Sarah Green’s field site, an amoeboid blot of land called Pogoni straddling the Greek Albanian border, is the kind of Balkan hot spot that attracts political hyperbole. But Green’s book is refreshingly subtle and even, I am glad to say, funny, with the kind of humor that serves to equalize the power disparities between the observer and the observed. Initially drafted as team ethnographer in a multidisciplinary study on the “Natural and Anthropogenic Causes of Soil Degradation and Desertification in the Mediterranean”— in this case, mountainous Epirus in northwest Greece—Green began by dutifully inquiring into local (she eschews the word) understandings and responses to the question of land degradation. Finding that this was a nonissue in Pogonian interpretations of the landscape (she describes this in passages of dialogue that recall, as she notes, the deadpan hilarity of E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s Nuer interviews), she applied herself more broadly to the question of what people did make of where they lived (or lived sometimes), and of movement and change. What they saw, chiefly, was the evidence, as she puts it, of marginality, abandonment, and ordinariness: an unremarkable scrubby landscape inhabited by people (mostly pensioners) who are “neither one thing nor another, or alternatively too much both one thing and the other, and somehow still not particularly noted or notable” (p. 7), a place both in the grip of irrevocable change (e.g., p. 53) and also always the same. Her geomorphological–ethnographic perspective allows her to draw imaginatively on different scales of analysis from the tectonic to the political, linking the instability of the soils, the shifting location of villages, and the opening and closing of the border to her larger arguments on what she calls, drawing from Marilyn Strathern, Roy Wagner, and others, “Balkan fractals.”

Green, amazingly, turns the detailed comparison of the quadrants of Lower Pogonian (Kasidiaris) topography into a compelling narrative. She gives the reader a vivid sense of why it matters to live in one place or another, and how diversely differently situated groups exploit and command the region through contrasting subsistence regimes and patterns of short- and long-distance movement. (Here, the book would be enriched by engagement with earlier literature on landscape, ethnicity, and class in Greece: In particular I miss reference to Muriel Dimen’s work on the Greek–Albanian border and the cross-disciplinary work of Susan Buck Sutton in the Argolid.)

Green’s interpretation of the meaning of landscape is a major contribution to the contemporary literature on space and place. She lucidly conveys a contemporary rural reality—unromantic, of “no account”—in which the inhabitants are not only “out-of-the-way,” but are also retracting from the territory they formerly exploited extensively, remaining within their villages and traveling between places on asphalt roads (p. 210). The chapters on “Counting” and “Embodied Counting,” in which Green discusses the production and interpretation of statistics about people, land, animals, and events, stand on their own as object lessons in understanding statistical representation; her ethnographically astute observations on the popular classification of forests (pp. 178–179) are an instructive complement to the broader-brush tableau of James Scott’s Seeing like a State (Yale University Press, 1998).

Green notes that most villages avoid marking (ethnic) difference in public, although the approximate segregation of neighborhoods was obvious to her: Villagers make claims to a generic “just Greek” heritage. This complicates municipal attempts to capture new EU resources organized around regional identities, “tradition,” and “cultural distinctiveness.” Ethnographers such as Jane Cowan and Giorgos Aggelopoulos have noted both avoidance and display in next-door Greek Macedonia: Green’s picture could benefit from more attention to the Slav–Macedonian question and the vexed triple, not double, Albania–Greece–Macedonia international border.

Green observes that Pogonians insist on sustaining a certain incoherence (p. 78) regarding the boundaries between people and places (as other ethnographers have observed, this suspension of definition is in the service of a scarce economy as well as the maintenance of peace); at the same time, they occasionally express nostalgia for the imposed clarity of dictatorship (p. 64). This is a key insight into the dynamics of “Balkan” ethnopolitical relations. . In a pivotal chapter, Green uses the concept of the fractal to describe and analyze contemporary hegemonic understandings of the “Balkans”. Like fractals, the Balkans are conceptualized as a self-replicating, proliferating, hybrid—or better, mixed-up— phenomenon in which the “whole is the same as the parts, and each part is in itself whole.” Yielding wholes at every level, fractal organizations produce “no tops or bottoms, no clear edges, no beginning or end” (p. 135): in short no totalization superior to the sum of the parts. On the one hand Green seems to argue against the Euclidean expectations that cast this fractality as pathological; on the other hand she recognizes it as a “fantasy with teeth” that generates, in the context of contemporary international politics, either murderous attempts at ethnic clarification or a kind of existential suffering connected to the namelessness of generic (and centerless) marginality. Green does not argue for the ontological reality of the Balkans as fractal; she does note the occasional use of “Balkan” as an ironic or disparaging term of self-reference.

Green’s wide-ranging discussion of “Balkan” history, emphasizing circuits of movement, is engaging and enlightening. The book’s theoretical discussions are dense (Green is marvelously well-read) but not turgid; Green has a light, direct, and unpretentious style of writing. Notes from the Balkans gives readers a visceral sense of the “ordinary” and, I think, a better idea about marginality. It is a delightful book to read.

Tourists and tourism are no longer the annoying, but for the most part avoidable, subjects they once were in cultural anthropology. They are topics that have come of age. No longer limited to “chasing anthropology’s discarded discourse” (p. 4), tourism has emerged as a legitimate subject of ethnographic inquiry, as the nine essays collected into Edward M. Bruner’s latest volume attest. To study tourism, as Bruner interprets it, is to study human mobility and identity, globalization and locality, and the relationship between postcoloniality, postmodernity, and the ethnographic project itself. What lies within the pages of Culture on Tour is as much a discussion of what is at stake generally for cultural anthropology, as it adapts itself to 21st-century social life, as it is a discussion of tourism per se by one of its most knowledgeable senior scholars.

