Akbar Ahmed and Bill Forst of American University have edited a volume of original essays by an impressive array of international scholars and religious and political leaders on the prospects for dialogue and understanding following the events of September 11, 2001.

Ahmed and Forst’s project suffers from the predictable weaknesses of a lack integration and balance and is uneven in quality and is largely predictable in conclusion. The intended audience is decidedly popular and there understandably is little attention to theory and historical context. The authors nevertheless raise issues well-worth contemplating on the roots of terror and on the possibility of communication across traditions.

Ahmed and Forst, in contrast, to Samuel Huntington’s dark and brooding vision of clashing civilizations, are decidedly optimistic towards the possibility of nurturing global mutual understanding and tolerance. The first set of essays discuss the nature and sources of what is termed the “problem” (13). The predominant theme is articulated by Archbishop Desmond Tutu who dismisses the focus on jihadists as diverting attention from the true sources of terror: poverty, disease and a lack of opportunity and democracy. Archbishop Tutu urges religious leaders to initiate a global effort to eradicate these underlying causes of violence. Tutu’s multilateral approach is echoed in the more pragmatic essay by former White House adviser, Zbigniew Brezinski, who argues that combating insurgent violence requires a cooperative effort by the international community.

The second portion of the volume is devoted to pathways to dialogue and understanding. The late Sergio Vieira de Mello, the former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, and United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan both argue that international human rights provides a vocabulary that transcends cultures and is therefore able to provide a unifying vision. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks suggests that the major religious traditions may be invoked to inspire dialogue while Queen Noor of Jordan advocates educational exchanges and concrete policy initiatives. Amitai Etzioni counters those who doubt the possibility of global communion by pointing out that in the past that modern societies have experienced sudden and unexpected transformations. Judea Pearl, the father of slain journalist Daniel Pearl, recounts his journey of reaching out to others in what Dame Marilyn Strathern of Cambridge University characterizes as “standing in the shoes of others” with whom “one has practically nothing in common but almost everything in parallel”(89).

Ahmed and Forst conclude with a discussion of the transition from “concern to action” (155). Joseph Nye of Harvard advocates reliance on the “soft power” of values and democracy and a sensitivity to the perception of American policies abroad. William Urey of the Harvard negotiation project points to the effectiveness of what he terms a ”Third Side” in bringing peace to South Africa, Guatemala, Northern Ireland and Sri Lanka (182). Martin Marty urges us to risk “hospitality” with the forces that we find so threatening (190).

Ahmed and Forst are to be credited for including contributions from a cross-section of global leaders, including former President Seyed Mohammed Khatami of Iran and Prince El Hassan bin Talal of Saudi Arabia. The authors’ effort marks an understanding that global stability requires a measure of understanding and tolerance towards other traditions. Dialogue, however, will not curtail a violence that is fueled by grievances stemming from colonialism, oil politics, dictatorial regimes, military occupation, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and racism and the problematic European effort to integrate Muslim communities. The demographic realities of the Middle East may overwhelm the effort to stem the global tide of terrorism. The underlying issue is whether dialogue is at all possible and, in the view of some observers, even desirable.

Ahmed and Forst fail to clarify the nature of the global divide that is at the center of the text. The advocacy of understanding and tolerance between traditions seemingly disregards the intricacy and complexity of the Muslim world. The discussion does serve to remind us that virtually all major religious traditions have been bloodied by crusader violence and that it is disingenuous to single out Islam for condemnation. It is a measure of the intensity of events since September 11, 2001 that the authors’ message, however imperative, appears to be the expression of a more innocent era. The question remains whether Ahmed and Forst are advocating a course of action that is too little, too late.

In this complex and theoretically sophisticated book, Dominic Boyer offers an astute anthropological engagement with the sociology of knowledge, tracing the shifting theories and social perceptions of German intellectuals in the 19th and 20th centuries to East German journalists’ conceptions of modernity and national culture. Combining ethnography, history, and social theory, Boyer covers an enormous range of diffuse topics (intellectuals, expertise, professionalism, dialectics of knowledge, media, journalism, public culture, and social identity formation) without, however, coming to any salient conclusions. The book would have benefited from more careful editing. In this work, Boyer explores the role of agency in the struggle between the “system,” a master trope for an external, imposed “social totality” (p. 8), and the “spirit,” a metaphor for the moral subject. This juxtaposition emerges as a tensive relation that Boyer conceives as a dialectical project.

The focus on “dialectical social knowledge” is the primary theme of this work. In the introduction, Boyer states,

With “dialectical social knowledge,” I mean specifically knowledges of social dynamics, relations, and forms that center on perceived ontological tensions between the temporality of potentiality and actuality and between the spatiality of interiority and exteriority. … More importantly, dialectical knowledge saturates everyday knowledges and modes of knowing selves, others, cultures, and histories. [pp. 10–11]

Although at times highly abstract in his discursive narrative, presenting long passages devoid of the decipherable performance of human subjects, Boyer illuminates this modus of knowledge production through German history, beginning with 19th-century political theory and philosophy and concluding with the 20th-century era of postunification, albeit here with an almost exclusive focus on the former socialist East. Boyer argues at length that
dialectical social knowledge emerges in the tension between the knowing subject and the compromising forces and conditions of epistemic context. … Only in synthesizing a phenomenological attention to the epistemic individual with a broader “social phenomenological” analysis of the response of intellectual activity to its social environment in intellectual culture … one comes to understand the dialectical social knowledge in its full complexity. [p. 17]

Boyer attempts to disentangle these assertions over the next 300 pages.

