With this context as background, Li then focuses on
what happened when, starting in the 1990s, highlanders
shifted from predominantly growing food (both for their
own consumption and to sell to people from the coast)
to planting cacao trees on common land. Here she makes
a strong theoretical contribution to understanding how
the concept of land ownership emerges in horticulturalist
societies. The dynamic process did not follow the models
of loss of indigenous common land usually described as
outside forces pressuring highlanders and grabbing their
land. Lauje highlanders readily recognized individual own-
ership once someone planted trees, but they debated who
had the right to plant where. Even though people accepted
the shift to individual ownership, its impact was to create
“enclosures” from which some people were excluded, as
individual Lauje responded opportunistically to outside
circumstances.
Li then takes up the impacts of enclosures into the
2000s. She examines how capitalist relations emerged and
competition and profit became the definers of status, social
relations, and land relations. Inequalities grew rapidly, even
within families, as some people acquired the capital to
obtain significant amounts of land and others found them-
selves at the “land’s end,” with no primary forest on which
Book Reviews  American Ethnologist
to establish new plots. Li looks at the political responses of
the Lauje highlanders and at the limited options they have
for dealing with these inequalities and rural poverty.
The concept of the “analytic of conjuncture” (16)
enables Li to weave together the wide range of elements
that contributed to the situations the highlanders face,
from economic factors to the materiality of crops and trees
to shifting social relations. She presents these factors as dy-
namic, ever responding to each other and to new elements
introduced from outside. Li incorporates both meaning and
practice over time, factoring in how highlanders explain
things themselves as well as how the academic theories that
inform her work contribute to constructing understand-
ings. The combination of the ethnographic longevity of
her work with the theoretical sophistication of her analysis
results in a provocative account of growing inequality and
dynamic capitalist relations. The case studies and stories
Li relates bring these elements to life, but the implications
stretch far beyond the Lauje highlands. As she deftly and
subtly indicates throughout the book, in both the text
and footnotes, the complications she observed among the
Lauje neighborhoods should be considered in other places
and for other peoples around the world. Too often, she
argues, development schemes are based on incomplete
understandings or simplistic explanations, dooming such
schemes to degrees of failure. Li asks tough questions about
how development plans are made. Although she does not
analyze specific development projects in depth themselves,
she demonstrates how those targeted in such schemes
need to be included in the process and listened to over
time. Li does not simply argue against capitalist growth,
but demonstrates the desperation of those at the land’s end
and the need for what she calls a “politics of distribution”
(185) if people are truly going to find ways out of poverty. I
found her approach and analysis refreshing and disturbing,
as she shows that economic growth and development are
not easy fixes to complicated problems. This book is worth
reading, pondering, and comparing with other places and
people in regions where the abundance of forests are giving
way to private property anchored by cash crops.
Cora Du Bois: Anthropologist, Diplomat, Agent. Susan
C. Seymour. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015.
423 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12274
DAVID LIPSET
University of Minnesota
There are obviously many possible relationships between
biographer and hero. In this case, the adulation that Susan
C. Seymour feels for Cora Du Bois, her PhD advisor at
Harvard, is informed by a kind of middle-class, glass-ceiling
175
American Ethnologist  Volume 43 Number 1 February 2016
feminism. The story Seymour seeks to tell of Du Bois’s life
in and out of American cultural anthropology is one of
professional success, successes for which Seymour rather
uncritically pounds a steady drumbeat (despite the title of
the series in which the book is included: Critical Studies in
the History of Anthropology).
A thumbnail sketch of Du Bois’s career, which I pull
together from Seymour’s account, can be viewed as hitting
the bull’s-eye not only of the discipline but also of larger
conflicts that roiled the 20th century.
Du Bois took a BA and an MA at Barnard College–
Columbia University during the time of Franz Boas and
Ruth Benedict. She did graduate studies at the University
of California, Berkeley, under Alfred Kroeber and with
Robert Lowie and Julian Steward. She worked on culture
and personality with Abram Kardiner in New York City and
psychiatry with Henry Murray and Harry Stack Sullivan in
Cambridge, Massachusetts. Du Bois visited Margaret Mead
and Gregory Bateson at their field site in Bali on her way
to do her well-known Alor ethnography. She was employed
in the State Department and then in Office of Strategic Ser-
vices (OSS) during World War II, both in Washington, DC,
and in the field in Sri Lanka, where she was joined by David
Mandelbaum and Weston La Barre, as well as Bateson
again. She turned down an offer to join the Anthropology
Department at UC Berkeley in 1951 because she refused to
sign a loyalty oath amid the anticommunist ethos of that
troubled moment, only to be subject to an ongoing investi-
gation by J. Edgar Hoover and then the CIA that lasted all the
way through the early 1960s. She spent a year at the Center
for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto
with Clifford Geertz and Melford Spiro, among others. She
was the first tenured woman at Harvard–Radcliffe, and
in the Anthropology Department with John and Beatrice
Whiting there. She served as president of the American An-
thropological Association in 1969 during the Vietnam-era
political tensions that then embroiled the organization. And
finally, in the 1960s and early 1970s, in response to postwar
modernization theorists, represented by no less than
Talcott Parsons, Alex Inkeles, and others, she undertook a
big urban anthropology project in northern India under
whose auspices Richard Shweder and others did research.
But throughout her intriguing life, with its unmistak-
able quality, Du Bois experienced estrangement, disap-
pointment, and failure, not to mention secrets that held her
back institutionally, politically, and socially. She opposed
state-sponsored research and development projects.
She wanted nothing to do with feminism in the 1960s
and 1970s. She refused to be critical for the unmistakable
gender biases of the university that employed her. She
came to dislike her own discipline, as it grew large and
anonymous. Formalistic theoretical turns in psychological
anthropology made her uncomfortable.
176
She was often feared, as Seymour makes clear, for her
tough, demanding personality. She appeared overbearing
to some and as a martinet to others. A lonely and rather
withdrawn woman, she had little contact with kin. Her
circle largely consisted of a few friends from OSS days, such
as Julia Child and her husband, Paul. She lived for several
decades with her partner, an artist, Jeanne Taylor, but was
unfaithful to her during a lengthy, tumultuous affair with
the poet May Sarton. As she aged, she drank and became
unable to get work done, other than mentoring graduate
students working in her India project with what seems (to
me) obsessive attention to detail.
Despite the doubt Hegel raised about the adage, I still
subscribe to Montaigne’s point that “No man is a hero to
his valet.” That is to say, I prefer a sort of valet’s view of
biography rather than a hagiographical one. A biography
that becomes a study of a saint, a stance to which Seymour
seems rather prone in the greater part of her book, leaves
me suspicious that the life has been distorted. So it is to
Seymour’s great credit that, despite her utter devotion to
her subject, one can still glimpse, if not quite appreciate,
the agony and heartache with which Du Bois lived.
Islam, Youth, and Modernity in the Gambia: The Tablighi
Jama’at. Marloes Janson. London: International African In-
stitute, 2014. 269 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12275
MICHELLE C. JOHNSON
Bucknell University
Marloes Janson’s book is a fascinating journey into the Tab-
lighi Jama’at, a Muslim reform movement in the Gambia.
The movement originated in India in the mid-1800s and
is present in 150 countries today, but despite its status as
“perhaps the largest Islamic movement of contemporary
times” (3), it has received surprisingly little scholarly atten-
tion. South Asian missionaries introduced the Jama’at to
the Gambia in the late 1990s. Although its membership rep-
resents only one percent of the country’s total population,
the movement has “actively shaped the religious landscape
in the Gambia over the last decade” (257).
Like other Muslim reform movements, the Jama’at
strives to “purify” Islam by ending customary practices,
such as consulting marabouts and venerating saints, which
followers consider superstitious and sinful. It advocates
a radical break with the past and offers a new model of
Islam, emphasizing “basic principles of moral behavior”
(73), including prayer and knowledge of Islam. The Jama’at
differs from other reformist movements, however, in that it
looks to South Asia rather than to Saudi Arabia as a model.
Interestingly, many Gambians are unaware of or even deny

the movement’s foreign origin. The Jama’at is also unique
in its emphasis of preaching over textual learning. Most of
Janson’s informants attended Western rather than Qur’anic
school and speak minimal Arabic. Tablighis also prefer
English as their language of communication because they
feel that speaking English enhances their modern, global
identity.
Tablighis also privilege behavior over belief as followers
strive to live according to the example set by the Prophet.
They pray with their arms folded across their chest and
adopt a strict dress code: men grow beards and wear pants
cut above the ankle and plain robes, and women wear no
makeup or jewelry and don the niqab—a black, full-body
veil. Most importantly, the Jama’at demands of all its
followers active participation in tabligh, or “missionary
work aimed at the moral transformation of Muslims” (3).
The book is based on 12 months of fieldwork in the
early to mid-2000s, but Janson began working in the
Gambia in the late 1990s. Her long-term engagement
with her informants is evident in the book’s numerous
biographies of converts and carefully crafted narratives
highlighting the complexities of “being young, modern, and
Muslim” (13) in the Gambia. Janson’s sporadic accounts of
the fieldwork process also enrich the book: readers learn
that her informants initially assumed she was a spy; they
also learn how she navigated gender seclusion by veiling
and by interviewing only those women whose husbands
were supportive of her research.
One of the book’s many contributions is its rethinking
of the categories of “youth” and “elders” in Africa. Janson
characterizes the Jama’at as a youth movement; it appeals
most to men and women between the ages of 15 and 35. For
Tablighis, youth has less to do with age or the achievement
of cultural milestones (e.g., marriage) than with one’s
attitude and disposition. Whereas mainstream Muslims
imagine elders as more religious than young people,
Tablighis see this in reverse, and describe (non-Tablighi)
elders as “backward” and ignorant of Islam. The movement
thus destabilizes Gambian traditional social structure and
provides young people with a new sense of being and
belonging.
As a result of economic difficulties brought on by
neoliberal reform, marriage in the Gambia—which involves
bridewealth comprising imported luxury furniture and
clothing—has become more difficult. Gambian men (like
others in Africa) confront the difficulty of delayed marriage
and adulthood. Tablighis view marriage as essential for
spiritual perfection and prefer to marry young. They render
this ideal attainable by limiting bridewealth to a prayer
mat, a Qur’an, and a kettle for performing ablutions.
Mainstream Muslims criticize Tablighis for transforming
marriage from a family to an individual affair and consider
them “anti-social” for rejecting the celebratory aspects of
life-course rituals. Although Janson considers the political-
Book Reviews  American Ethnologist
economic benefits of the movement for converts, she is
careful not to reduce its allure to these benefits.
Indeed, the heart of the book is a more capacious
exploration of the effects of Islamic reform on gender in
the Gambia. Janson’s balanced consideration of this topic
presents a refreshing challenge to the widespread assump-
tion that Islamic reform is “bad” for women. She rejects
binaries and refuses to understand the Jama’at exclusively
in terms of women’s empowerment, a category that her
Gambian informants barely recognize, let alone adopt as
a life goal. The situation is delightfully complicated. On
the one hand, Tablighis demand women’s seclusion while
reducing rituals and Muslim holiday celebrations to their
bare minimum, both of which result in a considerable loss
of women’s mobility, power, and influence. On the other
hand, Tablighi women attend weekly ta’lim (learning ses-
sions) where they learn how to be good Muslims, and every
other month, they go on missionary trips where they give
speeches. Female preachers only address female audiences,
however, and men choose the topics of their lectures, which
include subjects such as modesty, obedience, and women’s
domestic roles. But Janson’s informants don’t view this
as contradictory or limiting and find in the movement a
support network, increased self-esteem, and heightened
religious awareness. In the end, Janson describes the effects
of the Jama’at on women’s lives not as contradictory, but
as involving “a dialectic between submission and religious
agency” (224).
Janson pays as much attention in the book to men’s
(changing) roles as she does to women’s. When women
are away on missionary trips, their husbands assume
the traditionally female tasks of shopping, cooking, and
fetching water. Husbands also accompany their wives to
ta’lim sessions where they care for the children so that their
wives can focus on the sermons. Tablighi men do not view
this as “progressive,” however, but rather as “a return to the
Prophetic model” (216). Tablighi views on gender issues
are also complicated: adherents oppose polygyny, arranged
marriage, and the public display of stained sheets as proof
of virginity, but they endorse female circumcision and
veiling, viewing the latter not as “the expression of women’s
subordination but of their right to self-determination”
(192) and as a symbol of their newly attained piety.
Janson also challenges the common understanding of
conversion as a “unidirectional passage from impiety to
piety” (132), demonstrating instead that people move in
and out of the Jama’at. She recounts the story of Ahmed, a
Mandinka man in his late 20s, who joined the movement
when the civil war in Sudan prevented him from traveling
there for study. He later quit and joined a “ghetto,” where he
spends his days drinking tea and listening to reggae music
with his friends. In recounting her informants’ successes
and failures, Janson considers the emotional power of
conversion: how it actually feels to reject one’s “sinful” past
177
American Ethnologist  Volume 43 Number 1 February 2016
life, get closer to God, or fall short of Tablighi standards.
Readers learn that the path to piety is fraught with doubt
and difficulty. In producing “born again Muslims” (262), the
Jama’at resembles Pentecostalism, and Janson dedicates a
section in the concluding chapter to an intriguing discus-
sion of this comparison. As the title suggests, the book is
an engaging ethnographic appraisal of the topics of Islam,
youth, and modernity in the Gambia, and will be of interest
to scholars and students alike in the fields of anthropology,
religion, and African and youth studies.
The Voice in the Drum: Music, Language, and Emotion in
Islamicate South Asia. Richard K. Wolf. Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 2014. 375 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12276
MARY HANCOCK
University of California, Santa Barbara
The Voice in the Drum appears to be a book, just as Richard
Wolf appears to be its author. That which looks and feels
like a hardcover book, however, is conjoined to videos,
sound clips, and images that are accessed through a com-
panion website and, indeed, must be accessed to make
sense of the book’s arguments. As to the spectral quality of
its author: The book’s front matter includes “An Essential
Note from the Author” (xiii–xiv), which, while unsigned,
explains that the book unfolds within an imaginative
space called “ethnography-land” through the voice of a
protagonist named Muharram Ali (described as having
initially appeared in a dream) and a chorus of other voices,
each of whom are identified in the Cast of Characters listed
in Appendix C (269–74). And, in a “Note from the Editor”
(xv–xviii), signed by one Sufiya Rizvi, both Richard Wolf and
Muharram Ali are described as collaborators, albeit with
Richard Wolf acting as “puppetmaster” (xviii). To add to
the confusion, the endnote attached to the “Note from the
Editor” includes a disclaimer disavowing any intentional
similarity between the “above-named editor and persons
real or fictitious (with the exception of one appearing in
the story to follow)” (275), and distancing the claims of said
editor from those of the book’s publisher. (Spoiler alert:
We learn, much later, that Sufiya Rizvi is the beloved of
Muharram Ali.)
The blurring of authorial voices is matched by the
genre-shifting and multiply mediated nature of the book
(if I dare refer to it as such). At times, it is described as
a “novel” owing to the prominence of a narrative by and
about the dream-character, Muharram Ali. Ali, we learn, is
a journalist who has adopted the practice and persona of
an ethnographer in an effort to understand the significance
of drumming in Muslim ritual, Muharram processions
especially, and the roots of techniques and performance
178
styles shared across the diverse sectarian (Shi’i, Sunni, and
Hindu), linguistic, and regional communities who perform
such drumming. The book, as well, is part monograph,
organized to present research findings and make scholarly
arguments about those findings. To that end, it is also a
sourcebook that re-presents materials, such as poetic works
and transcriptions of musical performances—and, on its
companion website, sound and video clips of those perfor-
mances. Loosely gluing all of this together is a set of Chap-
ter Notes that, besides providing citations of evidentiary
sources, sustain a background narrative about the research
context. The reader will begin to see why this work is not a
passive object to be read and set down, but something that,
despite its occasional pretentiousness, is more demanding
and challenging—something that asks for engagement.
The book has 10 substantive chapters divided roughly
in half between chapters that focus on cultural, historical,
and musicological background, arguments, and themes,
and novelistic chapters that focus on the character of
Muharram Ali, his family, and his interests. To get the most
out of the whole or indeed any chapter, whether novel
or ethnography, the reader must consult the companion
website and the 60-plus pages of appendices, notes, and
glossary. The book’s core arguments concern the shared
instrumental traditions of southern and western Asia, with
a special focus on drumming, including the kinds of drums
used, their simultaneous contributions to both melodic
and rhythmic components of music, the roles of drums
and drummers in musical ensembles, and the Islamic ritual
contexts and experiences that drums help constitute. Wolf
elaborates on the claim that drums are “voicelike” in that
the combined melodic and rhythmic elements of drum-
ming enable such performances to carry textual and emo-
tional messages. He presents technical details about rhyth-
mic patterns, their uses in performance, and their historical
roots to furnish evidence of the salience of both verbal and
vocal models of performance. After what we might read as
scholarly scene-setting, Wolf brings the reader fully into
“ethnography-land.” Taking center stage is Muharram Ali,
and we learn about his quest to understand the shared roots
of the drum techniques and performance styles that are as-
sociated with different regional and sectarian traditions of
performance that exist among not only Muslim musicians,
but also their Hindu counterparts. The narrative tracks
Ali, journalist and avocational anthropologist, across the
border between India and Pakistan as he doggedly pursues
various musicians and ritual practitioners in an effort to
document these diverse drumming traditions as well as to
understand how these expressive practices became markers
of sectarian difference. These sections serve also as expo-
sitions of the process of knowledge creation through field-
work practices, demonstrating how scholarly intentions
are pursued through, but also interrupted by, accidental
encounters and fragmented conversations. And, yes, the