As an assemblage of texts generated for a variety of different purposes over the course of more than two decades, Bruner’s collection is remarkably cohesive. This is due to a theoretical orientation consistently maintained throughout the essays. Bruner defines this as a “processual, constructivist, and performative perspective” (p. 8), developed during the 1980s, that seeks to understand tourism as it is “lived, experienced, and told” (p. 19). These descriptors indicate the influence of symbolic interactionism (Victor Turner), the sociolinguistics of verbal art (Richard Bauman), and performance studies (Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett). In addition, Bruner engages the work of figures as diverse as Karl Marx and Margaret Mead, Coco Fusco and Clifford Geertz, and Homi Bhabha and James Boon. The constructivist perspective proves integrative of a wide range of cultural theory.

The volume is divided into three sections. Part 1, “Storytelling Rights,” contains the landmark essay “Maasai on the Lawn,” coauthored in 1994 with Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, along with a 2001 essay documenting touristic variations in constructing Maasai culture and a third essay from 1996 on multiple interpretations of the Ghanaian destination Elmina Castle. Part 2, “Competing Stories,” contains another classic essay, “Abraham Lincoln as Authentic Reproduction” (1994). Here, Bruner articulates his stance on the question of authenticity in relation to touristic practice. A second essay, on New Salem, from 1993, and a piece coauthored in 1983 with Phyllis Gorfain on the Israeli destination of Masada complete the section. In these essays, Bruner juxtaposes authoritative and popular interpretations that vie for dominance over each destination. Part 3, “Tales from the Field,” begins with another well-known 1996 essay, “The Balinese Borderzone,” in which Bruner lays out his theory of the geographical and performative characters of tourist sites in developing nations. Bruner builds on this discussion in the (original) essay that follows, comparing domestic tourists in Indonesia, Kenya, and China as they impose meanings on state-sponsored ethnic theme parks. Bruner ends the section with a 1999 account of his 1997 return to the Toba Batak community on Sumatra, Indonesia, where he worked in 1957. Here, Bruner argues that “post-local” (p. 252) communities can be identified in a wider range of locations than generally has been assumed to be the case in recent anthropological discourse—in particular, in the very villages that were once the objects of imperialist nostalgic ethnographic gazing.

Looking beyond the volume’s substantial contribution to the anthropology of tourism, I recommend Culture on Tour to anyone engaged in questions concerning the future of ethnographic practice generally. Especially for those who would call into question the continued viability of the ethnographic method in relation to contemporary topics of inquiry, Bruner’s work provides an incisive counternarrative. Tourism, without question, counts as a contemporary cultural object. Bruner, however, employs a relatively classic version of participant-observation to deal with it. He adopts multisited, transit-based, collaborative modifications only when necessary. If Bruner’s approach is nonstandard, it is in its emphasis on participation over observation in his efforts to dialogue with as many of tourism’s participants as possible. The result is strategically humanistic, complicating the contemporary picture of tourism by resisting the reductive tendencies that have plagued both industrial and anthropological conceptions of it. Even in this performative mode, however, Bruner’s method depends largely on techniques that Franz Boas would have recognized and found familiar. In this regard, Bruner’s ethnographies of travel write against internal critics of ethnography, suggesting that its usefulness is far from outmoded. As far as the understanding of global forms of consumption is concerned, the discipline, in fact, may never have needed it more.

Surely one of the most colorful and fascinating individuals in 20th-century anthropology, Jaime de Angulo (1887–1950) lived many lives. Born in Paris to Spanish parents, in 1905 he immigrated to America, where he worked as a cowboy, earned a medical degree, and ranched in Big Sur, California, before his fateful meetings in 1919 with Berkeley anthropologists Alfred Kroeber and Paul Radin. Becoming an amateur linguist and scholar of Native American cultures, he conducted his first fieldwork among the Achumawi people of northern California in 1921. Loosely associated with the University of California at Berkeley, de Angulo maintained an ambivalent and somewhat competitive relationship with Kroeber, but he was generally popular with the Berkeley graduate students. De Angulo seems to have known everyone—from Edward Sapir and Franz Boas in anthropology to Carl Jung and Ezra Pound in psychology and literature. A car accident in 1933 effectively ended his period of active research and writing. In 1949, the year before his death in San Francisco, he presented a series of radio broadcasts on “Old Time Stories,” retellings of Native Californian myths. These broadcasts and the posthumous publication of his Indian Tales (1953) did much to make de Angulo a hero to the Beats of the 1950s and the counterculture of the 1960s.

For too long, however, de Angulo’s literary fame has obscured his professional work in linguistic anthropology. The situation was remedied with the 1983 doctoral dissertation of Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz, now a professor of communications at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside. In her revised version, Rolling in Ditches with Shamans, Leeds-Hurwitz focuses squarely on de Angulo’s professional life, not his colorful personal life. In the first of two parts, she offers a brief biography, followed by a fuller treatment of the key professional figures in de Angulo’s life (anthropologists A. L. Kroeber, Boas, Paul Radin, Robert Lowie, and Edward W. Gifford and linguists Edward Sapir, Paul-Louis Faye, Hans-Jørgen Uldall, Charles F. Voegelin, and Leonard Bloomfield). The bulk of the book is then devoted to an analysis of de Angulo’s work, with chapters on basic formulations of his underlying questions in psychology, anthropology, and linguistics; the practical problems he encountered in text collection, phonetic transcription, and the classification of languages and vocabularies; his research funded by the Committee on Research in Native American Languages (a chapter the author published in 1985); his ethnographic and linguistic research with the Achumawi of northeast California, his principal Native subject; his work with other Native peoples, mostly in Native California, but including Mexico and the Southwest; and a concluding discussion of de Angulo’s “years of synthesis,” when his attention turned more to theoretical analysis and literary pursuits. The volume includes two useful appendixes: a basic chronology of his life and a complete list of his publications and manuscripts; supplemented by various tables and maps.

