During fieldwork, most ethnographers produce far more data than they can use in a single monograph. Such was the case with Pablo Vila, who, in Crossing Borders, Reinforcing Borders (University of Texas Press, 2000), examined how narratives of region, ethnicity, race, and nation organized identity for inhabitants of El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua. In that work, he parted from border theories derived from literary criticism to argue for a more nuanced, heterogeneous experience of identification. His interviews with actors on each side of the international divide revealed a convergence around certain hegemonic beliefs that shaped how people positioned themselves in the social universe of the border.

In this follow-up volume, Vila illustrates how these hegemonic beliefs, or “narrative plots,” provide the underlying logic for how residents of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez understand their religious, gender, and class identities. By focusing on these three axes of experience, which do not always adhere to the prevailing narrative plots along the border, Vila explores more fully how the struggle for identification takes place. Although the author’s own process of identification positions his intellectual heritage in the genealogy of thinkers of border hybridity, his direct interlocutors are theorists of narrative and identification. To that end, Vila’s analysis of interviews with border subjects aims not to illuminate the trajectory of any individual life but, rather, to demonstrate how all actors make sense of their selves through discursive practices.

In terms of religious identity, the narrative plots that structure the stories of Mexicans and Mexican Americans include the belief in a gradient of Roman Catholicism that intensifies as they travel south. Interviewees in both cities respond to a photograph of a well-tended cemetery by placing it on the Mexican side of the border, where they say that Roman Catholic traditions of caring for the dead endure. By contrast, Protestants in both cities reverse the gradient, claiming that northerners are more likely to achieve salvation. For them, the photographs serve as vehicles to narrate their own conversion stories.

Vila provides two chapters on religious identity, one focusing on Catholic and one on Protestant respondents. He then dedicates two chapters each to gender and class, one on each side of the border. On the Mexican side, the prevailing narrative plot about gender depicts Ciudad Juárez as a city of vice. This assumption leads men and women alike to connect bars and prostitution with female employment. Female Mexican migrants view their North American counterparts as dominating their husbands, a role the migrants must reconcile in their narratives with persistent machismo.

Vila explains the relative absence of class discourse on the Mexican side of the border as the result of a hegemonic belief that frames upward economic mobility as a movement from Mexico to the United States. This trope is so entrenched that respondents in Mexico consistently locate photos of El Paso shantytowns in Ciudad Juárez. By contrast, poor Anglos in El Paso correctly identify the locations of all the images because their operative narrative claims that “poverty is everywhere on the border” (p. 218).

If Vila argues that dominant narrative plots select for particular metaphors to construct coherent identities, disembodied interview transcripts provide only partial evidence. His opaque methodology, limited to semistructured group interviews using photographs as a modified Thematic Apperception Test, seems ill equipped to illustrate how such discursive practices anchor individual identities. Without any thick description or participant-observation, Vila cannot link interview responses to lived behavior. All he can claim, which he does repeatedly, is that the process of identity construction along the border is “complex.”

The disconnect between the variables religion, gender, and class compounds the complexity of identity formation. Vila justifies his focus by saying that those three categories came up most frequently in his interviews. No quantitative measurements bolster that, however, and no interview subject appears in all three sections to demonstrate the interplay between different narrative plots. Despite the author’s claim that this volume stands on its own, the data— framed by liberal quoting from secondary literature and not updated since the original 1990s fieldwork—feels spliced together from the cutting-room floor.

Marilyn Strathern collects four working papers that reflect her ongoing involvement in multidisciplinarity projects and collaborations that are reshaping her own ancient university and, by implication, research universities everywhere. She focuses on the Cambridge Genetics Knowledge Park, but her fascination is with “recent moves within and beyond universities to value collaboration as a special source of creativity, to forge alliances between cognate disciplines, to experiment across the boundaries of academic disciplines and the performing arts, and to address diverse publics and non-academic interests” (p. vii).

At stake is an epochal response of state-based political economies to global regimes of competition. In this response, the transformation of science, technology, and knowledge-making institutions has become crucial to the remaking of competitive economies. At the heart of this transformation have been the intensive reflexive self-management of universities in formal terms (the proliferation of “audit” culture, benchmarking, and performance measures) and the penetration of social policy issues of ethics, accountability, and the interests of stakeholders into the heart of doing science. No humanistic field of scholarship or human science, in its agreeable backwaters, is left untouched by these developments.

In her penetrating observations on changes in the university landscape around her, Strathern also has the prospects for social anthropological research in mind. For anthropology, in particular, many pitfalls and many opportunities exist in this redrawing of the boundaries of science and society in the roving, interdisciplinary fervor of the contemporary university becoming more dynamically a core institution of political economy.

These papers are the latest phase in the evolution of a remarkable career that has moved from the era of Melanesian ethnography in its historical climax (but with her sustained bifocal perspective on home as well) to reproductive technologies as the new arena of kinship theory to the emergence of audit culture (issues moving her into the expanded role for certain academics in the United States and Britain as public-interest intellectuals) to the broader horizon of far-reaching change in her own university setting. Anthropology now begins not only at home but also in the quite exotic local entanglements of new forms of knowledge making of globalizing scale.