Boyer’s thematic and central focus, particularly the “phenomenological attention to the epistemic individual” is sometimes lost in the elaborate discussions of historical formations, in which the emergence of collective imaginaries is privileged over the knowing subject. This is especially the case in chapter 2, “The Bildungsbürgertum and the Dialectics of Germanness in the Long Nineteenth Century” (pp. 46–98), and in chapter 3, “Dialectical Politics of Cultural Redemption in the Third Reich and the GDR” (pp. 99–159). Although these chapters provide an interesting overview, the thread of the argument, as outlined in the introduction, could have been more carefully attended to. In his attention to public discourses, Boyer tends to erase the dialectical knowledge production of the ontological subject. In his discussions about the dialectics of Germanness, one finds a curious nonattention to the linguistic medium: the centrality of the German language to the dialectics of a national imaginary. This is disconcerting because language has been historically treated as the exterior manifestation of the interior spirit, thereby linking citizenship and national authenticity to linguistic competency in contemporary Germany. Likewise, one finds no mention of organicity, race, or body in Boyer’s analysis. Intellectualism takes on an uncannily ephemeral quality.

In his last two chapters, Boyer brings his ethnographic engagement into clear focus. Here, with contextual attention, the labor of knowledge formation is documented in the analysis of everyday practices among eastern German journalists. Yet in reading through the prisms of what Boyer terms “dialectical social knowledges of self, other, and system,” one cannot but pose the question whether just any juxtaposition—east–west, past–present, nationals–regionals—can be legitimately analyzed as “dialectical apparitions” (p. 180) that provide the basis for “dialectical knowing” (p. 242). What sorts of knowledge productions are not dialectical? And if all knowing is dialectical in principle, then what does this complex exegesis tell readers about German society and subjectivities?

Much intellectual and emotional labor went into the production of this book. Unfortunately, given the highly abstract and theoretical nature of this publication, many readers will be perplexed rather than enlightened. Boyer has, nevertheless, provided a valuable text for sophisticated scholars interested in the sociology of knowledge and European (German) intellectual history.

For the scholar of postcolonial identities in the Caribbean, Martinique poses a startling anomaly. The goal of independence animated island politics in the British West Indies throughout the 20th century, becoming the basis of the region’s labor movements and political parties. By contrast, after three centuries of French colonial rule, residents of Martinique chose to formally integrate with France as an overseas department. Martinicans today are French citizens endowed with the same rights as their metropolitan compatriots, among them generous subsidies, housing allowances, and wage levels that make Martinique an island of First World affluence in a sea of impoverished independent states. In Creole Economics, Katherine Browne deftly explores the paradoxes of Martinique’s simultaneous Caribbean and French identities, principally as islanders seek to exploit both the largesse of the French state and the opportunities afforded by illicit economic activities.

Much as the dichotomy between reputation and respectability has become a master symbol of Caribbean identity, Browne suggests that Martinicans are pulled in opposing directions by their French citizenship and Creole culture. Their official status as Frenchmen, a source of pride when Martinicans compare their standard of living with that of other Caribbean islands, does little to offset the racism they experience when visiting the métropole. Neither can it erase a legacy of covert survival strategies that emerged in response to slavery. Just as African slaves resisted French planters with an arsenal of defiant acts, their descendants defy French laws designed to govern economic behavior on the island. Browne abundantly documents this thriving underground world of Creole economics, whereby débrouillards, islanders who define themselves by their cunning and resourcefulness, advance their well-being through unorthodox and often illegal activities. Among these are smuggling goods purchased in other countries and working “off the books” by collecting both an (unregistered) wage and state unemployment payments. Browne claims that such strategies are not merely mechanisms of personal gain but also are rooted in Creole values, foremost of which is a deep-seated need for personal autonomy (p. 55). She demonstrates that much of what defines Creole culture, including individuality, self-expression through clothing, and personal control over resources, is rooted in the experience of slavery, which denied all these things to its victims. Parenthetically, her argument corresponds closely with other widely noted aspects of West Indian economic behavior, including islanders’ famously intense attachment to land. Hence, even migrants who long ago settled elsewhere are reluctant to part with the fragment of land “back home” that once signaled their families’ bulwark against plantation labor.

Unlike earlier examinations of the reputation–respectability axis in Caribbean identity, which left the gendered dimensions of these value systems unexplored, Browne demonstrates how Creole values are expressed differently for women and men. Whereas “reputation” for men hinges on debrouillardism, illicit activity that opposes European respectability, a woman’s reputation derives from her ability to devote resources to her household. Even though personal autonomy is a central value of Creole identity, for women who cannot depend on men to support their children, security rather than risk taking forms the basis of this cherished ideal. Hence, although many women earn wages legally, their participation in Creole economics takes the form of additional unreported income, as they extend their wage activities to work completed at home as secretaries, nurses, and teachers. If there is one omission from the book, it might be gleaned from Browne’s passing reference to the “pitiful dwellings” of Haitians, St. Lucians, and Dominicans on the margins of Fort-de-France (p. 157). Migrants from Martinique’s economically depressed neighbors compose much of the island’s working population and, as in other developed societies, are consigned to jobs too poorly paid or unpleasant for natives to accept. Some also engage in livelihoods that carry considerable danger, such as ferrying marijuana from the English-speaking islands to Martinique, where drug trafficking incurs heavy penalties but potentially great rewards. Exploration of these activities might have shown how Martinicans’ French identity is selectively deployed to legitimize a labor market increasingly segmented along national lines.

In Creole Economics, Browne has given readers a vivid ethnographic portrait of a Caribbean society that opted for the paradoxes and benefits of a formal political integration with its colonizers. In doing so, she challenges the prevailing view of informal economies as pragmatic survival strategies existing outside of local systems of meaning and identity. Her work draws on years of interviews and ethnographic fieldwork conducted among all sectors of Martinican society, lending a nuanced view of how class, gender, and culture structure the opportunities available to island residents. In addition to being a beautifully written and deeply empathetic account, Browne’s book is visually striking. Interspersed with photographs from her fieldwork are many attractively rendered charcoal drawings of Martinicans and the flora and fauna of their island. The result is a callaloo of careful scholarship and imagery that is both enjoyable to read and a significant contribution to economic anthropology and Caribbean studies.

