Lines in the Water is a long-awaited ethnography of the fishermen of Lake Titicaca in the Bolivian and Peruvian Andes by a gifted and experienced Andeanist. Orlove uses new ideas in landscape ecology and experimental writing to approach his material, eschewing a problem-oriented, linear narrative. Throughout the book, the device is adopted of posing an intellectual question and sharing with the reader the search for an answer. In the preface, for example, the author engages the reader in his inquiry into vehicles to express the sense of space and time surrounding Lake Titicaca. We enter into the terrain of the novelists Dreiser, Chandler, and Atwood, the nature writers Thoreau and Williams, the short story writer Slouka and the humorist, Keillor. Of the lot, Thoreau’s organization of Walden as a series of separate essays best fits the author’s goal of telling a rather “simple” story (pp. 45–46) of Lake Titicaca fishermen, the state, and communal resource management. Chapters Lakes, Not Forgetting, Mountains, Names, Work, Fish, Reeds, and Paths follow.

In the chapter on not forgetting, the author explores the anxiety expressed by the villagers on his imminent departure for the United States. He uses an analysis of the lyrics of their folk songs to unpack the notion of “forgetting.” Two subtexts—betrayal and abandonment—are related to villagers’ inferior statuses of peasant and Indian, classic Andean themes of class and ethnicity. Yet although Lake Titicaca fishermen’s lives have improved for the better, they have not abandoned or betrayed others in their villages, that is, “forgotten” where they came from. Nor was their anxiety about Orlove’s abandonment of them warranted: On returning to the United States, he used their rich musical tradition to “remember” them, hosting for years a radio program on Andean folk music on his home campus.

The chapter on names is an extended discourse on conceptualizing and operationalizing terms used to refer to the research population, normally a task relegated to a footnote or a paragraph. For some the effort will seem overly literary and discursive. But there are unexpected rewards. Exploring the lack of a verb to fish, for example, opens up a number of otherwise hidden dimensions of local culture and linguistic dilemmas confronting villagers in their use of Spanish, Quechua, and Aymara.

Throughout the book, we follow Orlove’s train of thought, his discursions, dead ends, promising alleyways, and aesthetic reflections. Although this carries the risk of the author’s subjectivity dominating the material, these and other rhetorical devices are used judiciously and imaginatively to enliven the presentation. In the chapter on fish, for example, otherwise tedious technical and historical aspects of fishing are presented in the guise of an imagined museum.

Much of the material treats themes familiar to ecological anthropologists and regional specialists. Andeanists, for example, will recognize common cultural principles and schemas in the author’s chapters on mountains, work, and paths. But for the student and nonspecialist, important elements are not always made explicit. An endnote reference, for example, to the literature on Andean social organization would have clarified the cultural context of fishermen’s expressions of duality, equilibrium, and the like. Indeed, the fictional, natural history and social science models often seem to work at cross-purposes. The lack of subheadings places a premium on a detailed index, particularly with so much hiding in the chapters; the lack of numbers in the text referencing endnotes does not help. There are a very few numbered footnotes that provide the Web address to access the databases discussed in the text, an interesting accommodation to problem-oriented social science.

Although ecological anthropologists and regional specialists will welcome the new material, the book is especially rewarding for students and the nonspecialist. It is often difficult to convey the satisfaction and creativity of ethnographic research when much of what we have to give them to read is so tedious and off-putting. A talented teacher can communicate the excitement in the classroom, but written productions do not always work. Lines in the Water, in contrast, is engaging on all levels. The author succeeds in attracting the reader to his path of discovery without compromising ethnographic standards. The book will serve as a model for future directions in ethnographic writing.