Rolling in Ditches with Shamans will be welcomed by everyone with an interest in the history of American anthropology, linguistics, literature, and Native American cultures in the early 20th century. It is the intersection of these diverse subjects that de Angulo’s life and work profoundly address. The subtitle accurately reflects the book’s basic theme: the professionalization of American anthropology in the 1920s and 1930s. Leeds-Hurwitz explores the difficult position of amateur scholars like de Angulo, who were not fully trained and confined within academic institutions. All too often such important scholars have been left out of disciplinary histories. Until the work of Leeds-Hurwitz, de Angulo had been seen as a gifted sort of poet but not a contributor to the discipline in the manner of Kroeber and Sapir. Still, the former stereotypes contained some truth, as de Angulo was a pioneer in what has recently become an anthropological interest in fiction and other alternate modes of professional writing.

This excellent study is detailed and well researched, informative, and well written (and a nice touch is the small coyote silhouette placed beside each page number, in reference to de Angulo’s trickster identity). Leeds-Hurwitz consciously intended her work to complement the 1995 biography by de Angulo’s daughter Gui, which, is now out-of-print and hard to obtain (The Old Coyote of Big Sur: The Life of Jaime de Angulo, Stone Garden Press). There is, therefore, no single, comprehensive account of Jaime de Angulo’s life and work and their interrelationship. Reading this book, one wishes such a synthetic treatment existed. Until then, Rolling in Ditches with Shamans will surely answer many questions about this fascinating and important figure.

Christian Zlolniski’s compelling ethnographic portrait of Mexicans living in Santech, a working-class barrio in San Jose, California, is a penetrating examination of global structural forces that contribute to pronounced economic disparity and the “paradox of poverty amidst the affluence that has become a distinctive mark of the Silicon Valley” (p. 4). As the local economic base changed, immigrant laborers filled the niche for unskilled workers in agriculture, manufacturing, and more recently in the lowest-paid, most economically vulnerable flexible-labor sector of the high-tech industry that epitomizes the best of the “new U.S. economy” (p. 5). Zlolniski situates the economic, social, and political culture his informants are forging within the growing body of globalization and immigration studies.

Zlolniski’s ability to analyze complex theoretical issues through richly textured narrative is this book’s strength. His descriptions of the complexities of his informants’ lives reflect the rapport and trust that Zlolniski established with community members while conducting research in Santech for more than a decade. He illustrates the interplay of employment (formal, informal, and household), social relations, and political advocacy of residents to improve conditions (e.g., lowering the crime rate and improving schooling) to support his contention that men and women participate quite differently in economic restructuring and make varying adjustments to urban U.S. life.

Residents’ opportunities for employment in the service sector have changed significantly since Zlolniski began his research in 1991, as corporations have introduced cost-cutting measures: Janitorial labor at high-tech firms has given way to employment for local and multinational firms that subcontract this type of labor. Analysis of workers’ perceptions of ways that unionization—which promised to provide them with greater job security and higher wages—ultimately resulted in lower wages and less stable employment is a prime example of the types of frustrated attempts to get ahead financially that underscore the text. The demand for flexible labor has made informal economic activities—primarily vending, with some skilled employment—an integral supplement or alternative to “unstable, unpleasant, and poorly paid jobs in the formal economy” (p. 104) as part of household survival strategies.

In presenting detailed ethnographic accounts that indicate the necessity of income pooling for survival, Zlolniski also challenges models of autonomous, cohesive Mexican immigrant household units. Instead, he characterizes these households as sites of exploitation, inequality, and stratification across age and sex lines. Overcrowding (by relatives and paying boarders) that increases women’s domestic labor and uneven budgetary contributions among members compound these tensions. Even though paid and unremunerated labor is vital to economic solvency, household members often minimize the importance of women’s paid employment in an extension of their idealized household roles. Nevertheless, with a flexible structure that tends toward an extended family arrangement, these households frequently are “a bastion of resistance to poverty and exploitation often experienced by poor immigrant women” (p. 130).

Zlolniski integrates accounts of two types of agency among Santech residents for whom political mobilization became a “weapon of the weak” for seemingly “disadvantaged immigrants.” Demonstrating one type of agency, janitors—primarily men—worked with local Chicano leaders to unionize in “one of the most politically anti-union regions” in the United States (p. 8). Manifesting the other type, residents—particularly the working mothers who rely on social networks and are the most active community organizers—worked first with government programs and, then, more successfully with the People Acting in Community Together (PACT) interfaith civic organization to lobby the city government for better policing, better housing conditions, educational programs (including English as a second language courses) that met community needs, and a community center.

In an epilogue that includes valuable July 2003 updates on numerous informants’ lives, Zlolniski revisits the implications of his initial findings. Readers learn that the “new immigrants” already difficult quest for the “American Dream” has become more tenuous with corporate outsourcing, the crash of the dot-com industry, and heightened national security policies. This section chronicles the establishment of new households and the rupture of others, changes in Santech community membership as residents move to more affordable communities or return to Mexico, and the availability of fewer formal-sector jobs.

Zlolniski has delivered on his promise to show, “without painting a romantic picture,” that there is “room in Silicon Valley’s advanced economy for a group of poorly educated immigrants” (p. 21). With its timeliness enhanced by current debates about rights of undocumented migrants and proposed immigration reform, this accessible text is appropriate for courses across the social sciences. Given the political consciousness in the Santech community, readers will welcome, in future editions, a revised epilogue chronicling residents’ active participation in spring 2006 marches and demonstrations.