author known as “Richard Wolf” does make an appearance
as a minor character in the course of Ali’s peregrinations. If
the early chapters introduce social poetics as a theoretical
construct, then chapters 5 through 10 aim to demonstrate
the social poetic function of drumming with descrip-
tions of performances and performers’ exegeses on their
art.
This innovative and richly detailed work draws on field
research in India and Pakistan that commenced in 1996
and continued, intermittently, through 2010. It makes an
important contribution of substance, theory, and method
within South Asian ethnomusicology. As a teaching text, it
is best suited for advanced students in cultural anthropol-
ogy or ethnomusicology. It can also be read profitably by
those interested in experimental ethnographic writing. Its
complex, multivocal structure will frustrate some readers,
but there is much to engage, challenge, and enlighten those
who commit themselves to the journey.
Cultural Heritage in Transit: Intangible Rights as Human
Rights. Deborah Kapchan, ed. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2014. 238 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12277
ROBERT SHEPHERD
George Washington University
This refreshing collection brings together researchers from
anthropology, ethnology, folk studies, and performance
studies to examine cultural practice as a human right. In
her introduction, Deborah Kapchan defines cultural rights
as the “right to imagine, to identify, to sense, and to feel” (6).
One theme she addresses is what happens to such rights
when powerful institutions and actors take an interest in
cultural practices. In her work on Gnawa music and cultural
enactment in Morocco, Kapchan demonstrates how a state
appropriation and packaging of what was a platform for
remembering slavery and injustice has led Gnawa prac-
titioners to accept the label of “artists” who produce for
a transnational market (11). In her discussion of Balkan
Romani music, Carol Silverman elaborates upon this theme
of appropriation. Silverman complicates this discussion,
however, by noting that a pan-European Romani identity
movement uses essentialist notions of heritage for its own
political purposes (much as one finds among indigenous
peoples in the Americas).
As these examples indicate, this collection focuses on
cultural performance. Rights, Kapchan reminds us, much
like “heritage,” become meaningful only when enacted,
embodied, and performed (17). This is certainly the case,
but Dorothy Noyes reminds readers of the importance of
place for both tangible and intangible heritage (60). In
her chapter on “Heritage, Legacy, Zombie,” Noyes goes
Book Reviews  American Ethnologist
beyond the cautionary tales that note the problems that
follow when heritage becomes a tool for governing from
afar, a means of enforcing patriarchy and limiting agency,
or a product poached upon by powerful outside interests.
Instead, she juxtaposes the term with the vexing concept
of “legacy” as a way of illustrating cases of what might be
called “awkward heritage.” To make her point, Noyes uses
Afghan warlords, Ulster Orangemen, and stereotypes about
Appalachian hillbillies, managing in the process to weave
in James Dickey’s iconic Deliverance.
In another chapter, Barbro Klein charts the emer-
gence and growth of Sweden’s folklore movement in the
late 19th century. What is notable about this exhaustive
documentation of folk culture in field studies, archival
collections, museums, and the world’s first open-air folk
park—Skansen—is that for more than a century, this move-
ment was not referred to as a “heritage” (kulturarv) project.
Instead, Klein argues that folklore was a reform project
aimed at cultivating a homogeneous Swedish identity (118).
Ironically, in recent decades, the language of folk studies
has been displaced first by ethnology and more recently
by “heritage.” As Klein notes, Sweden is not unique in this
recent discovery of “heritage.” In the post–Cold War era,
the category has been expanded far beyond the material
stuff of folk studies; indeed, the concept has become so
inclusive that one wonders what might not qualify as
“heritage.” Bound up with problematic concepts such as
“diversity” and “sustainability” (Klein notes a 1995 govern-
ment “diversity mandate” directing cultural institutions
to foreground Swedish multiculturalism), heritage when
displayed in Sweden replicates the political issues found at
sites such as the National Museum of the American Indian
in Washington, DC: diversity is emphasized over actual
difference, so as to not offend (123).
In his chapter on culture in the Caribbean, Philip Scher
argues that states in the region view culture as an eco-
nomic and political resource that can be utilized to boost
economic development and promote state sovereignty.
Drawing on Michel Foucault’s idea of “bio-power,” Scher
expands this idea to include cultural performance (91). Al-
though the culture-as-a-resource argument has been quite
succinctly made within the anthropology of tourism by
scholars such as Kathleen Adams (1984) and contributors
to Michel Picard and Robert E. Wood’s edited collection
(1997), what Scher adds to this analysis is the question of
how rights intersect with this process of performance (93).
When cultural practice is defined by the state as a national
resource, does practice become not a right, but a duty?
Echoing Scher, Noyes writes, “The right to be cultural easily
slips into the obligation to be cultural” (61).
The most powerful chapter in this collection is
Valdimar Hafstein’s unpacking of the normative intangible
heritage protection narrative, based on his observations
of World Heritage Committee meetings. Hafstein, an
179
American Ethnologist  Volume 43 Number 1 February 2016
Icelandic ethnologist, argues that heritage is an interven-
tion into both a place and a set of social practices that
creates a bureaucratic entanglement. UNESCO’s emphasis
on the protection and transmission of intangible heritage
transforms what were once informal social practices (what
James Scott has termed metis) into objects of interest to
states and transnational institutions (34). Drawing on Tony
Bennett’s work, Hafstein describes how the preservation
focus no longer centers on debates between an aesthetic
Culture and an anthropological culture, but on “a set of
instruments acting on the social” (35–36). And at the center
of this process is the nebulous notion of “community.” As
Hafstein explains, preservationists assume the existence of
a coherent and collective “community” that recognizes its
“heritage” as well as the need to protect it (49). The irony
is that in identifying who belongs to a community, the
heritage process does not empower people but turns them
into heritage subjects (50).
This question of belonging is the topic of Sabrina
Magliocco’s chapter on Neopagan clashes with archeolo-
gists in Britain about the Druids. Should it matter that sites
such as Stonehenge predate the Druids by 2,000 years, or
that contemporary Neopagans romanticize the sites while
getting their historical facts wrong? Magliocco suggests
that, since all identities are constructed, denying the rights
claims of one group requires denying the rights claims of all
groups (173). We have, Magliocco asserts, a “right to imag-
ine” (49). We certainly do, but some interpretations of the
past arguably carry more weight than others (such as Stone-
henge worshippers who claim it as a Druid heritage site).
This rigorous and timely collection of studies con-
tributes to research on intangible rights claims and
debates. These essays will be useful in courses on heritage,
human rights, and museum studies.
References
Adams, Kathleen. 1984. “Ethnic Tourism and the Renegotiation of
Tradition in Tana Toraja (Sulawesi, Indonesia).” Ethnology 36 (4):
309–20.
Picard, Michel, and Robert E. Wood. 1997. Tourism, Ethnicity and
the State in Asian and Pacific Societies. Honolulu: University of
Hawai‘i Press.
The Calls of Islam: Sufis, Islamists, and Mass Mediation
in Urban Morocco. Emilio Spadola. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2014. 173 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12278
BERNHARD LEISTLE
Carleton University
The Calls of Islam by Emilio Spadola discusses the rela-
tionships between different varieties of Islamic doctrine
180
and practice in contemporary urban Morocco (Fez) from a
perspective of mediation. As elsewhere in Muslim societies,
Islam in Morocco is not a homogenous phenomenon, but
consists of calls competing with each other for receptive
audiences. Media are the means by which religious calls
produce these audiences, and so their analysis, for Spadola,
is thus of cardinal importance for understanding religion as
a mode of communication. In the contemporary context,
religious calls have become mass-mediated through their
dissemination in radio; television; exchangeable media like
tapes, CDs, and DVDs; and, with ever-increasing force, the
Internet.
Spadola’s theoretical approach is inspired by a combi-
nation of media theory and ideology theory (in particular,
Louis Althusser’s concept of ideology as “interpellation”).
For him, media are not mere channels for the transmission
of information, but ways of defining modes of subjectivity
and consciousness. The structure of the medium contains
a call that is answered by a corresponding type of subject
and consciousness. This notion of a mediated appeal is,
for Spadola, what links traditional forms of ritual com-
munication, like the call to prayer, to technological mass
mediations.
Mass media, modernity, and the nation-state are
mutually defining elements of one reality. By emitting
messages that are, structurally, the same for every recipient,
mass media provide the prerequisite for the constitution of
a generalized, anonymous subject and a uniform national
community. If religion is regarded as a form of communica-
tion that, in the present context, is carried out by means of
mass media, its study is inseparably connected with ques-
tions of political power, nationalism, and globalization.
Morocco is an interesting field for testing such an
approach, and Spadola is able to produce a number of
interesting insights in applying it. In the anthropological
literature, Moroccan political culture has been described
as highly infused with religion. During the colonial period,
the Moroccan king started to function as an embodiment
of a particular brand of “Moroccan Islam” consisting of
an amalgamate of Sufism, saint veneration, and prestige
assigned to descent from the prophet Muhammad. Spadola
shows how this development was connected with mass
media representations of “Moroccan Culture” as defined by
public rituals of trance and spirit-possession. Both nation-
alists and Islamic reformists developed a consciousness of
religion as mass communication in response to the colonial
situation. And, as in contemporary Morocco, both articu-
lated their respective calls of Islam in relation to practices
of trance and possession. Spadola discusses the Green
March to reclaim the Western Sahara for Morocco in terms
of the production of a national consciousness through
a “technologized call.” Endowed with a singular control
over radio and television, King Hassan II was capable of
staging an effective appeal to the whole nation, evoking in

Moroccans the feeling of a direct, personal relationship to
their sovereign, a powerful reproduction of the values of
“Moroccan Islam” under the conditions of mass mediation.
While mass media thus appeal to a uniform national or
global community and address a generalized subject, other
Moroccan calls to Islam play on individual difference. Such
calls center around jinns, or spirits, as “signs of difference.”
Directed at particular individuals or addressing particular,
localized social situations and groups, the calls use cor-
responding, “particularizing” media. Spadola discusses
two of these calls: jinn exorcisms performed by fqihs, a
Moroccan combination of teacher, scribe, and ritual expert;
and lilas, nightly ritual parties organized by seers where
jinns are embodied in dance and trance. In both cases,
Spadola stresses the homology between media and cultural
meaning: in case of the fqih, writing in secret corresponds
to the individual and private nature of the client’s subjec-
tivity; in case of the lila, the body as a medium brings about
a community defined by social difference.
Such acceptance of difference is, in Spadola’s in-
terpretation, inacceptable to the mass-mediated calls
characteristic of contemporary Moroccan Islam. To il-
lustrate his argument, he uses a case study of an artist
and cultural activist named Aisha, who performs trance
and possession practices on the theater stage. Spadola
interprets such staging in terms of domestication and con-
trol: separated from their connection to jinn possession,
trance practices lose their relation to difference and be-
come signifiers of unity. Entranced masses as emblematic
embodiments of a uniform national community can be
witnessed at contemporary festivals of Moroccan culture.
Spadola concludes with a chapter devoted to exorcisms
performed by Islamists and subsequently disseminated
on DVDs and on the Internet. Spadola’s discussion of this
phenomenon is one of the highlights of the book, and it
demonstrates the analytic power of his media-theoretical
approach. In his interpretation, Islamist exorcisms of jinns
become comprehensible as exorcism of difference effected
by the communicative structures of mass media. Funda-
mentalist religious rhetoric is—not just in Morocco, but
also in other Islamic and non-Islamic contexts—shown to
be inherently connected with modernity, revolving around
such themes as self-control, self-discipline, and individual
isolation.
In sum, Spadola’s dense but short study (140 pages
of text, plus notes) manages admirably well to deal with a
complex topic, skillfully balancing ethnographic and ana-
lytic elements. The connecting theme of mass mediation
allows for elegant formulations and produces important
insights. But Spadola’s insistence on a “capacious view of
media and mediation” (5) also bears some problems. If
everything from the entranced body to videos on YouTube
is subsumed under the category of medium, doesn’t this
cover up differences between modes of communication
Book Reviews  American Ethnologist
that are just as essential as their shared medial character?
Media theory approaches such as Spadola employs show
a tendency to dismiss the question of “authenticity” as
irrelevant (see, for example, p. 116). Yet it seems hard to
deny that bodily experiences of trance and possession
carry a different existential weight than watching trance
videos. The quality of “the call” can be expected to vary
accordingly. Spadola’s study would have benefited from
a greater consideration of embodiment, as it would have
from more elaboration on some of the ethnographic and
theoretical context. But to wish that a book would be longer
is also a testimony to its quality.
The Modern Spirit of Asia: The Spiritual and the Secular in
China and India. Peter van der Veer. Princeton, NJ: Prince-
ton University Press, 2014. 282 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12279
JEAN DEBERNARDI
University of Alberta
In The Modern Spirit of Asia, Dutch anthropologist Peter
van der Veer seeks to write a modern comparative soci-
ology of religion in India and China, a topic that evokes
Max Weber’s famous studies of the religions of China and
India. Van der Veer focuses on how these two countries
modernized their traditions as the consequence of the
imperial encounter, which took different forms in India
(a former British colony) and China (which was not directly
colonized).
Many scholars have discussed multiple modernities,
challenging earlier assumptions that modernity would in-
evitably lead to secularism and the decline of religion. Van
der Veer’s book contributes to this discussion by investigat-
ing the differing ways that China and India developed with
respect to four comparative categories that he describes
as a “syntagmatic chain of religion-magic-secularity-
spirituality.” He claims that these “emerge historically
together, imply one another, and function as nodes within
a shifting field of power” (9).
Van der Veer positions his approach in relation to
Michel Foucault’s work on governmentality; moreover,
his comparative method evokes structural anthropology,
and in particular the writings of Claude Lévi-Strauss, who
sought to organize a huge array of details into a small
number of opposed semantic terms like raw and cooked,
nature and culture. Van der Veer’s four-part scheme sim-
ilarly proposes mutually defining complementarities and
oppositions. Three of the most important are secular versus
religious, religion versus magic, and Western materialism
versus Eastern spirituality. Van der Veer uses these terms as
universals to organize his multifaceted comparison of India
and China.
181
American Ethnologist  Volume 43 Number 1 February 2016
I found van der Veer’s discussion of religious moder-
nity in India compelling and enjoyed reading about Tagore,
Gandhi, and British theosophist Annie Besant. When he
turned to China—my field of expertise—I had more ques-
tions. Why, for example, did he compare Mohandas Gandhi
(India’s founding father) and Rabindranath Tagore (a poet)
with two important but less well-known Chinese religious
reformers, Tai Xu and Chen Yingning? If he wanted to un-
derstand why religion has a different role in modern China
than it does in modern India, surely Republican founder
Sun Yat Sen (a Christian who apparently took seriously the
call to smash idols) and left-wing satirist Lu Xun would have
been more appropriate and illuminating comparisons.
I also disagreed with some of his sweeping claims
about China. Van der Veer concludes, for example, that
China did not develop any practice of spirituality that
became as widely globalized as that of Indian gurus and
leaders whom he discusses, even stating that “spiritual-
ity does not acquire the centrality in the translation of
Chinese traditions as it has in that of India’s traditions” (56).
No doubt he is correct about the globalization of Indian
spirituality, but he overlooks the widespread influence
of Chinese philosophy in translation. As early as 1830,
Ralph Waldo Emerson read Confucius in translation, and
scholars now speculate that he drew on the Confucian idea
of self-cultivation in his philosophy of self-reliance. And
as J. J. Clarke has documented (1997, 2000), Daoist texts
including the Daodejing and the Yijing have had enormous
influence on the development of Western philosophy.
Chinese “spirituality” also is well represented in the
West in the copious popular literature on “Chinese wis-
dom” published in English, including the works of Chinese
popular author and translator Lin Yutang, whose 1937 The
Importance of Living is now cited by members of the Slow
Movement. Lin does offer a chapter “On Lying in Bed,”
but also provides a brilliant explication of the meaning
of popular religious veneration of the Monkey King and
other characters of the vernacular novel Journey to the West.
Self-cultivation, philosophy, wisdom, and the Journey to the
West (whose episodes are performed in traditional Chinese
opera, but which recently inspired a British-Chinese mul-
timedia “opera for the twenty-first century”) are all part of
the story of Chinese religious modernity.
The author’s focus on the nation-state also may have
caused him to neglect the contribution that generations
of overseas students, English-speaking immigrants like Lin
Yutang, and overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia have made
to the modernization of Chinese religion. In Singapore, for
example, we find individuals like Lim Boon Keng (1869–
1957), an English-educated Chinese doctor and a leader
in the so-called Confucian renaissance, who returned
to China as the second president of Xiamen University.
In early 20th-century essays, Lim described the English-
educated Straits Chinese as a “Chinese Bridge” (huaqiao)
182
whose multilingual members could connect China with
Western modernity, and he rejected Christianity as being
less compatible with Western science than Confucianism.
Moreover, although China was not directly colonized
by European powers, Hong Kong was a British colony
until the handover in 1997, and Japan colonized Taiwan
for 50 years, introducing a Japanese form of modernity.
Today Taiwanese are major investors in Mainland China
as well as passionate supporters of Chinese traditional
religions. A focus on developments within the boundaries
of the Chinese nation-state inevitably will miss some of the
dynamics of religious modernity in that country.
Van der Veer’s ambitious project of comparing the re-
ligious modernity in India and China will be interesting to
general readers and students who seek to know more about
the modern history of those two countries. For specialists,
this book will not replace the original works of scholarship
on which it is based, but many will enjoy reading it for the
author’s wide-ranging comparisons and abundant insights.
Because advanced undergraduate and graduate students
could find many starting points for further research in this
book, I recommend it for adoption for advanced seminar
classes. As the Chinese cultural geographer Yi-Fu Tuan
reminds us, reading should always be a dialogue, and the
ideal reader should always say “yes, but . . .” (1989, x). The
readers of this book will find much to discuss.
References
Clarke, J. J. 1997. Oriental Enlightenment: The Encounter between
Asian and Western Thought. London: Routledge.
———. 2000. The Tao of the West: Western Transformations of Taoist
Thought. London: Routledge.
Tuan, Yi-Fu. 1989. Morality and Imagination: Paradoxes of Progress.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Ethnography for the Internet: Embedded, Embodied and
Everyday. Christine Hine. London: Bloomsbury Academic,
2015. 212 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12280
JENNIFER COOL
University of Southern California
When Christine Hine’s Virtual Ethnography came out in
2000, the book broke new ground by showing that the In-
ternet should be taken seriously as a cultural artifact. Now
that networked media have become a mass phenomenon
across much of the globe, and the Internet is so integrated
into so many daily lives that it often disappears into the
commonplace of infrastructure, Hine takes up the method-
ological questions and challenges of adapting ethnography
to contemporary conditions. Ethnography for the Internet:

Embedded, Embodied and Everyday is predicated on
the idea that, despite the many challenges to conven-
tional conceptions of the field, immersive notions of
“being there,” and holism, “the in-depth and embodied
approach of the ethnographer has a lot to contribute
in highlighting how we, as embodied individuals, nav-
igate these new conditions of social existence” (182).
Although computer-mediated communication is her
explicit focus, Hine’s deft epistemic framing and princi-
pled openness to multiple forms of data and new ways
of conceptualizing field sites make this book essential
reading for anyone practicing or teaching ethnographic
methods today, regardless of any specific interest in the
Internet.
Hine begins with the seeming paradox that the con-
temporary Internet simultaneously requires and resists
ethnographic understanding: “The Internet needs ethnog-
raphy, but those very factors that make it fascinating are
also challenging for ethnographers, as they seek to find
coherent ways to carve out a researchable object from
the mass of temporal and spatial complexity and the
interweaving social and cultural processes that create
the Internet and embed it in everyday life” (13). Hine’s
overarching aim is to chip away at this paradox, delineating
the challenges, then demonstrating multiple strategies for
traversing the apparent impasse.
Hine draws on the literature of multisited ethnography,
mobile methods, and science and technology studies to
make the case for understanding the Internet as an embed-
ded, embodied, and everyday phenomenon. Rather than
a discrete “cyberspace” apart from “real life,” the Internet
is embedded in diverse contexts, institutions, devices, and
practices of daily life, with considerable continuity between
online and offline use. “In popular discourse and every-
day experience,” Hine notes, “the Internet has become
much more routinely a place to express an embodied self
rather than a place to leave the body behind” (43). The
everydayness of the contemporary Internet follows from
its embedded and embodied qualities, and networked
communication has become, in many regards, “mundane
and unremarkable . . . simply an infrastructure that offers a
means to do other things” (46).
After highlighting the methodological challenges
posed by each tine of her three-pronged conceptualization
of the Internet as embedded, embodied, everyday—for
which she adopts the shorthand “E3 ”—Hine moves to
discuss overarching strategies for adapting ethnography to
these conditions. After mapping out connective, mobile,
networked, and autoethnographic strategies, Hine explores
ways that standard ethnographic repertoires might be
deployed “in emergent Internet field sites” (70). She ex-
plores observation, field notes, interviewing, mapping, and
autoethnography—all in both face-to-face and mediated
contexts—as means of doing ethnography.
Book Reviews  American Ethnologist
The three case studies that comprise the book’s second
half provide “insights into the messy reality” of applying
the methodological principles laid out in the first half. Hine
presents research on the online gifting Freecycle Network
as embedded within locales, households, and devices. She
then looks at the development of distributed databases in
the field of biological systematics (taxonomy), exploring
multifaceted connections among individuals, institutions,
and initiatives. Next, she focuses on the television se-
ries Antiques Roadshow to reveal the way “the Internet
makes available new modes of ethnographic inquiry for
the understanding of mass media in everyday life” (40).
In her conclusion, Hine brings together the themes of
these example-based chapters, reiterating her overarching
argument for the enduring value of ethnography as an agile
and adaptive approach.
The chief strength of this book is its across-the-board
relevance to ethnographic practice. Whether or not net-
worked communications are a focus, the diffuse, dynamic,
and multiplex character of contemporary social phenom-
ena requires the symmetrical skepticism to both inherited
and trendy assumptions of ethnographic method that Hine
deploys throughout. In her unwavering focus on meaning
making and ethics as constant reflexive processes that
define ethnography, Hine underscores the continuity of
“ethnographic knowledge production as highly personal to
the individual ethnographer, involving immersion within
the setting, and taking part in the same activities as par-
ticipants as far as practically feasible in order to develop
a deep sense of what participants do, how this feels, and
what its consequences might be for the social formations
that result” (183). It is refreshing to see attention to archives
and discourse analysis of such “old” Internet genres as the
mailing list put forward alongside more recent tools for
data analysis (ScraperWiki and Hootsuite) and visualization
(TouchGraph SEO), and Hine’s closing proposal of “pop-up
ethnography” (193).
The only shortfall of the book is that, aside from her
chapter on Freecycle, Hine’s research examples are not
quite specific enough to convey a rich, rounded under-
standing of each project. In the other example-based
chapters, the focus on how she conceptualized the field in
each setting and attention to broader themes, such as in-
sider identity (129–32) and unobtrusive methods (159–63),
hampers, to some degree, the comprehensive attention
expected of case studies. The privileging of everyday ex-
perience that comes up in discussion of Hine’s decision to
work as a moderator on the Freecycle mailing list (119–20)
invites the question of whether “everyday user” persists as a
status, given the individualistic and multilayered complex-
ities of contemporary experience. All told, these are minor
criticisms of a masterful book that offers real insights and
strategies to a diverse range of readers interested in doing
ethnography in and of the present.
183
American Ethnologist  Volume 43 Number 1 February 2016
The Republic Unsettled: Muslim French and the Contra-
dictions of Secularism. Mayanthi L. Fernando. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2014. 313 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12281
JOHN R. BOWEN
Washington University in St. Louis
Mayanthi Fernando’s new book is a welcome addition to
a now substantial literature on Islam and secularism in
France. Many of the subjects she treats will be familiar to
readers: the debates over the 2004 law banning Islamic
scarves from public schools, the internal contradictions of
secularity (laı̈cité) and of integration, and the activities of
many younger Muslims who seek recognition as Muslim
and French. She draws on her conversations to carry out
a clear and incisive critique of liberal political theory, one
that draws on Talal Asad’s writings about “the secular.”
Fernando carried out fieldwork in several French cities,
mostly in the early 2000s, and at one point worked in a
school near Paris, where she met young women and men
who bring fresh voices to the ethnography. The first half
of the book examines the contradiction between a puta-
tively undifferentiated French citizenry and the marked
status of those seen as “Muslims,” many of whom would
rather be treated as equal citizens and not as tokens of
cultural diversity, an observation that motivates a critique
of theories of “recognition” (Charles Taylor, Alain Touraine).
In France, recognition of religions is deeply ambiguous:
discursively abolished in 1905 but structurally embedded in
the Interior Ministry’s bureau of religions, and, for Islam, in
the (post)colonial habit of consulting the consulates about
“their” Muslims living in France. Fernando tracks these
instabilities as they run through two projects: the state’s
creation of the French Council on the Muslim Religion
(CFCM) intended to “represent” Muslim interests, and
Paris’s construction of the Institute for the Cultures of Islam
(ICI) in the Goutte d’Or district. The ICI discussion is partic-
ularly welcome because not told elsewhere: it was created
to be a site of cultural programming about Muslim lands as
part of a broader transformation of the Muslim geography
of the district. Fernando nicely weaves the two stories to
show how France seeks to govern a domesticated Islam and
to showcase a Muslim addition to France’s cultural diversity.
In the second part of the book, Fernando develops an
argument about choice and toleration. Writing about the
2004 ban on Islamic scarves in public schools, Fernando
argues that Muslim French view the issue as both a matter
of religious prescription and a matter of choice. The com-
plexity of this view means that they can successfully argue
neither on grounds of freedom of conscience, because a
ban on scarves does not constrain belief, nor on grounds of
an obligation to wear scarves, because one is not compelled
184
by a religious hierarchy to wear them. This subtle argument
is well made. Fernando argues further that the tension
between discipline and freedom is found in republican
and liberal modes of thinking as well as in that of Muslim
French.
Fernando then turns to the paradoxes of French fem-
inism, drawing on Joan Scott’s analysis of French attempts
to postulate both sexual difference and abstract, universal
citizenship. Fernando argues that some French displace
the resulting tension onto Islam by championing attacks
by secular Muslim women against Muslim men who keep
women from achieving liberation and equality. The key
figure here is Fadela Amara, the founder of the group “Nei-
ther Whores nor Doormats.” Fernando also intriguingly
links this “carceral feminism” to neoliberal predicaments
of social welfare states. Sexuality is central to the way in
which tensions between universalism (of human values)
and particularism (of France) have played with respect to
Islam, and Fernando brings analytical clarity here. She then
examines the dilemma faced by Muslim French who wish
to support feminist projects but do not wish to give blanket
support to abortion and to homosexual rights, and who are
then labeled as “intolerant.” This values-based condem-
nation of Muslims has been especially prominent in the
Netherlands, where acceptance of visibly gay men has been
a litmus test for Muslims. (From what Fernando writes, I
am not sure that the criticism of Muslims as homophobic is
as central in France.)
Fernando brings the Muslim French example back to
her running critique of political theory when she argues
that liberalism and republicanism face the same “impasse”
as do Muslim French when they try to reconcile a belief in
choice with a set of value commitments. Muslim French
reach this impasse when they agree with secular feminists
that homosexual marriage is a matter of choice, some-
thing they support, but cannot join them in advocating
homosexual marriage because of Islamic teachings (and
their values) against homosexuality. Liberals reach the
same impasse on other issues, for example on an arranged
marriage when both parties agree.
Because Fernando makes a lucid argument based
on extended ethnography and sophisticated reading in
political theory, The Republic Unsettled will surely be read
widely by all those engaged in thinking about the politics
of diversity in Europe. But her strong engagement with
broad theoretical issues will inevitably raise questions for
discussion. Here are two.
First, she draws on the views of a small and relatively
homogeneous set of interlocutors to characterize what
“Muslim French” think and do. Fernando defines “Muslim
French” as practicing Muslims who also see themselves
as French citizens: the phrase sounds broad but seems
to be limited in its application to those modernists who
reject both ancestral practices and Salafi orientations; who

“resurrect the exclusionary terms of national belonging”
(56–57), but in a way that expands “France” temporally
and spatially to assume its colonial past and neocolo-
nial present in North Africa (96); and who think through
questions of choice and obligation in a particularly self-
reflective way. But many others who also see themselves
as French citizens and practicing Muslims do not fit this
category. For example, the “secular Muslim” Fadela Amara
is an active citizen and a practicing Muslim, but her views
are taken to be sharply distinct from, if not antithetical to,
those of Muslim French. Many Muslim citizens of France
have attachments to Senegal, Turkey, or elsewhere, and
their narratives of colonialism are not at all about Algeria.
Many other Muslim citizens do not engage in the same
kind of reasoning as do the women and men profiled here.
Could we not label all of these Muslims French?
Second, Fernando critiques liberalism and republi-
canism by arguing that some major theorists (e.g., Michael
Walzer, and also Touraine), faced with the tension of in-
dividual choice versus value commitment, end up using
“sleight of hand” to appeal to self-evidence and emotions,
and that they thereby “shut down reasoned public debate”
(236). She contrasts them with the more tolerant “progres-
sive Muslim French” (242) and finds them more rigid, less
open. What would we conclude were we instead to examine
the way “ordinary” secular liberals, or republican Catholics,
engage in conversations on these issues? Or if we were
to read the many contemporary liberal political theorists
who take on these issues with no legerdemain? Might this
approach allow us to find a similar good-faith flexibility in
the everyday politics of liberals, and to bring us closer to
Fernando’s goal of “agonistic respect” (266)?
The Spirit of the Laws in Mozambique. Juan Obarrio.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. 274 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12282
OLUFUNMILAYO B. AREWA
University of California, Irvine
Although law has played a central role in the construction
of the postcolonial nation-state and varied multinational
relationships in Africa, the formation, structure, and
operation of law in African contexts remain understud-
ied. Juan Obarrio’s ethnography of law and justice in
postconflict Mozambique is a welcome addition to the
literature. Obarrio uses the postconflict and post-Socialist
transition in Mozambique to examine the emerging cen-
trality of the customary in Mozambique legal practices
and devotes significant attention to elucidating the realm
of the customary, particularly in relation to histories of
colonialism, socialism, and past warfare and conflict. He
characterizes the domain of the customary as an opposite
Book Reviews  American Ethnologist
vector to the state. He connects notions about the custom-
ary to conceptions of citizenship, noting the continuing
resonance of a colonial-era bifurcation between white
colonists and elite natives, “who made up the central state,
had access to citizenship rights and were ruled by civil
law,” while the rural majority, “located in ethnic enclaves,
were ruled by ‘traditional authority’ through customary
law” (77).
Obarrio seeks to locate contemporary legal reform
efforts within broader contexts of externally driven neolib-
eral legal and economic reform processes. He notes that
the postcolonial nation-state “constitutes a regional space
of paradoxes and anachronisms” (61). His description of
events in Mozambique highlights a number of important
contradictions related to legal processes and how law
has been both conceptualized and effectuated. He also
describes the roles of external experts funded by donors in
legal reform activities, which is an important issue in law
and policymaking in Africa.
Obarrio’s discussion underscores the importance of
Enlightenment conceptions of law in shaping understand-
ings of what the nation-state and rule of law should be.
Despite framing his analysis, in part, in terms of such
conceptions, he resists undertaking a typology, including,
for instance, one derived from Montesquieu’s The Spirit of
Laws (1748), which inspired his own book’s title. His con-
cept of the state does not sufficiently consider how the state
is constituted in terms of law and legal processes. Further,
his discussion shifts between detailed descriptions of legal
contexts—including court cases and legal reform processes
shaped by external forces—and conceptualizations of state
and citizenship, which would benefit from greater connec-
tion to his discussion of law. Obarrio notes that Western
normative categories have often been a starting point for
highlighting African failings, noting, for example, that Max
Weber’s evolutionary history has been used to characterize
the postcolonial state as deploying “a less ‘developed’
mode of legitimation based on charismatic, traditional,
and patrimonial forms that stand in a more or less complex
relation to the imported rational-legal formal apparatus”
(77). In eschewing the use of categories that conceptualize
the state in more legal terms, however, Obarrio’s analysis
of law and legal processes in Mozambique is at times
unclear. For example, Montesquieu’s highly influential
discussion of separation of powers between the executive,
legislature, and judiciary reflects a conceptualization of
spheres of influence and law that is often characterized as
defining many states today. Obarrio does not sufficiently
engage with the implications of these categories, which are
mentioned extensively in his ethnographic description. He
does not discuss how these or other categories may or may
not apply in changing contexts in Mozambique, and thus
misses an opportunity that might lend greater clarity to
his analysis of law in Mozambique, as well as assist in our
185
American Ethnologist  Volume 43 Number 1 February 2016
understanding of why such conceptualizations may or may
not be adequate. Although he describes discussions among
external legal experts sponsored by donors about issues
related to civil law versus common law and their con-
ceptions of separation of powers, he does not sufficiently
contextualize these discussions in terms of his broader
analysis about the spirit of the laws in Mozambique.
Obarrio’s discussion and analysis of law in Mozam-
bique is also at times incomplete and imprecise in
significant ways, with specific legal elements and overall
frameworks not always sufficiently explained. Obarrio’s
fieldwork focused to a significant degree on customary
courts in Mozambique. His description of such courts
could do more to locate such courts within broader legal
contexts in Mozambique. On other occasions, his discus-
sion of law describes policy discussions that surround law
but does not give sufficient indication of how such policy
discussions should relate to law and legal process. Despite
undertaking fieldwork in legal settings in northern Mozam-
bique, he does not discuss the significance of Islamic law,
merely briefly mentioning less than a handful of times the
presence of Islamic law in northern Mozambique. Further,
because his conception of law is not as well grounded as
it might be, the definitions and categories that he uses to
discuss law and his underlying assumptions are often not
sufficiently explained or even discussed. He suggests, for
example, that a decree from the executive is not a “full-
fledged” law “publicly debated and passed by the National
Assembly as many donors had requested” (57). This is an
area where greater engagement with some typology of law
or government might lend greater precision to his analysis
of law. Obarrio also states that rule of law is a modernist
concept that “excludes any kind of legal ‘pluralism’ or
recognition of ‘customary laws’ within the orbit of the
state apparatus” (54), an assumption that needs further
explanation.
The complex legal fabric that Obarrio describes re-
flects varied sources including Portuguese colonial-era
laws, postcolonial Socialist laws, and post-transition ex-
ecutive and legislative actions. He also identifies different
means by which laws have been created and interpreted
that are evident in executive decrees, civil codes, and
other laws enacted by a legislative body, administrative
rule-making, and judicial case law. His discussion of the
history of law in Mozambique confronts implications of
this complex fabric and the varied sources and modali-
ties of lawmaking that are characteristic of many African
legal systems. As such, Obarrio’s book is an important
intervention about critical issues related to law in Africa.
The Spirit of the Laws in Mozambique should appeal to
those with an interest in Africa, postcolonial conditions in
Africa and elsewhere, and issues related to rule of law more
generally.
186
Tamil Brahmans: The Making of a Middle-Class Caste.
C. J. Fuller and Haripriya Narasimhan. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2014. 278 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12283
TIMOTHY P. DANIELS
Hofstra University
This study of interweaving caste and class hierarchies
among Tamil Brahmans is an important contribution
to the anthropology of India. C. J. Fuller and Haripriya
Narasimhan offer us a detailed historical and ethnographic
study of the transformation of Tamil Brahmans from a
rural landowning elite to a segment of the urban middle
class. They argue that Tamil Brahmans, unlike Brahmans
from other ethnic groups and regions in India, became
almost entirely urbanized, yet maintained strong caste
identity, and are highly represented in the educated and
professional upper-middle class. The result of over two
years of ethnographic and library and archival research,
this book is a valuable resource for those working on issues
of caste in relation to class, gender, and urbanization in
contemporary India.
Fuller and Narasimhan introduce the book using
a vignette of a rural landowning Tamil Brahman father,
born in the early 20th century, and his urbanized son that
exemplifies their central theme of rapid transformation.
This deployment of sketches from their own and others’
research provides a refreshing ethnographic flavor through-
out this detailed study. Fuller and Narasimhan describe
subdivisions of the Tamil Brahman caste, the history of the
anti-Brahmanism in Tamil Nadu, and their use of a neo-
Weberian approach to “social class.” While Narasimhan,
herself a Tamil Brahman, conducted most of the ethno-
graphic research, Fuller engaged in library research and
wrote the book. However, we are told that they collaborated,
negotiating agreements and compromises on its contents.
They note the value of Narasimhan’s “insider” status in
facilitating discussions with Tamil Brahmans, but admit
“very little firsthand information about non-Brahman
perceptions of Brahmans” (25). This lack of non-Brahman
perspectives is most telling in the latter chapters that focus
on intercaste relations in the contemporary urban context.
In the early chapters, the authors describe the village
context in Tamil Nadu in the early and mid-20th century,
urban migration for employment and education, and the
changing position of women in society. Tamil Brahmans
used to live in exclusive quarters in villages, and they
practiced rules of purity and pollution that reinforced the
subordination of non-Brahmans and Dalits over whom
they ruled. Their separation from village society and
detached attitude toward land “pushed” them out of vil-
lages, while their desire for employment and educational