Doormen is a book about the work of doormen in the lobbies of residential buildings in New York City. It is organized around a cluster of seemingly contradictory phenomena: Doormen claim that they simply stumbled into their jobs, and most people who say they formally applied for a doorman’s job never got one. Doormen sustain a delicate balance between delivering personalized service and maintaining formal commitment to the norm of universal service, which is considered to be the basis of their professional status. In relation to this, doormen appear both too busy and too idle, and, by extension, they manage to project to tenants an eagerness to serve even if they are unable to provide service exactly when tenants believe they need it. During labor contract negotiations, tenants align themselves with doormen against management. Correspondingly, during strikes, doormen help tenants ensure that their building can function smoothly, thereby undermining the impact of their own strike. The central issue in these contradictions, Peter Bearman argues, is how doormen and tenants negotiate interpersonal closeness given the vast social distance between them.

Doormen are far beneath their tenants in life opportunities and social class. Yet their relationship with tenants is not one that involves simple servility or subordination. Bearman portrays the nature of the relationship as mutually supportive. That is, tenants need the doormen’s service to achieve a sense of distinction, whereas the doormen want to be perceived as professionals; together, they validate each other’s status claim. To accomplish this, “tenants want to know that their doormen know who to greet and who not to greet. Doormen want to know whom their tenants wish to see and not to see” (p. 11). The intimate knowledge a doorman has about his tenants is essential to this common goal.

Yet knowledge is a double-edged sword. Whereas tenants long for the distinction derived from the personalized service provided by their doormen, they are also concerned about the personal information doormen learn about them. The negotiation and (re)assertion of boundaries is a continuous process in the lobby through the daily interaction between tenants and doormen and is expressed in the language of respect on both sides. Tenants also worry, however, that they will not get full benefits from their doormen if they do not demonstrate the right amount of appreciation, primarily in the form of a Christmas bonus. The annual bonus carries multiple meanings: It is “a gift, a way of saying thanks, an obligation … a sign of expected reciprocal attention and an expression of social power” (p. 172). Calculating the bonus is also a nerveracking experience for the tenants. This is particularly true in a building where the occupants of each individual apartment have to hand out a bonus separately. People do not want to give too much or too little. They try to find out how much their neighbors intend to give to doormen, so that they can exceed them by just the smallest amount. Doormen also welcome this subtle competition. They, of course, prefer a large bonus, especially when the annual bonus constitutes a considerable portion of their wage packet.

Bearman states that his goal in Doormen is to focus on “the grammar of social life”—“the unspoken rules that organize social interactions, shape decisions, and motivate behavior” (p. 4)—and to link this microprocess to the macrostructure one observes (p. 63). I found his description of the tenantdoorman interaction in the lobby compelling; it gives the reader a vivid sense of the complex and ambiguous nature of their relationship. In this respect, Doormen could be seen as a modern heir of the early urban ethnographic tradition in sociology. I question, however, the choice of the subject matter. Doormen originated as a class field project in Bearman’s sociological method course for which his primary concern was finding a safe site for students to study; the lobby of a residential doorman building seemed to be a reasonable choice. To write a book about doormen, I feel, requires a stronger justification. Given that the majority of New York City residents do not live in a doorman building—and many of them may hardly ever visit such a building—do doormen offer the best choice of data to address the author’s research question? Accordingly, how does the tenant–doorman interaction in a lobby inform readers about social life in New York City or in U.S. society at large?

Political Ecology in a Yucatec Maya Community is the third volume in a series of reports by E. N. Anderson and his local colleagues based on nearly 15 years of intermittent fieldwork in Chunhuhub, a Mayan town in Mexico’s Quintana Roo state. The two previous volumes provide much of the ethnographic detail drawn on here: an ethnobotanical monograph, Those Who Bring the Flowers (ECOSUR, 2003), and an ethnozoological account coauthored with Felix Medina Tzuc, Animals and the Maya in Southeast Mexico (University of Arizona Press, 2005). Anderson is a veteran of four decades of ethnographic field research on two continents. His early work on Chinese ethnobiology and nutrition is well known. At the time of life when most anthropologists are satisfied to recline in their academic armchairs, Anderson undertook a second major ethnographic effort among the Yucatec Maya. These books are the fruits of that effort.

In Political Ecology, Anderson gives free rein to the broad sweep of his moral engagement with the political and ecological crises of the modern world, with Chunhuhub’s recent history grist for the mill. Anderson’s critical commentaries are strongly worded and often idiosyncratic, challenging any resort to easy answers, but at times frustrating in dismissing the seemingly incontrovertible. For example, for Anderson, “the worldwide rural environmental crisis appears to be by far the most serious and immediate threat facing our species” (p. 211), yet he dismisses global capitalism (or “Wall Street devils” [pp. 206–207]) as a primary factor, arguing instead that “much of the problem is caused by inefficiency and waste” (p. 13). He clearly leans toward individual motivation as opposed to institutionalized power as ultimately causal, both of crises and of their resolutions (p. 215).

He is generous in his praise of Mayan environmental knowledge and traditional ecological values but faults locals for overhunting and overharvesting local forests. Although it is impossible to simply characterize Anderson’s complex arguments, they boils down to this: “The leading question in economic and social action, for Chunhuhub as for the world, becomes one of trading long-term, wide-flung interests against narrow, short-term ones” (p. 11). His analysis, however, offers little hope for a positive outcome either for Chunhuhub or for the world, given that “subsistence maize farming is a fading trail” (p. 219) and that the younger generation in Chunhuhub seems little interested in lessons their elders might offer. Even the most aware of the senior generation voted in 2004 to privatize their ejido under provisions of the neoliberal amendments to Article 27 pushed through the Mexican congress by ex-president Salinas Gortari. Anderson dismisses as “nostalgic” the “dream” of some anthropologists (myself included) “of saving indigenous ways of life” (p. 213).