In making this new generic context of research itself an object of inquiry, Strathern is steady in her own style of doing anthropology. The classic terms of social anthropology—personhood, property, exchange, and comparison—remain legible and foundational throughout Strathern’s projects. Yet her personal success in agilely sustaining this tradition tends to divert attention from challenges to anthropology’s signature methods and forms of reporting. Still, these challenges (and opportunities) do not go unacknowledged by Strathern.

Following is a selection of four quotations from Strathern’s papers that stimulate new thinking about challenges to the function and form of ethnographic inquiry cast amid the current fervor for wide-ranging interdisciplinarity in knowledge making. I follow each quotation by a comment to encourage dialogue.

1. “Social anthropology has one trick up its sleeve: the deliberate attempt to generate more data than the investigator is aware of at the time of collection … a participatory exercise which yields materials for which analytical protocols are often devised after the fact …” (pp. 5–6). This sentiment celebrates the serendipitous virtue of a loose method, perhaps too much, as an aesthetic of its tactical genius. But it does point to the realization that the valuable surplus dimensions of “data” in the processes of fieldwork emerge only later in the way that ethnography is processed in reception, among the community of anthropologists and others who respond to its textual forms. Norms for incorporating reception as an integral part of ethnographic knowledge making seem called for.

2. “[Ethnography allows] one to recover the antecedents of future crises from material not collected for the purpose … to anticipate a future need to know something that cannot be defined in the present” (p. 7). This is an appealing temporal refunctioning of ethnography toward emergent phenomena—ethnography that can document and articulate possibility. Anticipation of future crises, however, is like soothsaying, and the capacity to practice this function within ethnography needs examination.

3. “Anthropologists once regarded it their job to elicit reflexivity from their research subjects, but nowadays they are often presented with a high degree of already cultivated self-awareness and self-consciousness … presented with what one might call indigenous social analysis …” (p. 10). This is a statement of the key challenge to contemporary ethnography. Anthropologists encounter, not Other, but Counterpart, or epistemic partners, requiring a rethinking of all of the available tropes by which we constitute subjects, difference, and collaboration in ethnography as well as the genres of knowledge that might come from it. “Writing Culture” returns in a very different era!

4. “That conflicted subject is one which the dystopic conditions of accountability regimes have themselves created. The realisation of the impossibility of the programmatic ideal … is a realisation of its absurdity. And that means that other apprehensions of social reality are being created at the same time … [so] why not ‘anthropologise our evaluative practices’?” (p. 78). Here, in what she calls “the creativity of the repressed,” Strathern locates where epistemic partnership in the refunctioned collaboration of fieldwork might be found for ethnographers intervening within the new formally reflexive, socially aware regimes of knowledge.

Finally, I comment on the genre of working papers, so skillfully employed by Strathern, and what it suggests about the future of ethnography in the kind of critical inquiry that her project exemplifies. This genre creates an appealing work-in-progress environment that licenses the always-revisable, always-speculative character of ethnographic argument amid the morphing of the forms of knowledge making that are both its milieu and object. Could it be that the authoritative ethnographic text or article no longer has a secure place amid these anticipatory reports, working papers, memoranda, and talks on the moving ground of the contemporary?

In this fascinating book, veteran Andeanist Linda J. Seligmann probes the multifaceted world of Cuzco’s market women. Structuring the book around a mosaic of vignettes, Seligmann plunges into the kinetic frenzy of Cuzco’s permanent and transient markets—stretching from the official indoor arena of San Pedro to the city’s sprawling open-air markets of transient street vendors—to study their internal workings. To probe the cultural logic lying beneath the market’s surface chaos, Seligmann pins much of the early part of the analysis on “spatial relations.” She conceives of space not only as a critical resource and organizing principle of marketplace culture but also as an assemblage of communication codes and meanings that resonate well beyond the marketplace. Through various venues, Seligmann studies the centrality of spatial relations to market women in their daily struggle to gain a livelihood through exchange, as well as in their quest for sociability, knowledge, and security and in their occasional pitched battles against repressive municipal authorities. Readers see, for example, how space intervenes in the structuring of market power relations between the market’s wealthiest wholesale “tomato queens” and butchers, on one extreme, and the peasant ambulantes poised at the precarious spatial–economic edges of the market, on the other. In probing the cultural logic of market space and exchange, the author also traces the long market chain of intermediaries in both the formal and informal sectors, which together formed the local economy’s circulatory system. In this way, Seligmann slowly peels back the surface chaos of the marketplace to reveal the hidden tensions and arteries governing spatial, exchange, and sociability relations that make it work.

Two other aspects of this book deserve mention. First, the book is ample in scope. Early on, Seligmann recognizes the need to engage in “multisited” research using a multiplicity of analytic lenses. Indeed, this book exceeds conventional boundaries of local ethnography by using market relations as a prism to view issues of market women’s participation in politics and popular religiosity, as well as to probe their notions of gendered, racial, and class identities and differences. Especially effective is Seligmann’s discussion of “race recipes,” in which she captures women’s everyday knowledge of the market’s social hierarchy, the varied status markers (dress, territory, education, and wealth) that map the social terrain, and the “appropriate behaviors” correlated to specific racial categories. All this comes across in vivid, sassy, and sometimes hilarious conversations with women throughout the marketplace. Indeed, Linda Seligmann soon found herself cast as a foil (as the blue-eyed gringa with the “pretty” name) in humorous teasing and racy exchanges, which encoded (and challenged) a deeper racial–gendered order of things. Such improvisational street exchange makes for a marvelous dialogic entry into the terrain of racial identities, affinities, and animosities among Cuzco’s vendors and traders.

