In Intimate Economies Ara Wilson charts the complexities and nuances of contemporary Thai citizens’ encounters with capitalist modernity. Specifically, Wilson offers an original and timely analysis of the class, gendered, and sexualized dynamics that both shape and are themselves transformed through commodity exchange and capitalist market forms in urban Thai society. By examining the links between everyday arenas of market exchange and consumption and the ongoing constitution of gender and sexual as well as ethnic and class identities, Wilson presents a compelling ethnography of global capitalism and a nuanced portrait of modern urban citizenship in Thailand.

Based on multisited field research in the 1990s, Intimate Economies highlights five distinct “capitalist venues” that characterize the modern (some would say “hypermodern”) landscape of Bangkok, Thailand’s primate capital city. Each one of the five main chapters takes up a different location: a department store, go-go bars, a shopping mall, a high-tech corporate media workplace, and direct sales networks. Framed by a nicely synthetic introduction and a brief conclusion, the five ethnographic case studies examine both how capitalist modernity has entered into “the intimate realms of daily life” (p. 8) in Thailand and how “intimate identities and relationships, specifically gender, ethnicity, and sexuality, have been and continue to be centrally involved in the operations of modernizing markets” (p. 9). In other words, the globalizing and transnational processes of capitalist modernity—rather than the homogenizing and culturally depleting forces of much popular imagination—are demonstrated to be both productive of and reliant on diverse (gendered, ethnic, and class) local identities and existing social relationships.

The first chapter traces the history of the powerful Sino-Thai merchant family whose members established the first Thai department store in the 1950s, a company (now much expanded) that remains an icon of middle-class consumer style and progress. The focus here is the interplay between one family’s entrepreneurial successes, rooted in specific class and ethnicized notions of masculinity and patriarchal heterosexuality, and emerging models of middle-class consumption and commodified norms of urbanized femininity (norms that frame both the clientele and service-sector labor force of the department store). Ch. 2 moves to the marginalized world of sex workers in Bangkok’s go-go bars catering to a predominantly foreign, Western clientele. Here Wilson examines how capitalist modes of production and consumption inform the lives, desires, and strategies of rural-born women who are themselves objects of commodified exchange. Next, a chapter on the shopping mall explores how this emblematic space of commodity consumption provides a unique stage for urban individuals to perform and experiment with new notions modern selfhood, “underwrit[ing] the construction of a variety of personae, … through the democracy of consumption” (p. 132). Most dramatically, the mall stages the enactment of novel patterns of heterosexual romance and nonnormative genders and sexualities (e.g., transgendered kathoey, tom and dee. The remaining ethnographic chapters shift the reader’s attention toward new arenas of globalized entrepreneurship. In ch. 4, Wilson examines self-consciously cosmopolitan “knowledge workers” in the promotional offices of Bangkok’s premier cable TV corporation. Skilled in English and global technologies, these professionals exemplify some of Thailand’s most privileged modern subjects. Hailing from varied middle-class and elite backgrounds, corporate men and women formulate messages to sell transnational images of modernity to Thai audiences, even as they negotiate what these images and ideals mean in their own lives. Finally, the fifth case addresses the explosive growth of globalized direct sales in Thailand (through companies like Avon, Amway, and their locally grown counterparts). Wilson explores the complex and contradictory ways in which participants rely on and reformulate conventional gendered, class, and ethnic identities in their pursuit of new entrepreneurial dreams.

This is an ambitious book. Related studies tend to focus on one particular group or community or on one particular space of consumption or exchange. Wilson’s innovation is important: combining in a single analysis both multiple spaces of exchange and multiple identities. Not all the case studies succeed to the same degree—in particular, the two chapters focusing on individual corporate venues (the department store and the cable TV company) are somewhat thin ethnographically. I also am slightly dissatisfied with Wilson’s use of terms such as folk, kin, and moral economies when describing the interpenetration of capitalist modes of economic behavior with noncapitalist arenas of value and exchange (e.g., those based in kinship and community ties). Such terminology risks essentializing nonmarket relationships as timeless products of a uniform or unchanging tradition, counter to Wilson’s own clear intentions. Nevertheless, the overall direction of Wilson’s argument is clear and persuasive: “Markets stage more and more of Thais’ work, leisure, and self-expression. The realization of intimate lives through capitalist venues both reproduces and transforms aspects of identity, social relationships, and cultural meanings” (p. 193).

Wilson raises questions and offers directions of analysis in this book that will engage ethnographers of globalization, consumption, gender, sexuality, and popular media, among other topics around the world. Moreover, Wilson writes clearly and accessibly, which makes Intimate Economies not only a refreshingly readable but also a readily teachable text.

It is appropriate that Brenda Farnell has written the foreword to Drid Williams’s 2nd edition of Anthropology and the Dance, Ten Lectures. Farnell displays a clear grasp of not only the basic tenets of Williams’s work and the trajectory of her career but also Williams’s now-mythical sojourning into the realms of dance and anthropology under the prestigious tutelage of that famous Oxford don, Sir Edward Evans-Pritchard (“E-P,” as he was fondly called). E-P told Williams, “Regardless of how it turns out, it will be the first thesis written on this subject in this university for eight hundred years!” (p. vii).

Farnell’s tone is respectful, almost to the point of being reverential. It is through her eyes that readers are invited to share, vicariously, in her experiences as a graduate student under Williams’s mentorship, through the ten lectures that make up Williams’s book. “The courses and the individual tutorial sessions she gave us remain memorable to this day, twenty years and a Ph.D. degree later” (p. ix).