Although generous with opinions and advice, Anderson does not fail to offer a wealth of detail about Chunhuhub, its environment, history, people, and politics, with special focus on local agroecology, forest management, and medical recourses. Chunhuhub is unique—as is every rural town in Mexico and the world. Yet Chunhuhub also is “strikingly reminiscent of the small Indiana and Texas towns” (p. 205) where Anderson grew up. Anderson clearly identifies several features of the town that set it apart from better-known Mexican communities. First, although “indigenous” in that it is a largely Mayan town that occupies the site of an ancient Mayan settlement, it is also recent, the oldest residents having come from elsewhere to settle there, recolonizing the forests depopulated in the aftermath of the Caste Wars of the latter half of the 19th century. For this reason, or because of what Anderson characterizes as a distinctive Yucatec Mayan “intensely familial” social orientation, the town lacks such collective institutions (p. 77) as the Zapotec guelaguetza and the powerful corporate identity that has characterized the Tzeltal and Tzotzil communities of the Chiapas central highlands. Chunhuhub is rather an open town characterized by fluid membership and malleable identity (p. 153). Perhaps as a consequence, Chunhuhub has avoided the often-violent conflicts in highland Mayan communities between traditional Catholic Maya and the new wave of evangelical converts.

Anderson, on several occasions, points to overpopulation as a contributing factor to ecological degradation in and around Chunhuhub. It is not clear, however, whether this “overpopulation” is due to continuing high fertility rates (as he suggests at one point [p. 195]) or to continuing high rates of in-migration, primarily from elsewhere in the Yucatan peninsula. He makes excellent use of detailed government census data but leaves this key issue unresolved. Consider that Chunhuhub’s population has grown from zero in 1940 to 3,453 in 1990 to more than 6,000 by 2000 (occupying ejidal lands of 143 square kilometers). This expansion is clearly due almost entirely to in-migration. It is likely that Classic Mayan populations in this region were as high or higher. Furthermore, Anderson does not comment on the dramatic decline in Mexican fertility rates over the past few decades and the likely correlation between that decline and increased educational opportunities for girls.

Chunhuhub thus contrasts sharply with the Zapotec town with which I am most familiar, an indigenous town that has continuously occupied the same communal lands (although the best for agriculture are held as “private property” by local families) for more than 1,000 years, a town that is very strongly corporate and endogamous, which has so far balanced internal population growth with available farmland by a pattern of circular migration that “exports” labor in exchange for cash and commodity inputs without disenfranchising the migrants. As in Chunhuhub, however, religious conflicts are muted, in sharp contrast to the situation in many highland Mayan areas, perhaps because religious distinctions in both communities have no evident economic basis.

Although Anderson at times is darkly pessimistic (e.g., “There is a very real chance that humans will not only exterminate themselves but will destroy all higher life forms in the process” [p. 205]), he offers some hope in his concluding chapter, looking forward to a Chunhuhub linked to the wider world by means of its computer-savvy youth and wise citizens, who may be capable of distinguishing destructive federal development schemes from small-scale marketing experiments tailored to local soils, climate, and human values. But in the final analysis, it is not clear if this Chunhuhub of the future will remain at heart a Mayan town.

In this book, George Mentore explores a variety of themes associated with Waiwai sociability, their thoughts, how they feel about themselves, and their situation in the so-called modern world. The Waiwai are an Amerindian society located on both sides of the Brazil–Guyana border, comprising approximately 2,000 individuals of whom the majority live on the Brazilian side. Mentore, who has been working in the region for 25 years, primarily focuses on the Waiwai living in the village of Sheparaiymo, situated in southeastern Guyana.

In the initial pages of the book, the author clearly establishes his particular perspective. Born in Guyana when it was still a British colony, and identified on his birth certificate as a “Black, Native of British Guiana,” Mentore feels that his inheritance endows him with a special sensitivity to approach this ethnographical work about a group of people with whom he shares a common history. On the basis of that premise, he vindicates subjectivity not merely as a means of approaching social reality but also as an object to be described within that reality.

Following that introductory exposition, specific chapters of the book address topics ranging from the presence, in circular time and space, of individual aspects of Waiwai social life to giving and generosity, and they include considerations of shamanism, kinship, ecology, and so on. Mentore describes multiple aspects of social life within different production contexts, combining empathy and dense descriptions with more classical ethnographical analyses, even introducing quantitative data. Among the themes covered, the notion of “body” and the intimately associated notion of “embodiment” occupy the core of Mentore’s reflection. In this area, Mentore offers some interesting hypotheses. For example, he suggests that because visual memory interacts with knowledge and because body adornments can be associated with visual memory, one can infer that, for the Waiwai, body adornments express certain knowledge. Still more significant, for the Waiwai, this knowledge is the result of a perceptive experience of the world, particularly attributable to visual capacity. Thus, with the analysis of the perceptive properties of the Waiwai body that he presents, through the description of the notion of “ewri ekatï” (which he translates as “spiritual vitality of the eye”), Mentore illustrates how vision opens the way to experience, which gives shape to knowledge.

The author addresses many other issues; however, it is hard to establish the overall intellectual project that Mentore pursues in this work, beyond a sensitive description of Waiwai aesthetics, through the analysis of disparate elements. The phenomenology that he appears to recur to, conceived more as a description of what takes place rather than as a methodology to find complexity, produces interesting writing, some of which is even inspiring, but it is unable to account for the integrating social axis. Unfortunately, the phenomenal reality, conceived as a flow of events, is too complex to approach without an explicit methodology.

