The past two decades have seen heightened interest in the anthropology of emotions. Megan Jennaway adds to this growing literature with Sisters and Lovers, her account of women’s romantic and sexual desire in rural North Bali. Jennaway is concerned with how “women express their eroticized subjectivity, through strategies ranging from secrecy and deception to succumbing to hysterical illness” (p. 6).

Jennaway’s ethnography is unique in that it incorporates a fictionalized narrative of the lives of three sisters in the village. She writes from the third-person omniscient perspective, giving insight into their thoughts and feelings. The purpose of these fictionalized interludes, clearly segmented from the traditional ethnography with the use of italics, is to “render more vivid some of the stories being told” (p. 215) and to provide access into the subjective experiences of the women as they experience romance, marriage, childbirth, and divorce.

In the first chapter, Jennaway describes Punyanwangi (a pseudonym), a small village located in the mountainous area of North Bali. She introduces her three fictional protagonists and presents her arguments for the use of a constructed account of their lives. In the next chapter, Jennaway argues that anthropology has largely ignored research on sexuality and desire and cites philosophical and feminist psychoanalytic theories on the topic. Drawing on Julia Kristeva’s work, Jennaway argues that women in Bali are doubly muted, denied subjectivity as well as the ability to act on their desires. This repression produces a Freudian hysteria that is somaticized as illness. Jennaway concludes that “as hysterics, [Balinese] women are enabled to seize upon a rare and delectable luxury, to ‘speak’ their desire, albeit ‘through’ their bodies” (p. 30).

Chapter 3 is a straightforward ethnographic description of the economy and social organization of Punyanwangi. Although her informants espouse a complementary and reciprocal working relationship between the sexes, Jennaway finds that women are predominantly engaged in domestic, unremunerated, or physically tedious tasks. This exclusion from ritual power and civic engagement leads to a further muting of women in Punyanwangi.

In the fourth chapter, Jennaway writes about how concepts of love and marriage are expressed by women in Punyanwangi. She begins with classical kinship constructs of women as passive objects of exchange and moves to a much more textured look at women as active agents. Jennaway’s ethnography shines the most when she quotes directly from the women she worked with, whether single or in monogynous or polygynous marriages. We see their romantic worlds as imaginatively rich but frustrated by various social constraints.

In chapter 5 Jennaway temporarily shifts her attention to Lovina, a tourist resort located about five kilometers northwest of the village. There, young Balinese men perform as both tour guides and paid gigolos for foreign women. Jennaway explores the construction of sexuality and desire that transpires between the men and their foreign girlfriends–clients–patrons. She notes that she did not observe any foreign men dating local women and suggests that Balinese women are forbidden from the urban “economy of pleasure” (p. 100).

In chapters 6 and 7, Jennaway merges her interest in feminist psychoanalytic theory with her training as a medical anthropologist. She challenges the classical anthropological interpretation of Balinese as emotionally flat. She portrays Punyanwangi adolescent women’s desire as turbulent and erotically charged, but ultimately muted. This repression manifests itself as babainan (p. 197), a form of what Jennaway describes as a Freudian hysterical-type disorder that leads women to behave in socially inappropriate ways. In chapter 7, she provides a detailed description of the health and illness models found in Punyanwangi.

The greatest weakness of this text is that Jennaway does not connect her research with more recent scholarship on emotions and desire. Her assertion that this is an undeveloped area in anthropology is myopic. There has been significant interest in emotionality and desire in Southeast Asia, and references to work by scholars such as Aihwa Ong, Michelle Rosaldo, Evelyn Blackwood, or Catherine Lutz would have strengthened her theoretical framework. In recent years, there has been an efflorescence of innovative work in Latin America by scholars such as L. A. Rebhun, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, and Setha Low. Within feminist ethnography, Lila Abu-Lughod’s insights have challenged the classical models of women’s repression and muting used in this text.

Nonetheless, Jennaway’s insights on women’s desire and marital relationships should make Sisters and Lovers useful for scholars of North Bali. Psychological anthropologists may find the most utility in the text as a whole, whereas those interested specifically in tourism, gendered agrarian economies, Balinese somatic models, or women’s sexuality may find sections of the book focusing on those topics illuminating.