opportunities “pulled” them into towns and cities. Fuller
and Narasimhan inform us that Tamil Brahman men, long
dominant in administration and law, became overrepre-
sented in new colonial schools and the learned professions
of law, medicine, and engineering. Their caste status, social
connections, and belief in their innate superiority and natu-
ral suitability for serving in modern, secular roles facilitated
their overwhelming presence in the urban upper-middle
class. In the post-Independence era, policies reserving gov-
ernment positions for higher percentages of non-Brahmans
nudged Tamil Brahmans toward a greater emphasis on pro-
fessions in the private sector. Moreover, the orientation
of urbanized Tamil Brahmans toward English-medium
education provided them an advantage in securing private
sector employment, including positions as information
technology (IT) professionals. The decline in child mar-
riage and preference for sons over daughters, and the rise in
female education and companionate marriage, facilitated
the changing position of women in society. Many middle-
class Tamil Brahmans began to steer their daughters
toward IT professions, which they considered to be more
“morally safe” than engineering jobs in the manufacturing
sector.
In subsequent chapters, the authors describe the
urbanization of Tamil Brahmans in four urban sites, and
the role of religion, music, and dance in their modernity,
and compare their transformation with other groups of
Brahmans. The authors, using Herbert Gans’s revision of
Louis Wirth’s essay on urbanism, contrast the extensive
networks of primary kin and “quasi-primary” neighborly
relationships in Chennai, where a large percentage of Tamil
Brahmans live, with the more heterogeneous and limited
primary and quasi-primary social ties that characterize
their urban environments in Mumbai, Bangalore, and
American suburbs. Although there no longer are exclusive
Brahman quarters in Chennai, Brahmans constitute a
majority in its southern suburbs, where they maintain
strong solidarity and social control among themselves
and expect respect for their customs from others. Many
of their upper-middle-class Tamil Brahman interlocutors
considered Chennai to be a “balanced city,” combining
traditionalism—especially religion and “classical” music
and dance—with post-liberalization modernity. On the
other hand, many Tamil Brahman residents of Bangalore
and Mumbai—cities where there is less social control
and more relaxed middle-class morality—prefer these
metropolises and “emphasize the personal opportunities
and liberties available” (169). The authors estimate that
over half of Tamil Brahman overseas emigrants live in the
United States, where they settle as quickly as possible in
the outer suburbs beside predominantly white residents
and internalize the racialized ideal of American suburbia,
“whereby the white suburbs are opposed to black inner-city
‘ghettoes’ characterized as violent” (171).
Book Reviews  American Ethnologist
Fuller and Narasimhan describe how urbanized Tamil
Brahmans have fashioned Sanskritic “high culture”—
Brahmanical religion, song, and dance—as symbols of the
caste’s middle-class modernity. They note that Brahman
superiority is widely institutionalized in the religious
domain, including the exclusive role of Brahman temple
priests, special Brahman subcaste domestic priests serving
only Brahman clients, and rites of passage reserved for
Brahmans. Despite the presence of ongoing “culture wars”
and anti-Brahman movements, the authors offer some
description of non-Brahmans attending classes for Sanskrit
devotional songs, Carnatic music, and Bharatanatyam, and
seeking to participate in other practices widely deemed as
the special prerogatives of Brahmans. They suggest that
these non-Brahmans are embracing upper-middle-class
culture. Here, more interviews eliciting non-Brahman per-
spectives, as well as field observations in temples in urban
neighborhoods where Brahmans are the minority, would
have been helpful. Nevertheless, the authors accomplished
their primary goal of making Tamil Brahman society and
culture more intelligible.
The Development State: Aid, Culture and Civil Society
in Tanzania. Maia Green. Woodbridge, UK: James Currey,
2014. 217 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12284
BILL DERMAN
Norwegian University of the Life Sciences
In this significant book, Maia Green takes “development”
theory and practice in Tanzania as her subject by exploring
how the Tanzanian state has been constituted to imple-
ment particular meanings of development on behalf of
villagers through the ideology of participation. Her earlier
work focused on Christianity and then witchcraft in two
districts in the Morogoro Region. From 1998 until 1999,
she worked as a social development adviser for the United
Kingdom’s Department for International Development
(DFID). Since then, she has done consultancies for civil
society and local government, and then as part of a team
performing an evaluation of the Local Government Reform
Programme. Green’s central argument (and it would be true
of several African states) is that “development in Tanzania
is a modality through which state, culture and society are
organised” (13).
In the earlier years of an independent and socialist
Tanzania, development was taken to be a collective project;
over time, however, it became understood as a personal
project of development. Individuals would formulate
projects and, through connections to development institu-
tions and donors, gain the resources to accomplish them.
187
American Ethnologist  Volume 43 Number 1 February 2016
Donor-introduced and -sustained participatory develop-
ment relies on community (collective) undertakings at odds
with the Tanzanian perspective. Participatory development
rests on assumptions that people (especially poor people)
should be involved in project planning, implementation,
and monitoring. The assumption is that such engagement
will lead, over time, to the empowerment of the poor. In this
perspective, as the poor gain knowledge, they will increase
their agency to overcome the material and intangible limits
to their lives. However, Green finds that participatory devel-
opment has led overwhelmingly to the bureaucratization of
“participation.” She also points to a long-standing tension
in Tanzania: government and the ruling party attempt to
have villages or communities take responsibility for their
own development, while the structural factors limiting
development are beyond villagers’ control. In Tanzania
as elsewhere, this tension leads to the idea that villagers
resist development because of their “culture” or their
unwillingness to change. Thus the move to participatory
development, which, according to Green, is assumed to
break down such barriers. While the development assis-
tance provided could not deal with structural factors (poor
access to markets, for example), it has provided resources
for some to improve their standard of living. This conclu-
sion leads Green to examine and critique how participatory
development has become bureaucratized, formalized via a
cadre of people trained to do it: the logical frameworks (or
“log frames”), need for consensus, and rules of participa-
tion, “where truths about development are not negotiated
but axiomatic” (71). The process of participatory planning
has now become obligatory in Tanzania. As a result, partici-
patory planning produces common results that depoliticize
development, rejecting divergent visions of the world “that
could emerge through an iterative open-ended politicised
conversation” (98).
Green devotes two chapters to a critique of how civil
society has been instituted and inscribed in the national
political context of Tanzania. She contends that, rather
than emerging organically from oppositional movements
to the Tanzanian state, this civil society has more to do with
a transnational attempt to establish it. The civil-society sec-
tor, she argues, has become part of governance processes.
To illustrate her case, Green draws upon her consultancy
with an international NGO project whose purpose was to
foster local civil-society organizations; these groups, in the
hope of becoming officially recognized by the government
to avail themselves of funding opportunities, sought to
conform to the project’s expectations. Next, in “Anticipa-
tory Development: Building Civil Society in Tanzania,”
Green traces how NGOs learn to write proposals to garner
resources for themselves. NGOs do this through a formal
organization including a constitution, goals, missions,
visions, officers, and minutes of meetings. The people who
do this writing are paid; they follow the donor rules and
188
forms—and they are usually not from the villages where
they create these organizations. The new organizations are
“capacitated” when they succeed in having their proposals
funded, and they gain full legitimacy through implement-
ing projects. In turn, building successful NGOs by following
the rules of development is what Green terms “anticipatory
development.”
Green subsequently analyzes how anti-witchcraft ser-
vices have changed in order to serve broader developmen-
tal processes by disabling witchcraft activities. Witchcraft
works against development, while anti-witchcraft or
witchcraft suppression works for development. Ritual
cleansing through shaving off the body hair works both
to protect individuals from witchcraft and also to cleanse
witches. Green has published widely on this topic and
related subjects, so we quickly turn to chapter 8, where she
explores Tanzania in particular and Africa more broadly as
sites of economic opportunity rather than catastrophe. She
examines how the intersections of technological changes
(especially in communication), increasing access to educa-
tion, and changes in consumption with increased incomes
all lead to a new subjectivity of being “middle income.” Us-
ing material from Ulanga District, Green describes how the
district capital increased from a population of 4,000 in 1998
to 24,000 in 2012. There has been comparable peri-urban
expansion as nearby villages are incorporated into the
center, a pattern repeated throughout sub-Saharan Africa.
Residents now transfer funds via their mobile phones, buy
their food at supermarkets, and shop at new clothes stores
while secondhand clothes dealers are pushed to market
stalls. These members of the middle class are the primary
beneficiaries of the new forms of development. They have
become like middle classes everywhere. Many of them
make a living in programs directed at lifting the poor out of
poverty.
In sum, this volume addresses several important
characteristics of how notions of development policies
and practices have reshaped Tanzania. As Tanzania has
replaced its state-centric former socialist policies with the
market, it is also reinstituting national development plans
often cloaked in strategies to reduce poverty. Unlike the
earlier focus on inequality, the current state development
plans focus on economic growth. As a result, we see the
emergence of “development professionals,” intensified
emphasis on individual projects, and development in-
creasingly meaning the deepening of capitalist relations. In
critiquing participation, formalization of NGOs, and civil
society, however, Green seems to wield a very broad brush
without presenting any countertrends or Tanzanian-based
critiques, of which there are many. Thus, a greater engage-
ment with Tanzanian scholars would have been helpful in
placing her critique with others from a more structuralist
bent. It would seem from her reading that the Tanzanian
developmental state is here to stay. But perhaps a closer

reading of those critiques, as well as more comparisons with
the neighboring states of Uganda, Mozambique, Malawi,
Zambia, and Kenya, might have permitted a broader
consideration of the uniqueness or not of Tanzania.
Return to Sender: The Moral Economy of Peru’s Mi-
grant Remittances. Karsten Paerregaard. Washington, DC:
Woodrow Wilson Center Press with University of California
Press, 2014. 235 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12285
SUSANNA FIORATTA
Bryn Mawr College
Migrant remittances are one of the most significant kinds
of capital that move through the contemporary world.
Every year migrants send hundreds of billions of dollars
to developing countries, amounts surpassing international
development aid and second only to private investment.
Impressed by the global size of these money transfers,
many policymakers and governments of migrants’ home
countries have counted on remittances to advance national
development. Karsten Paerregaard’s Return to Sender adds
a cautionary perspective to temper the enthusiasm of those
who would assume that remittances necessarily foster
development or represent a stable form of income. The
lived reality of remittances is much more complicated, as
Paerregaard demonstrates by drawing on material from
interviews with Peruvian migrants conducted between
1997 and 2011 in Peru, Argentina, Chile, Italy, Spain, the
United States, and Japan. Through dozens of profiles of
individual migrants and their family members, Paerre-
gaard shows how variable the effects of remittances can
be. Although remittances can sometimes appear to be
reliable flows of money, withstanding national and even
global economic crises, they can also diminish or dis-
appear for reasons largely unrelated to macroeconomic
factors. In the case of Peru, they also tend to reinforce,
rather than break down, existing socioeconomic inequal-
ities. Paerregaard argues that only through studying
individual migration histories, remittance practices, and
regular household uses of remittances will the varying
impacts of migrant remittances on home societies be
understood.
Paerregaard takes the notion of “commitment” as a
central organizing theme. In order to understand when and
why migrants send money home, Paerregaard views remit-
tances as a “pledge tied to specific relationships of trust and
responsibility between remittance senders and recipients”
(30). By using “commitment” as a frame, Paerregaard is
able to illustrate how social circumstances surrounding
migrants, their families, and their communities influence
why and to whom migrants send money, as well as what
Book Reviews  American Ethnologist
prompts them to stop sending it. Paerregaard subdivides
“commitment” into three categories, borrowing Spanish
terms from his Peruvian interviewees. Compromiso, or
“family commitment,” refers to the support that individual
migrants provide to their families during their absence, al-
lowing them to meet the everyday basic needs that migrant
individuals would have felt similarly obligated to support
even had they not migrated. Migrants in these cases may
stop sending remittances when their families join them in
the destination country, when their dependent children
reach adulthood and become financially self-sustaining, or
when family members separated for many years become
estranged. The second type of commitment, voluntad,
Paerregaard describes as “social volition,” referring to the
monetary contributions migrants make to their communi-
ties of origin. These contributions may occur in the form
of one-time donations or sponsorship of a festival, are
rarely long term, and are often more symbolically than
materially significant. Finally, superación refers to the
commitments migrants make to themselves, with goals
to improve their own social and financial standing by
working abroad. Paerregaard notes that although migrants
must usually wait until they have already fulfilled their
family and community commitments before they can ded-
icate themselves to superación, these personal ambitions
are often what inspire individuals to migrate in the first
place.
These categories of “commitment” give Return to
Sender its structure. After an introduction and a chapter
on the particularities of migration and remittances in Peru
(where migrants tend to come from urban middle-class
backgrounds and a majority are women), the book’s three
core chapters follow, each focusing on one of the three
kinds of “commitment” and presenting nested typologies
of kinds of migrants and the ways they send remittances,
with several examples to illustrate each type. The final
chapter, “After Remittances,” concludes with policy recom-
mendations for governments and others who might rely
on remittances to further development. Here, Paerregaard
addresses “policymakers and development planners” di-
rectly, instructing them “not to view migrants’ money as
a cash cow ready to be milked but to focus on migrants’
many commitments and then to design migration policies
that support their efforts to meet those commitments,
even when those [remittances] fall short of yielding the
short-term economic output expected by the sending or
receiving governments” (206).
Directed as it is to policymakers, Return to Sender is,
perhaps unsurprisingly, light on theory. For Paerregaard,
the term moral economy, invoked in the book’s title, ap-
pears only as a broad concept encompassing the “economic
and social context” of remittances. Instances of gifting, re-
ceiving, and obligations to reciprocate surface repeatedly
throughout the book, and yet Marcel Mauss receives only
189
American Ethnologist  Volume 43 Number 1 February 2016
a passing mention in the introduction. Lengthy discussions
of these or any other theoretical constructs may be out of
place in a book like this, but even a small measure of more
sustained attention as to why these particular concepts
help us better understand remittances would strengthen
the argument that anthropological perspectives add value
to policy debates.
Although Return to Sender includes minimal the-
oretical discussion, the book is also not ethnographic
in a thick descriptive sense. Instead, it relies heavily on
synopses of life histories condensed from interviews with
Peruvian migrants and their family members, both in Peru
and abroad. At times, the series of interview summaries
becomes overwhelming. The chapter on superación alone
includes 18 of what Paerregaard calls “case studies,” each
briefly recounting the highlights of a different migrant’s
story. Presented in such quantity and with little depth,
the stories lose the effectiveness they might have had
with more sustained analytical treatment. Anthropolog-
ical perspectives have more to contribute to migration
policy than is evident from this text, especially since I
suspect that many readers will skip the “case studies” and
move directly to the concise paragraphs summarizing
the main points at the end of each section. Nevertheless,
by proposing that we see remittances in terms of “com-
mitment” and illustrating in detail how commitments
can vary and change over time, Return to Sender has the
potential to productively reshape the terms of international
policy debates surrounding migration, remittances, and
development.
The Impotence Epidemic: Men’s Medicine and Sexual
Desire in Contemporary China. Everett Yuehong Zhang.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. 288 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12286
JING JUN
Tsinghua University, Beijing
Is there in fact an epidemic of impotence among men in
China? Members of the Chinese public seem to think so.
In the last two decades, impotence has been a subject
for television and online discussions, advertising fliers
on city streets, serious literature, and casual jokes to an
extent that would have been unimaginable under the rule
of Mao Zedong. In his illuminating book, which draws
on interviews with 350 men and their partners over the
course of a decade of research, Everett Yuehong Zhang
explores this new preoccupation with sexual health and
its relationship to the enormous transformations Chinese
society has undergone in the post-Mao era. He sees what
is often labeled an impotence epidemic in China today as
“more than a biological phenomenon and impotence itself
190
as more than a neurovascular event” (9). Rather, impotence
serves as a symptom of profound social and economic
change.
Although epidemiological data that would allow reli-
able comparisons of actual male sexual function during the
1950s and 1960s with the current day may be in short sup-
ply, there is no doubt that the early years of Communist rule
emphasized a collectivist spirit that vigorously suppressed
the expression of any individual desires and, by extension,
the overt search for remedies to any physical barriers to
satisfying those desires. Zhang notes that Chinese men
were far less likely during the period of radical socialism to
seek medical help for impotence than for nocturnal emis-
sions. The latter were considered beyond an individual’s
conscious control and therefore no reflection of personal
wishes, and the patient typically sought medical help to
get rid of this unwanted excess of sexual drive. When men
did seek treatment for an inability to obtain an erection,
it tended to be for reproductive reasons, because that
inability impeded having a child.
Interestingly and importantly, Zhang details the in-
stitutional structures that underlay and reinforced the
collectivist norms of this time. The residence registration
system (hukou), which determined where citizens could
legally live, and the work unit (danwei) to which they were
assigned and which served as the source of employment,
housing, and most other social benefits, greatly reduced in-
dividual mobility; these systems also discouraged personal
attachments that stood little chance of being accommo-
dated by bureaucratic needs. Individuals were encouraged
to repress their feelings until after the state determined
where and how they were likely to spend their adult lives.
All this was upended by the economic restructuring that
began after Mao’s death in 1976. The gradual dismantling
of the danwei system granted citizens the liberty, and
imposed the obligation, to choose their own professions
and secure their own housing and other social welfare
benefits. The shift from collective to personal responsi-
bility within an increasingly consumer-driven economy
legitimized individual aspirations and the striving to satisfy
them. By the late 1990s, the moral stigma once attached to
indulging sexual drives had been replaced by shame over
any deficiencies in a man’s ability to realize himself as a
fully functioning, high-achieving, modern individual.
Meanwhile, the pressures to maximize performance
only increased across the board. The mass layoffs in many
state-owned enterprises in the 1990s entailed not just a loss
of jobs and benefits, but also a traumatic plunge in status
among men who had entered the workforce at a time of
guaranteed employment. In many of these men, the body
responded with impotence, a reflection of their reduced
physical but also social well-being. Among ambitious
businessmen, efforts to advance their careers by cultivat-
ing official and commercial connections often involved
 Book Reviews  American Ethnologist