Williams, as well, initially gives one the impression that the book will have autoethnographic and biographical insights, as she firmly claims that one of its distinctive attributes is that it is written from a “dancerly” point of view—that is, from the perspective of someone who is a practitioner of various dance forms and who has reflected deeply on what makes “dance” what it is, different from movement or gesture. Williams insists that the chapters in the volume are not simply the result of “navel gazing” but are “the results of thought that took place while sweating over a ballet-barre or attempting to master a Calypso dance in a New York studio or a North Indian Kathak tukra, paran or ghat in a similar context, and so on, including years spent in the field in West Africa and Australia” (p. xvi).

The book fails to deliver, for the most part, on this apparent promise of a “personal anthropology,” as it emerges as mainly analytic in its orientation, using tools of sociolinguistics and logical argumentation. Snippets of personal narratives occasionally pop out, such as the humorous story Williams recounts of an airline magazine piece regarding an American English teacher in Japan who thought “body language” is “universal” and transcends all cultural boundaries. The teacher was proven wrong very quickly when she pointed to her chest and was shown to a bath (in Japanese culture, pointing to one’s chest, rather than one’s nose, means “I want a bath”; p. 64). This analytic orientation is not necessarily a weakness, as a genuinely critical review of the most important texts in the field, serving as a guide for nonspecialists, is very much needed, and Williams consistently states that providing such a review is one of her main aims. One strength she displays is her ability to parse out the hidden, flawed syllogisms that underlie popular arguments regarding the “timelessness” and “universality” of dance. For example:

All human beings move.

All dancing is movement.

Therefore, all human beings dance. [p. 34]

Another appealing attribute of her writing is her deployment of strategically located, down-to-earth examples that illustrate crucial points, such as the difference between a purely “physical” description of a movement versus an “intentional” one, which dance, as a semantically laden and culturally embedded form of movement, requires. For example:

Her arm moved rapidly forward and made contact with his face (movement only)

She slapped him angrily (Action). [p. 21]

In an academic universe in which camps typically polemically divide into modernists and postmodernists, she astutely takes a middle position regarding the construction of social knowledge. She acknowledges that theory “partly” constructs reality (p. 32) but also that dancing bodies ontologically precede the activity of dancing (p. 198). To her credit, à la Keali’inohomoku, she is highly suspicious of ethnocentrism, and à la Langer, she differentiates carefully between a symptom (a “natural history” of the dancer’s real feelings) versus a sign (which is close to Langer’s notion of “virtual emotions,” culturally encoded). There is much to admire in this book, yet it is still clearly not written for a general audience, as it has a high degree of theory in it; furthermore, Williams, in my view, waits too long to give a positive alternative to the extensive and impressive literature review that frontloads the book. By the time she gets to her own philosophy, rooted in the term semasiology, the reader has been so mired in so many theoretical epicycles as to find it difficult to sustain engagement. Nevertheless, precisely because it is far from a typical “textbook” or “how-to” handbook, the volume is well worth reading.

In Rough Waters, Christine Walley analyzes the politics of the creation of Tanzania’s first marine park, on Mafia island, an initiative meant to test ideas about linking conservation to sustainable development and the active participation of park residents. Walley first describes the field site and identifies the major actors: the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), representatives of the Tanzanian government, and island residents. Fieldwork on the island gave Walley day-to-day contact with residents and the local WWF representative and intermittent interaction with short-term experts and tourists. She had less contact with Tanzanian government officials, who lived at some distance; interaction with them was also limited by national, age, and gender differences.

In part 1, Walley thickly describes the conflicts over the future direction of the marine park, particularly those between the government-appointed acting warden and the WWF technical advisor. The former was ultimately removed after allegations of embezzlement; the latter resigned amid complaints that he was arrogant and noncollaborative. Walley contextualizes this social drama in terms of the historical development of the Swahili coast and the ideology of the Tanzanian state. In particular, Tanzanian elites saw themselves as progressive and identified with the nation, in contrast to Mafia residents, who believed that elites often acted in their own self-interest and at the expense of the poor.

In part 2, Walley focuses on the interests and values of local residents, showing how these were affected by a long history of involvement in sea-based regional trade networks. Colonization by Omani Arabs brought slavery, creating a stratified and ethnically mixed population. Later colonization by Germans and British, and then independence, moved centers of influence to the Tanzanian interior, marginalizing especially the smaller islands. Since abolition, island residents have become more equal yet poorer; their sense of community is based on notions of local ownership buttressed by close social networks. Residents, who earned income from fishing, tree products, and wage labor, believed that the park would help them face challenges to fishing, especially illegal dynamiting, and would help youth get jobs. To improve their lives, they used patron–client relationships to encourage more powerful mediators to influence national elites.

In part 3, Walley illustrates the perspectives of conservation experts, national bureaucrats, and tourism personnel. In Tanzania, approaches to conservation evolved from support for elite hunting to rationalization of resource use to participation and sustainable development. Nevertheless, some national staff used bureaucratic procedures to blunt planned participation and exclude the concerns of island residents. When Walley returned to the island in 2000, she discovered that the participatory and local development aspects of the park had been cut back, and residents had come to see officials and tourists as the major beneficiaries.