Despite these critical observations, the book—the result of years of work and several attempts by Mentore to find the adequate tone to reflect the sensitivity that he wants to portray—is a reference for scholars interested in this region, which has contributed so much to the ethnography of the lowlands of South America. With this text, Mentore also offers readers a beautiful example of combining anthropology with the memory and firsthand experience of colonialism.

More than 12 years have passed since the Zapatista Army of National Liberation uprising in Chiapas, Mexico, on January 1, 1994. Many academics and news-media specialists have assessed the Zapatista revolt and its impact on Mayas and Mestizos. Although the Zapatistas have faded from front-page news, they still maintain strongholds in the countryside and resist the Mexican national army. Mayas and Mestizos—whether sympathetic or not to the Zapatistas—continue to be affected by this conflict. The publishing blitz to explain the Zapatistas and the cultlike obsession with Subcomandante Marcos, the ski-masked, Mestizo intellectual guerrilla, have resulted in a quagmire that only specialists can wade through and comprehend.

From my perspective as an ethnographer interested in Mesoamerican indigenous life, political economy, and power, monograph-length, detailed ethnographic research on contemporary Mayas of Chiapas since the Zapatista uprising is sparse and heavily dependent on mass-media reports. Worse yet, the authors of these reports tend to disregard the wealth of ethnographic research already conducted in the region that could add depth to their media-oriented analyses. With Mayan Voices for Human Rights: Displaced Catholics in Highland Chiapas, Christine Kovic has written a well-researched and very readable book that helps make highland Chiapas politics comprehendible. Furthermore, Kovic firmly situates her research within Maya ethnography and makes an important contribution to one of the most ethnographically studied regions of the world.

For the ten years of research on which Mayan Voices for Human Rights rests, Kovic lived, walked, and worshipped with Catholic Mayas from the community of Guadalupe, located near San Cristóbal de Las Casas. This community of Tzotzil Mayas was formed by Catholics expelled from the ethnographically well-known community of San Juan Chamula. Little has been written about expelled Catholics in highland Chiapas, with most research focusing on the expulsion of Protestants and conflicts between them and traditionalists, those who subscribe to a fusion of pre-Columbian and Catholic practices. Much of the writing on the Protestant–traditionalist conflict uses conflicts of faith to explain the expulsions. Kovic, in contrast, takes a political-economy approach to look at the struggle for power and limited resources among Chamulas, paying close attention to how state policies and local economic, ideological, political, and economic conditions have led the consolidation of power among a small group of traditionalists in Chamula. She shows how Chamulas who do not have access to economic resources must conform to an ideology of “being of one soul” or face expulsion, as occurred in the case of the Catholics who formed Guadalupe.

In documenting conflicts over the control of the material base and political power, Kovic does not gloss over Mestizo and state institutional forms of discrimination and racism that, for nearly 500 years, have helped shape how Mayas live with each other. Her extensive knowledge and use of the ethnographic literature of the region further informs the monograph, but her vivid descriptions of the people, which are interwoven with their own explanations of their struggles and faith, make the book interesting to read and an important ethnographic contribution.

Aside from untangling the politics of highland Chiapas and contributing to a better understanding of expulsion, Kovic also illustrates how faith is interwoven with the economic and political conditions with which the residents of Guadalupe contend. The community that she describes provides an alternative image of Chiapas, where residents have forged positive social relationships that are based on their concepts of human rights, respect, and dignity.

The theoretical heart—not to imply Kovic’s linkage of faith and political economy is not a contribution—is her sustained argument throughout the book about what “human rights” means. First, she uses four chapters to describe the history of Chamulan expulsions and Catholic missionization. Then, over two chapters, she defines and explains legal, Catholic, and anthropological concepts of human rights, which are contrasted with the perspectives of Tzotzil from Guadalupe. In the remaining three chapters, she illustrates how expelled Mayas struggle for respect, to practice their faith, and for their livelihoods—to gain and maintain human rights as they define them.

Kovic has written a sympathetic book, which demonstrates how expelled Mayas build supportive faith-based communities and form alliances across faiths, alliances that do not conform to either traditionalist or Zapatista models. Nevertheless, there is no mistaking that Guadalupe comprises economically and politically marginalized people who have very clear conceptions of what constitutes their human rights. For this reason, students of Maya ethnography, human-rights scholars, policy makers, and those interested in religious studies would benefit from reading Mayan Voices for Human Rights.

The current large number of books published in anthropology, as in other categories of knowledge, is simultaneously exhilarating and depressing: exhilarating because of the mind-boggling acceleration of information; depressing because the passionate reader of anthropology inevitably feels a bit like Sisyphus facing an endless array of worthwhile texts, not to mention an equal number of useless ones. This sense of being overwhelmed, however, evaporates immediately when one has the rare and precious pleasure of encountering a book like this one. The anthropological reader struggling to prioritize the dizzying number of potential reads should place Richardson’s book at the top of the list.

On the most obvious level, Richardson’s Being-in-Christ is a highly perceptive comparison of two Christianities as constructed and lived in by hombres de carne y hueso, people of flesh and bone, and observed by Richardson over a lifetime of work in Spanish America and the American South. In a work full of rich ethnographic detail and insight, Richardson focuses on the contrasting experiential creation of Jesus from his depictions in church architecture, religious material settings, music, liturgical orders, sermons, words, and pilgrimages, and he constantly invites the reader to peel away layer after layer of empathetic depth. Through descriptive detail and insightful analysis, Richardson enables the reader to experience the “Christ of the Touch” of the cathedral in Nueva Esperanza, Colombia, and the “Christ of the Word” of the Southern Baptist church in Mt. Hope, Louisiana. He brings to life the significant contrasts between the living creation of the Jesus of suffering in Latin America and the Jesus of resurrection among Southern Baptists. In the end, the differential constructions of “being-in-Christ” serve the same inevitable and noble struggle of humans everywhere: to put death in its place.