strenuous banqueting, drinking, and sexual indulgence, The Hero’s Fight: African Americans in West Baltimore
and they could take their own physiological toll. And those and the Shadow of the State. Patricia Fernández-Kelly.
men were more likely to seek out treatment. A parallel de- Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015. 440 pp.
velopment was the emergence of men’s medicine (nanke)
as a recognized clinical specialty. While this specialty DOI: 10.1111/amet.12287
encompasses infertility, prostate ailments, and venereal
disease, it also addresses impotence, and it is widely iden- ALISSE WATERSTON
tified with this in the public eye, in part because of adver- John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York
tising. The increasingly open promotion of pharmaceutical
In The Hero’s Fight, Patricia Fernández-Kelly depicts the
remedies for erectile dysfunction, including Viagra, which
painful, Sisyphean struggles of African American men,
was introduced to China in 2000, encouraged the notion
women, and children in America’s war on the racialized
that impotence was a growing problem that needed to be
poor. The setting is West Baltimore, where 25-year-old
tackled.
Freddie Gray was fatally injured while in police custody in
Viagra, however, failed to serve as the answer. For
April 2015, one of several deaths of young black men and
centuries, Chinese medicine has viewed potency not
women at the hands of officers in urban ghettoes across
simply as the ability to achieve an erection, but as an
the country to recently become national news rather than a
important measure of overall vitality. Suspicion that Viagra
paragraph in the local paper. That setting is also featured in
addressed a symptom but not root causes, or that it might
the acclaimed HBO television series The Wire, which vividly
be a dangerous aphrodisiac, stimulating excessive sexual
portrays the struggle of young black men in the shadow
drives to the detriment of long-term health (as folk histories
of the state. Fernández-Kelly asserts that her analysis of
suggested destroyed more than one emperor), contributed
urban poverty is novel and her way of portraying it unique,
to lower-than-expected sales, not just in China but also
suggesting The Hero’s Fight provides a new way readers
in other regions where traditional Chinese medicine was
can think about and confront this most shameful of US
well established, such as Malaysia and Singapore. This
tragedies.
phenomenon suggests that cultural definitions of what
The book is organized around rich biographies of
constitutes physical well-being often tend to favor a
seven men and women whom Fernández-Kelly befriended
broader approach, incorporating older herbal treatments
even as they served as research subjects over the long
as well as newer pharmaceuticals.
history of the sociologist’s ethnographic fieldwork. The
While the high visibility of impotence in China today
biographies bring to life a series of complicated journeys
has been termed an “epidemic,” and therefore, presum-
through the big processes of relatively recent US history:
ably, a pathology that must be cured, Zhang takes a more
the Great Black Migration, racialization and racism, urban
positive stance, seeing a welcome shift from a society that
industrialization and deindustrialization, globalization and
stifled individual desire to one that embraces it. He also
ghettoization. The struggles are personal, the pain is raw,
notes that, increasingly, impotence is viewed not only as
and the journeys are only intermittently joyful. We meet
an event affecting individual men, but also as a relational
D. B. Wilson, who landed in Baltimore from South Carolina
issue involving their partners, and that many men seeking
in the late 1950s, a time when blacks could find modest
treatment are doing so at the initiative of women who are
jobs and build solid neighborhoods before the ravages
asserting their own newfound claim to sexual satisfaction.
of deindustrialization took hold. Then there is Big Floyd,
He suggests that, rather than “impotence epidemic,” we
whose calamities were exacerbated by the dire conditions
consider calling this phenomenon the “contagion of de-
of postindustrial Baltimore. His son Little Floyd came of age
sire.” “It is,” he writes, “one of the most profound changes
as the quality of life in West Baltimore continued to decline;
in recent Chinese history” (15). It may well be so, but the
Little Floyd’s is the life story of a beautiful baby born in
author could have bolstered his argument by systematically
1990 whose encounter with structural violence left him
exploring the interactions between the newly emerged field
with little means to a meaningful life. We are introduced
of men’s medicine in contemporary China and the rich
to Clarise Latisha Twigg, a little black girl with great yet
history of traditional Chinese medicine. After all, through-
unfulfilled potential, and Towanda Forrest, a fighter who
out the history of traditional Chinese medicine, sexually
lost the battle against forces ultimately too great for her
invigorant medications have been consistently offered to
to bear. Lydia, Towanda’s mother and Clarise’s guardian,
satisfy various forms of desire. While these medications
figures large in their lives and small in the eyes of “large
were banned in mainland China under Mao’s reign, they
segments of American society” (349) that look upon her
remained popular pharmaceutical commodities in Hong
with disdain. Portrayed last is Manny Man, the talented
Kong, Macao, and Taiwan.
entrepreneur in a predictably violent business.

191
American Ethnologist  Volume 43 Number 1 February 2016
Alongside each of these portraits, Fernández-Kelly
analyzes the social conditions that frame lives, details
the circumstances of individual decisions, and provides
relevant facts of history to support the argument that struc-
tural features of social life are central to understanding
and addressing poverty in the United States. The book
is organized around the seven portraits, each of which
is followed by analysis that is particular to that aspect
of the larger story of US poverty. The author’s analytic
focus includes the intersections of race, gender, and
class; capital disinvestment and predatory capital; the
uses and contradictions of social and cultural capital;
and importantly, the role of the intrusive and punitive
state.
Deep into the story, Fernández-Kelly quotes Lydia:
“There’s no winning here. . . . I keep tryin’ and tryin’ and
they’s always knockin’ me down. You wonder if the govern-
ment knows what they doin’ when they hurt mothers like
me” (226). This quote touches on what are for Fernández-
Kelly some key purposes of the book: to bring the state
into analyses of urban poverty, to understand the effects
of state institutions on individual lives, and to explain how
the state—by means of these encounters—participates in
reproducing the disruptions, the very conditions behind
the seemingly intractable cycle of poverty. She introduces
the term “liminal institution” to capture the idea that the
poor have a qualitatively different relationship to the state
than do their nonpoor counterparts.
Fernández-Kelly posits that this book is long overdue
in two aspects: she has salvaged biography in the study of
the poor, and she has filled a gap in the literature on urban
poverty by bringing the intrusive, punitive surveillance
state into the picture. Both are problematic claims. The
voluminous literature on urban poverty includes works
that offer biographies of the poor analyzed in terms of
larger political economy, structural forces, and the role
of state institutions in producing and reproducing urban
poverty and the so-called deviant populations that dwell in
poverty’s midst. To her credit, Fernández-Kelly references
a good amount of poverty literature in the social sciences,
but she tends to neglect those works that do precisely what
she claims is original and unique in her project. These
works include Timothy Black’s When a Heart Turns Rock
Solid (2010), Catherine Kingfisher’s Women in the American
Welfare Trap (1996), Laurence Ralph’s Renegade Dreams
(2014), and Dorothy Roberts’s Shattered Bonds (2002),
among many others. In addition, there is a large literature
that analyzes the role of the state in reproducing racialized
poverty. This literature includes Manning Marable’s 1983
classic, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America,
in which the historian predicted that confrontations
in the United States between blacks and the coercive
agencies of the state would escalate in the decades to
come.
192
It is unclear why Fernández-Kelly feels compelled to
claim hers a unique brand of fieldwork and analysis. Her
book contributes in important ways to a long-standing
discussion, and her voice is a welcome addition to the
enduring plea by many scholars that the United States
must examine its assumptions about poor people and its
entrenched beliefs about the causes of poverty and how to
solve it. Lydia wonders if the state knows what it is doing
when it hurts mothers like her. We must also wonder: Do
social programs indeed succeed in fulfilling an underlying
mission, goals scholars must make explicit? Does the capi-
talist state have a vested interest in reproducing ghettoized
poverty? These questions are still on the table, not taken up
fully in The Hero’s Fight. Though this is not the first book
of its kind, Fernández-Kelly delivers a valuable work filled
with thick description, rich and comprehensive data, and
good analysis to help us confront the toughest of questions.
References
Black, Timothy. 2010. When a Heart Turns Rock Solid: The Lives of
Three Puerto Rican Brothers On and Off the Streets. New York:
Vintage.
Kingfisher, Catherine. 1996. Women in the American Welfare Trap.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Marable, Manning. 1983. How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black
America: Problems in Race, Political Economy, and Society.
Boston: South End.
Ralph, Laurence. 2014. Renegade Dreams: Living Through Injury in
Gangland Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Roberts, Dorothy. 2002. Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Wel-
fare. New York: Basic Civitas Books.
Fluent Selves: Autobiography, Person, and History in
Lowland South America. Suzanne Oakdale and Magnus
Course, eds. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014.
319 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12288
GALE GOODWIN GÓMEZ
Rhode Island College
Fluent Selves makes an important contribution to the study
of biographical and autobiographical narratives among
indigenous groups of lowland South America. The book
is composed of a substantial introduction by the editors,
including an extensive bibliography, which is followed
by 10 chapters grouped into four thematic sections. The
authors of the individual chapters are established scholars
from the United States, Europe, and Brazil in the fields of
sociocultural anthropology and linguistics. Ten indigenous
groups from four countries are represented: the Waorani
of Ecuador, the Piro (Yine) and Asháninka of Peru, the
Mapuche of Chile, and, from Brazil, the Marubo,

Kalapalo, Tucano, Kawaiwete (formerly Kayabı́), Xavante,
and Kuikuru.
In the introduction, the editors present important
concepts, such as temporality, perspectivism, and per-
sonhood, that feature in the discussion of the individual
narratives. Temporality is particularly relevant to the study
of indigenous narratives since they often reflect differing
conceptions of time, especially with regard to the past. Past
time among indigenous cultures may lack a clear distinc-
tion between “history” and “myth,” contrary to Western
expectations. Likewise, perspectivism, defined as “the
observation that in many indigenous American ontologies
different kinds of beings see different worlds in the same
way” (14), is closely linked to the indigenous character
of the narratives. The indigenous conceptualization of
personhood, consequently, incorporates this “perspectival
paradigm” (16), allowing for both multiple and singular
models of a person. These concepts are highlighted as the
four thematic sections are described and later exemplified
in individual chapters. This well-organized presentation
of the overall content of the volume is very helpful for
the reader; it encourages searching out these theoretical
aspects in the collection of widely varied narratives.
Part 1 is subtitled “Neither Myth nor History,” signaling
that the three articles in this section deal with the inter-
section of myth and history in indigenous narrative. The
first author in this section, Casey High, relates the story
of Waorani elder Dayuma, well known for her relationship
with US evangelical missionary Rachel Saint. Dayuma’s
autobiographical narratives emphasize a sense of victim-
hood resulting from intra-tribal violence, and her history
includes the missionaries who are credited with bringing
peaceful “civilization” to the Waorani (through Christian-
ity). High provides a twist to the story by introducing the
perspective of a new generation of young Waorani men who
espouse a mythical “killer’s point of view . . . through bodily
imagery, gesture and embodied performances” (52). Histor-
ical violence and victimhood have been transformed into
imagery of a “mythical” warrior past in which strength and
bravery ensured tribal autonomy. In the second chapter,
Peter Gow presents a culturally specific type of autobio-
graphical history that recounts personal experiences tied to
an individual narrator. Such experiences always “deal with
very unusual and emotionally charged life events” (69) that
die with the narrator, in contrast to “mythic narratives [that]
are the personal experience narratives of mythic beings”
(89), which have no specific narrator (or witness) and are
passed down through the generations. In the first section’s
final chapter, Hanne Veber presents excerpts from two
narratives of “Asháninka family memories” (97), in which
the narrators describe not their personal experiences, but
Book Review  American Ethnologist
rather the experiences of their parents and grandparents
during colonization; in this way, the narrators establish
their own histories as well.
The chapters in part 2 focus on the concept of person-
hood, whether the multiple person of a Marubo shaman
in the chapter by Pedro de Niemeyer Cesarino or the
distinction between “‘unfinished’ and ‘finished’ versions
of the Mapuche person” (145) in the chapter by Magnus
Course. Part three also has only two chapters, which reflect
the section’s subtitle, “Creating Sociality across Divides,”
although in very different ways. Ellen B. Basso examines
the use of “little rituals,” such as the use of specific registers
or formulaic speech, in communications with strangers.
The second chapter in this section, by Oscar Calavia Sáez,
is distinct from others in the volume in that the Tucano
narrator, Gabriel Gentil, is an independent writer from
Manaus. The unique aspect of his autobiography is that the
overarching theme through which he weaves the narrative
of his life is sex.
The subtitle of the final section, “Hybridity, Disso-
nance, and Reflection,” anticipates the book’s last three
chapters, all of which have narrators who find themselves
in the role of intermediary between indigenous groups and
representatives of Western culture, specifically Brazilian na-
tional society. The first chapter in this section is by Suzanne
Oakdale. She contrasts the narrator’s experiences as a
young capitão during the post–World War II rubber boom
with the process to attain wyriat (literally, “the owner or
caretaker of a place” [220]) status as a Kawaiwete leader. In
the next chapter, Laura Graham traces the transformation
of an influential young Xavante leader, Hiparidi Top’tiro.
His autobiographical narrative reveals how crises experi-
enced in his youth, especially when he was sent away for a
Western education, caused him to change his perspectives
and to mature as a Xavante leader. The final chapter is by
Bruna Franchetto. It seems fitting that the book should end
with narratives by or about the great Kuikuru leader Nahu,
who recalls traveling and working with the Villas-Boas
brothers during the creation of the Xingu Park.
This book would be an excellent resource not only
for graduate and advanced undergraduate courses that
focus on the genre of biographical and autobiographical
narratives, but also for more general courses dealing with
indigenous South America. Individual chapters could be
used to provide first-person, indigenous perspectives on
specific topics ranging from indigenous leadership, the
rubber boom, or the influence of missionaries to the more
general impact of contact. Because of the high quality of
the chapters and the variety of themes and individuals
captured in the narratives, this book is also a fascinating
read even for nonspecialists.
193
American Ethnologist  Volume 43 Number 1 February 2016
Histories of Victimhood. Steffen Jensen and Henrik Ronsbo,
eds. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014.
280 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12289
ELLEN MARAKOWITZ
Columbia University
Histories of Victimhood, edited by Steffen Jensen and
Henrik Ronsbo, is an excellent addition to the discussion
of how people come to be defined as victims and what
victimhood entails as a social category. The editors pose
this question: “What does the focus on the histories of
victimhood entail for a politics more in tune with the lived
experiences and dilemmas of those interpellated by cate-
gories of victimhood?” (17). The contributors to the volume
discuss the explanatory power of illustrating the distinction
between victim and victimhood, utilizing specific histories
of victimhood to illustrate the linkage between lived and
experienced victimhood and the ways in which suffering is
entextualized and acted upon.
Covering the histories of victimhood across a wide
geographical spread—including Colombia, Turkey, India,
and South Africa, among others—the volume explores
a broad scope of issues including violence, refugee as-
sistance, displacement, and psychosocial interventions.
The examination of victimhood is approached from three
perspectives: victimhood as assemblages, as transactions,
and as figures against a ground.
The strength of the volume rests on the variety of
ways in which the contributors are able to articulate the
very complicated relationship between a definition of a
victim—an individual who is experiencing suffering—and
the notion of victimhood—a category, an ideology, a tem-
porally situated condition. The contributors grapple with
this relationship through work that includes historical
analysis, ethnographic work, governmentality, and the ex-
amination of global institutions directed to humanitarian
and human rights concerns. The editors have put together
a volume that draws from these different perspectives in
a way that makes the reader both reconsider and question
assumptions around victimhood. Although victims are
often construed as morally blameless, the volume shows
how that “morality” is shaped by narratives developed by
different actors in particular historical moments.
A discussion of the concept and development of
humane violence, in an early chapter, sets the tone for the
book. In “Why Social Scientists Should Care How Jesus
Died,” Darius Rejali interrogates the concept of humane
and inhumane violence: “How one decides the humanity
of violence then indexes one’s claims to victimhood. If vi-
olence is humane, how can one be a victim really?” (23). In
tracing the history of crucifixion, Rejali illustrates the rela-
194
tionship between definitions of humane and inhumane vi-
olence and categories of human. He shows that even, for ex-
ample, when there may be a natural law tradition providing
arguments against torturing anyone, the construct of hu-
mane and inhumane violence can result in greater violence
when some are more human or less human than others.
Several of the authors show, through illuminating
ethnographic work, how victimhood can constitute a high
political value and, at the same time, have an ambiguous
etiology. Nerina Weiss, in her chapter, “The Power of Dead
Bodies,” looks at the political significance of victimhood for
Kurdish activists living in eastern Turkey. She illustrates this
significance through the moving story of a Kurdish mother
whose son had joined the Kurdish guerrilla movement. After
many years, the mother found out that he had been killed
in a fight with the Turkish military. This knowledge was the
start of a long journey to find his body. What could be read
solely as a story of the son as victim is, however, compli-
cated by the son’s history of having been accepted into the
Turkish military but his not being able to join because the
“Turkish officials lost his certificates” (166). It is this type of
detail that so beautifully illustrates the ambiguity of victim-
hood in the internal and external components that consti-
tute its assemblage. Weiss shows how the mother’s attempt
to claim the body helped to shape the definition of her
son as a martyr and part of the political fight to legitimize
the Kurdish nationalist struggle. In particular, the reader is
compelled to consider both the metaphor and reality of the
tortured body and the layers and levels of victim as repre-
sented by the son and the way in which the mother becomes
both a victim and a political vehicle in light of her son’s
death.
In another intriguing piece, Henrik Ronsbo and Walter
Paniagua explore the reproduction of modern state power
and the recognition of victims. Victims are beneficiaries of
any number of postconflict reparation schemes. By look-
ing at psychosocial practices in response to Guatemalan
genocide, the authors challenge the reader to consider
the limits of the “empire of trauma” and to question how
much the state response to the recognition and reparation
of victimhood produces any of the social structures this
recognition has set out to change. Their articulation of the
assemblage of victimhood in this case sheds light on the
transactional character of the assemblage.
What marks these essays as a whole as so powerful
is that the individual does not get lost in the rendering
of violence. Each essay takes on the categories of victims
and victimhood with powerful theoretical insights, but all
manage to still capture the phenomenological experiences
of victims and the fact of their pain alongside the use and
performance of suffering. In capturing these experiences,
the contributors engage with the complicated reality that,
unconscious or not, institutionally or ideologically guided
or not, sometimes people find it advantageous to define