Arriving for fieldwork as the park was being created in 1995, Walley had exceptional access to the social drama surrounding it. She was able to observe, in formal and informal contexts, the uses of power that accompanied conservation initiatives. Living on the island alongside its residents and a few other expatriates, she had privileged access to their perspectives; she also was given access to many WWF documents. In contrast, as she recognizes, her relationships with Tanzanian officials were more tenuous, the major weakness in this otherwise outstanding ethnography. The reader can see Mafia residents as real people who use multiple strategies to address challenges to their livelihoods. The portrait of the WWF technical representative is also sympathetic, even though he exhibited flaws as well as strengths. At the same time, Tanzanian officials are primarily portrayed as bureaucratic and corrupt; readers get only a minor understanding of the constraints they faced.

Such portrayals are common in ethnographies of development projects. Anthropologists’ disciplinary training leads us to render visible those with less power, such as the residents of Mafia; our own backgrounds often facilitate access to other expatriates, but we face challenges to understanding national elites. Data collection at different levels is not equivalent, nor is analysis. In particular, we need to distinguish between actual corruption versus the tendency of elites to consider state interests as homologous to those of individuals and communities. In this case, the two tendencies overlapped, but state interests may dominate even without corruption.

Overall, this book has many strengths. Walley proposes more nuanced views of globalization and hybridity and effectively integrates a variety of methodological approaches and theoretical perspectives. I would strongly recommend this work to all interested in the dynamics of international development projects.

Katherine Verdery’s Vanishing Hectare offers an astute analysis of land restitution and the introduction of property rights based on the experiences of a Transylvanian rural population in Romania. The book’s title alludes to the bleak conditions created by privatization processes that do not allow farmers to engage in effective farming, either because they lack the productive means or as a consequence of the manipulations of managing elites. Building on three decades of research in the village of Vlaicu, Verdery shows how anthropology can contribute to an understanding of the (post)socialist transformation of “property.” Her analysis shows how and why property, land, in particular, is not solely a material thing that can yield productive results if correctly (re)distributed to private hands—as envisaged by international organizations such as the IMF and World Bank. Although global transformation and reorganization inaugurated similar processes of privatization in the capitalist world, the introduction of the very principle of private property through decollectivization and restitution is specific to the postsocialist context. Verdery first analyzes the property regime of socialism and its patterns of appropriation and distribution. Then she lays out the changes that followed by exploring complex relationships among international organizations, national policy makers, local elites, collective farm members, and state and private organizations such as fertilizer companies and court commissions.

Central to Verdery’s analysis are the concepts of “property,” “value,” and “risk.” She argues that property is not a universal concept but, rather, one that is historically and politically specific. This insight helps her unmask how Western ideological assumptions about property inform the expectations of international actors—yet at the same time lead them to ignore the necessary conditions of property ownership that allow people to use it productively. In her judgment, property is “a cultural system, an organization of power, and sets of social relations” (p. 48), all of which operate together in social processes. “Value” informs the process of property appropriation and becomes an important component of her analysis. In showing how the value of land differs in presocialist, socialist, and postsocialist contexts, she makes clear that value is a function of context. Finding a value in land is difficult if not all the necessary conditions of production are in place (p. 31). It follows that creating property rights does not necessarily create effective ownership. External factors influence effective ownership and in some cases people “centralize” risk in themselves to maximize their control over production. Although it is the least explored conceptual component in Verdery’s work, the notion of “risk” complements the overall framework. Risk here is about the ability to adjust to conditions of instability and the unpredictability of global and governmental forces; it is about managing certain elements of production.

After establishing how access to resources was organized under socialism—how, for example, the members and president of a collective farm would benefit from the use of the collective product and how political hierarchies resulted in the underpayment of those at the lowest ranks, ultimately prompting them to leave for better-paying industrial jobs—Verdery explores the events and conditions of decollectivization. She describes the implementation of new legislation and regulations as well as codes of conduct imposed by international organizations. She discusses their interpretation, the resistance to them, and the actions of those affected while incorporating the cultural values by which people operate. Numerous cases convey the experiences of members of the local landholders’ association that replaced the collective farm in Vlaicu—a process that she has witnessed firsthand over the past ten years. The significance of the values attached to land, labor, and kinship ties and the ways in which these values have differed among the generations are carefully documented. Decollectivization brought a new set of social matrices; the instability of government policies and the villagers’ lack of preparedness for the changing conditions of market and government forces has created a stratum of society in which ownership has not necessarily improved on the lot of the landless farmer.

The Vanishing Hectare embraces an anthropology of land and agriculture, ideology and power, and postsocialism, as well as knowledge of global neoliberal politics, to make a powerful argument. The book should find a wide readership among social scientists.