The book’s other notable feature is its effort to lard each chapter with the voices, knowledge, and emotions of market women. This achievement is testament to the author’s decades of deep and engaged field work. With characteristic openness, Seligmann relates in her introduction that she began working in the Andes at age 18 by “riding in the back of trucks several layers deep with people and their produce, saturated in the early-morning aroma of 80 proof pure grain alcohol, coca leaves, and unwashed wool” (p. 4). There, Seligmann gradually learned “some important survival rules … which I have never forgotten” (p. 4). Her teachers of truck-riding etiquette and survival were the women traders who rode the circuits of overland trade and straddled the city and countryside. “Their strength and their ability to defy existing ideals and categories on those uncomfortable truck rides attracted me, and this book constitutes my effort to set out to try to understand their world” (p. 5). Seligmann reconstructs this world from the varied, often dissonant, voices of market women. Sensitive to the chasm that separated their lives from hers, Seligmann nonetheless managed to achieve an extraordinary sense of trust, friendship, and solidarity among many of the women she came to know. Readers also can see the fragility of the fieldworker’s status and credibility when local political circumstances turned tense and confrontational, suddenly thrusting the researcher into the center of political action. Indeed, the book’s subtext is the story of the relationship that unfolded between the researcher and her subjects. Seligmann not only offers an incisive analysis of Cuzco’s market culture but she also demonstrates the power of ethnographic fieldwork that is engaged, participatory, reflexive, and empathetic.

Author Garbi Schmidt is a Danish woman “trained in the history of religions and Islamic studies and acquainted with anthropology and sociology” (p. 13, emphasis added). Anthropology and sociology are established disciplines with methodology and theory. Scholars trained in area, women’s, religious, or Islamic studies receive a very different kind of training that does not qualify them to do anthropology or sociology. Being acquainted with the latter two is a meaningless statement.

After Schmidt visited New York, her interest shifted from researching “the relationship between Muslims and Manicheans ... in eighth-century Baghdad ... [to] refocus on Muslims living in the United States today” (p. 13). She discovered “Islam in America … a topic that few researchers had yet investigated" (p. 13) and decided to go to Chicago to study Muslims. Her observation about the dearth of research on Islamic America is not accurate and is contradicted in her notes, which reference many works on Muslims in the United States.

The study stresses Muslim American schools and universities and the national Muslim Student Association (MSA), which has active chapters at many university campuses in the United States. This relative emphasis on Muslim American education is worthwhile because it fills a real gap, as opposed to the one the author identified. A systematic look at education for Muslims is relatively neglected in scholarship on Muslim Americans.

The book has six chapters: Introduction, The History of Muslims in Chicago: An Overview; Muslim Children in Chicago; Muslim Colleges and Students' Associations; Understanding Islam; Islamic Identities; and Islamic Authority among Adults and Muslims in America. The front book cover has a collage of Chicago images of high-rises with two highlighted photos: one of Muslim men and women praying behind a male imam on what seems to be a public lawn and the other of what seems to be a mosque with a minaret. No mention of authorship or basis of selection is made for these visual images.. Neither are readers given context for them. Visual anthropology has been painstakingly working on raising the level of awareness and education about the responsibility of images and how they are employed in books and print materials. Images send messages often more powerful than words but cannot explain themselves except in art.

The book mentions two factors affecting the research: Schmidt’s Danishness, by which she means she is “sharing foreignness with immigrant Muslims,” and her gender, which seems to account for (or perhaps excuse) her greater focus on women than men. She begins her “story” with “it is time to enter the American Medina, and encounter the many faces and voices of Muslims in Chicago” (p. 15). Story is the term Schmidt uses to describe her descriptive account. She describes certain aspects of Muslim life in Chicago. She borrows the Arabic notion of “medina,” which refers to a traditional (in contrast with modern) town in the Muslim urban landscape and which, as Schmidt points out, has religious historical significance as it is what the town of Yathrib in Arabia came to be called on the establishment by the Prophet Muhammad of the Islamic community in the seventh century. This storytelling device is consistent with her romantic application of the notion of Medina to Islamic Chicago.

Yet, this is an interesting descriptive account with many original observations by someone who seems to have put much personal effort in trying to understand Muslims on their own terms and whose participation allows readers entry into their lives. The author gives remarkable details, recording what many would consider mundane, even dry, events, such as Islamic classroom behaviors and encounters between teacher and student. Many examples show tensions between American-raised Muslim youth who reject “Old World” forms of teaching and even interpretations. Herein lies the value of the book—a detailed descriptive record of aspects of Sunni Muslim life in Chicago. In this account readers can see how some very ordinary situations become special, how daily behaviors reveal issues of wide relevance to problems that are on the minds of Muslims and non-Muslims today in the United States. One striking example is the observation that “science [is] an argument for Islam” (p. 127) and that “science, point by point, proved the Qur’an to be right” (p. 127). This significant point describes a side of Muslims that is in stark contrast with fundamentalist, evangelist U.S. Christians who are in direct collusion with science, something that is not shared with Christians in most of the industrialized world.