themselves or be defined as victims. This collection pro-
vides a superb platform to explore the complicated and
painful reality of the construction of victims through
suffering.
Mysteries of the Jaguar Shamans of the Northwest Ama-
zon. Robin M. Wright. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
2013. 387 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12290
EVGENIA FOTIOU
Kent State University
Robin Wright combines extensive historical research with
almost four decades’ worth of ethnographic work and col-
laboration with Mandu Manuel da Silva—a jaguar shaman
of the Baniwa ethnic group of the Northwest Amazon living
in the community of Uapui in Brazil. Wright uses the life
story of Mandu as a springboard to take the reader on a
journey through Baniwa history and sacred landscape.
The first part of the book centers around Mandu’s life
story (written with the help of his daughter); the second
part focuses on an in-depth discussion of Baniwa cos-
mology, building upon previous research by the author as
well as Irving Goldman’s important work on Hehenewa
metaphysics. The third part discusses in depth the myths
regarding Kuwai—the creator’s son and a central figure
in Baniwa religion—and the transmission of knowledge
and power in Baniwa society. The final part of the book
discusses Baniwa revitalization movements.
In an intricate account of indigenous Baniwa shaman-
ism, the author walks us through what he calls a “nexus
of shamanic power and knowledge” (6) and reveals a
hierarchical system consisting of four major categories
of “owners” of power and knowledge: the pajés (jaguar
shamans), the sorcerers, the priestly chanters, and the
dance leaders. All these figures play important roles in the
transmission of culture and maintenance of harmonious
conviviality in Baniwa society. As interest in shamanism
increases in Western New Age circles, the book offers an
important view into the role of shamans in contemporary
indigenous communities where shamans’ knowledge has
inherent creative power, and their powers are connected to
the food cycles of the cosmos.
Dualities such as the struggle for power between pajés
and sorcerers are a recurrent theme. Wright discusses ex-
ternal disruptions to Baniwa society and the role of sorcery
as a way to keep in check inequalities that might result
from these disruptions. The historical overview shows that
increase in envy, and therefore sorcery, is intimately con-
nected to external factors in Baniwa society such as the vi-
olence during the rubber boom. Seeing their communities
being torn apart by these factors and their aftermath, pajés,
Book Reviews  American Ethnologist
among them Mandu, have focused on eliminating sorcery
and restoring balance and harmonious conviviality. A more
recent challenge consists of wealth differences exacerbated
by international NGO projects that benefit communities
selectively, ignoring the Baniwa ideal of egalitarianism.
The section on metaphysics reveals a complex multi-
level universe in which shamans are “responsible for en-
vironmental cycles and sustaining an ideal ecological har-
mony” (150). In addition, shamans are the only ones who
have a holistic view of the universe and can travel in all of its
levels. The power of the pajé also lies in his ability to envi-
sion a new world. Wright also emphasizes the relationship
between landscape, myth, and community identity. In the
chapter on mythscapes—landscapes with sites relevant to
creation myths—he illustrates an extensive “sacred geogra-
phy” with sites that represent “petrifications” of events from
the Baniwa primordial past. These sites serve as “timeless
reminders of how life came to be the way it is today” (217).
Throughout the book, tensions produced by Baniwa
conversion to Christianity and their abandonment of
shamanic practices are evident. In discussing the Kuwai
religion, Wright emphasizes the importance of the sacred
flutes—whose use was viciously fought by missionaries—as
they are related to the reproduction of life. Kuwai is a mul-
tivocal figure that signifies “continuity, the transmission of
culture, and especially shamanic knowledge” in addition to
“the change that his body effects during passages of the life
cycle” (229). Kuwai combines contradicting aspects, creat-
ing a sense of ambiguity or multivocality very common in
indigenous religious traditions. He embodies liminality and
transformative change, which is significant, as the universe
in Baniwa cosmology was not created from nothing, but as
a series of transformations.
The last Kuwai story discussed is about the “struggle
between men and women for power over the reproduc-
tion of new generations” (277). Despite their ambiguity,
women were important in introducing change and as
intermediaries in relationships with outsiders, and they
are still important in the regeneration of society. They were
also owners of sorcery, a fact that signifies their power.
However, it is a power that is associated with everything
negative from the outside world (industry, technology, and
sickness). Wright introduces some potentially fascinating
aspects regarding gender, but by his own admission, more
research is required in this area. It would be fascinating
to explore how much of this heightened ambivalence
toward women is a result of the loss of men’s power in their
communities due to colonization. Whatever the case may
be, this story reveals not only tension between the sexes,
but also insights into how the Baniwa think about whites.
One thing that is clear throughout the book is the im-
portance Mandu places on preserving traditional modes of
knowledge and the continuity of Baniwa traditions in order
to resist domination by outsiders. In the final chapter we
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American Ethnologist  Volume 43 Number 1 February 2016
get a better view of the tensions in contemporary Baniwa
life, most of which are due to inequalities created by well-
intentioned development projects. Projects that do not take
into account local worldview and ethics are destined to fail.
Perhaps the most important argument of the book is that
“indigenous religious traditions and specialists provide a
privileged understanding of ‘cosmo-praxis’ which provides
the springboard from which sustainable development
projects are formed” (309). The lesson here is that cultural
revitalization is important for retaining cultural continuity
that is vital for the well-being of the group and is constantly
threatened by outsiders. In this sense, since the outside
threats are still very much present, shamans today have
an important role to play in the continuity of traditions
that will reproduce Baniwa society. As such, this book is an
important contribution to the scholarship on indigenous
religious traditions and their position in today’s global
environment. It succeeds in demonstrating the vitality of
these complex living traditions and their importance for
the survival and well-being of indigenous peoples.
The Khmer Lands of Vietnam: Environment, Cosmology
and Sovereignty. Philip Taylor. Singapore: Singapore Uni-
versity Press, 2014. 316 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12291
PHILIP HIRSCH
University of Sydney
The Mekong River delta in Vietnam has been the site of
many international development and disaster risk reduc-
tion projects; it is a hotspot of concern over impacts of
climate change, and its farmers have driven Vietnam’s
transformation over a short period of time from food-
insecure rice importer to globally important rice exporter.
Yet the Khmer people who originally settled the Delta,
shaped its agriculture, constitute an important proportion
of its current population, and best know its environmental
potentials and constraints remain little studied and even
less understood.
Philip Taylor’s masterful study should do much to
dispel ignorance, prejudices, and basic misconceptions
about the Khmer Krom (literally, lower Khmer). The book
explores Khmer ways of life in Vietnam through their
adaptation to what others usually experience or perceive
as harsh environmental conditions. It shows how myths
and stories, together with the organization of Khmer village
society around Theravada Buddhist temples, shape Khmer
Krom people’s own views of their place in the world and
the social organization that gives them confidence in
their ethnic identity despite the pejorative attitudes that
surround them. And importantly, the book says much
about the status of Khmer Krom as a minority viewed with
196
apprehension by both the state in which they live (Vietnam)
and that with which they can identify most closely in ethnic
and linguistic terms (Cambodia).
Taylor’s work is based on 13 years of painstaking re-
search conducted over many trips around and beyond the
Mekong River delta, during which he visited most of the
more than 400 villages in Vietnam where a majority of
the population identifies as Khmer. An engaging preface
to the book recounts the quite unconventional fieldwork
that allowed him to combine depth of understanding with
breadth of observation, and it also helps the reader under-
stand the challenges for subjects and researcher alike of
negotiating the mainly Kinh (that is, ethnic Viet) official-
dom that governs many aspects of rural life. Yet at the same
time, the surprisingly sympathetic position of local govern-
ment officers also anticipates paradoxes revealed later in
the book, whereby Kinh of the Delta have assimilated many
aspects of Khmer knowledge and cosmology into their own
ways of living.
The book is organized around seven main chapters,
each of which describes Khmer life in a specific agro-
ecological zone, and each of which reveals the “ecological
repertoire” that has allowed Khmer to live successfully
in an environment that later settlers found challenging.
These zones do not conform to previously classified human
ecological distinctions. Rather, they have been intelligently
composed and delineated by the author based on his
intimate recording of settlement patterns, uses of land and
water, and cosmologies. These worldviews are revealed
through nicely selected excerpts from engaging stories
recounted to the author by monks and village elders, and
they are beautifully conveyed to the reader in translation.
These stories provide local voice to the researcher’s account
of the Khmer Krom.
Six of the seven zones are in the Mekong River delta.
The coastal dune belt north of the Bassac River near its
mouth is a series of settlements raised above the low-lying
coastal area on residual sand ridges. These ridges, referred
to as phno, allow villages to remain dry in an otherwise
flooded wet-season landscape. During the dry season they
provide a vital source of fresh water in the shallow “lenses”
(domes of groundwater that sit above the level of the
surrounding water table) that, with careful management,
remain separate from the underlying saline water table.
South of the Bassac River, the phno are more scattered in
what is described as a coastal river-dune complex. A key
feature that distinguishes this area is its more outward-
looking character, as movement of people and trade in
goods have given Khmer Krom in this area a reputation
for entrepreneurship. In contrast, the Khmer communities
of the most prosperous part of the Delta, in the central
area around Can Tho, have faced displacement by war and
subsequent events, and here they have had to contend
most with the challenges of relations with a Vietnamese