Richardson’s account, however, lives in a multiplicity of levels and has significance for readers interested in postmodernism, textual construction, and philosophical anthropology. He resurrects an approach reminiscent of the philosophical anthropology of bygone days, probing deep questions of human nature and the one question that both permeates and transcends all others: what to do about death? Drawing on ideas from the likes of Ernest Becker, Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and the ever-present Hank Williams, Richardson constructs an amazingly easy-to-understand portrayal of what it means to be human. One may disagree with portions of that construction, summarized by Heidegger’s notion of “being-in-the-world,” but Richardson presents his ideas with clarity, precision, and occasional humor. In addition, Richardson has created a delightful text, a unique experiment in writing. Those who are familiar with his other work will not be disappointed; those who are not will be introduced to a great writer. For example, he actively invites readers into the text by referring to us as you and by explicitly recognizing through explicit textual conversations between the I of the author and the you of the reader that the text is a joint production, not just written but actively read. His writing gives the sense that the text is still very much alive while never sacrificing substance and rich ethnographic detail for style.

In the midst of these myriad levels is something even more important. In the end, this volume is a highly personal excursion into fundamental existential questions. The text begins with the tragic death of Richardson’s mother and ends with the death of his distant father, folding Richardson’s own being-in-the-world into his anthropological work. Although the discussion never once dwells on the personal, never once appears self-indulgent, the personal is nevertheless there, profoundly and deeply. Whereas some may find this an unwelcome intrusion into an already original and provocative book, others will be able to see and admire that Richardson’s anthropology is not just a discipline; it is his life. Many years ago, Jules Henry wrote in his introduction to Jungle People that anthropologists avoid the fundamental existential questions in the lives of the people they study because to do so would require them to confront those painful questions themselves. Not Richardson. In the final analysis, Richardson not only leads readers through the tragic and noble poems of the Other but he has also created a text through which we are invited to confront the fire and frost of our own existence.

Thanks, Miles. And, as always, thanks, Hank.

This is a carefully recorded, coherently related, and meaningfully interpreted anthropological study of an oral epic performed by lower-caste groups in the Braj region of northern India. As specialists would quickly recognize, the study solidly contributes to a neglected cultural sphere. It also highlights multifaceted cultural communication involving complex and contested social relations embedded in the rich moral-experiential sensibilities of the lower castes. The author, after a systematic long-term study, publishes on this subject just as the winds of economic and political globalization also pick up. At the core of the oral epic Dhola, however, are those perennial puzzles that Hindus (or, more generally, humans), their rulers, fate or destiny, and interceding gods and goddesses compose. In her distinctive study, Wadley convincingly shows how the lower castes (e.g., the oil pressers, acrobats, bangle sellers, and merchants) appropriate Raja Nal in their own distinct situations, thereby also showing, Wadley claims, “this tension between biology and culture, between birthright and achievement” (p. 146).

As Wadley’s two appendixes, one dozen illustrations, and two tables show, the recordings, organization, and interpretation of the regional Dhola performances attracted her unflagging attention (beginning 30 years ago). So engaged in a close, long-term cultural reading of the actual performances and performers in different regional locations, she conveys “the actuality of performance and the vivid imaginations, nuances, and humor” (p. xii). The study is presented in two parts: The first introduces Dhola, retells the epic in “a vastly condensed” form, and profiles the life stories and styles of the two Dhola performers Wadley had followed over time. The second part has four interpretive chapters devoted successively to the goddess, to “women and the issues of femaleness,” to the nature of caste (i.e., the issues of birth and achievement), and to Raja Nal “identity and humanness.”

Wadley’s work is clearly an anthropological study of a regionally well-known and complex cultural performance. An anthropologist’s shaping is evident, for instance, in condensing the epic Dhola story, six hours long even for a locally “knowledgeable storyteller.” Hence, “the resulting story must be recognized as my version of Dhola, not that of any one singer or teller of the tale” (p. 9). Still, together with sections on Dhola’s literary, cultural, and historical placement, including late 20th-century audiocassette versions, the story occupies about 55 pages of the book (pp. 9–64). The two major local singers–performers, comparatively rendered and interpreted via selected pithy dialogues, convey to the reader a distinct oral–musical–communicational style, embellished appropriately with an earthy local social, gastronomic, and emotional–aesthetic verve (pp. 65–92).

Fortunately, Wadley does not abandon this culturally textured stance in her interpretive part of the book, showing convincingly how the goddess, the women, and their femaleness pervade the epic, which must structure itself not only around the male central figure, Raja Nal, but also, interminably –and under contestation—¬ around “the nature of caste” or the problem of “birth versus achievement” (p. 143). Discussions of women’s status in the book show how the performance allows subversion of “the accepted forms of male dominance” (p. 121). Yet Wadley neither neglects lower-caste female sexuality, sexual desire, and aesthetic nor overlooks cunning and disguise while attending to social duty and propriety (pp. 122–140). These multiple social–moral motivations and actions get reflected in Wadley’s “puzzles” or the “conditions” that “fate, time, and being human” conspire to test the main characters and their identities (e.g., Motini and Raja Nal; pp. 140–141; 192–195).

More generally, Wadley asserts that Dhola players, the “‘organic intellectuals’ of Gramsci,” significantly comment on and contest “the traditional social order, whether the caste system, norms for women, or life itself” (p. 4). A similar critical stance echoes as Wadley concludes her discussion of Raja Nal’s identity: “Through Dhola, the singers question the rightness of caste, and of caste behaviors, especially those that keep the mighty in power” (p. 171). Any broader theoretical claims via Dhola on the actual processes and provenance of British colonialism in the region or on the available layers of Hinduism, however, must await a different kind of work. And such a study should be also as meticulous and careful as is Wadley’s work on Dhola.