Times are good for Big Oil. Corporate profits are unprecedented (Chevron netted a cool $14 billion in 2005); the world oil market is tight, compounded by “supply risks” Iran, Venezuela, and Nigeria; the speculative impulses of the commodity exchanges have driven up the price of oil to $64 a barrel; and a former oilman (surrounded by other former oilmen) stalks the halls of the White House. As if that were not enough, the New York Times (March 27, 2006, p. 1) reports that, through a “vague law,” the U.S. government will waive, for the oil supermajors, about $7 billion in state royalties over the next seven years. Good work if you can get it. None of this prevented President Bush from declaring—as no other president has dared to do—that the United States is “addicted to oil” (which is to say, to the car). His program to reduce dependency on Middle East oil is laughable (not least because the United States will still be depending on someone—probably Africa— and because the Bush administration has already savaged other government funding designed to increase energy efficiency and alternative energy sources). All of this, as Toby Shelley reminds readers in Oil, goes back to the 1973 oil embargo and President Nixon’s Project Independence, designed to achieve U.S. self-sufficiency by 1980. (For the record, U.S. dependency on imported oil was 20 percent in the late 1960s and is expected to be about 66 percent by 2025.) The policy failed miserably, and Nixon (like Bush) resorted to maximizing domestic supply and turning to reliable foreign suppliers at minimal cost (p. 117).

The commodity—or the commodity chain—has been something of a warhorse for social science, providing a powerful optic through which the biography of the commodity can expose not simply the hard-edged political economy of use and exchange value under global capitalism but also the world of the commodity as spectacle, the fetish-world of Black Gold. In his neat and concise treatment of oil, Shelley focuses primarily on the former, the twin foci of what he calls “the global structure of the industry” and “vital political and social issues in the global energy sector” (p. 2)—although he explicitly excludes from his purview the complexities of energy trading and the downstream oil industry, such as refining and petrochemicals. Not surprisingly, in virtue of the ferocious debate surrounding the U.S. empire and the occupation of Iraq, there has been a rash of new popular books treading a similar path (one thinks of Sonia Shah’s Crude: The Story of Oil [Seven Stories Press, 2004] and Matthew Yeoman’s Oil: Anatomy of an Industry [New Press, 2004]), but Shelley’s is among the best of the crop. He is a journalist associated with the Financial Times—has covered energy issues around the Middle East and Africa—but brings none of the pro-business or free-market triumphalism that one might expect from such an affiliation.

Shelley’s story is at once sobering and critical. He opens with the broad contours of the industry structured around the division among wealthy consumers and developing-country producers. Oil accounts for more than 66 percent of the world’s energy supply, and the growth of both gas and oil consumption is skyrocketing. The expected investment in the industry over the next 25 years is an astounding $6 trillion. The heart of the book is four related narratives. The first addresses the oil producers and the so-called resource curse by which wealthy oil producers are almost always unable to “sow the oil” in a way that either stimulates economic growth–diversification or improves standards of living. Oil wealth unleashes stagnation, massive corruption, violence, income inequality, environmental despoliation, and wasted windfalls. (Nigeria, to take one example, has $50 billion in oil revenues unaccounted for since 1970, and, according to the IMF, $350 billion of oil “does not seem to have added to the standard of living at all.”) The second is oil geopolitics, which reveals a dark paradox. Oil has been central especially to U.S. foreign policy (“energy security”), and yet in 2006 that policy is a massive shambles, indeed, a failure (the “special relationship” with Saudi Arabia, after all, produced September 11). Shelley takes readers through a riveting account of the garrisoning of the Middle East, the decline of Saudi Arabia as swing producer, the relations between oil and the war on terror, and the emergence of the key new actors, such as China and India, in the global oil sector. In the third part, he turns to petronationalism, most especially the rise of OPEC, its internal dynamics, the prospect of an OPEC for the gas (and liquefied natural gas) industry, and the struggle to open up (“liberalise”) what remains a strongly nationalized (i.e., regulated) energy sector. Finally, Shelley provides a brief discussion of alternatives (and what is clearly a global system with enormous rigidities) and the efforts (Tony Blair’s Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative and George Soros’s Revenue Watch) to make corporate social responsibility in the oil sector have some teeth.

It all makes for pretty bleak reading. Not so much because oil is running out and people will all be walking to work soon, but rather because the oil sector can stretch out hydrocarbon capitalism—and turbocharged corporate profits—for a very long time.

Australia has been a significant destination country for Greek migration over the last 150 years, especially for the period 1952–74. Since then, flows have dried up, with Greece, now a member of the European Union, itself becoming a destination for migrants, including members of the recent Greek diaspora. Yet, the dispersion of Greeks stretches back several millennia, interlinked with foreign occupation of Greece, complex political conflicts in the Balkans, and rural poverty. Against this background, Anastasios Tamis has written a very readable survey of the Greeks in Australia.

The approach taken is that of a chronicle, moving from Greek migrant “discovery” of Australia through community formation and settlement, social life, cultural accomplishments, the achievement of respectability, and contribution to Australian public life. The tone is not overtly scholarly, and Tamis offers no commentary on the work of others, although the material used draws on a background of demographic, archival, and interview-based research, enlivened by many excellent photographs.

Tamis takes a quiet pride in Greek successes, especially when they are conducive to pan-Hellenism, whereas he evinces a Stoic disappointment when failure or setback ensues. One imagines the book was written mostly for Greeks in Australia to read about their history, rather than for scholars of migration, ethnicity, and diaspora.

At its best, this study provides fascinating insights into major features of Greek Australian life, notably the long and complex struggle between the Orthodox religious hierarchies and local Greek communities. This is described in considerable, possibly excessive, detail. The basic tension here has been between communities that wished to promote their social autonomy, whether or not their members were particularly devout, and a centralized church hierarchy steeped in long traditions of dominance over religious life and broader community activities, including education and Greek language promotion. Tamis notes how the church neglected the material needs of Greek migrants until comparatively late in the 20th century, undermining at least some of its legitimacy and prestige.

The descriptive depth of this study is, however, both a strength and a weakness. It both crowds out analysis and encourages a reliance on taken-for-granted explanatory gestures, for example, reliance on stereotypes of Greek individualism and love of freedom to explain phenomena such as high rates of home ownership and involvement in business. One problem here is a failure to explain how community, family, and individual life are interrelated and to explore the possibility that there are different modes of being Greek rather than one overriding set of core values.