population whose own sense of history is one of occupation
and civilization of empty lands.
The most challenging environment to which Khmer
have had to adapt is the saltwater rivers zone of the far
south, where tidal influences set the terms of managing
salt- and freshwater regimens. Here, the modification of the
area by Kinh shrimp farms and engineering projects has
placed challenges in front of the Khmer population.
Closer to the Cambodian border are the last two Delta
zones described in the book. The first of these is a series of
mountain outcrops around which Khmer historically set-
tled successfully on the piedmont land watered by streams
from the hills while remaining above the surrounding
deep flooding of the late wet season. Communities in this
area suffered terribly during the Khmer Rouge incursions
of the late 1970s, which targeted Khmer as well as Kinh
villages on this side of the border. The second zone closer
to the border is “between swamp and sea” on the Gulf of
Thailand, where inshore fishing has historically provided
a good living that recently has become more precarious
because of incursions by trawlers and other competitors.
Finally, the northeastern uplands are represented as a
zone—outside the Delta—where the Khmer Krom have ex-
isted in a more forest-dependent way of life. Ironically, this
zone includes Prey Nokor (literally, the forest of the great
city), which now incorporates Ho Chi Minh City. Many
of the young Khmer of the Delta join their non-Khmer
compatriots in seeking new opportunities in work and
education in this new frontier.
Overall, the book shows the Khmer Krom as a highly
diverse group, yet one with a strong identity, whose
livelihoods are based on sophisticated agro-ecological
adaptations. The Khmer Krom identity is shaped not only
in relation to the proximate environment in which the
Khmer have made a living for many centuries, but also by
the challenges of being a minority viewed with suspicion by
the Vietnamese and Cambodian states alike. Paradoxically,
at a more vernacular level, the assimilation of Khmer
culture, religion, and herbal knowledge by Kinh reveals a far
more complex incorporation of a minority into a chauvinist
state and culture than is commonly assumed.
Migrants in Translation: Caring and the Logics of Differ-
ence in Contemporary Italy. Cristiana Giordano. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2014. 288 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12292
MAURIZIO ALBAHARI
University of Notre Dame
Migrants in Translation is a precise, excellently written
ethnography of the emergence of ethno-psychiatry in the
contemporary Italian context. Cristiana Giordano scru-
Book Reviews  American Ethnologist
tinizes multifaceted clinical encounters migrant women
have with members of the mental health professions, along
with these women’s interactions with Catholic nuns and
police officers. The women at the center of the book had
been recruited in countries such as Nigeria, Albania, and
Romania with the promise of a legitimate job, but ended
up as prostitutes being exploited in the long nights of Ital-
ian cities—even if such exploitation does not necessarily
imply coercion. Nuns and police officers are tasked with
redeeming migrant women in their charge (and possibly
themselves in the process). Some of these women seek au-
thorities’ protection. Others are co-opted into a pioneering
state program for “victims of human trafficking.” Work-
ing with them, nuns and ethno-psychiatrists—including
several with anthropological training—find themselves
in larger networks of linguistic, cultural, and existen-
tial translations. In their interactions, documented with
skilled nuance, all these actors make explicit the contra-
dictions that state recognition of alterity is tasked with
solving.
The ethnographic work is centered in Turin, in the
postindustrial urban northwest. The region, building on
the blue-collar work and marginal inclusion of southern
Italian migrants, contributed much to reconstructing Italy
after World War II. Giordano outlines the structure of
the book and the various “scenes” that she enters. She
conducts participant observation in a Catholic shelter, in
police and immigration offices, and more substantially in
an ethno-psychiatric centro (facility). “I’m here to meet
Dr. Fanon,” some of the new patients are likely to say
as they are greeted in this clinic’s lobby. In reality, it is
the centro that is named after the Martinique-born psy-
chiatrist, philosopher, and revolutionary Frantz Fanon.
For, as explained by its director, Roberto Beneduce, the
clinic aims to bring together political engagement and
clinical intervention for postcolonial populations facing
institutional racism (91). In Migrants in Translation, Fanon
also contributes to Giordano’s theoretical frame, together
with anthropologist Ernesto de Martino and psychiatrists
Franco Basaglia and Tobie Nathan. Among its merits, the
book critically interrelates these important figures: to-
gether, they traced a pioneering space at the intersections
of psychiatry, anthropology, and political critique.
Ethno-psychiatry is such a space. It is a practice that
challenges both the discourse of psychiatry and the pre-
tense of state actors to recognize and include “indigestible”
alterity (7) by reducing it to a presumably known, disci-
plined form of otherness. Consequently, the ethnography is
able to focus both on the ethics and politics of therapeutic
work with foreign women and on dominant politics of state
recognition. By delving into the nexus between therapy
and governance, Giordano is able to illuminate the nexus
between redemption and justice, policing and politics
(the latter in the transformative sense clarified by Antonio
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American Ethnologist  Volume 43 Number 1 February 2016
Gramsci and Jacques Rancière, among others), and liberal
inclusion and cultural entrenchment.
For Giordano, Italy is a country she “began learning
about after leaving it” (for graduate studies in the United
States, xii). Her realization serves as a reminder of the
contextual and strategic qualities of cultural competence,
which in the ethno-psychiatric approach is instrumental
to the “acknowledgment” of difference, rather than to its
“recognition” (9), and to “care,” rather than to “cure” (204).
Ethno-psychiatry, argues Giordano, “takes other cultures’
forms of knowledge about health and therapeutic practices
seriously and thus deconstructs certainty within Western
psychiatric knowledge” (81). This is not a form of psychiatry
that reifies cultural competence toward a more grounded
diagnosis. As one of Giordano’s informants puts it, in the
centro “we use the [migrants’] mother tongue in therapy
sessions not because we are anthropologically sensitive to
the patient’s cultural difference, but because the mother
tongue is a political instrument” (75). Indeed, could it be
that personal well-being might sometimes be found in ex-
ile? More broadly, in Giordano’s analysis ethno-psychiatry is
largely inextricable from radical critique. It does not pathol-
ogize or psychologize migration (including trafficking). It
does not presuppose that a patient’s existence can be trans-
lated into a coherent and (chrono)logical trajectory. Rather,
ethno-psychiatry interrogates the structural inequality of
the postcolonial, gendered, and migratory encounter. Like
anthropology, it benefits from a self-reflexivity that is not
paralyzing. It seeks to invert, at least “for a moment,” the
expert asymmetry between patient and doctor (75). What
is at stake, Giordano writes, is ultimately “the question
of difference in relation to healing and suffering,” and
ethno-psychiatry’s potential “to critique institutions and
colonial experiences” (72).
Together with ethno-psychiatrists, lay and religious
social service providers “accompany” migrant women (on
a path culturally marked toward “autonomy” and “good”
motherhood). In so doing, these social actors keep alive
what is left of the Italian welfare state. Despite good inten-
tions, women in their charge often face daily forms of cen-
sorship. Among the examples Giordano gives us is Afërdita,
who is prevented from speaking Albanian to her children in
foster care on the rare occasions she is allowed to see them.
In other stories, needless suffering is caused not only by
trafficking and prostitution, but also by the systematic tar-
diness of police authorities in granting a legal residence per-
mit to cooperating former victims. There is a larger tension,
here, between what in theory are “human” and “legal” rights
and their administration as discretionary permissions.
Migrants’ “assistance” on behalf of public health,
police, and local authorities is part of a competitive mar-
ket. Centro Fanon often finds itself marginalized (like its
clients), also for not adhering to the ostensibly univer-
sal dictates of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
198
Mental Disorders. More broadly, public services are cut;
one-on-one, personal-clinical encounters are often made
redundant. This situation hardly translates into more rights.
Centro Fanon eventually severed all ties with institutional
partners. Its clinical activity, though, continues to serve and
engage people. Its dialogical encounters contribute to the
transformative politics of Italian citizenship, rather than to
its policing.
Forest and Labor in Madagascar: From Colonial Conces-
sion to Global Biosphere. Genese Marie Sodikoff. Blooming-
ton: Indiana University Press, 2012. 245 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12293
SARAH OSTERHOUDT
Indiana University
In Forest and Labor in Madagascar, Genese Marie Sodikoff
brings us to the tropical forest of northeastern Madagascar,
with its charismatic wildlife and dynamic mix of subsis-
tence producers, illegal loggers, commodity traders, and
government bureaucrats. Against this setting, Sodikoff
tells the story of the UNESCO Mananara-Nord Biosphere
Reserve, a 140,000-hectare protected area that has been a
site of contestation between local residents, state officials,
and various outside interests since its establishment in
1989. Taking both an ethnographic and historical perspec-
tive, Sodikoff highlights the ways that struggles over this
landscape connect to the larger trajectories of colonial pol-
itics, ethnic rivalries, and conservation sensibilities in the
region. Throughout, she turns toward the material spaces
within and surrounding the reserve to examine the “mutual
formation of people and nature through the process of
transforming a specific place at a particular time” (5).
Giving a refreshing focus to what could by now seem
a somewhat familiar narrative of conflicts between peo-
ple and parks, Sodikoff examines the role of labor in cre-
ating, maintaining, and contesting the reserve. She weaves
together large-scale political and economic accounts of la-
bor alongside analyses of more intimate forms of labor, in-
cluding ancestral relationships and the phenomenological
realms of the body. She focuses on “subaltern labor” per-
formed by the people at the lowest rungs of Madagascar’s
social hierarchy, especially the “conservation agents” of the
Malagasy park service who perform the “mundane tasks
that have made possible the acquisition of certain types of
knowledge, and the evolution of certain philosophies of na-
ture” (7). Such manual tasks include clearing paths through
parks, cultivating swidden rice on hillsides, and carrying
tourist backpacks (or even, on occasion, tourists them-
selves) over the rough terrain of the reserve landscape.
Overall, the book convincingly argues that the image of
the reserve as a “natural” space emptied of visible human

labor in fact requires a tremendous amount of material and
ideological work to produce and maintain. For example,
Sodikoff takes the innovative approach of looking at feet
and eyes as “bodily symbols of social hierarchy” (32). She
contrasts Malagasy feet (shoeless, calloused, immersed in
mud) with the feet of colonial officials and modern-day
conservationists (boot-clad, blistered, “unmoored from
the weight of the body” [30]). Similarly, Sodikoff contrasts
the mediated sight of privileged travelers to Madagascar,
who view the landscape through maps and cameras,
with the direct and grounded sight of Malagasy laborers,
porters, and guides. Collectively, she illustrates how eyes
and feet emerge as powerful symbols that “outsiders”
have used over time to construct both the nature of
Malagasy environments and the character of Malagasy
people.
Throughout the text, Sodikoff illustrates connections
between power, identity, land, and labor. For example, she
examines how the Betsimisaraka (the main ethnic group of
the region) are depicted as “bad” workers by those groups
seeking to exert economic discipline upon local residents.
Against such assertions that the Betsimisaraka “don’t know
how to work” (53), Sodikoff argues that the Betsimisaraka
adhere to a work ethic that emphasizes reciprocity, auton-
omy, flexibility, and social ambience. In a similar manner,
Sodikoff examines the contrasting views regarding the
“right” kind of heritage to preserve in the Mananara-Nord
Biosphere Reserve. She concludes that while conservation
groups advocate for the preservation of natural heritage—
such as native species—this was “not necessarily the types
of heritage that Betsimisaraka peasants found to be im-
portant or worth bequeathing to their descendants” (141).
Instead, they valued social ties created through community
involvement and ancestral relationships.
One significant contribution of Forest and Labor in
Madagascar is its inclusion of aspects of local Malagasy life
that may otherwise be dismissed as not relevant to a study
of parks. For example, Sodikoff examines hillside swidden
rice cultivation, arguing that the lower-paid Malagasy
conservation agents are only able to support themselves by
relying on rice produced from swidden agriculture—a type
of land use vehemently forbidden by the park. Such ironic
entanglements mirror the past dynamics of the French
colonial forest service, which similarly relied on the “sub-
sidies” of swidden rice, even as the French state adamantly
(and often violently) opposed the practice. Additionally,
Sodikoff draws from David Harvey’s concept of “time-space
compression” to focus on the uneasy relationships between
environmental conservation, local residents, and cash crop
production in the region (116). It would be interesting to
see these more recent “compressed” trade relationships
situated within the longer arc of economic history in the
Mananara region, where smallholder farmers have been
active in Indian Ocean trade networks for centuries.
Book Reviews  American Ethnologist
Throughout the book, it is clear that Sodikoff has
both a great knowledge of and a deep respect for the
people and the environments of Madagascar. The result
is a humane and approachable ethnography that would
connect with both undergraduate and graduate students.
The monograph would be an interesting addition not only
to courses on environmental anthropology, but also for
those looking to include a parks example in discussions
on colonialism, postcolonialism, political ecology, or mul-
tispecies approaches to anthropology. Finally, the book
could easily provoke classroom discussions on current
social challenges, including the complexities of biodiversity
conservation. Indeed, Sodikoff closes the book with a brief
statement that while she is cognizant of the disturbing
ideological histories of the conservation movement, she
too “desires to salvage rare life from oblivion” (189). And,
while Forest and Labor in Madagascar may not provide
definitive answers to how to reach this goal, it offers an
important contribution to conversations about environ-
mental conservation by raising nuanced, thoughtful, and
ultimately more productive questions.
A Talent for Friendship: Rediscovery of a Remarkable
Trait. John Edward Terrell. New York: Oxford University
Press, 2015. 302 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12294
MERLE WALLACE
Sewanee: The University of the South
John Terrell has produced an uplifting and thought-
provoking book for our times, times that are unfortunately
characterized by endless examples of hatred, bigotry, and
violence, where “Love thy neighbor as thyself” sounds
more like a utopian aspiration than a moral imperative. He
wants the reader to consider that we humans—all of us,
not just those in our own time and social networks—have
a survival advantage because we are endowed with promi-
nent propensities for friendship. Neither we, nor any other
groups we might imagine, are entirely brutish or savage.
Instead, he argues that at our most human core, we are
friendly.
Terrell wants many people to have access to his thesis
and arguments, so he has written a hybrid academic and
popular book that will appeal to anyone interested in
human nature. Since Terrell includes history, philosophy,
anthropology, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, social
network theory, and historical and contemporary evo-
lutionary theory, as well as tales from the “corner store”
and his fieldwork as a museum curator, the narrative is
accessible and sophisticated. It is also adventurous and
compelling. Finally, he provides ample evidence that the
notion that others (and we, too) are bloodthirsty savages
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American Ethnologist  Volume 43 Number 1 February 2016
motivated by self-interest, tribalism, and a violent na-
ture is too simplistic and ultimately false. The criticism
spans many disciplines and then lands squarely as a strong
argument against early ethnographic and literary character-
izations of peoples of Oceania as savage headhunters and
cannibals. It turns out that they, too, had the same propen-
sity for friendship that we all do. Friendship and sociality,
according to Terrell, are cornerstones of human adaptation.
For many, this book will be enjoyable reading because
of its uplifting thesis and the playful way in which Terrell
approaches it. Take Lou, Laurence, and Leslie: these are pet
names he assigns to three kinds of information process-
ing. Lou is habit and routine, and for Terrell, this kind of
thinking is quick and not very skilled, like Lou Costello’s
comedic persona. Instead of choosing Bud Abbott to rep-
resent the second kind of more reasoned and deliberate
thinking, Terrell selects Laurence (Olivier), who is more
“cultured”—not mean, as he feels Abbott was. Continuing
with his Hollywood-themed selections, Terrell chooses
Leslie (Howard) to stand for the mind at rest and play in
imaginative scenarios that we create in reflection on actual
experience. He is talking about Lev Vygotsky’s inner speech
or the internal dialogue here. Terrell says that Laurence is
critical because “our dilemma as a species is not that we are
inherently violent and selfish creatures by nature, but rather
that it is so difficult for us to agree and act on the principles
by which we should translate ‘virtual worlds’ seen in our
heads into the experienced realities of our daily lives” (32).
So it is the fear generated in misunderstanding that Terrell
finds as the spark of violence, not hardwired aggression and
self-interest. What is hardwired is friendship.
Terrell is the curator of Oceanic Archaeology and Eth-
nology at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago,
and he has many years of experience in Papua New Guinea,
especially the Sepik coast. He is able to provide ethno-
graphic and archaeological evidence that supports his
friendship thesis. The most significant evidence revolves
around Pacific Islanders’ two-thousand-year (or more) his-
tory of travel to see friends near and far. Part of the agenda
is trade, as different places produce or yield different things,
such as foodstuffs, pottery, or obsidian. In working to re-
collect the items from A. B. Lewis’s 1909 museum buying
and collecting trip, Terrell and his colleagues found that
they could easily purchase all of the items again in 1990.
Excited by this, they wondered if a longer history for items
might be revealed through archaeological excavations.
They unearthed potsherds from this Sepik coastal area
and found that the pottery styles had been the same for at
least two thousand years. Even more exciting, they found
that these pots shared a sea turtle motif used widely in the
South Pacific. From this material evidence, Terrell posits
that Pacific Islanders are not savage and warlike—rather,
that they are friendly and that island hopping is an endur-
ing routine, at least two thousand years old. Parents take
200
their children to visit the inherited friends of their ancestors
who speak different languages and have developed varied
customs. This widespread traveling and visiting is evidence
that the people from these parts should be characterized as
travelers with long-standing friends near and far.
Another extended example that serves to confirm
the friendliness of Pacific Islanders comes in the form of
a handbook for hosting a marae, a stylized and ancient
meeting format from the Maori of New Zealand. The main
purpose of the marae is to create a space for an encounter
between two communities. It involves speakers, gifts, food,
and perhaps musicians from each group taking turns to
present and respond, and has been used to show hospital-
ity, to resolve disputes, and to trade. With this handbook,
Terrell gives us a gift. The marae format may be altered and
made appropriate for meetings of any groups. It is a mirror
on and an encouragement of our propensity for speaking
and listening, and for friendship.
This positive, enjoyable, and academically creative
book would be appreciated by a well-educated reader,
especially in a reading group, and would also be valuable in
the teaching of evolutionary theory, cognitive psychology,
archaeology, and anthropology.
Hunters, Predators and Prey: Inuit Perceptions of Anim-
als. Frédéric Laugrand and Jarich Oosten. New York:
Berghahn Books, 2015. 408 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12295
T. MAX FRIESEN
University of Toronto
Inuit hold a special place in the anthropological literature,
where they are seen as prototypical hunter-gatherers who
are famous for their adaptation to harsh environments
and for their technological wizardry. Their relatively recent
encounters with the expanding European world-economy
led to detailed recording of Inuit lifeways by a series of
talented ethnographers—a process that continues today in
collaboration with modern Inuit communities. Perhaps the
most notable aspect of the resulting rich array of anthropo-
logical information is the centrality of animals to virtually
every aspect of Inuit society, including economy, social
relations, and worldview. In this book, Frédéric Laugrand
and Jarich Oosten provide an important new synthesis of
this relationship. Through detailed coverage of connections
between people and key species, they document a world
in which hunting is a moral obligation, and “the killing of
game makes the existence of society possible” (350).
The book is organized into four parts. Part 1 provides
several categories of introductory material including rele-
vant theory and method, and an overview of Inuit-animal
interactions from a more general perspective, including

