Anthropology may be closer to history than to sociology when it comes to theorizing. There seems to be a greater willingness among anthropologists to accept as unproblematic the ability to make ontologically objective statements that reveal the truth about people and the culture in which they live. This is the central issue in this intriguing book. The epistemological foundations of the social and natural sciences are different. Making statements about culture is very different from making statements about the material world. Doing anthropology is always a case of one culture looking at and interpreting another. In this sense, according to Salazar, anthropology is always perspectionalist and intersubjective. The only way it can discover truth is through accepting that any rational scientific analysis of a lived-in culture in which people do not critically reflect about themselves or their culture will always be a second-level meaning structure laid on the original. Anthropologists need to be always conscious of this and also that they can only describe and reveal the original through an ongoing process of intersubjective engagement and surrender: a process of involvement with enough detachment to be able to do anthropology without going native.

In many respects, the problems with which Salazar is grappling are as old as the hills, but he brings a fresh, theoretically sophisticated and nuanced approach to them. Best of all, he grounds his theory in two good examples: Gilbert Herdt’s study of beliefs about semen in Sambia and sexual “repression” among the Irish. In particular, he argues that, when it comes to sexuality, beliefs and values are primary and not, as for many anthropologists, demographers, and sociologists, secondary or residual explanations.

The Irish continue to have sex appeal for anthropologists. Over the last hundred years, they have drawn the attention of a steady stream of scholars, particularly from the United States. Conrad Arensberg and Solon Kimball are probably the most renowned, but John C. Messenger, Alexander Humphries, and Nancy Scheper-Hughes have all left their mark. Although their arguments and evidence varied, they generally agreed that the Irish were quite repressed when it came to sex. This was evident in the rigorous way in which the Irish adapted the stem-family system (SFS), particularly after the famine (1845–48), and how they stuck with this system late into the 20th century. The result was a low level of marriage late in life, and sex was confined to marriage. The level of births outside marriage was very low, but the level of births inside marriage was very high. The Catholic Church became the means to implement the SFS, and the result was that the Irish developed a deeply devout, sexually repressive Catholic culture. The standard structural-functional (S-F) explanation was that this culture developed as a response to the social and economic conditions that emerged after the famine. Salazar sets out to pull this argument to pieces.

He argues that the S-F explanation does not account for why the Irish had so few births outside marriage and so many births within marriage. Once marriage was controlled and, with it, lineage, property rights, and an increase in the standard of living, there was no need for bachelors and spinsters not to have sex and for married people not to use contraceptives. The reason both did not was not structural-functional, but cultural. They were devoted to being Catholic. They lived in a culture with an idiosyncratic logic when it came to sex. But instead of anthropologists recognizing and accepting this, they read Catholic Irish beliefs and practices as repressed sexuality.

There are residual issues that Salazar might have dealt with in more depth. If, as he accepts, power and culture are interlinked, the question is why the Irish became so devoted to being Catholic. Was this devotion linked to other cultural interests, such as differentiating themselves from the Protestant English, their colonial masters? And even if being a good Catholic, not having sex outside marriage, and having large families constituted more of a cultural act, was it linked to attaining honor and respect? But then the question is to what extent can the pursuit of symbolic and cultural capital be sometimes detrimental rather than advantageous to attaining economic capital—that is, in Ireland, improving the standard of living. If it was not linked to more material interests, was this religious interest completely divorced from the fulfillment of other, particularly, material interests? I can accept that, as an anthropologist, Salazar is not interested in the causes of cultural patterns. Nevertheless, the question remains why have the cultural beliefs and values of the Irish changed so dramatically in recent decades? Why are the Irish becoming less devoted to being Catholic and, in terms of their sexual attitudes and behavior, more like the rest of the West?

This is an important, challenging, well-written book that manages to open up a proverbial can of theoretical and Irish worms and to examine them carefully without letting them wriggle away.
[notes, references, index.]

Grains from Grass by Lisa Cliggett presents an ethnographic portrait of age and gender as variables in survival among the Gwembe Tonga of southern Zambia. In a highly textured portrait, Cliggett demonstrates the different strategies pursued by women and men throughout their life cycles to offset recurrent hunger, poverty, and resource inadequacies. The depth of ethnographic treatment here is possible because Cliggett is heir to the legacy of data from Elizabeth Colson and Thayer Scudder on families in the Gwembe Valley from 1956 onward. She begins her account with longitudinal data on socioeconomic and domestic relations prior the building of the Kariba Dam on the Zambezi River in 1958 and the subsequent resettlement of the Tonga. In contrast to the period immediately after resettlement, the Gwembe are now grappling with drought, extreme poverty, environmental degradation, declining standards of living, and food insecurity. In this ethnography, Cliggett helps fill the information gap on African gerontology by generating a framework for understanding the different strategies of the elderly for mobilizing, controlling, and manipulating resources as the young around them migrate in search of jobs and survival. She gives readers powerful visual images of the rural crisis: the debilitated grain storage bins that serve to discourage those seeking handouts of food during the hungry times and the frail old woman gleaning grains from grass to fend off starvation.