'“What can we do with the past, I wrote in my journal that night. How can we outlive it? And what about the stories we tell? So partial, so fugitive.” These words, I think, express something central about Michael Jackson’s many years of anthropological struggles. He continues, “We tell stories in order to come to terms with what has befallen us,” to “create the illusion … that we have a hand in our own fate” (pp. 30–31).

In Sierra Leone is a small but ethnographically rich book that could only have been written by someone who has followed the developments of the country for several decades and who also is a gifted writer. It is a kind of ethnographic biography of S. B. Marah, a Sierra Leonean politician. The book revolves around Marah’s life story and political career. Woven around that theme are explanatory stories told by Jackson’s old-time assistant Noah, who is Marah’s younger brother, and by other informants as well as Jackson’s personal experiences and reflections, always full of small but, indeed, profound observations, of the sort too often ignored in writings on war-torn Africa. For example, as Jackson notes on the last page of the chapter called “The War,” the majority of frustrated young men in today’s troubled Africa choose not to embrace armed struggle. A rare but, indeed, important insight.

Jackson describes his recent revisits to Sierra Leone and inland travels with Marah toward Kurankoland. But he also presents a journey into the country’s past, and into his many years of Sierra Leonean experience. Readers can also recognize the feeling of loneliness that sometimes characterizes the enterprise called “ethnographic fieldwork,” despite the many people constantly crying for the attention of the anthropologist. Jackson sketches the paradox of his life-long Sierra Leonean engagement, at one occasion ceremonially initiated and celebrated, at other times imbued with a feeling of being among people with whom one does not quite belong. Still, a shared humanity.

Marah’s stories are carefully recorded, transcribed, and reproduced, and these stories also frame the account: “So partial, so fugitive.” Jackson discusses less about the motivations of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels or on how former rebels now cope with the stigma of being global bad guys in postwar Sierra Leone. Marah’s four-wheel-drive vehicle, with Jackson in the back seat, briefly stops in a town depicted as an “RUF stronghold,” not because of the travelers’ curiosity but because of a mechanical problem with the car that needed attention. Before readers can learn more about the town, the car is repaired and the journey continues. Jackson works from the other end, contextualizing Marah’s and other people’s bitter experiences of the war and the RUF rebels. So this is a book with the victims’ rather than the perpetrators’ stories. Jackson’s conclusion is still very important: A conflict always “takes on a life and logic of its own” (p. 155). With time, this violent logic detaches itself from the original motivations; the root causes fade. Perhaps it was all about politicians, like Marah, who eventually lost “touch with the common people” (p. 126), and perhaps young people’s “patience with autocracy, traditional or modern, had worn thin” (p. 47). But also, as Jackson so insightfully elaborates, in postwar Sierra Leone, Marah is again a man of age, of position and power, which enables him to nurture his bitterness. The majority of war victims, by contrast, are too powerless to cultivate feelings of retaliation. “They were simply realists, acutely aware of what they could and could not do,” because everything is boiling down to the existential “issue of power and powerlessness” (p. 69).

Jackson struggles against impressionism and against abstractions and generalizations. Still, he says something profound on the human condition, in general. He carefully balances his personal experiences against the diverging experiences of his informants and Sierra Leonean friends. As is typical of Jackson’s work, each dimension shreds light on the others. I read the book for a second time during fieldwork in war-torn Uganda, leaving it behind with one of my best friends, a university student and a close fieldwork associate, when I traveled back to Sweden. The book encouraged us to reflect on numerous parallels with Ugandan history and with our own experiences. And we were both provoked by Jackson’s statement about young students he interviewed in 1969–70, about “the poignantly impossible gulf between their dreams and their reality” (p. 148). We hope that our own research, from young Ugandans’ perspective, eventually will add nuance to this conclusion.

Jackson’s existential–phenomenological anthropology is of great inspiration to me, a source that never goes dry. And In Sierra Leone is perhaps ethnography at its best; it is specific but still encourages comparison and contemplation on the human condition, in general, forcing and inspiring scholars to engage in new ways with our own material.

What does “existential anthropology” encompass? Human existence entails a struggle between contending imperatives, Michael Jackson begins in Existential Anthropology. One wishes to strike a balance between being an actor and being acted on, between furnishing the wherewithal of life through one’s own capacities and through one’s memberships, and between a search for pure self and a search for belonging with and to others. One possesses a fluid consciousness that oscillates between speech and silence, reflection and habit, aimlessness and purposiveness, body and imagination, and passion and calm. Being is precarious and unstable, one’s sense of well-being waxing and waning continually, susceptible to subtle changes in mood, to one’s perception of another’s glance, gesture, or remark. One struggles for being in the face of the nothingness of a life wrought meaningless by adversity, exclusion, and violation. Does one win this struggle to strike a balance? The outcome derives neither from external circumstance nor from inner essence: Neither reductive nor determinate, the outcome is a “dynamic relationship,” a dialectic born of how “limiting conditions are shaped by the ways in which we respond to them” (p. xi).

In what ways are the above matters relevant to sociocultural anthropology? The question of being is universal, only its symbolic expression differs, and it is properly the starting point of any attempt to explore and compare human lifeworlds. Albeit individuality may be played down in the milieus in which anthropologists often work, identity and responsibility may be taken to be primarily matters of community belonging, and meaning and fate may be supernaturally lodged—such habits of mind are not ontologies. Existence does not reduce to category terms, whether “society,” “culture,” “individual,” “belonging,” “relationship,” “habitus,” “structure,” or “ideology.” Such terms cannot be made foundational to a theory of human being. These terms are rhetorical devices: some of the symbolical vehicles by which human beings have designated some of the modalities of their experience and sought solutions to the issue of existence. Category terms are manifestations of the “endless experimentation in how the given world can be lived decisively, on one’s own terms” (p. xii). An existential anthropology is an attempt to appreciate the means and the consequences of people always and everywhere attempting to exercise freedom: to see in their lives a reflection of their human capacities to make their own sense.