Taking as her point of focus the relationships that link global political and economic processes, state-orchestrated nationalist ideologies, and emerging local popular subjectivities, Deborah A. Thomas chronicles the transformation in Jamaica from mid-20th-century, postindependence “creole nationalism” to present-day manifestations of “modern blackness,” that is, urban popular expressions of blackness, notably, dancehall culture and its styles of gendered performativity, and working class–based consumer practices. Situated in Mango Mount, a pseudonymous community of about 2,500 located outside Kingston, this study explores the significance of this transformation within a world in which current processes of globalization maintain social and economic inequality and the promises of sovereignty (various forms of development and prosperity) under neoliberal economic structures and weak state power have failed much of the population, particularly the “poorer sets” and younger generations. Emphasizing the ways that definitions of cultural distinctiveness and economic and political progress are reproduced through institutional structures at the village level, Thomas traces the decline of the Jamaican state’s role in cultural leadership and the rise of a black subjectivity that demands visibility and legitimacy, challenging its devalued marginality under creole nationalism. Thus, whereas creole nationalism’s emphasis on national boundaries, on the symbolic primacy of Africa and local “folk” cultural practices, on multiracial representations, on pursuing middle-class forms of respectability, and on an acceptance of patriarchy once held sway, modern blackness presents transnational points of reference and influence, an unapologetic black identity without the centrality of either Africa or “multiculturalism,” and challenges to patriarchal, bourgeois values about respectability. In the process, Mango Mount villagers are experiencing such social transitions as the demise of traditional, patron–client relationships that have tied the “poorer sets” to the middle and upper classes and marked, generation-specific shifts in ideas about progress, development, and getting ahead. These challenges to creole nationalism, however, are neither revolutionary nor a new form of nationalism. Modern blackness is complex resistance: Not a theoretical agenda or entirely counterhegemonic, it represents a pragmatic and nuanced form of agency. This book joins the scholarship that understands agency as manifest in multivalent forms. Although they are disfranchised under the global structures of inequality with which creole nationalism contends, and that it reproduces locally, Mango Mount villagers are not passive, disengaged victims. They are agents in transforming stigmatized cultural production into modern blackness—increasingly approved emblems of the Jamaican nation that simultaneously reflect the affirmation of the “dominant elite ethos of globalization” in “racialized working-class” terms (p. 229). Agency may be assumed in these processes, but it possesses no uniform character of resistance, nor is resistance uniformly counterhegemonic, as, for example, when conventionally disreputable alternatives become (inter)national symbols. Given these important considerations, further probing the character of modern blackness would be revealing. That is, because modern blackness’s “racially based claims to national belonging” are not “exclusionary” (p. 269), what might be the foundations and patterns of its inclusiveness? Despite the failure (and at times pretense) of creole nationalism’s rhetorical “out of many, one people,” the Indians, Chinese, Syrians, “mixed,” and so on, who also compose Jamaica’s population (many of whom embrace younger generations’ perspectives as well as belong to “poorer sets”) play a part in the construction and expression of this emerging black subjectivity. Contributing to the racial tenor of modern blackness are the inadequacies of creole nationalism, African American cultural influences, and the particular contours of Mango Mount; yet because modern blackness is internally multifaceted, could there be more that makes its external boundaries “black”? How might one get at the meanings of blackness that are encased within the abiding power of racial discourse in the Caribbean? All of this points to an important criterion for the success of a book: the kinds of additional questions it provokes. Presented with conviction, this book should stimulate readers to ponder further, providing, as it does, a clear statement of the ways global forces may be engaged, and disengaged, by governments and communities, the latter of whom energetically redefine themselves, and in some respects the wider world, along the way.

Made in China is a theoretically ambitious book based on impressive field research among factory workers in Shenzhen in south China working on the line and living in the factory dorms. Shenzhen is an important part of the coastal regions of China that have become the factories of the world. Eighty percent of the suppliers of the world’s largest retailer, Walmart, are based in China, and they supplied that company with $12 billion worth of goods in 2004. The nature of the work processes and their impact on Chinese workers and society, more generally, are thus extremely important topics and have become politically contentious issues around the world. While carefully documenting the abuses and health risks of the predominantly female labor force of an electronics factory, Pun Ngai also demonstrates how the agency of workers limits the domination of managers and creates social spaces of mutual support and hope. Her ethnographic accounts of their interactions among themselves and with their superiors, and of their dreams and fears for their futures are richly described and clearly written.

One of the key theoretical tasks taken on by Pun is to revitalize class analysis to make sense of the new groups of workers emerging under China’s economic reforms since 1979, particularly in foreign-invested enterprises. She argues that Maoist class analysis “from above” has become a “dead language because of its hegemonic nature” (p. 12). Despite this interpretive gap, for class analysis to be a useful “weapon of social struggle,” it must be “reactivated by rooting it in class experience from below—that is, in the everyday infrapolitics of the Chinese workers themselves” (p. 11). Female factory workers, confronted with the “triple oppression” of state, capital, and patriarchy, “have to live out their own class experience as part of their life struggles” (p. 11). Beyond this worthy goal, Pun also invokes Michel Foucault, to consider technologies of the self and of control, and cultural studies, to explore “minor genres” of resistance in the form of nightmares and menstrual problems. These theoretical excursions are all interesting and well supported by insightful ethnographic analysis but partake somewhat too much of homage to the “usual suspects.” Given the topic, I would have liked to see reference to work outside the canon, such as studies in eastern Europe and Latin America. There is a great deal of unexploited potential for comparative analysis. For example, there is no mention of very comparable work by anthropologists on migrant laborers living in crowded dormitories in central and southern Africa. Here, Pun partakes of a common tendency in the anthropology of China to neglect parallels and interpretive resources that have become more salient as the communist giant becomes more like other Third World nations. Similarities with early factory towns in the 19th century could also be discovered.

Anyone concerned with the contemporary world economy, not just those with a specific interest in China, should find this book of interest. While occasionally jargon heavy, the book is written in a compelling manner with evident sympathy for the workers, which should make it more approachable to students.

As cultural anthropologists increasingly focus on the advantages of multisited, event-based, and problem-focused ethnography, I find it refreshing to encounter a text that refuses to give up on the more traditional strengths of the field. That is, one endeavoring to understand how immigrants negotiate becoming American by way of that whole set of mediated concerns anthropologists call “culture”: kinship, economics, politics, gender, sexualities, labors, ethics, religion, ritual, and even dress. Doing what Louisa Schein has called “itinerant ethnography”—not living in the community but visiting the field episodically, focusing on institutions and interviews with families—Aihwa Ong is able to collect an amazing amount of data, illustrative and compelling in their ability to shed light on these immigrants’ experiences. Buddha Is Hiding offers a rich and thorough example of the best that a more contemporary approach to ethnography can offer while feeling methodologically old, solid, and familiar.

