The editors of this volume explain its central concerns with reference to an earlier volume, Tense Past (Antze and Lambek, eds., Routledge, 1996) whose connecting theme they now see as the overliteralization of memory and the absence of irony. Starting from the Freudian perspective that sufferers may be accomplices in their own condition, they move quickly to link irony with an earlier, much-used distinction between disease and illness: disease involving a literal and illness an interpretive understanding of the situation. Such speedy prolepsis encapsulates both the positive and the negative qualities of this book. The profusion of ideas intrigues and raises questions but ultimately teases, tantalizes, and leaves the reader unsatisfied. General statements such as “irony is inherent in signification” or “irony speaks to and from the human condition” (p. 3) are not hugely helpful in coming to grips with the subject.

However, the subsequent discussion of Richard Rorty’s ideas on irony and his use of the term ironist to describe individuals who find within themselves the capacity to recognize the contingency of their historical and cultural situation offers an easier way in to this difficult terrain. In this connection the editors write, “it has been a deep assumption of anthropologists that the people we study hold nonrelativist commitments to the worlds they live in” (p. 4). However, it is a truism that some peoples are more at ease with a relativist position than others. Coupling irony with contingency opens up the possibility of important questions that the editors fail to raise, let alone answer. Namely, what conditions promote or inhibit the ironical stance in cultures and individuals? These may be elementary questions that students are encouraged to ask to acquire a socioanthropological imagination, and yet they offer a useful reminder of what anthropological enquiry is about. If, as the editors argue, “illness provides a condition (or set of conditions) in which irony rises steadily to the surface” (p. 5), then readers surely need to know why, in some circumstances, there is a commitment to a literalist version of disease and irony appears to be out of the question.

Reading the introduction feels like listening to someone thinking aloud. This is, of course, both refreshing and annoying. But these criticisms indicate the importance of the subject. The subject matter of this volume is important for undergraduate students and clinicians, and they need a clearer map of this little-known terrain. Having said that, I note that the volume brings together six unmissable essays, including Antze’s “Illness as Irony in Psychoanalysis,” among the most perceptive commentaries on Freud’s thought ever written. Antze draws on the ancient Greek distinction between rhetorical and dramatic irony to throw more light on Freud’s theories of neurotic illness. Rhetorical irony helps one understand neurosis because “neurotic symptoms, such as ironic words and deeds, have a double meaning, one overt, the other hidden” (p. 114). However, the real point of case histories lies outside “the minutiae of patients’ lives, … in what they reveal about a set of larger controlling influences—the Oedipus complex, the psychosexual stages, the life and death instincts, the primal crime, primal scenes, primal repression” (p. 116).

Anne Meneley’s finely honed ethnographic account of fright illness among Yemeni women explores narratives of near tragedy and the way in which they can create “a moment of ironic reflection on the thin line between the comic and the tragic” (p. 25). Although, as Muslims, Yemeni women acknowledge the need to accept the will of God when confronting loss and death, fright illness allows them an ironic mode for challenging the rightness of that will. It introduces the semantic condition whereby the unsaid acquires the power to challenge the said (p. 32).

Other chapters in this volume are of equal fascination. Janice Boddy offers a history of midwifery in colonial Sudan that identifies the complex strategies used by the Wolff sisters in rewording Western scientific ideas in vernacular terms. Andrew Lakoff explores the unlikely marriage of psychopharmacology and Lacanian psychoanalysis in a psychiatric ward in Buenos Aires. Laurence Cohen makes a brief, and somewhat glib, attempt to apply ironic theory to studies of old age. And Michael Lambek presents the case study of one man’s military career and its shaping by what Lambek terms “rheumatic irony.” Through the double identity created by spirit possession, the man, Ali, acquires an enlarged sense of agency: He denies agency and, yet, accepts responsibility for his identity.

Not everyone will be able to see the threads that draw these chapters together. Readers will hope for another volume that is not afraid to provide a more simplified guide to this treacherous terrain.
[notes, references, index]