Another problem is a rather muted engagement with debates over migrant ethnicity and, in particular, changes over the generations in the characteristics of ethnicity. Tamis notes that with migration flows drying up, the demographic profile will feature sharply decreasing numbers of Greek born. He also emphasizes shifts in orientation from the first to subsequent generations, with quite high rates of exogamous marriage among the second generation, in some states exceeding 50 percent, and declining participation in community organization. These threads, however, are not connected with scholarly debates over matters such as Herbert Gans’s theory of generational shift to symbolic ethnicity or discussions of hyphenated identity linking two affiliations. Tamis’s notion of “ethnotic,” as opposed to ethnic, affiliation is not spelled out sufficiently here to provide a clear sense of how he views processes of intergenerational changes.

Somewhat greater sociological depth is provided in discussing the changing social-class composition of Greek migrants. Most striking of all, perhaps, is the subtle coverage given to the microhistories of migrants from particular towns, villages, or islands. These groupings are significant both in terms of establishment of migrants’ own organizations and in terms of the formation of inhibition of interregional pan-Hellenic linkages among those from very diverse origins.

In the later chapters, the book moves far closer to a descriptive chronicle of Greek life, listing prominent figures in public life and the dense web of institutions, including clubs and newspapers that constitute the Greek Australian world. This is informative but lacking in any analytical substance. It is only in the final pages that Tamis returns to something approximating an analytical overview, picking up once more the problem of lack of second- and third-generation participation in Greek community life. This, together with Australian policies of multiculturalism that privilege English as the overarching national language, is seen as posing the greatest challenge to the maintenance of distinctive Greek presence in Australia.

Gerald F. Reid’s study of politics in the St. Lawrence Iroquois community of Kahnawà:ke (or Caughnawaga) during the late 19th and early 20th centuries sheds new light on that particular place but falls short of advancing the study of Native American politics in colonial contexts. Kahnawà:ke’s political divisions will be familiar to scholars of other Indian peoples. Reformists or Progressives were largely Christian métis who favored accommodating colonial demands for reduced community autonomy and governmental reforms. Their opponents, the Traditionalists, were mostly Indians (called full-bloods in other settings) who pursued self-determination. Sometimes, a third faction of moderates or political upstarts joined these contests. Reid’s treatment of these factions challenges earlier accounts that characterize Kahnawà:ke as passive and unified in response to outside pressure and without a traditionalist movement until the 1920s. His failure to engage the rich literature on Indian politics, however, undermines his goal of demonstrating that Native factionalism could serve as a dynamic and effective response to colonization.

Reid ably traces the lineages of Kahnawà:ke’s factions with an overview of the community’s early history. Kahnawà:ke was born out of factionalism in the late 17th century, as Catholic Iroquois (mostly Mohawks) left their people in upper New York to create a religious haven near Montreal. Thereafter, Kahnawà:ke formally broke with the Iroquois League and supported the French against the English in the colonial era’s imperial wars, contrary to league neutrality. That said, Reid emphasizes that Kahnawà:ke maintained cultural, kin, and even political ties to other Iroquois communities. Such linkages continued to shape Kahnawà:ke politics for generations to come.

During the late 19th century, Kahnawà:ke faced a series of interrelated challenges widely shared among other Native peoples, although Reid does not address these parallels. In the 1870s, Kahnawà:ke’s Indians squared off against the community’s whites and métis (also called Canadians or half breeds) about the latter’s access to collective resources. Class tensions, not just racial ones, infused this dispute, because Indians were generally poor whereas their opponents were comparatively wealthy. Debate grew so caustic that some members of the Indian Party advocated parceling the reserve, with an eye toward wresting territory from métis hands rather than opening Kahnawà:ke’s land to the market. When Ottawa followed through in the mid-1880s by subdividing the reserve, Kahnawà:ke succeeded partially in expelling Canadians from the community.

Thereafter, Kahnawà:ke politics centered on Canada’s Indian Act of 1876 and Indian Advancement Act of 1884, which sought to replace the traditional council of lifetime clan chiefs with an elective council serving limited terms. As before, class divisions shaped political alignments. Large landowners and entrepreneurs, especially the young, supported government initiatives and thus became known as the Reform Party. Conversely, small landowners and the landless feared that restructuring would exacerbate their vulnerability. After Canada forced its policies on Kahnawà:ke in 1889, some traditionalists began working within the Indian Act system to carve out an autonomous role for the band council. Other traditionalists focused on overturning the legislation altogether. What traditionalists did agree on was reaching out to other Iroquois communities to collectively pursue local sovereignty. The cultivation of Iroquois nationalism in the context of Kahnawà:ke politics began in earnest in the 1890s and continued well into the 20th century. In particular, traditionalists’ opposition to a proposed school taught by nuns inspired them to join a movement led by Chief Thunderwater to create an Iroquois Council of the Tribes. Ultimately, the school opened and the Thunderwater movement collapsed, but these clashes also introduced the Longhouse religion to Kahnawà:ke as the traditionalist way of worship, thereby adding a new layer to local factionalism.

Methodologically and stylistically, this book disappoints. Reid makes excellent use of oral history, having spent ample time at Kahnawà:ke, but his written source base is limited to materials from Canada’s Department of Indian Affairs and newspapers. Certainly, Reid could have uncovered other pertinent material, given that Kahnawà:ke was a literate community under the scrutiny of missionaries and government officials. A broader range of sources, in turn, would have allowed Reid to delve more deeply into cultural meanings that Kahnawà:ke people attributed to their political activities, a critical topic he neglects throughout the study. Kahnawà:ke’s stylistic lapses are even more glaring. Several sections are little more than block quotations (some of them running almost an entire page) strung together by short transitions. Reid’s own voice and, more importantly, his analysis rarely break forth.

In sum, Kahnawà:ke should attract Iroquoianists interested in this specific community. Other Native Americanists, however, will be discouraged by Reid’s narrow lens and poor presentation.