With so much research already directed toward “the global assembly line,” what could another book on Mexico’s maquilas say that would yield new insights into this global form of production that has transformed many female workers in Asia and Latin America into the relatively new, highly exploited labor force of today’s multinationals? Leslie Salzinger’s book focuses almost exclusively on managerial control and shop-floor practices, “making workers” (as the subtitle states). She criticizes previous analyses for stopping at the shop-floor gate and essentializing women into the icon of the docile and dexterous workers made popular through Annette Fuentes and Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Women in the Global Factory (Institute for New Communications, 1983).

In her careful ethnographic analysis of four plants located in or near Ciudad Juárez, Salzinger makes a compelling case for the importance of managerial control and shop-floor practices. Control ranges from patriarchal, repressive shop-floor strategies that “feminize” and antagonize a largely male labor force to creative techniques for “masculinizing” a mixed labor force, in which experience and skill are valued and paying a family wage is accepted as the norm. Workers respond very differently, some with resistance (often taken out by male workers on their female counterparts), others with the docility expected of this unseasoned and highly vulnerable labor force. I have difficulty with Salzinger’s insistence that workers’ different responses are entirely the product of managerial initiatives. My own research on export processing in the Caribbean (The Myth of the Male Breadwinner: Women and Industrialization in the Caribbean, Westview Press, 1995) points to other factors, particularly the different demographics of each plant. Two of the Juárez plants employ both men and women, whereas the other two are predominantly female. Most workers are predominantly young, but almost no data exist on these workers’ families, whether they are single, married, or heads of household, their ages and educational levels, and other factors that I have found to be important in shaping workers’ attitudes.

The book’s principal value lies in its analysis of the shift toward male workers in maquila production, not only its effects on female workers, but also on managers and on the community at large. Male employment has risen to 45 percent of the Mexican maquila labor force. Salzinger explains this shift primarily in terms of the tight labor market brought on by the boom in maquila production after several dramatic peso devaluations in 1982 and thereafter. This shift happened not only in Mexico but also in the Dominican Republic (where I worked) and globally as maquila production tried to upgrade away from light garment production to more diverse sectors, such as auto parts or trouser production, which employ more men. Not only product diversification but also deterioration of male employment induces young men, who initially disdained maquila work, to redefine certain sectors as appropriate for men.

Another factor in the increased hiring of men may be the anxiety provoked in the local community by the initial change from a male labor force (as in the earlier Mexican Bracero program) to female workers in maquilas. Salzinger discusses how this change is thought to have provoked the growth of crime, delinquency, and single motherhood along the border. It was also devastating to male workers, who were thus robbed of the basis of male hegemony. Animosity toward the young, assertive women working in Mexican maquilas has reached the point at which it may be considered one of the factors behind the mass murders of maquila women in Juárez, a point Salzinger does not mention.

By focusing on the shop floor, Salzinger leaves out much of the political economy of the border region and the way in which it shaped the drive for cheap labor. After male labor had been sufficiently cheapened by the lack of suitable alternatives, men could again be considered for maquila employment. Her analysis also glosses over the low wages, long hours, and brutal discipline maquila workers face, perhaps because she thinks these have been overemphasized in previous analyses. But in looking only at managerial strategies for worker control, she robs the workers of agency, which they clearly have not lost.

Salzinger’s book should be read by those interested in maquila production, because of her keen analysis of shop-floor practices and managerial strategies, but I wish she had given readers a fuller picture of the lives of female and male workers along the border.

Alternative genders are not rigid categories but multiple, changing identities shaped by a variety of sexual and social forces. Gayatri Reddy’s thoroughgoing ethnography of hijras—the “third sex”—in Hyderabad, India, furthers Lawrence Cohen’s critique of essentialized third-sex and gender categories and his location of the body along a multiplicity of differences. Reddy shows that hijras’ identities and social relations are inscribed and configured through their bodies and their fictive kinship instead of solely through their use of receptive, rather than penetrating, sexual positions. She reframes hijra identity and embodied practice in terms of achieving respect and authenticity, and she highlights the complex relationships that exist between the sexual, moral, local, and global economies.

Hijras locate themselves outside the gender binary frame of reference and focus on their gender liminality. They emasculate themselves by excising their testicles and penises to gain fertility powers, which they bestow on newlyweds and children. They gain identity, respect, and authenticity as long-haired, asexual ritual intermediaries who wear saris, pluck their facial hair, and hold fictive kinship ties with other hijras. Hijras who do not renounce their sexual desires for receptive sexual roles, who have male “husbands,” or who engage in sex work with men are stigmatized. The tension between asceticism and eroticism is always present in hijras’ lives.

Reddy explains the ambivalent readings of contemporary hijras in terms of their diverse roles throughout history. In ancient times, they were political and religious actors who had access to all spatial domains and segments of the population. Under colonialism, hijras became representatives of Indian femininity, sexually and politically dominated by the British. Ghandi questioned the homology of sexual and political dominance by proposing a dissident androgyny in which sexual renunciation would become a powerful moral force and the basis for Indian authenticity, respect, and identity. Contemporary hijras draw on this image, highlighting their identity as emasculated persons who cannot reproduce to present themselves as “ideal citizens of the modern nation-state.” By recasting themselves as “the embodiment of respect and morality,” they make the body “central to constructions of gender, authenticity, and modernity” (p. 223).