From this anthropology, Jackson is determined to bracket off questions of truth, of objective reality. He does not judge or rank the symbolical vehicles—cultures—that human beings deploy to give form to their work of securing being. He is more concerned that these be seen alike, as commensurate acts of everyday, individual, and collaborative effort, and that the universal consequences be appreciated of occasions when the work of being does not receive others’ due recognition. What, for instance, is the effect of feeling so ostracized and oppressed—objectified and depersonalized—that one’s sense of humanity disappears? Loss of ontological security and the need for redress can eventuate in the suicide bomber.

The testament that anthropology can provide of the existential effort of being is edifying rather than systematic in character. It comes from the interexperience of social interaction and offers detailed glimpses of the tensions and intentions of particular lifeworlds. Hence, Jackson focuses, in 11 chapters, on events whose moment and drama illuminate personal reasons and impersonal causes in the constitution of being. From suffering war and postwar in Sierra Leone and in Brooklyn, to being and being out of place in white Australia, to violations of human rights, to the interface between bodies and machines and globalization and technology, to mundane rituals and names, here are moments in which human beings variously create viable lives—emotionally, magically, rationally, corporeally, narratively—and the recognition, dignity, well-being, love, and respect they ubiquitously seek.

In a preface, Jackson notes that this book brings to an end an anthropological journey of 40 years: an appreciation of people’s longing to come into their own. At the book’s close, he hints at where his literary projects might take him next: toward more metaphysical exploration (now based at Harvard Divinity School) of that being-in-the-world which is defined by being-with-others-in-a-place and for which sitting on the ground, sinking back into the earth, manifests the welcome “state of nascence, of pure potentiality” (p. 192). This book is a thoroughly wise one, learned, patient, and humane: an inspiring companion with which to journey anthropologically to human lifeworlds at any stage of one’s life-project.

In the 21st-century era of flexible-production models carried out in ever-more-mobile assembly plants known as maquiladoras in Spanish, the new forms of labor organizing by women who assemble clothes, appliances, and computers are a significant and worthy object of study. In this creatively theorized and well-grounded ethnography of a workers’ movement in post-Sandinista Nicaragua, Jennifer Bickham Mendez masterfully articulates the history, political context, strategies, and information politics undertaken by the Working and Unemployed Women’s Movement María Elena Cuadra (MEC), which emerged as an autonomous women’s organization in 1994. (Visit the movement’s website at http://www.mec.org.ni/.) What is particularly important about the MEC as a case study and in Bickham Mendez’s theoretical positioning of the organization is its hybrid structure and demands, which incorporate aspects of both a nongovernmental organization (NGO) and a labor union. MEC focuses simultaneously on improving working conditions for women laboring in the maquiladoras in Nicaragua’s free-trade zone and on empowering women in their homes through education and training about domestic violence and reproductive health. In addition, the women of MEC have become distinctive and important political subjects in neoliberal Nicaragua through their successful introduction of a code of ethics to be followed in free-trade zone factories.

The founders and many of the regional leaders of MEC came out of the Sandinista labor movement, particularly the Sandinista Workers Central (CST) of the 1980s. After the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) lost control of the Nicaraguan state in 1990 elections, the country elected two consecutive presidents who proceeded to privatize much of national industry in a move to a neoliberal economic model that included the dismissal of 10,000 textile workers from state-owned enterprises in the early 1990s. The development of free-trade zones saw some of these workers and others—primarily women—employed in ever-increasing numbers of assembly plants. MEC grew out of a complex political soup that involved continued Sandinista labor networks and organizations, the launching of an autonomous feminist movement, the creation of pan-Central American networks of NGOs, and continued reliance on Canadian, U.S., and European foundations and NGOs as funding sources. As a new kind of flexible organization or movement dedicated to both workers’ rights and women’s rights, MEC provides a wide range of services, education, and types of advocacy to women workers, including workshops on discrimination and gender roles, gender and reproductive health, self-esteem, and domestic violence; technical training in nontraditional trades such as auto mechanics, masonry, and electrical work; and access to rotating credit funds.

What is perhaps culturally most unique about MEC (in addition to its insistence on always putting women front and center) and similar organizations that have sprung up around the world, often as “workers’ centers,” is a new type of organizing strategy that emphasizes negotiation, lobbying, indirect pressure, and bridge building with corporations and their managers instead of direct confrontation. MEC organizers believe that the gendered interests of women workers are not served by engaging in actions, such as boycotts and strikes, that are likely to drive the largely U.S.- and Chinese-owned assembly plants to move elsewhere. Bickham Mendez echoes their perspective. “Even if a boycott causes a transnational corporation to change its behavior, should it be considered a success if this change involves propelling women workers and their dependent families into even more dire poverty?” (pp. 218–219). Bickham Mendez argues that a more nuanced analysis of workers includes broadening definitions to look at racial, gender, and ethnic dimensions of workers’ identities as well as their structural and class position. Such an analysis, she maintains, will illuminate the logic of MEC’s focus on working with women as integrated individuals with many different dimensions to their lives who need to keep their jobs and cannot afford the tactics of antisweatshop groups, such as the Campaign for Labor Rights. Positioned at the intersection of local, national, and transnational politics and informational cultures and practices, MEC models an innovative but challenging path for feminist and labor organizing. Bickham Mendez captures the political, theoretical, and strategic importance of what MEC and similar social movement organizations are doing and, in the process, has written a must-read text for anyone interested in contemporary women’s movements, labor organizing, and issues of transnationalism and globalization in Latin America and elsewhere.