The dominant issues are how the Gwembe Tonga exercise agency and negotiate their fates within the context of scarcity, but the corresponding shifts in matrilineal family relations provide the leitmotif throughout the book. Notably, Cliggett eschews the structural focus on matrilineality in favor of the bigger picture of individual behavior, viability, or vulnerability. Utilizing Michael J. Watts and Hans-Georg Boehl’s model of vulnerability, she compares the processes “that make some groups suffer more than others” (p. 50). This allows one of her primary comparisons to be what men and women mean when they say that they are “old,” and how this label reflects the subtleties of gendered autonomy, agency, and dependency. In contrast to the popularized images of female-centered corporate lineages from other parts of the matrilineal belt and West Africa, the Gwembe Tonga mukowa (matriclan) is challenged by the male lutundu (patrinuclear family), which generally acts as the residential unit. Men acquire power as they marry polygynously and give cattle as bridewealth, whereas women acquire few resources as they help support households and children and incur the risks of marginalization or abandonment.

Cliggett examines how men and women cope with the variable “space and time of vulnerability” (pp. 47–77). In the villages, women work for pay on others’ fields or brew beer and make pottery and woven baskets to sell at the informal markets on the edges of funerals and weddings. Although old men control the supernatural, old women’s rituals, songs, and ancestral knowledge related to the “cult of the shades” remain important even as tradition wanes. Cliggett says that although the presence of matrikin in a village helps women sustain themselves, even an old women living alone can use the threat of her zyelo spirits to coax assistance or food from young people. In fact, old women may have more strategies for “begging survival” than old men because of how they are integrated into the social, ritual, and supernatural dynamics of village life. Those old men who have managed to garner resources through control of labor now find themselves victimized and impoverished by munganga (witchfinders) who have accused them of evil doing and who charge fees for cleansing.

Cliggett has produced an extremely sophisticated ethnography that is interspersed with theoretical and methodological insights, that is accessible to students, and that shows the “extreme costs that local people pay as a result of seemingly well-meaning development endeavors” (p. 6). She has excellent syntheses of issues related to the anthropology of development, globalization, resource flows, and supernatural retributions, in addition to a counterintuitive take on the experience of aging in Zambia. Perhaps inevitably, the reader is left wanting to know more about the interpenetration of political, economic, and health challenges in contemporary Zambia, about how matrilineal dynamics vary across the country, and about whether the rural crises are transforming culture in fundamental ways or merely producing temporal adjustments to stress. Nevertheless, Cliggett has made an extremely welcome contribution to the anthropology of aging and given readers a rich ethnographic portrait of the challenges of rural Zambia.

[tables, illustrations, maps, references, notes, index.]

The field of legal anthropology continues to produce innovative research on the relationships between local legal subjectivities and global institutional discourse on current social problems. In this book, Sally Merry traces the construction and implementation of the concept of “human rights” in the context of violence against women. Merry is as much interested in understanding the mechanics of the process as she is in discovering to what degree the idea of human rights has taken hold and is used at the grassroots level. To achieve these goals, she undertakes “deterritorialized ethnography,” combining direct observations of UN committee meetings and international conferences with interviews of local and international activists and long- and short-term fieldwork among women’s nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in Fiji, China, India, Hong Kong, and the United States (p. 29). This creative methodology yields a set of interesting findings concerning the impact of human-rights discourse on local responses to violence against women as well as anthropology’s role in promoting a more nuanced definition of culture among all the stakeholders involved in defending women’s rights.