At the same time, hijras assert their social marginality by identifying as Muslim, making a “subaltern statement about religion, identity and citizenship. It is Hijras’ supralocality, their ability to cross borders of gender, religion and the nation, that allow their Muslim positionality” (p. 120). As metasignifiers of potential for transnational and transcultural citizenship, hijras hold the only transcendental position in a world of categorical absolutes. By exposing their mutilated genitals to others, hijras mock male powers and the procreative imperative, invert the powers in their favor, and gain respect.

Hijras’ corporeal understanding of a socially constituted sexuality is rooted in a multiplicity of differences. The body is the medium through which hijras enact individuality, and respect is the currency through which they construct it. The idiom of respect is a primary marker of difference between hijras and other kotis—effeminate men who desire receptive same-sex intercourse. Reddy shows that these morally evaluated modes of differentiation vary along the axes of genital excision, kinship, class, clothing, and religion. Hijras gain authenticity through their essential asexuality, symbolized by their absence of genitals and use of saris, in opposition to kada-catla kotis, effeminate men who use male clothing, have sex with other men, and are associated with sexual excess and inauthenticity, and to zenanas, male dancers who adopt women’s clothing for performances but do not emasculate themselves and therefore have no access to divine powers. Whereas kada-catla kotis and zenanas can be married to women and have children, hijras cannot.

These categories based on gendered practices coexist and intersect with the category “gay,” based on choice of sexual partner. The “different sexual classificatory grids in India and their varying emphases on modernity illustrate fluid constructions of sexual subjectivity in the region” (p. 221). Reddy challenges Michel Foucault’s notion of a modern homosexual persona and the idea of a coherent, universal gay identity. She demonstrates that colonial relations and transnational flows of knowledge, commodities, and narratives affect the cultural production of homosexual identities. Hijras and kotis reflect the complex, negotiated nature of contemporary sexual identity, which calls into question notions of sexuality, culture, and modernity.

Suzanne Oakdale has written an insightful and compelling study of ritualized autobiographic performance among the Kayabi Indians of central Brazil. Her topic—the narration of personal history, and narration as history–also opens up space for a welcome historical ethnography of the Kayabi.

Oakdale focuses her primary attention on two forms of ritualized narration: maraca cures held by senior shamans and jawosi songs to help end mourning. In each, the senior men who perform the narratives use dialogic speech forms that incorporate autobiographical text, giving both of these the form of ritualized autobiography and autobiographical rituals. Despite having senior male leaders, both maraka cures and jawosi songs are villagewide, collective rituals that alter the collective state of being in the community. Much of Oakdale’s interesting analysis concentrates on the ways in which the dialectic movement between a narrating subject and the community transacts the personal autobiography of the leader, negotiates political alignments, and offers models of and for proper personhood to community members. Each genre of narrative performance posits a different relationship among the living and the dead to accomplish different social and psychological ends. Maraka identify the current population with past generations to affect cures and promote health; jawosi separate the living and the dead to bring an end to the social isolation of mourning.

Oakdale draws on Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s influential notion of “perspectivism,” the idea common among indigenous Amazonian peoples that different beings have different and unique perspectives or views of the same things (e.g., what people see as manioc beer, peccaries might see as blood) and that individuals represent themselves through the perspectives of others. In Kayabi autobiographical ritual, for example, this perspectivism takes several forms, including the use of quoted speech in which the narrator recites what others have said about him. As Oakdale notes, this produces a kind of “dividual”: Years of association with multiple others yield an orchestration of voices rather than a single narrative line in ritual. Her analysis is similarly a fine orchestration of frameworks and perspectives that produce a satisfyingly coherent picture of these interesting rituals.

Oakdale’s focus on these narrative forms also opens a broader field for her to explore a wide range of aspects of Kayabi culture and social life. Illness and its cure, and death, are critical life events that enroll local and regional political forces, notions of the body and spirit, maturation, gender, and relations with non-Kayabi. Oakdale folds all of these issues into her analysis with a seamless touch, as she radiates out from single songs or narrations to the broader issues that inform them for the narrator and his listeners. Oakdale is also sensitive to the fact that the Kayabi, like other indigenous Amazonian societies, are a kind of refugee community, the small remnants of once-vast populations, and she uses this fact to explore how the multiple contacts Kayabi have with other local and regional populations, indigenous and nonindigenous, shape the contemporary Kayabi sense of themselves and their history.

For many years the Kayabi have been well-known but understudied, one of several groups descendant from the famous Tupinamba Indians, who lived on the coast of Brazil in the 15th century. Oakdale’s research and especially this outstanding new book provide welcome access to the ethnography of this interesting community.

This book will probably be remembered for author Cathy Small’s failed attempt to pass as “Rebekah Nathan,” or, as she put it, “to protect the students” she had spent a year with (“Understanding Student Culture,” Anthropology News, 1995, 46[7]:17). For reasons that initially sound plausible, Small decided to conduct her study of college student life as a student, applying to the university where she is a faculty member, paying tuition, taking courses, and living in a dorm. She played the student role for a year, and the experience was successful—as far as she is concerned. As the title of the book states, she “became” a student. From her own evidence, I am not sure she succeeded. She mentions at least twice that students kept identifying her as a “mom.” She also states that she remained a “partial observer owing to my age”. This may not be surprising, but it opens the question of whether the whole attempt to pass was worth it, methodologically and theoretically, if not ethically.