How does an immigrant community navigate the cultural demands of an amorphous world like California (or the United States) in ways that are both strikingly similar to other ethnic immigrant groups and unique, given the particular histories, racialized social environments, and religious and ethical orientations they have brought with them or that they encounter? This question is the central concern of Buddha Is Hiding, argued in and through a metanarrative concern with “citizenship.” “Citizenship,” Ong writes, is “less a legal category than a set of self-constituting practices in different settings of power.” And “power” for Ong, following Michel Foucault, is a “social technology that derived unity not from a process of homogenization or totalization, but from transversality—from passing through individuals, inducing both being-made and self-making” (p. 276). For Ong, this means accessing the processes by which immigrants are asked to create and re-create their identities by way of the nation-state. As one might expect given the extensive corpus of Ong’s previous research, her concerns lean toward political economy, but her portrayals offer much more than that. For Ong’s Cambodian informants, becoming American means, first, remembering the past—how life under Pol Pot induced certain possibilities for engagement between parents and children, for labor and agriculture, for relations to the state that were violent and yet organized, desperate and yet hopeful. These self-making practices also constituted a kind of governmentality—a way of being Cambodian in a former land and from the past—that Ong makes available to readers through living memories of immigrants (as well as a thorough reading of the anthropology and history of Cambodia and immigrants’ experiences of war and refugee life). Ong is able to track these pasts as emergent in problems of the present. Cambodians find that their ethical, generational, domestic, and even sexual identities are placed under a different kind of scrutiny as they become immigrants who are asked to be different in the United States, who are forced to enter treacherous territories on the margins of mainstream white culture to be some kind of “American” or, as Homi Bhabha said of the colonial predicament, “almost the same but not quite, almost the same but not white.” Through vivid accounts from men, women, young persons, social workers, and monks, readers get a sense of the uniqueness of these immigrants’ efforts to accomplish this. Stated more bluntly by one particularly insightful young Cambodian man, “To be American is not an easy thing” (p. 219).

The most obvious difficulties faced by Cambodian refugees in the United States have to do with intergenerational conflicts, shifting gender norms and opportunities, problems of economic marginalization, and problems of racial discrimination—all of which are mediated by state interventions in making these immigrants into “good citizens.” The interplay of what anthropologists once called “structures,” whether economic, political, biomedical, or religious, are made visible as Foucauldian sites of power—as encounters with social workers, health advisors, legal counselors, employers, religious leaders, job markets that have no place for them, gang members who promise ethnic and financial security, and the Mormon church, which actively converts them.

One of the strengths of Ong’s analysis is its ability to provide a sense of the particularities of Cambodian experiences and a kind of “Cambodian culture” without rendering the community itself uniform and essential. These immigrants work through whole clusters of opportunities to actualize themselves in new ways, through assemblages, in Ong’s words, of ethical possibilities. In an institution-based ethnographic approach, these ethical mediations reveal much about how nation-states function to create and re-create subjectivity in immigrants. So, becoming Mormon means for some of these immigrants entirely shedding their understanding of Buddhism, whereas for others it means creatively reading one religion into the other, Buddhism into Mormonism or other Christianities and vice versa. Similarly, the involvement of social workers in family life results for some in new opportunities for restructuring domestic gender and generational dynamics, whereas for others, it becomes a means of reinforcing traditional relations of hierarchy and community. Economic marginalization results, for some, in poverty, welfare, and the endless scramble for wage, or piecemeal, labor and the consequent tolls it takes on traditional family structure, independence, health, and sense of well-being, whereas for others, it enables a flourishing of kin-based reciprocal and culturally embedded practices of entrepreneurialism. That gang membership is as much a part of the immigrant experience as is the rise to riches and financial patronage by way of ownership of doughnut franchises shows a thoroughness in empirical work but also a way of diverting suggestions that culture is never really processual and iterative in Ong’s approach but, rather, given as a set of ethical possibilities that now increasingly define the experience of “being” Cambodian American.

Buddha Is Hiding provides a refreshing set of insights about not only the Asian immigrant experience in the United States but also about how to read these experiences in relation to literatures on migration, diaspora, cultural studies, ethnic studies, globalization, and history. Ong is a master at tackling the scholarly materials available for making sense of her ethnographic subject while not overburdening her illustrations with overly theorized, ethicized, and policyized frameworks. Her contribution is in providing insights from the ground up—from the experiences of real people in real, sometimes tragic and other times wildly successful, immigrant experiences—before turning to her larger theoretical contributions. Namely, to suggest that, as researchers, we can benefit from rethinking our ideas about citizenship as an active process of self-actualization in and through engagements with official social institutions, economies, markets, and religions and from viewing it instead in terms of ethical possibilities—as ways of making ethical sense of relations with one another, with one’s community, with a state that offers conditional support as a reward for good citizenship, with markets that would otherwise neglect and oppress immigrants. Thus, Ong’s title, Buddha Is Hiding suggests not a disappearance of traditional values embedded in that cluster of Buddhist cultural norms that still can be seen and felt at critical junctures of family life but, rather, a reframing of these values in ways that enable them to reflect on past norms while embracing new ones. These concerns become stunningly apparent in people like Joe, a 17-year-old Cambodian American gang member who, Ong writes, was attired in “a large torn T-shirt, earrings, low-slung baggy khakis, and heavy shoes—sweeping debris in his uncle’s doughnut shop. Joe had a silver Cambodian earring in one hear and a Buddha amulet on a gold chain, and with his spiky, colored hair and insouciant look, he could have posed for a Benetton ‘cross-cultural’ commercial” (p. 240) One wonders whether the hoped-for return of a Buddha who has not disappeared but is merely “hiding” on the part of the more nostalgic monks or elderly Cambodian Americans will ever be actualized in youth like Joe or in his compatriots who have converted entirely to Mormonism. But for Joe, that question is irrelevant because, as Ong suggests, the Buddha dangling on the end of his gold chain is for Ong one of the most important signs that he is able to stylize himself as an individualized, urban, masculine youthful consumer who is “distinctive, stylish, subversive and definitely not white” (p. 240). Hiding or just barely visible in other ways, this Buddha speaks worlds to the value of good ethnographic research and the ways it can show subtlety of interactions of power, culture, and ethics in the immigrant experience.