Merry opens her query with the production of rights discourses at the United Nations. Although this meticulous task is directed by the goal to reach consensus among member states, it is far from a conversation among equals. There are coalitions and blocs (usually uniting wealthier northern states), members whose governments refuse to ratify outcomes (among these, not surprisingly, is the United States), and an impressive and growing array of NGO activists who contribute by lobbying official government participants. Despite the slow grind of debate required of consensus making, the results have been an actually impressive set of institutionalized agreements and conventions that, although they lack a formal enforcement body, are still quite useful tools to promote and, in some cases, produce legal reform and social change. In the case of women’s rights, the core document is the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). As with other conventions, CEDAW calls for the United Nations to monitor the progress of member states in guaranteeing legislative protection and providing services for women, and it is here that NGOs play a critical role in evaluating government compliance with the convention’s standards of gender equity and demands for culture change. Yet it is also within the formal monitoring process that Merry discovers the many different uses and meanings of the concept of “culture” among stakeholders. For example, some member states appear to invoke culture, defined as traditional lifeways or primordialist identities, to excuse their lack of progress in complying with CEDAW reforms. In contrast, some local activists have found culture-specific resources to be quite effective responses to violence against women, as in the case of the Fijian custom of bulubulu, or reconciliation. Merry reveals how the CEDAW committee may at times ironically conflate the complexities of local traditions and reject some grassroots strategies as backward and, thus, obstacles to reform. Such rejections are the inevitable result of the legal-rational culture of secular transnational modernity espoused by UN actors, who, moreover, have little time to consider local cases in detail. Merry’s excellent discussion of the competing ethnicizations of local practices and global principles raises important questions about the potential for anthropology to contribute to refining human-rights discourse as a transnational legal framework.

In addition to following how CEDAW has emerged at the level of the United Nations—a task in itself of great value to human-rights scholarship—Merry’s captivating transnational ethnography examines how human rights become a part of local social movements and legal consciousness. In comparing India, Hong Kong, China, and the United States, she finds that a set of similar reforms (including domestic violence laws, shelters, community education efforts, and surveys) has been appropriated and adapted to local contexts. But do these changes have any lasting impact on those most in need of rights protection? Two case studies from Hawai‘i and Hong Kong reveal that although grassroots awareness and assertions depend on personal experiences reinforced by legal institutions that take human-rights reforms seriously, successful movements do not necessarily require deep or long-lasting commitments to human-rights discourse among local communities. The keys to the global flow of human-rights knowledge and practice are individual translators who are able to move between the layers of rights language and local women’s stories. Also crucial to the dialogue is the state, which, from the perspective of both the victim in need and the lofty UN committee hoping to implement change, remains the focus of action.
[notes, references, index]

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]

Those familiar with Marilyn Strathern’s innovations in the study of kinship will not find much unexpected in Kinship, Law and the Unexpected because the book contains materials that Strathern has presented previously. Nonetheless, by juxtaposing these pieces, Strathern explores interfaces at which the “complexities and ambiguities of relationships” confront other formative components of Euro-American epistemologies including concepts of science, society, property, ownership, and “the language and imagery of individuals” (p. 27).

First, Strathern demonstrates how biotechnology, as applied science, has been “drawn ‘into’ society” (p. 10) as a resource for reconfiguring social relationships. But “biotechnology has (also) become an arena in which society speaks back” (p. 17). In this context, Strathern looks at how the conjunctive and disjunctive messages inscribed around divorce, in vitro fertilization, and the unity–separation that relate a woman and her fetus as the domain of recombinant families come into contact with Euro-American constructs of individual persons.

Strathern then examines the obverse scenario: how science is already part of society. But she is too cursory in her treatment of science, reducing the reflexive layers and specific practices of multiple sciences to one generic formula. Nevertheless, she notes that science is duplex in formulation, “allowing ideas to appear alongside of and be co-produced with critiques of them” (p. 34). For 20th century structural-functional kinship theorists, kinship as inherently relational was foregrounded even though this dictum crosscut overt cultural logics concerning the a priori existence of individuals. Equally, folk reformulations of relationships in current-day recombinant families “take knowledge … as informative of kinship” (p. 48). Following SarahFranklin, Strathern notes that the “conditions of feasibility” that allow recombinant families to be discursively formulated are “already built into the conception of kinship as a hybrid of individual and society, of natural and cultural facts” (p. 48).

Strathern explores how the production of scientific knowledge is inherently relational, contrasting with other ideas of authorship in which texts are seen as unique creations of independent authors. Scientific authors create knowledge relationally in two senses. First, information is transformed into knowledge by bringing one bit of information into relations with seemingly disparate fragments, making others aware of “its context or grounds” (p. 63). Second, scientific knowledge is generated in a (socially) relational way, frequently marked by group authorship (lending scientific knowledge further legitimacy, in contrast to the way multiple authorship may subtract value from single-authored texts in other fields). This seeming diversion into the history of knowledge production lets Strathern explore the flows that intermix these broad conceptual relations within the domain of family–kin relations.

In part 2, “The Arithmetic of Ownership,” Strathern compares Euro-American and Melanesian notions of knowledge transmission, outlining the contours of Euro-American patent law as compared with New Ireland Malanggan production and use of masks–objects that embody the essence of dead persons and are displayed briefly for ceremonial purposes and then quickly discarded (p. 96). Here, Strathern wishes readers to consider the familiar anthropological ground of categorical incommensurability with her astute recognition that anthropological narratives “forever translate diverse and multiple worlds into versions of—perspectives on—the same world” (p. 91). New Ireland people view their products as artifacts acquired, not as inventions. Their central concern is with the right to reproduce what others have long reproduced. In contrast, Euro-American law allows patents for cell lines that simply involve the transcription of a “natural code into a new medium” (p. 108). Here, the idea of invention becomes problematic, and the boundaries of nature must be perpetually renegotiated.