Given its limitations as anthropology, the book will probably be most useful in discussions of anthropological ethics. The research was approved by the university’s institutional review board (IRB)—so it met legal requirements. Small ends the book with an “afterword on ethics and ethnography.” There, she gives a brief account of issues not raised in the IRB, her decision to go beyond IRB strictures, and summaries of cases in which she “disclosed her identity.” By writing in this way, Small acknowledges that she never achieved a student identity and that the revelation of her “secret” always produced difficulties. She quotes a bona fide student who told her that Small had “fooled” her by not telling her she was a faculty member. This is the tone of the reaction to the full public revelation. Still, no evidence so far suggests that anyone was hurt by Small’s impersonation (although the case is not closed). To that extent, at least, my sense is that her decision was ethical.

But was it worth it anthropologically? Small is convinced that what she wanted to learn could only be learned through deception. But she does not actually develop why she felt this to be so. Her justifications are phrased in terms of “what I learned personally,” not in terms of what the anthropological community might learn. She compares what she knew before the experience to what she learned as a result. She wrote the book first for herself, and, secondarily, for college professors as teachers (rather than researchers). Her research questions were variations on “Why don’t students do what professionals expect them to do?” She was looking for explanation of absences. Like generations of anthropologists, she went looking for a lack in her natives. She returned to tell academia: There are good reasons for the lack; it has something to do with the natives’ “culture”; “understanding this culture” would make it easier for those in authority to deal with the natives.

Generations of anthropologists have criticized this discursive process, but Small ignores this criticism. Even if one stays within her own problematics, secrecy does not add to understanding and may limit it: She repeatedly mentions that many of her observations cannot be reported precisely because those whom she observed were not aware she was conducting research. This may account for, among other matters, a lack of reports on relationships among the students—perhaps because Small did not go so far as actually to be the kind of friend in whom one confides. To flesh out her reports, she refers to various anthropological studies of college students, particularly Michael Moffatt’s book Coming of Age in New Jersey: College and American Culture (Rutgers University Press, 1989). Moffatt did attempt to pass as a student, but only briefly. He also lived in a dorm, but all there knew he was a faculty member. In the end, he gives more details about college life than Small does and his remains the work of reference. Small’s chapter on “Community and Diversity” is original. It gives a sense of the hegemonic ideologies students sometimes resist. The chapter on “time management” may be useful to college professionals. But the book as a whole does not provide much new information.

Anthropologically, the work may be useful for discussions of what it does not face, that is, the possibility of “passing” as a theoretical concern. What are the mechanisms for passing? What can one learn about social processes when someone does pass? I look to follow-up articles in which Small–Nathan tells what exactly she did: What was she asked? What convinced students that she was a bona fide student? What is a bona fide student, professor, woman of a certain age, or friend? Answering these questions might reveal more about students, the United States, and anthropology.

Patiently, from 1993 to 2003, Kristy Nabhan-Warren listened, learned, and participated as a deeply sympathetic outsider in the devotions and public activities that developed around a busy professional woman, Estela Ruiz, and her home and family in South Phoenix after Estela claimed to have received a visit from the Virgin Mary in 1989 and began to share the Virgin’s frequent messages with a mostly Mexican American audience. The author was not present at the beginning of the movement—how it all began is not perfectly clear—but she describes in rewarding detail the role of Estela’s family in what has come of the Blessed Mary’s messages of love, hope, occasional displeasure, and promise of healing. She traces changes that point toward less charisma and greater institutionalization, some decline in devotional fervor locally, and more interest from abroad.

This shrine and popular devotion are not offshoots of liberation theology or an exalted millennialism that rejects the world of the living. Estela and her family are conservative Catholics, respectful of church authority and very much in the world, but they found inspiration in a direct, personal experience of the divine. The charismatic, apparitionist side of the story seems inspired by older revivalist traditions in Mexican Catholicism and the examples of Marian apparitions and messages at Medjugorje and Lourdes, with a dash of Guadalupanismo. But this is Phoenix in the 1990s, and the shrine-making and public activities reflect local countercurrents and concerns in striking ways. The movement focuses on faith and obligation here, now, and for eternity, blending older Baroque practices with the vocabulary and activism of evangelical Protestantism, an ecumenical message, a vision of Mary as more than sweet and passive, community improvement programs, female empowerment, Montessori schooling, and even partial sponsorship by the National Football League.

This is a respectful, sensitive, clearly written book in which the author seeks to resolve the alien ethnographer’s dilemma by “writing like a relative.” The reader’s reward is a rich sense of the circumstances and struggles of at least some Mexican Americans in South Phoenix to make a good life in the contemporary United States that balances faith and family with education, material strivings, professional growth, discrimination, and personal suffering in ways that begin to bridge the conceptual divide between official and popular religion. Whether the author reaches her grander goals of getting at the heart of lived religion and “understanding the power of place, the process of pilgrimage, and how personal transformations are named by the devout” (p. 181) is less certain. Little is mentioned about pilgrimage, place, the “cadres” of Mary’s Ministries , and the remote but watchful interest of the church hierarchy. And thin conceptualizing about syncretism, fusion, and transculturation tends to confuse more than clarify the living of religion in the neighborhood. No doubt “the shrine remains a place of hope and healing in the religious imagination of the pilgrims who go there” (p. 213), but the book has little to say about those who go or have gone. And how important to the recent changes (especially the waning devotional fervor at the shrine) are the end of Mary’s messages to Estela in 1998 and the death of Reyes, Estela’s husband, in 2003? Perhaps the outgoing, deeply devout Reyes was more important to the unfolding of the whole story than the view of him as model husband, father, and devotee. In the end, readers learn mainly about Estela’s immediate relatives and the activities of a family ministry and enterprise that brought them closer together. That, in itself, is well worth knowing and can serve as a touchstone to much more.