Florencia E. Mallon writes a unique history of modern Chile from the point of view of a Mapuche community—a marginalized indigenous people who sustain a politics of difference in relation to the nation-state. Mallon weaves together oral histories of the Mapuche community, archival research, and the community’s reactions to her writing of their contested history. She explores how history is shaped by the political concerns of authors and subjects—the questions writers ask, the subjects they write about, and the way people remember their own history. She shows how political concerns shaped the questions she asked about the Mapuche community of Nicolás Ailío and residents’ multiple perspectives and political visions about their efforts to survive and reconstitute themselves in the face of Chilean state repression. Mallon draws on these multiple perspectives to highlight how different actors in the community make sense of their past and present actions and shows how her writing of this book intervenes in Mapuche constructions of these diverse historical narratives.

Mallon also analyzes the common threads in these divergent perspectives to provide a broader vision of the community’s collective experience of the most significant moments of Chilean history between 1906 and 2001. She highlights the community’s memories of the Mapuche resettlement at the beginning of the 20th century, the loss of land to private investors promoted by state-backed developmentalism, the emergence of class-based rural activism and agrarian reform in the 1960s and 1970s, the brutal repression of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship, and the resurgence of ethnic-based strategies with the return to civilian rule in the 1990s.

Local Mapuche perspectives about how to narrate the complex combination of resentment, resistance, fear, and solidarity challenge researchers to rethink larger issues in Chilean history. Mallon shows that state policy favored national and foreign colonists as well as entrepreneurs, in general, over the legitimate land rights of the original Mapuche communities. She argues that this policy created Ailío’s expectations about justice and restitution. The residents of Ailío adapted creatively to the state’s conditions of exploitation, reorganizing their systems of kinship and authority to reproduce their identity in a postsettlement context. State policy not only fractured Mapuche territoriality and identity but also attacked the Mapuche’s capacity to preserve their culture and memory. The result was intense poverty and internal debate on how to confront the future. Mallon shows that Ailío community members draw on different interlocking notions of community, depending on the need and context. Sometimes, they organize their strategies of struggle and survival around a class consciousness and identity, at other times, around an ethnic consciousness and identity as a people.

Mallon documents the emergence of contemporary Mapuche identity from a mix of state action and the Mapuche’s own resistant and creative strategies. The ability to innovate and adapt when faced with difficult and uncontrollable situations is a central theme in the history of the community. The talent for adaptation and human connection helps researchers understand how such a demographically small community can have such a large historical presence. The Chilean state establishes structures, institutions, and political discourses within which people must struggle and exist, but Mapuche push the boundaries of these discourses, structures, and institutions, adapting and modifying them to their own struggles and identities. Mapuche peasants adapted and made theirs the postsettlement institutional order instated in 1884, which fragmented traditional lines of authority and forced them into sedentary agriculture. They rebuilt territorial relationships among communities through kinship, exchange of products, and the performance of collective rituals. With the transition to democratic rule, the people of Ailío used the new indigenous law to reorganize their community and acquire new land. They also combined state-generated categories and discourses with their own notions of solidarity and justice. They adapted state-given parameters to their own social, cultural, and family needs. The unity between territorial and cultural revindication, however, did not translate easily into existing political definitions.

Mallon offers an original contribution to the understanding of indigenous politics and memory, negotiations between indigenous people and the state, and the production of history from the margins.

In this book, Penelope Papailias infuses the term history from below with a new meaning. Although it usually means an approach to history from the perspective of “ordinary” people in contrast to history from the perspective of rulers and elites, Papailias takes a further crucial step—and then another. For “history from below” is still mostly authored in established academic contexts. But how about considering a range of marginalized social actors who themselves “do history”? I use this phrase instead of “write history” because Papailias also nudges readers to expand the field by considering a range of unexamined historical practices such as the creation of archives, memoirs, witness accounts, and historical novels. If any anthropological examination of the margin is intellectually productive by forcing encounters with the unspoken presuppositions of the commonsensical, Papailias forces reexamination of the presuppositions of historical production itself by ethnographically considering a range of marginalized historical practices.

Greece provides the social context for the examination of various such historical practices, as a society in which the word archive carries fearful connotations: “Perhaps the only truly ‘successful’ archiving project in Greek history was that undertaken by the security police” (p. 27). It is worth noting that all the key terms Papailias employs have more open meanings in Greek, which reinforce the conceptual openings she strives for. Archive, from the Greek archeio, whose older literal meaning was “residence of the powerful,” etymologically links to arche, which means both “power” and “beginning.” Istoria can mean both “history” and “story.” Mythistorema (the literary novel) is a telling combination of the concepts of “myth” and “history,” and martyras can mean either “witness” or “martyr.”

Yet the four case studies Papailias examines do not just explore the idiosyncrasies of a Greek “experience” (in the process making valuable contributions to the cultural history of modern Greece), but all speak of wider themes. Her discussion of the practices of local historians in a provincial Greek city (Volos) who are interested in their city’s story reveals the tensions between professional academic historians and local amateur ones, as well as those between national and local stories, while pointing to modernity’s shifting narratives of urbanization and westernization. In her second case study, she focuses on the formidable effort to document the experiences of refugees from Asia Minor resulting from the 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey, the first compulsory population exchange in modern history, a tragic policy subsequently replicated in many other frantic efforts to achieve national homogenization. This project “introduced the problematic of witnessing, testimony, and trauma in modern Greek historical studies” (p. 98). In her third case study, Papailias takes the opposite direction by focusing on a controversial novel from a left-wing writer about the Greek civil war, a novel that problematized the nature of testimony and of historical discourse itself. In her last study, she focuses on the memoirs of a Greek migrant to the United States who subsequently returned to Greece. This moving story of hardship and story about movement casts a dark critical shadow on liberal narratives, whether of progress or globalization, and on territorialized stories of belonging.