Ethnographic studies of transnational migration frequently suffer from two tendencies: (1) an overly celebratory perspective that sees migrants as agents defying the grip of nation-states and (2) a particular thinness as researchers choose breadth over depth in their ethnographic accounts in the name of multisited approaches. From Cuenca to Queens suffers from neither of these handicaps and, instead, offers an often-sorrowful, experience-near account of one family in the Ecuadorian Andes caught up in the throes of globalization. The book is a necessary reminder of how an “extraordinary event” (p. 184) like the migration of a family member can illuminate otherwise everyday aspects of raising children, maintaining a marriage, and coping with injuries of racial and class prejudice.

Anthropologist Ann Miles has carried out fieldwork in Cuenca for over 15 years, pursuing research interests ranging from childhood to commercial natural medicine. Each fieldwork stint, however, always brought her into the intimate folds of one family’s life. In From Cuenca to Queens, Miles captures the hardscrabble lives of the Quitasacas family over a ten-year period, charting the ups and downs of parents Lucho and Rosa as they try to get ahead in Ecuador’s perpetually stagnant economy and watching as their children careen fitfully through adolescence. The story details the family’s migration from the countryside to Cuenca (and the enduring ties between both locales), their confrontation with Cuenca’s rigid and racist class system, and the tug-of-war of modernity. To tell this story, Miles revisits the life-history method pioneered by Oscar Lewis. While attentive to the criticisms of Lewis’s work, including the much-maligned “culture of poverty” concept, Miles takes her cues from his ability to locate large structural processes expressed in domestic situations: "[I] borrow from him the idea that a single family can reveal much about the meanings of culture in individual lives” (p. 7).

Each of the central chapters of the book profiles a different family member’s perspective regarding the eldest son Vincente’s undocumented migration to the United States. The views of both parents and his younger siblings (presented as a combined chapter) are included. Vincente’s story caps these chapters and further complicates the meanings accorded to his migration. Each chapter unfolds in a highly readable format, including a brief introduction to the family member (and Miles’s relationship to him or her), a chronological selection of field notes, and a first-person narrative. In the final chapter, Miles brings the various voices into dialogue with one another and deftly problematizes the black box concept of “family.” At her most perceptive, Miles demonstrates how each family member ascribes different meanings to Vincente’s migration. When it is obvious that Vincente's has not met with quick enrichment abroad, Miles shows the effect of this fact on different family members. Each pegs his or her life trajectory and own success up against Vincente’s life abroad. The juxtaposition begs an important question: Who is really transnational? Vincente, who has physically migrated, or his family members, who have tied their own dreams in Cuenca to his success in the United States?

Candid discussions about the research process also give this book the kind of transparency missing in much recent anthropological writing. Specifically, the field notes—arranged by month and year—stress the ways anthropological understandings form (often slowly) over time. Through this process, Miles puts an incredibly honest face on the research experience. Her chapter on Lucho is perhaps the most telling in this regard. Miles’s field notes are forthright about difficulties she had liking Lucho at beginning of her research. Yet, by the end of the book, Lucho figures prominently, both as Miles’s main informant and as one whose own eventual migration has severely changed the Quitasaca family. Because of the emphasis placed on fieldwork, this book would be a fine addition to an ethnographic methods course. Surely, some readers will find the lack of authorial guidance a hindrance, and, indeed, Miles could have pushed the methodological implications of her unique approach farther. Overall this book will be of interest to migration specialists, those studying family systems, and anyone seeking ways to demystify the fieldwork experience and ethnographic analysis. Finally, Miles should also be commended for filling a critical void in Andean ethnography by providing one of the few ethnographic accounts from the region not about indigenous peoples. Although she purposely shies away from affixing an ethnic identity to the Quitasacas (they can be provisionally referred to as “chola/o”), her work highlights the problematic nature of ever ascribing fixed labels such as “mestizo” and “Indian” to peoples of the Andean region.

Nicole Hahn Rafter and Mary Gibson have masterfully translated Cesare Lombroso and Guglielmo Ferrero’s classic study Criminal Woman, the Prostitute, and the Normal Woman which was first published in Italian in 1893. Although they have heavily edited the original text, shrinking it from 640 pages to just over 300, they retain the book’s structure and key ideas. In contrast to the previous English translation that was published in 1895 as The Female Offender and dealt with only “one part and bits of another” of Lombroso’s original (p. 4), Rafter and Gibson include the main points from each of the four sections of the original volume. In this way, despite making significant cuts, they present a more comprehensive version of Lombroso’s work than has hitherto been available.