Walter E. Little paints a complex and nuanced portrait of Maya identity formation in Mayas in the Marketplace. He does so, however, not by following the well-established ethnographic tradition of studying indigenous people close-up, in their home communities. Rather, he does so by following their trajectories in a wider social space in which the local meets the global. These are marketplaces in addition to those places where the lives of Guatemalan típica (or handicrafts) vendors intersect with a variety of other social spaces and actors (including their home communities and international tourists). Of course, market or vendor studies are not without precedent in the ethnographic literature, and Little’s study makes its own distinctive contribution as it works from such precedents and responds to ongoing debates. Using a straightforward, conversational (at times, almost alarmingly casual) style that belies the complexity of his overall argument, Little deftly builds a multilayered composite sketch of the highly particularistic ways that Maya vendors use various strategies for making and deploying multiple identities.

The result will be frustrating for those who seek a space outside the politics of identity from which to think through the local, national, and global economic, political, and cultural aspects of Maya identity formation. According to Little, even without firm footing from which to dissect the intricacies of Maya identity, the answer is, “Maya all the way down” (p. 269). Those more comfortable with the idea that identity formation is an ongoing process, and with the notion that transnational social space (the global) is built up from the everyday practices of people going about their everyday lives, will find much to recommend in this ethnography.

Little finds his theoretical footing in a convincing coupling of an interactionist approach to marketplace analysis and the practice theory of Michel de Certeau. Meanwhile, the ethnographic narrative he crafts moves through the social spaces articulated through the identity-making practices of Maya típica vendors. This space and the practices that give it shape are peeled away and examined chapter by chapter. He begins this process by explaining that to tour the Ruta Maya (the much-traveled, Maya-focused touristic sites, also sometimes called the “Mundo Maya”, stretching from Mexico south to El Salvador) is to visit a living history museum where Mayaness is exhibited- often by the Maya (and especially Maya women) themselves. Mayas live and work in this performative space, a “touristic borderzone,” according to Little, where they craft gendered identities (and many vendors are women), emphasizing different aspects of their identities depending on the circumstance—now típica vendors are women, now indios, now Maya women, now Kaqchikel speakers, and so on.

Little builds this complex composite sketch of típica vendors as his narrative follows them through the streets and formal marketplaces of Antigua as well as to their homes in the western Guatemalan highland communities of Santa Antonio Aguas Calientes and Santa Catarina Palopó- which have also become places where típica is sold. Rather than treat these various locales as distinct social spaces, however, Little’s narrative follows distinct personalities and themes (such as gendered patterns of participation in household típica businesses or state-sponsored cultural patrimony programs or himself) to link them as part of his larger trans-locale touristic borderzone space.

Some of the approaches Little takes as he peels away his multilayered analysis of the social spaces in which Maya típica vendors make their identities are more successful than others. For example, his use of Michel Foucault’s notion of “heterotopia” does not seem to move his analysis forward in any profound way. And his use of de Certeau’s distinction between tactic and strategy, although intriguing as a means of thinking through the role of power in shaping Maya identity-making practices in different contexts (home, típica marketplace, and street), might have been more fully developed throughout the entire ethnography. Overall, however, Little convincingly and deftly builds his multisited account of the strategic (and frequently tactical) ways that Guatemalan típica vendors deploy multiple identities in a very complex social space. Moreover, the straightforward, accessible narrative style will have broad appeal to a diverse audience, making it an ideal choice for undergraduate courses and, in particular, for an introductory course (or section of a course) examining the global lives of the world’s indigenous peoples.

Does England exist and, if so, in what sense? That may seem like a strange question, given the nation’s ubiquity and age. And yet something is fundamentally problematic about England. It may be the largest country in the United Kingdom (of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, to give the state its full Sunday title) with 85 percent of the state’s population, dwarfing its Scottish, Irish, and Welsh neighbors, but one might argue that England is everywhere and yet nowhere. It is the territory that, by and large, dares not speak its name. Often, it was a synonym for the United Kingdom or Britain (probably less so today); it gave its name to the world language of English; and it rarely appears explicitly in national naming conventions (e.g., the National Trust and the Football Association). One wagers that if this journal were published in England it would simply be called The Ethnologist

Does this matter? In large part this APPARENT disinterest in self-reference is a reflection of implicit power. Just as white people are never referred to as an “ethnic minority,” or men never think of themselves as a gender, being English is taken for granted as a powerful given. The Scots, Irish, and Welsh who also inhabit these islands juxtapose their national identities vis-à-vis their powerful neighbor by explicit naming. If they wish to assert their non-Englishness, they have little option.