introduction to many of the Inuktitut terms used through-
out. The remaining three parts contain seven chapters,
each focused on a particular category of animal. Part 2
contains two chapters on animals with special meanings
relating to transformation, life, and death: the raven and
qupirruit (insects and other small species). This latter
category is one that has not been extensively synthesized
before, and the authors’ nuanced discussion emphasizes
the association of qupirruit with transformation and re-
juvenation, which makes them powerful and effective as
shamans’ helping spirits and amulets. Part 3 has chapters
on the dog and the bear: the former, the animal category
with the closest connections to human society; the latter,
the species most like humans in terms of behavior. Part 4
contains three chapters on major prey species—caribou,
seals, and whales—as well as a concluding discussion.
The text works back and forth between general discus-
sions of, for example, methods of hunting or sharing, and
more specific considerations of how Inuit perceive animals
and interact with them in ethical and spiritual ways. Data
sources are rich and include important “classic” 19th- and
early 20th-century ethnographies such as those of Franz
Boas and Knud Rasmussen, combined with the authors’
own interviews and extensive unpublished information
from other sources. Throughout, Inuit perspectives are
emphasized, revolving around the complex relationship
between the physical animal itself and its tarniq (plural
tarniit), in some ways comparable to the concept of a
“soul.” The tarniq takes the form of a miniature image held
inside a bubble of air in the body, and it survives after the
death of the animal. The interactions between hunters, an-
imals, tarniit, shamans, and others form the framework for
a wide array of Inuit actions ranging from rules of respect
(such as prohibitions against eating certain body parts,
and the oft-cited offering of fresh water to a newly killed
seal) to rituals and ceremonies, such as competitions and
community-wide spousal exchange at the start of the seal-
hunting season. Occasional forays into modern conflicts
between Inuit and the state (for example, relating to the re-
sumption of bowhead whale hunting in recent decades, or
the government-mandated killing of sled dogs in Nunavik
[northern Quebec] in the 1950s and 1960s), while initially
seeming to detract from the narrative flow, are ultimately
well-chosen and useful. They serve not only to reveal
the ways in which Inuit worldview collides with modern
“Western” ideologies, but also to emphasize fundamental
aspects of enduring Inuit perceptions of animals.
While the book is highly successful in delivering a wide-
ranging and sensitive picture of Inuit relationships with
animals, not every aspect is covered in detail. For example,
it is not always easy to comprehend fully the relationship
between relatively “universal” aspects of Inuit-animal inter-
actions and those that are more specific to particular times
and places. This subject would offer a potentially rich area
Book Reviews  American Ethnologist
for historical interpretation, given that phenomena which
occur across the Arctic are likely part of an initial Thule
Inuit ideology brought from Alaska around eight hundred
years ago, while those that are more spatially restricted
probably represent more recent innovations in the eastern
Arctic. Linked to this is the role of Christianity. Some of
the most fascinating passages throughout the book discuss
the ways that various Inuit groups have incorporated and
reinterpreted Christianity in the context of their preexisting
worldview; however, there is not much general discussion
of this process. Perhaps most profound in this regard are
the practice of eating formerly prohibited parts of seals as
an indication of conversion to Christianity, and the obser-
vation that Christianity provided a direct contradiction to
traditional Inuit ways of understanding the world, since
in the former only humans have souls, while in the latter
many entities, including humans and animals, have tarniit.
As someone who has been working with and reading
about Inuit for three decades, I found this book a pleasure
to read, and highly useful on two quite different levels. At
a more specific level, it is a wonderful source for particular
information about almost every aspect of the human-
animal relationship; the authors have judiciously culled the
most important details from early ethnographies, combin-
ing them with relevant unpublished or recently acquired
information. At a broader level, reading this book expanded
and enriched my general understanding of Inuit worldview.
Indeed, since animals are so central to Inuit society, if one
comprehends the complex intellectual framework linking
animals with people, one has taken an important step
toward understanding Inuit lifeways at the broadest level.
As such, this book is recommended for a wide array of
scholars—not just those engaged with Inuit culture, past or
present, but also scholars interested in general approaches
to understanding hunter-gatherers and how humans in
worlds very different from ours imagine the human-animal
relationship. As nature becomes increasingly a central
theme in an emerging global ethics, this kind of book is a
very important resource indeed.
Environment and Citizenship in Latin America: Natures,
Subjects and Struggles. Alex Latta and Hannah Wittman,
eds. New York: Berghahn Books, 2012. 254 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12296
JONATHAN DEVORE
Yale University
Environment and Citizenship in Latin America contains 12
chapters written by anthropologists, geographers, political
scientists, urban planners, human ecologists, and scholars
in several other interdisciplinary fields. These chapters
explore issues including food sovereignty, displacements
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American Ethnologist  Volume 43 Number 1 February 2016
caused by urban construction, and the recognition of “na-
ture” as a rights-bearing subject. The countries represented
in the volume include Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile,
Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay;
two chapters directly address cross-border environmental
conflicts.
The contributions range from high-resolution case
studies to more generalized accounts of environmental
struggles. Those on the latter end of the continuum provide
succinct and insightful accounts of different environmental
struggles and political moments, and will be informative to
scholars examining similar topics. Those chapters that work
at a higher resolution offer surprising empirical insights
that challenge categories of received thought. The volume
excels in highlighting the social transformations that come
about through different moments of environmental trans-
gression. Marı́a Gabriela Merlinsky and Alex Latta’s chapter,
for example, explores how families fighting the pollution of
local waterways are able to draw upon the juridical field in
unexpected ways to bring about institutional change.
The volume opens with a fascinating quote from a
food activist in Oaxaca, Mexico, which presents corn as the
result of generations of exchange and dialogue between
humans and the grass teosinte. This indicates an exciting
prospect of the volume, namely, exploring the notion of
“nature” as a subject endowed with rights and an interlocu-
tor in struggles over citizenship. This is the focus of Juliet
Pinto’s exploration of public debates over Ecuador’s 2008
constitution. Examining the institutions portended by the
new constitution, however, it appears that nature would
be reduced to a ward of humanity—nature’s acting legal
guardian. Indeed, when nature appears to literally speak
for itself—as is common in perspectivist and ontology
literatures—it speaks with a curiously human voice. This
points to a latent conundrum: extending rights to nature
may too easily reduce to extending those rights that hu-
mans would be willing to grant to, or require of, nature for
the sake of continued human life. This is to say that what
might appear as the recognition of nonhuman beings may
quickly slip into instrumentality. One might also pause to
consider the possibility that if “nature” is a subject, then
perhaps it is neither interested in human political institu-
tions nor committed to the continuation of human life.
In a way that mirrors the identity politics that cut across
the political spectrum, a number of chapters proceed from
broadly wrought categories of elites and subalterns, both
of which are conceived as collectives that stand opposed
to one another. Accepting these terms for the purposes of
social analysis, however, sometimes ends up flattening the
specificity of people actually inhabiting complex social and
biophysical landscapes. Indeed, some of the evidence pre-
sented in the volume militates against such easy divisions.
Some chapters point to ways in which “collectivizing”
social identities may foster further exclusions, and recall
202
the indirect forms of rule employed in different British
colonial projects. Brián Ferrero notes internal tensions
that arise through possible collusion between provincial
officials and indigenous leaders who permit logging on
community lands. Jason Tockman indicates some of the
ways in which communal institutions may in fact be aimed
at regulating the social life of subaltern populations. Fábio
de Castro points to some ways that communities become
internally differentiated through asymmetrical patterns of
engagement between NGOs and authorized community
representatives, and directly addresses tensions that may
arise with the proliferation of reified social identities.
Another categorial (but not categorical) criticism of
the volume pertains to what is at times a strained reliance
on terms such as “neoliberalism.” In our intellectual times,
this quasi-compulsory reference frequently comes pack-
aged with reified notions of markets, private property, and
individualism that are often opposed to equally idealized
notions such as the commons or the collective. When in-
voked, such categories may be ceded too much explanatory
power and sometimes substitute for further investigation.
In their conceptually rich introduction to the volume, Alex
Latta and Hannah Wittman seek an alternative in the notion
of citizenship, claiming that it “embodies the possibility of
contestation, [and] is more open-ended” than, for example,
the idea of “modernization and markets” (16). Whether
or not a term can be more or less open to contestation,
however, is an assumption that should be interrogated.
Enrique R. Silva’s chapter on displacements brought about
by an urban highway project in Chile and Brián Ferrero’s
chapter on competing claims over the forests in northern
Argentina both offer rich accounts of local struggles. But
when the former accounts for failures in collective action
in terms of “seeds of individualism and self-interest” (186)
planted during earlier struggles for land and housing, and
the latter cedes the “last instance” to forestry companies
that “define the characters and limits” (224) of governance,
these come as unsatisfying claims that do not always fit
the evidence that is made available. This is not to say
that “neoliberalism” indexes no actual social phenomena,
but simply that it is not as all-encompassing as it may
appear.
Juanita Sundberg relays what I found to be one of the
most fascinating moments in the volume—a moment that
defies categorial expectations through the collaboration
between a group of Maya women and a male European
botanist (named Sam) to compile data on indigenous plant
use. Sundberg describes how the women draw upon this re-
lationship in surprising ways as they fashion affirming new
visions of gender relationships within their local communi-
ties. In moments like this, the volume is at its most dynamic.
The various activist groups, indigenous populations, cor-
porations, and NGOs no longer appear, to paraphrase
Eric Wolf, as billiard balls spinning off one another; the

despair of neoliberal power fades to the background as we
find hope in the collaborative projects that occur between
people seeking new ways to inhabit the world.
The Business of Creativity: Toward an Anthropology of
Worth. Brian Moeran. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast, 2014.
299 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12297
ALANNA CANT
University of Oslo
In his “overture” to The Business of Creativity, Brian Moeran
sets himself the task of addressing a fundamental question
faced by all researchers who work on artistic and cultural
production: Should creativity primarily be understood
as an internal, psychological capacity or, rather, a social
process in which multiple people collaborate, whether
consciously or not? Because Moeran is an anthropologist,
it is not surprising that he comes down on the side of social
practice, and he has much ethnographic experience to
draw on to make his case. The Business of Creativity brings
together over thirty years’ worth of research focused on
the Japanese, European, and American culture industries
of pottery production, advertising, and fashion magazine
publishing. This focus on the culture industries affords the
book a timely relevance beyond social scientific research
as national governments, corporate executives, and devel-
opment planners continue to view “creativity” as a vehicle
through which social development and economic growth
can be achieved.
The book is organized in a useful and straightforward
manner: the chapters alternate between ethnographic or
interview-based narratives about different kinds of creative
production and theoretical chapters in which the author
cumulatively builds his analysis as the book progresses. In
the overture and chapter 1, Moeran describes and begins
to unpack the central themes and concepts of his analysis.
These range from basic terms, such as genre, value, and
worth, to the conceptual frames the author deploys in later
chapters, such as ensemblage (an assemblage of people,
objects, materials, and spaces producing worth through
creative practice) and editorial moments (the choices made
by different people at different stages of a work’s production
and circulation). Chapter 1 details one of the main concep-
tual points of the book. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu and
Howard Becker, the author argues that in order to under-
stand creativity, we must begin by identifying those larger
features that both enable and constrain creative practice.
He identifies six types of such affordances, which come to-
gether in various ways to form productive circuits of power
and social relations: techno-material, spatial, temporal,
representational, social, and economic. In the chapters that
Book Reviews  American Ethnologist
follow, Moeran takes the reader on extended excursions
into the practices and outcomes of social actors as they
perform creative and auxiliary work in their particular
industries to chart the influences of different affordances.
Moeran begins by exploring his experience of putting
on a show of his own pottery within the Japanese ceramics
art world. He illustrates how, at particular moments in the
process, from the show’s conception through pottery pro-
duction to its display and sale, different practices and values
emerged and combined to produce the perceived worth
(both commercial and aesthetic) of his pots and the event
by individuals and institutions in this art world. Then he
considers the shooting of an advertising campaign in Japan,
highlighting the dynamics of time, space, professional ex-
pertise, and power that contribute to and work against the
successful production of the campaign. The analysis con-
siders how different actors’ knowledge and practices come
together in editorial moments, showing how creativity is the
product of groups of different kinds of people (what Moeran
calls a “motley crew”) working together within the preestab-
lished structures of their given field. Next he discusses the
workings of fashion magazines and their relationship with
the fashion markets and industries in which they are em-
bedded, highlighting the symbolic features of these markets
and the role that the magazines play as mediators between
the fashion industry and consumers, and as producers of
fashions in their own right. He follows with an analysis
of the tensions of craftsmanship and creativity within
commercial design by exploring the development of a par-
ticular style of Danish tableware, designed by a recognized
artist-craftswoman working within the Royal Copenhagen
company and brand. Finally, Moeran discusses the broad
politics of evaluation that take place during the awarding
of an annual prize for ceramics in Japan.
The lively and colorful ethnographic accounts are a
major strength of the book, as they give the reader a real
sense of the practices and the ideals of creativity that are
invoked by actors as they go about their work. While the
author himself suggests some professional dissatisfaction
with interview-based research (143), these sections are
also presented in a well-developed and insightful manner
and complement the ethnography well. However, while I
generally agree with Moeran’s declaration in the conclusion
that academic publishing may too often become a “tourna-
ment of names” and citations (253–54), I feel that the book
suffers from its general lack of engagement with the an-
thropological literature, specifically on art and on cultural
production, and also with the discipline’s larger discussions
about the production of knowledge and economic and
social value. More acutely, the book does not meaningfully
interrogate creativity as a concept; by the end, the reader
is left with the impression of a somewhat tautological
approach that identifies creativity in those moments where
actors are being creative. A more capacious discussion of
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American Ethnologist  Volume 43 Number 1 February 2016
the historical, cultural, or even cognitive features involved
in the recognition of creativity could have provided better
grounding for the arguments that the author seeks to make.
Despite these drawbacks, The Business of Creativity
offers researchers a coherent language and set of concepts
through which diverse instances of creative and cultural
production may be described, analyzed, and compared. It
would certainly be useful as a guide for those embarking
on initial research about creative practices and also raises
a series of provoking questions for those working in the
anthropology of art and cultural production more generally.
Native Evangelism in Central Mexico. Hugo G. Nutini
and Jean F. Nutini. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014.
197 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12298
ROLAND ARMANDO ALUM
University of Pittsburgh and DeVry University–New Jersey
Campuses
Although Latin America is considered the Roman Catholic
region par excellence, Protestantism (of diverse variants)
has made remarkable inroads there. Several evangelical
churches in particular are becoming formidable competi-
tors in the market for the Mexicans’ souls. These churches
are the topic of this fine “analytic ethnography” by distin-
guished Mesoamericanist Hugo Nutini (who died in 2013)
and his Mexican-born anthropologist spouse, Jean.
Between the two Nutinis, numerous aspects of Mexi-
can culture in virtually every social layer were subjected to
their meticulous ethnographic scrutiny for decades. Hugo
Nutini started his half-century anthropological career with
a theoretical mélange of Lévi-Straussian structuralism with
Chomskyan generative-transformational grammar. He
later advanced his own eclectic version of John Roberts’s
“expressive culture” approach in his quest to bridge the
emic/etic bifurcation toward an innovative interpretation
of scientific anthropology, as displayed here.
The novel focus of the book under review is the “native
evangelist sects”— namely, sui generis, Mexican-founded,
autonomous religious movements attracting churchgoers
equally disenchanted with Catholicism and the US-
influenced Protestant churches (Baptists, Presbyterians,
etc.), as well as with independent sects (such as Jehovah’s
Witnesses and Pentecostals). “Sects” is used here following
the Weberian and Parsonian sociological tradition, that is,
spinoff congregations.
The ethnographic present is 2006. Research techniques
included participant-observation for 10 years, intensive
and longitudinal interviews, and archival investigations. As
in Hugo Nutini’s previous writings, Karl Marx is shunned
204
in favor of French sociologist-philosopher Raymond Aron’s
forward-looking socioeconomic epistemological principles
(good, given also Marx’s disdainful remarks about Mexicans
during the Mexican-American War). Inquiry subtopics
encompass theological, teleological, and socioeconomic
considerations vis-à-vis proselytism and the doctrinal
elements that survive conversion.
The Nutinis argue that the social psychology of con-
version from Catholicism is shared by mainstream Protes-
tantism and native evangelism alike. The Bible becomes
the sole source of religious-moral understanding, replacing
Catholicism’s symbolism of reaching God through saints,
and “salvation . . . is achieved individually,” independent of
priests and pastors “as . . . intermediaries” (162–64).
A key pragmatic attraction for conversion is the native
evangelists’ emphasis on material needs, along with spiri-
tual ones. In reality, the doctrinal reasons for conversion of-
ten become ex post facto rationalizations, given that many
converts—notably from rural areas—liberate themselves
from the financially onerous folk-Catholic ceremonies
emblematic of Mesoamerica (e.g., the mayordomı́as).
Moreover, in the converts’ new weltanschauung, Catholi-
cism is seen as a top-down patriarchal structure rather
adverse to wealth accumulation, whereas native evange-
lism is perceived as more democratically governed, and
also more amenable to personal economic advancement.
A prime example of material expressive culture is a
shrine-like corner in the congregants’ living-rooms dis-
playing Bibles that are customarily hand-carried when
congregants leave their homes, typically clean-groomed
and dressed conservatively.
In my own field experience in the Dominican Republic
and among US Hispanics, I found some side effects of
conversion, such as family discord and friendship disinte-
gration. This is mainly true with the most fundamentalist
converts who may come to prefer their new co-parishioners
(usually addressing each other as “brother” and “sister”)
over their consanguineal, affinal, and former Catholic ritual
kin, inasmuch as the congregation becomes a de facto
mutual-aid surrogate family. Nonetheless, the Nutinis note
that prior Catholic compadrazgo ritual ties continue among
many of their convert informants.
The authors identified nine major native evangelical
sects in the wider Tlaxcala-Puebla Valley and the Córdoba-
Orizaba (Veracruz State) urban areas. But they concentrate
on the two most visible ones: La Luz del Mundo (The Light
of the World, better known as Mundistas) and Amistad y
Vida (Friendship and Life). They share various commonali-
ties: both are Anabaptists and Trinitarians, reject iconolatry,
recognize only marriage as a sacrament, practice glosso-
lalia, forbid spouse abuse and alcohol imbibing, discourage
infidelity and divorce, encourage literacy and a work ethic,
and so forth. All this is imbued with a sense of millenarian

expectations, nationalism, and even some local historical
discourse.
Yet, these two sects display some contrasts: La Luz
was founded in Monterrey in 1926 when “Apostle” Aarón
claimed to have received God’s calling to restore “the prim-
itive Christian church.” His son and successor, Samuel,
initiated in Guadalajara the Hermosa Provincia (Beautiful
Province), a quasi-self-contained community of the faithful
whose houses, built with the church’s assistance, surround
their pyramidal mega-temple. (Samuel died in December
2014 and was succeeded by his son Naasón as chief spiri-
tual leader.) Mundistas oppose abortion, birth control, and
homosexuality. La Luz reputedly has millions of followers in
Mexico and some 28 other countries, including the United
States (e.g., in New Jersey’s Hispanic enclaves). Coinciding
with some Mexican writers, the Nutinis consider it “a de-
structive sect,” essentially given its rigid, male-dominated
dynastic cult-like governance, preference to provide vol-
untary service solely to congregants, and well-publicized
malversations and child and adult labor controversies, as
well as allegations of underage hetero- and homosexual
abuses (though never proven in court).
Amistad y Vida was founded in 1982 in Mexico City by
a disenchanted Presbyterian minister. New congregations
Book Reviews  American Ethnologist
followed in Puebla, Córdoba, and Veracruz, with aggregate
membership of over 120,000. Members call themselves
Cristianos (perhaps characterizing everyone else as “non-
Christian” and therefore “other”). The Nutinis consider
it an example of “a beneficial sect,” largely because of its
liberal egalitarian governance, women in leadership, and
encouragement of congregants to build fellowship, as well
as to a forthright conduct (including voluntary service to
outsiders).
Nutini and Nutini conclude that, controversies
notwithstanding, native evangelism has carved its place in
Mexico’s religious space while pushing historically hege-
monic Catholicism to implement modernizing reforms.
This is especially so since converts’ return to Catholicism
appears to be statistically minimal.
This book makes for enjoyable reading. It is filled with
rich rococo-style details and enthralling epistemological
discussions characteristic of the Nutinis—the kinds of
ethnographic detail that make one long for a list of à propos
glosses and acronyms, as well as for photographic images
of temples and congregants. Overall, they have produced a
distinctive contribution to Mesoamerican studies and the
anthropology of religion, and moreover, an outstanding
example of what constitutes good ethnography.
205