In their introduction, Rafter and Gibson summarize Lombroso’s argument and contextualize his work. They also explain why they decided to write a new translation of this text. Although today he is generally mentioned only in passing as a founding father of criminology, in his lifetime Lombroso influenced a range of disciplines and helped establish the scientific method as a whole. Criminal Woman, in particular, set the scene for all subsequent studies of female crime well into the 20th century. That he is often overlooked, according to Rafter and Gibson, stems as much from the difficulty of finding his work in English translation as it does from any limitations to his research.

Of course, many if not most of Lombroso’s ideas have been thoroughly discredited. His is not a useful text for anyone seriously interested in the causes or nature of women’s crime. Lombroso believed that “woman is a male of arrested development” (p. 37), that she “feels less just as she thinks less” (p. 64), and “that lying is habitual and almost physiological” (p. 77) in the female of the species. His views on “savage people” (p. 97) are to be expected (violent, animalistic, irrational, sexual), as are his assumptions that black women and southern Italians reveal more atavistic traits than white women.

For those interested in research methods and the historical origins of ideas about female criminality, the book is more rewarding. Lombroso pioneered many research techniques that remain central to the social sciences. Some, such as his emphasis on phrenology, are, thankfully, no longer in use, even though criminologists and forensic scientists have returned, in recent years, to examining the body and its parts for evidence of criminality and guilt. Others, like interviewing and use of control groups, are more widely accepted.

Methodological issues are raised by the process of translation itself. Despite essentially reducing the original by half, Rafter and Gibson claim their excisions “involved nothing substantive” (p. 30). Instead, they only cut “repetitions and examples” (p. 30). This strategy led them to delete not only words from nearly every sentence but also wholesale examples and case studies. The result is an affordable, elegant, easy to read volume. Yet, as they acknowledge in their introduction, this accessibility does come at a price:

“Our cuts created two translation effects. First, they minimize Lombroso’s long-windedness. In this respect our translation somewhat distorts the original. Second, by cutting some of the book’s outlandish examples, our translation may, ironically, make the text seem more rational and scientifically sound than it in fact was” (p. 30).

Nineteenth-century scholars like Lombroso were, for the most part, verbose, complex, multifaceted, multilingual, and interdisciplinary. Anyone who has read Max Weber or even Karl Marx knows this to be true. I was relieved, therefore, that the translation retains some of this flavor. In building his argument that prostitutes were born criminals and that all women were atavistic throwbacks to earlier evolutionary forms, for example, Lombroso skips from one kind of text to another; statues, Dante, folk tales, religious allegories, photographs, statistics, head shape, brain size, tattoos, stories gathered through prison visiting, physical attributes, and so on, are all presented as equally legitimate and useful data.

This new translation of Criminal Woman provides an excellent and accessible version of Lombroso’s text. Although Lombroso scholars and historians will want to read the Italian original, this volume would be usefully assigned in a range of undergraduate and graduate courses. Later this year, Rafter and Gibson are publishing the accompanying volume, Criminal Man, which I, for one, cannot wait to read.

Adrie Kusserow argues that, for too long, social theorists interested in cultural conceptions of the self have treated mainstream North American individualism as a homogeneous, self-evident category. Although many North Americans may, indeed, share an ideology of individualism, Kusserow suggests that class relations shape the ways that individualism is experienced, articulated, and transmitted to the next generation. In her book, Kusserow offers an account of how parents and teachers in three neighborhoods in New York City conceptualize a child’s “self” and socialize their children into class-based identities. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s scholarship on habitus, Kusserow aims to examine the relationship between conceptions of individualism and the reproduction of social inequalities. Kusserow offers new insights into the relationship between cultural ideas about the person and social class in North America, although she ultimately raises more questions than she answers.

Kusserow provides a detailed account of gaining access to the communities as well as of her own positioning. She worked in three neighborhoods: two in Queens (Kelley and Queenston), one white, working class and one mixed, lower-working class, and the third an upper-class, white neighborhood in Manhattan (Parkside). Kusserow is careful to point out that although gender, ethnicity, and race are certainly imbricated in the workings of social class, she does not address them (p. 8). Nevertheless, by choosing predominantly white communities, Kusserow has implicitly included race, albeit as an unmarked category. Throughout the book, Kusserow points to interesting directions her work might have taken had she included race or gender, which can be frustrating, especially given that she is poised to engage discussions of race (whiteness) and class.

After a review of the literature, which is so broad that it is not helpful to her argument, Kusserow gets to the heart of the analysis. In ch. 3–5, using interview data, she compares and contrasts parents’ “ethnoconceptions of the child’s self.” In ch. 6 and 7, she examines preschools in the three communities, focusing on teachers’ conceptions of the child’s self as enacted in exchanges with children. Kusserow’s main finding is that individualism can be qualified as “hard” or “soft,” with the working-class communities tending toward hard individualism and the upper-class community toward soft individualism. Hard individualism is divided into hard protective individualism (Queenston) and hard projective individualism (Kelley). This reflects that parents experience Queenston as a dangerous place from which children needed to be protected and that Kelley parents, as working class but upwardly mobile, were preparing their children to change their socioeconomic status (p. 57). In contrast, in upper-class Parkside, soft individualism, which included the notion of a psychologized self, prevailed. Kusserow draws on the metaphors that parents frequently used to evoke their conceptions of the child’s self. The children in Parkside, for example, were compared to flowers blossoming, whereas Queenston parents used fortress metaphors and those in Kelley used sports metaphors (endurance and strength).