In the last decade or so, there has been a remarkable change in these conventions. Krishan Kumar’s excellent book is one expression of the problematizing of England and the English. It is now much more common to find debates about “being English,” and in what senses, as well as assertions of Englishness vis-à-vis Britishness. English, rather than British, flags are flown at sporting events. (Many Americans would be hard put to know the difference, making the point about English hegemony hitherto.) In the last few years, a growing industry of books on Englishness and its origins has developed. Kumar dismisses the view that Englishness dates from the 13th century (wars), the 16th century (religion), and locates the “moment of Englishness” at the end of the 19th century, when English cultural expressions (folk songs, literature, and pastoralism) bubbled to the surface. Why then? He argues that, despite seeming to be at the apex of imperial power, celebrations of supremacy were indicators of imminent decline: Hegel’s famous owl of Minerva. To some, this might seem like an odd argument. After all, was it not by then a “British” Empire, rather than an English one, that was entering decline? Indeed it was, but that is Kumar’s key point. England had two empires: first, an internal one to the so-called British Isles, dating from late 12th-century conquests of Wales and Ireland and incorporation of Scotland in the 1707 Treaty of Union; and second, the late 18th-century imperial British one. The implicit and ambiguous nature of “England” was deliberately so, because it reinforced hegemony by understating its power. Kumar observes, “Ruling the roost, they [the English] felt it impolitic to crow” (p. 187). In his view, England had a “missionary,” an imperial, identity to incorporate by means of obfuscation and fuzzy frontiers.

Kumar argues that the beginning of the end for this English strategy came in the late 19th century with the rising challenges to global power, leading to soul-searching for the essence of England (as opposed to Britain), just at the moment when nations were being uncovered or invented throughout Europe. When the empire finally ended, with a whimper, not a bang, in the mid-20th century, he observes, “The British, having acquired the empire, in a fit of absence of mind, seemed to have given it up with equal insouciance (p. 194).”

England now stands at the cusp of the 21st century puzzling out what it is. New political–constitutional changes have taken place. British entry into the European Union in the 1970s and a devolved parliament for Scotland and a national assembly for Wales in the 1990s have seemingly diminished Britain as a powerful state and, with it, English hegemony. This is also the moment, 100 years from the late 19th century one, when talking for England becomes more pressing and urgent. It is to Kumar’s great credit that he has provided exquisite analyses of both.

Marie Theresa Hernández discusses various stories told to her in villages, towns, and cities of the state of Nuevo León in northern Mexico during fieldwork in the 1990s. “I believe the stories that are told among the nuevoleneses [people of Nuevo León] are a way of saying ‘This is our history, this is who we are, regardless of what the government and the church decree’… The stories are repressed, erased, put aside, yet they continuously erupt” (p. 171). She begins with stories about the supposed barbarity of nuevoleneses, noting that “at times [this] is an embarrassment and at other times is touted as an asset” (p. 183). People also say that the region was settled by Jewish conversos from Spain, although this is denied in official history. By contrast, she notes the lack of stories, whether official or nonofficial, about the previous indigenous inhabitants of the region. Hernández ends by looking at stories that are not just hidden but also are about hiding—tales of buried treasure, bodies buried in the walls of houses and under shopping malls, and so on. She argues that all these stories are “ingredients still active in a place that has moved swiftly into modernity, yet has chosen not to occlude all of its past life … allowing the nuevoleneses to move between the alternating identities and moments that characterize their world” (p. 4). This leads her to conclude that “Delirio is located within the eye of the norteño who is constantly facing a de-centering and de-territorialization resulting from the convoluted and opaque nature of the region’s written, oral, and occulted history” (p. 260).

Hernández presents much interesting material in an engaging way. She discusses, for example, the months she spent working with Horacio Alvarado, the presenter of a well-known television program on the traditions of Nuevo León, as well as her friendship with the artist and collector Aquiles Sepúlveda, who claimed Jewish descent and encouraged her to take the Jewish stories seriously. She describes her experience in the state capital, Monterrey, of taking diploma classes in regional history, observing that when she and other students asked about the stories of Jewish settlement, the teachers would simply respond that there was no documentary evidence. Some of her arguments are also interesting. For example, she suggests that the epithet barbarian was formerly used for the indigenous inhabitants but has now lost that association and is used for and by nuevoleneses in general. Her discussion of the secrecy of all these stories, drawing on Michael Taussig’s notion of the “public secret,” is suggestive, too.

That said, the author is often coy about stating her arguments, and when she does state them, I found them sometimes simplistic, despite her compulsive references to theory, mostly citing Taussig and Michel de Certeau. She argues, for example, that the 16th-century trial of Luis de Carvajal, the first governor of Nuevo León, for practicing Judaism, was “closely related to the ‘secret Jewish stories’ often told in present-day Nuevo León” (p. 171). She continues that “this secrecy is intensified by the contradiction of history and remaining ambiguity regarding the current-day presence of Jews in the world,” but she gives less attention to this latter contradiction and ambiguity than to the 16th-century events surrounding the trial (p. 171). She also cites several people, such as Alvarado and Sepúlveda, who claim to identify remnants of Jewish practices in the region. Rather than presenting and seemingly backing their claims of a Jewish legacy, she might have paid more attention to what these stories did for people in the various ethnographic contexts that she describes.

In this respect, Hernández might have benefited from a closer look at Mexican anthropology, not just for ethnographic context but also for its sophisticated approach to region. Region in Mexican anthropology is the outcome of a process through which particular groups struggle to corner and control other groups, often in the face of state power. Representations are caught up in this struggle, setting the terms of relations among groups, but they are not the whole story. This approach could have offset her poststructuralist readings, which I felt also served to distance Nuevo León from Houston, where she lived and studied. The Mexican intellectual José Vasconcelos wrote in 1937 that northern Mexicans were barbarous; Hernández seems to respond that they are merely decentered.