As Papailias moves from one study to the next, her analysis deepens as she is then able to reconsider each practice from the perspective of the previous ones, in the process refining her arguments and producing a tightly integrated discussion. This is a thoughtful book whose author pushes the boundaries of anthropology and history further as she demonstrates the gains of examining their overlaps.

Using multisited ethnography, Julia Elyachar has produced a masterful description and sophisticated interpretation of the transformation of the social, cultural, and political economy of urban Egypt since the early 1990s. She anchors the study in one of Cairo’s new desert suburbs, Madinet el-Hirafiyeen (Craftsmen Town), where craftsmen have been relocated in efforts to clean up older parts of Cairo, places they had lived and worked in for generations. Joining the craftsmen are lower middle-class university graduates given loans from international donor agencies to set up microenterprises in the suburb. From this rather bleak and desolate base, Elyachar expands the study into Cairo’s air-conditioned offices, training centers, and conference halls of bankers, state officials, international agencies, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).

She shows how workshop owners and workers as well as unemployed university graduates are linked in complex and multilayered ways to donors, social scientists, and officials. Elyachar also highlights the profound misperceptions and lack of knowledge foreign and local upper-class experts have of the local, mainly working-class people targeted for “improvement” through development programs. Especially striking is the cultural bias experts hold in favor of an imaginary free-market economy. The experts remain ignorant or dismissive of the socially constructed, networked, and proven production and exchange system of the craftsmen as well as of the failure of loans to provide a socially viable and economically sustainable alternative for the educated but unemployed youth.

Elyachar begins with a broad-based critique of ideas, concepts, theories, and ideologies of markets and the market. She describes her ethnographic research into the realms of practice and theory, power and value, popular culture and the culture of experts, and the seemingly absurd contradictions of the “centrality of marginality” and “empowerment through indebtedness.” Speaking and reading Arabic, living in the bleak new neighborhood, working and collaborating with an Egyptian male assistant, Elyachar probed politically sensitive issues seemingly with ease among a wide range of relocated working-class men and unemployed, indebted young men. Genderwise, the world she describes and analyzes is a world of men, and she does that with astute perception. Women are present but usually in the background. Although the business of work and making a living occupies center stage, the everyday man’s world of workshop, street, mosque, coffeehouse, marriage, family, drinking, flirting, and so on permeates the book and provides a nuanced view of life and its contradictions in a slice of “real world” Cairo.

Elyachar uses oral histories along with written history to show a century of change and continuity in work, home, and neighborhood in northern areas of Cairo. She deconstructs the notion of an informal sector, elaborates the decline of state power in the economy, and shows people in state institutions in conflict with each other. She documents the rise to prominence of donor agencies and their setting of agendas and discourse to be followed as controlling mechanisms in so-called development. She questions the division bifurcating NGOS from centers of national and international power and control and suggests that links between government and nongovernment are strong. She portrays the power of household and kin, the value of a person’s name, the regulating role of the evil eye, and the importance of empirical knowledge for cases of success in the working world of the craftspeople of urban Egypt. And she documents the failure of monetary loans to change Cairo’s youthful recipients into entrepreneurs with successful enterprises, micro or not.

Elyachar contributes poignant insight into the fields of economic anthropology, political economy, and development studies. She presents a much-needed perspective on society and economy of urban Egypt that accurately reflects the aspirations, achievements, and failures of a generation and more of men and their families from reputable but not wealthy urban backgrounds. She convincingly shows how this bulwark of the society has been promised empowerment through enterprises and new work locations but has been left, dispossessed, with little or nothing to show for their efforts or the money of the donors, much of which leaked to better-off and better-positioned local elites and foreign experts and administrators. Elyachar has written a book that is essential reading for anyone concerned with development, Egypt and the Arab World, and the dangers of ideologically motivated interference by foreign social scientists and other experts in local economies and societies.

The title of Deborah Reed-Danahay’s book is a little misleading. If the title had not already been used by another work, her volume could have been appropriately called Understanding Bourdieu, using the term understanding in the somewhat technical sense that Pierre Bourdieu himself gave to it in an important late work, which Reed-Danahay discusses briefly (pp. 144, 150). Bourdieu sees the relationship between researcher and research participant as, ideally, one of “intellectual love,” in which the concept of “love” represents a relationship of mutuality that, however momentarily, rises above or steps out of the agonistic relationships characteristic of most human life. This relationship provides the ground for true understanding. Reed-Danahay tries to engage with Bourdieu’s work in this spirit and often succeeds by allowing Bourdieu to speak to the reader through her work in interesting ways.

Reed-Danahay describes her approach as one in which she has “worked to uncover the autoethnography in Bourdieu’s work” (p. 152). She sees Bourdieu’s work as a kind of ethnography, one in which the immanent object of inquiry is Bourdieu himself—hence, autoethnography, a form of discourse that she succinctly defines at one point as “commentaries and analysis by informants on their own sociocultural milieu” (p. 130). But, to complicate things further, she describes her own approach to Bourdieu as itself ethnographic. She adopts the role of an ethnographer in relation to his work, taking seriously Bourdieu’s own admonition that “informants produce a discourse for the anthropologist that cannot be taken at face value” (p. 131).

Reed-Danahay’s book is actually two books in one. One, the first half of the volume, is devoted to revealing the autoethnographic dimension of Bourdieu’s work. Thus, for example, in a long chapter on education (ch. 2), she shows how Bourdieu’s own educational experience and trajectory are the ground on which he builds his theory of the work of the educational institution in France. Like an ethnographer, she locates his educational experience and his displaced representation of his own experience (displaced in the sense that Bourdieu only rarely directly alludes to his own experiences in his writing about education) in the wider context of the field of education in France. In another chapter (ch. 3), she directly explores “Bourdieu’s point of view,” focusing, in particular, on the miraculous way in which he made good as a scholarship boy. Yet another chapter (ch. 4) examines the way the resonances between Bourdieu’s early social background in southern France and that of the Kabyle peasants he studied are the basis for his thinking about reflexivity.