A surprising omission in the text was children’s voices. Readers have little idea of how children responded to their parents or their peers except for some reported exchanges in classrooms with teachers. Kusserow cites the language-socialization literature that shows that children are active in their own socialization, although she does not engage this approach rigorously. This would explain why, as she portrays them, the children seem like empty vessels awaiting their class-based futures. Instead, Kusserow adopts the theory that socialization is a form of adaptation to the environment. This is an overly mechanistic understanding of complex processes that produce subjectivities.

The book is most intriguing when direct comparisons are made among the different communities. Then the reader is able to see both the subtle and explicit differences in conceptions of the self articulated through individualism. Especially provocative is Kusserow’s discussion of the upper-class emphasis on the need to know “the true self” to be successful and “excellent” in a career (p. 163). In these discussions, she reveals the ways that parents’ and teachers’ beliefs about individualism create expectations for participation in class-based positions.

Kusserow touches on some of the broader political implications of her work primarily in the concluding chapter. An important insight is her suggestion that upper-class conceptions of individualism (consciously or not) obfuscate class hierarchies while naturalizing and reproducing elite status, which is an important insight. Kusserow concludes with a series of provocative questions, such as the implications for working-class children when a soft form of individualism is privileged in the classroom (p. 187). If these questions had been integrated in and addressed throughout the text, however, Kusserow might have provided broader theoretical insights than she does into the relationship between individualisms across social classes and the reproduction of social inequality.

Marcia C. Inhorn and Frank van Balen have been instrumental in creating the realm of “new thinking” alluded to in their subtitle. They have contributed not only with their own groundbreaking scholarship but also by identifying and bringing together scholars from around the world to work on this important topic—at international conferences (Amsterdam, 1999, and Ann Arbor, 2004) and in this valuable collection.

Inhorn and van Balen introduce the book with a discussion of the reasons the topic has been relatively neglected and of their desire to counter “the predominant Western view of infertility as a yuppie complaint of little concern to the rest of the purportedly overpopulated developing world” (p. 7). Part 1 also includes a chapter by Margarete Sandelowski and Sheryl de Lacy, in which they describe the various ways the “infertile” in the United States are represented—as emotionally distressed, socially handicapped, cultural dupes, and heroic suffers. Charis M. Thompson provides a useful historical overview of feminist theorizing on infertility, and van Balen explores the psychologization of infertility (including theories about women’s psychologies being the cause of their problems and more recent theories about the psychological stress that infertility inflicts on women, including the pressure to participate in psychological studies!).

Part 2 begins with an excellent essay by Arthur L. Greil on the ways infertile women in the United States understand their bodies (as machines, as emblems of self, as property) and the consequences of these understandings for their experience. This section also includes a chapter by Gay Becker on how couples decide whether and who to tell about having used donor insemination. In her chapter on the marital consequences of infertility innorthern Vietnam, Melissa J. Pashigian focuses on the special hardships for women in patrilineal–patrilocal societies. Gwynne L. Jenkins offers a well-crafted account, written in collaboration with a Costa Rican couple, of the process that led the couple to adopt after years of childlessness. There is also a masterful narrative analysis by Catherine Kohler Riessman (who literally “wrote the book” on narrative analysis) of three infertile Indian women now past childbearing age.

Part 3 focuses on Africa’s “Infertility Belt.” The essay by Lori Leonard makes clear the difficulty of measuring infertility given the discrepancies between local and international definitions (e.g., only married women are counted by international definitions, but because one of the common consequences of infertility is divorce, many infertile women are excluded in assessments of frequency). Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg compares international, national, and local attitudes toward reproduction and offers a complex picture of the way that concerns with population control and the need to produce (workers, subjects, citizens, and families) have interacted over time. Trudie Gerrits’s study of the Macua of Mozambique shows how matrilineality, especially when combined with matrifocality, protects infertile women from some of the hardship normally associated with infertility.

Part 4 focuses on the use of new reproductive technologies (NRTs). In her previous work, Inhorn described the problems that infertility poses for the 12 percent of Egyptian married couples who suffer from it and the range of enthnomedical and biomedical therapies that infertile Egyptian women use to try to overcome it. Here she focuses on the culturally shaped beliefs about the body that inhibit the use of NRTs in Egypt. In contrast, Susan Marcia Kahn focuses on how NRTs, including artificial insemination with non-Jewish donor sperm, have been embraced by ultraorthodox Jews in Israel, the country with the highest number of infertility clinics per capita in the world. She describes how these technologies are being used to maintain exceptionally high birth rates (one woman used in vitro fertilization when she had difficulty getting pregnant with what would be her sixth child) and, in contrast with other essays in this collection, which argue that infertile women are not “simply victims” but active agents, Kahn raises the question of how much choice infertile ultraorthodox women really have to say no to these invasive interventions. Lisa Handwerker shows how NRTs, including donor sperm, prenatal diagnosis, and sex selection, are being used in China as part of the “new eugenics” movement to ensure, in light of the one-child policy, that only superior children are produced. Aditya Bharadwaj takes a different tack in his essay, which focuses on a bitter and protracted battle in India about which doctors deserve the credit for the first test-tube baby there.

As a scholar of pregnancy loss, I was struck by how many of the essays included material on miscarriage and stillbirth. One would not know this from the index, which is, as is so often the case these days in collected volumes, skimpy. Inhorn and van Balen have taken a substantial step toward addressing the “scholarly lacuna” on infertility cross-culturally. I hope that a similar achievement with regard to the experience of pregnancy loss “around the globe” will soon follow.