Strathern then expands on shortcircuits that occur as very different worldviews are woven together. She explores how Euro-American ownership over body parts becomes viable even as English law prohibits ownership of an entire person. When Euro-American legal precedents are transported to Papua New Guinea, however, misunderstandings emerge; Strathern analyzes specific cases to illustrate how complexities of social personhood and identity are negotiated in performative settings. In Miriam’s case—an instance of mortuary gifts owed to maternal kin—Strathern argues that Miriam is not commodified as part of a “head payment” in holistic, individualist, terms (p. 114). Rather, this case shows how New Guinea residents frequently reify persons in performative settings to objectify certain relationships by momentarily eclipsing others that weave persons into arrays of meaningful social relations. Understanding the complexities that constitute Miriam’s social personhood is sacrificed in the courtroom, and her condition is stereotyped as “misguided tradition” to be supplanted with representations of New Guinea as truly modern. Cases like this also speak to the contested domain of human rights, which pits “supra-local universalism” against a dialectic of locally negotiated notions of human rights vested in concrete contexts and specific historical and biographical circumstances.

Finally, Strathern uses ownership to contrast Euro-American and Melanesian epistemologies of person and relationship. She suggests a Melanesian perspectivism modeled on Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s view of persons as “being in the appropriate and necessary ontological state to exercise” the right to reproduce certain objects. She argues that this right of “making duplicates” constitutes “the capacity for creation” in Melanesia, unlike Euro-American ideas in which objects and ideas, through their very objectification, are possessible, and the “source of creativity is not passed on, … [but] is left intact in the … original author or inventor” as a distinguishing mark of individual persons exercising their own will (pp. 152, 154).

These last chapters I found most rewarding, perhaps because they indulge the anthropological fancy of coming to understand typifications of one’s own cultural milieu through comparisons with others’ perspectives. The entire book is an insightful overview of several threads of Strathern’s recent work and engages readers in probing discussions that continue to make the study of kinship in its varied epistemological frames a worthy pursuit.

[references, author index, subject index.]

This is a compelling book. It is a rare anthropological page-turner, despite the long timescale Thomas Sheridan covers: He begins with the prehistory of the Tohono O’odham and ends in the very late 20th century. His topic is time and space in southern Arizona and the construction of space, a theme that he takes from critical geography. Taking up the history of the Upper Santa Cruz river valley and its occupation by different cultures, Sheridan gives an account of the way in which each society has lived in and conceived of the land, for use or possession, sharing or competing.

Sheridan divides the book into two parts, titled “Landscapes of Community” and “Landscapes of Fraud.” In the first, shorter, part, he begins with the O’odham creation story, told by Juan Smith to Julian Hayden, recounting the O’odham conquest of Hohokam. He next describes the entrance of missionaries, first the Jesuits and subsequently the Franciscans. Sheridan describes this “conquest” and the social and ecological revolution that the missions brought about for the O’odham. He moves on to the Hispanic settlement of the area and the ongoing changes and shifts of power that the Spanish military brought to both the missions and the O’odham.

It is in the second, and longer, part that Sheridan tackles the major topic of his book: the land speculation that is so much a part of recent, especially western, U.S. history. The O’odham and, secondarily, the missions are the crucial background for—or perhaps, backbone of—the author’s focus, which is land and the displacement of community. The way in which land speculation in Arizona in the 19th and 20th centuries played out in this particular region is a critical element of his exploration of the social construction of space. Sheridan uses the details of the Tumacácori Land Grant, the Baca Float, and the legal, political, and capitalist games played by a range of characters and institutions to provide a detailed account of the culture that turned land into capital—as he titles chapter 6 “Fictitious Capital and Fictitious Landscapes” (p. 138).

The Baca Float or, to be precise, floats, as there were more than one, were areas selected to compensate heirs of Luis Maria Cabeza de Baca, whose 1821 grant of half a million acres was being turned into a community grant. Tired of battling Comanches, the Baca family had ceased to use the land; after its settlement by small Hispanic farming families, another generation of Bacas attempted to reclaim it. By the mid-19th century, there was a new type of conqueror: “grant litigation had turned the territory into a golden cash cow for lawyers and their political allies” (p. 144). From this point on, the Baca heirs were pawns in an endless series of lawsuits, and the leg