Reed-Danahay’s “other” book consists of two long essays that relate Bourdieu’s work to important trends in contemporary anthropology: the anthropology of the emotions (ch. 4) and the place of narrative and the representation of subjectivity in social science (ch. 5). Reed-Danahay quite rightly points out how little Bourdieu’s work has been used in the “emotional turn” in anthropology, which is quite surprising given the visceral nature of his concept of “habitus.” She draws out and highlights the potentially useful connections between this emergent field and Bourdieu’s work. This includes discussion of the place of emotion in fieldwork. The latter, however, I feel could have done with a closer reading of Bourdieu’s later reflections on the place of “love” in research practice and also his reference to the place of “spiritual exercises” in that practice.

Reed-Danahay set herself a subtly difficult task, ethnography of autoethnography, and she has succeeded to a considerable extent. One of my main reservations relates to an occasional tendency to disparagement: she describes Bourdieu, for example, as “somewhat disingenuous” in “disowning any ambitions regarding intellectualism” (p. 167), pointing to his voluminous writings as evidence to the contrary. These sorts of remarks, rare though they are, detract from her account and seem to be unnecessary. But they point to what is, for me, a more puzzling element of her work. Given Reed-Danahay’s interest in autoethnography, her ethnography of Bourdieu lacks an autoethnographic dimension itself. I would have been interested in seeing Reed-Danahay handle this aspect of the order of tasks confronting her a little more successfully. This could have been done, for example, by a little more critical reflexivity about the choices of topics—“emotion,” “subjectivity,” and “narrative”—that she makes the focal points of her engagement with the hidden dimensions of Bourdieu’s work. As Bourdieu himself would remind readers, such choices are not arbitrary but are revelatory of various forms of doxa.

This is an excellent book, and I would recommend it both to those who want to begin an engagement with Bourdieu’s work and to those who would like to be surprised by fresh understandings of that work.

In her book Cañar, documentary photographer Judy Blankenship provides a first-person account of her 2000 return to an Ecuadorian village located between Quito and Cuenca where she and her husband, Michael, had spent time ten years earlier. On initial perusal, one recognizes that this is not an academic-styled ethnography (it lacks index, bibliography, and glossary) but, rather, a sophisticated reflection about an Andean community as seen by a visual artist. Reflecting her background in social science, Blankenship’s interests and methods parallel those of an ethnographer as she participates in the daily lives of the local Cañari people and addresses topics such as kinship and marriage, health beliefs and medical practices, and economics and subsistence. Cañar is a well-written, detailed description of conducting qualitative fieldwork in an underdeveloped community. Even though Blankenship does not present a theoretical position, her observations serve as an excellent source of ethnographic material for a variety of courses and will spur further discussion and analysis in the classroom. Particularly useful are her passages about being in the field, learning to understand a different worldview, and adapting to local ways of life. For Latin American studies, visual anthropology, or even introductory cultural anthropology classes, Cañar will supplement theoretically and regionally focused lectures and provide its readers with significant and relevant details regarding life in an Andean village.

Blankenship’s engaging style whets the ethnographic appetite, and the short, focused chapters make the book easy and enjoyable to read and follow. Blankenship introduces readers to her old friends through historical vignettes and presents her own thoughts as she enters new situations. Each of the 22 chapters considers a facet of her and Michael’s experiences throughout the year. She provides three- and six-month reflections as well as chapters focusing on specific themes, such as birth, marriage, death, healing, fiestas, and so on. Three-quarters of the book covers the first half-year, demonstrating Blankenship’s interest in (re)establishing her relationships with community residents, emphasizing the role trust plays during fieldwork and how her history with the community shapes the success of her return visit. Beautiful, personal, black-and-white photos of various Cañari residents open each chapter, and subsequent pages are illustrated by candid images depicting life in the village.

Latin American scholars, particularly Andeanists, will find Blankenship’s introduction of Quichua cultural characteristics detailed though lacking explanation (e.g., reciprocity, cuisine, health and healing, and compadrazgo), providing an acceptable platform on which to further elaborate and analyze. By contrast, Blankenship’s discussion of urbanization and migration (national and international) establishes a threshold for students to think about the politics of macroeconomics and the ramifications of globalization. Her description of activities, places, and events (e.g., homes, fields, fiestas, and markets) delve below the surface and present meaningful terms and definitions but refrain from much analysis. My only concern is her identification of individuals (apparently without pseudonyms) who have illegally entered the United States to work and then have returned to Ecuador.

Visual researchers, among others, will find the book interesting for methodological and practical reasons. First, the book boasts roughly two black-and-white images per chapter, which seems to be significantly more than similarly sized ethnographies. The first page of each chapter has a 6 cm x 6 cm image, whereas the other images were shot on 35-mm film. Taken apart from the text, these images serve as a photo essay and reflect the author’s profound relationship with the Cañaris. Second, Blankenship does not elaborate much on her use of photography as a documentarian (as opposed to ethnographer), although she employs images to elicit cultural information and teaches locals how to take photographs. Blankenship should have included more discussion regarding her motivation and goals for her documentary at large, as only sporadically do readers get a glimpse of her photographic field methods (e.g., pp. 39, 87) or her philosophy about the nuances of when to make images and when to simply observe. In particular, a short discussion about equipment selection and image management would be appealing to readers interested in including such methods in their work.

Through her thoughtful choice of anecdotes, observations, and photographs, Blankenship weaves a holistic representation of life in Cañar. The book is a testament to the importance of listening and observing in the field, but perhaps most importantly it becomes a commentary on the skill of creating and building rapport with the local people. Only through her relationships does Blankenship obtain an intimate view of life that is usually kept very private and personal, defining herself less as a tourist and more like a documentary photographer (and ethnographer). Overall, Cañar entices the reader to think about the people and their community, recognize the local and global issues that affect their lives, and understand how their worldview is maintained despite the multifaceted influences cascading on them everyday.