In his collection, Culture and the Question of Rights: Forests, Coasts, and Seas in Southeast Asia, Charles Zerner brings together eight individually authored essays that deftly demonstrate the ways in which cultural performances and practices like poetry, song, and storytelling are intimately connected to the politics of nature, property, and rights. All of the essays describe and examine the moments when these social acts, sometimes acts of great spiritual importance and sometimes mundane day-to-day acts, become claims to the environment. They are also concerned with challenging representations of human uses of the environment as simply neutral, rational, and economic. Instead, they show that actions often seen as “resource use” are aesthetic, full of morality, feeling, poetics, and bodily experience. The six ethnographic essays in the book are bracketed by an introduction by Zerner, who employs his fluid prose to ask the reader to think about the essays in the context of a world in which nature is understood to be both materially and symbolically constructed, and by two concluding essays, in which Donald Brenneis and Jane Monnig Atkinson give different readings of the conceptual grounding and political importance of the ethnographic essays.

Zerner’s introduction examines the ways that people articulate knowledges, desires, and rights and the acts of translation that make these articulations legible to others. His discussion of the politics of translation is excellent. It raises questions about the role of translation professionals (anthropologists, lawyers, sociologists) in the complicated and volatile landscape of political claims based on articulations of practice, belief, and understanding that often come from outside the group or groups of people engaged in what is being translated.

The first of the ethnographic essays, by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, is the most direct challenge in the volume to translations that code environmental actions as “resource use.” Using a minor forest product (honey) and its collection by Meratus hunters, Tsing challenges the frameworks through which people and nature are made by economists, ecologists, and the Indonesian state. Zerner’s own ethnographic essay, which follows, is a reading and analysis of three kinds of political and poetic texts: Mandar fishing calls, a marine-related court ruling, and ethnographic interviews with Mandar fishers. In his discussion, the multiple ways of making livelihood, rights, territory, culture, and the sea become clear. In the third ethonographic essay, Marina Roseman writes about Temiar rain-forest dwellers who create, learn, and remember their landscapes through song. These aural maps are multitextured; they are historical, personal, ecological, and more. Roseman juxtaposes these living maps with the mapping practices of the colonial and postcolonial Malaysian state in a way that complements the Tsing and Zerner essays, in that local poetic practice and the politics it engenders are seen next to state practices of translation.

In what is the most unusual, and in some senses because of this, the most intriguing essay in the collection, Stephanie Gorson Fried explores the ways that Bentian Dayak authors write about identity, rights, nature, land, and use. Fried shows the ways in which Dayak life and belief are translated for the larger Indonesian public by the authors. In the essay Dayaks are objects and subjects, a productive and disarming tension that works to connect the essay to Zerner’s articulate discussion of the politics of translation.

The final ethnographic essay, by Nancy Lee Peluso, a classic reprinted here in an abbreviated form, is an examination of the nature of anthropogenic forests and tree planters in West Kalimantan. In it, Peluso makes clear that landscape, forest, rights, and history are all in process and that setting them temporally or legislatively works to erase them as they are understood and known by the people who made and lived them.

As a contribution to anthropology, Zerner’s collection works to bring rich and thick ethnography and an appreciation for aesthetics to the forefront of political ecology without reinscribing cultural performance as some sort of anthropological curio and marker of Otherness. Although giving voice to the policies, discourses, structures, and agents that could be thought of as global (e.g., capitalism, development discourses, NGOs), much contemporary political ecology, perhaps because of influences from political economy, fails to give voice to local politics that are expressed in forms not used at the macro level. In each contribution to this volume, the lives of people who gather honey, go fishing and hunting, plant and manage trees in dense forests, and conduct other ordinary social practices in nature, albeit often with extraordinary accompanying performance, shine through discussions of the larger politics that often threaten to erase these social lives from view and from existence. The book would work well in both upper-level undergraduate seminars in anthropology, geography, environmental studies, and conservation biology and in graduate seminars.

Among anthropologists working in Ecuador, Norman Whitten Jr.’s 1981 edited volume Cultural Transformations and Ethnicity in Modern Ecuador (University of Illinois Press) is informally known as the “Green Bible.” That volume has stood as the primer for discussions of Ecuadorian social relations, and it is still not outdated in its essence. Whitten’s new volume has the same critical spirit, and it brings the discussions of cultural transformations squarely into the 21st century. Although Millennial Ecuador does not have the full range of themes of Cultural Transformations, it has rich descriptions and analyses of history, politics, religion, and social relations. Throughout, the volume dissects the politics of disenfranchisement and the struggles, both overt and subtle, to counter it.

There are no subheadings to organize the sequencing of the volume, yet when the chapters are read in order, certain themes the editor wishes to highlight emerge. For example, William Vickers’s contribution is a modern example of the impacts of the historical processes Kris Lane discusses. In a widely applicable and cautionary tale, Vickers documents how the Amazonian Secoya have come to be fully engaged in national and international political processes and demonstrates how this once “invisible minority” negotiates in a global world. Then, in a buoyantly written chapter destined to be cited prolifically, Lane deconstructs central themes of Ecuadorian history and disentangles colonial “realities” from colonial “mentalities.” With an enormous sweep of history, Lane documents Ecuador’s lamentable inability to move away from the politics of marginalization. Read together, these two chapters clearly reflect Whitten’s concern for positioning structural and contrastructural powers, the modern and the millennial.

The contributors of the next three chapters explore the complicated connections between religion, ideology, domination, and contestation. In examples from the highlands (Rachel Corr), Amazonia (Michael Uzendoski) and the coast (Diego Quiroga), the authors consider the meanings of religious symbols and practices and discuss the social relations that emerge from, and intersect with, belief. Corr and Quiroga show that Catholicism is only partially and contextually incorporated into local belief systems, creating a space for opposition. Uzendoski explores why evangelical Protestantism (and not Catholicism) is gaining ground among the Quichua of Napo (p. 129).

Whitten’s idea that there are transformative “millennial forces” (p. 31) is most clearly elucidated in his contribution coauthored with Dorothea Whitten and Alfonso Chango and that of Luis MacasLinda Belote, and Jim Belote, which document the struggles and symbolic creativity of Ecuador’s indigenous rights movements. These chapters represent true collaborations between anthropologists and political activists. Whitteng et al. chronicle the riveting story of the 1992 “March for Land and Life,” when thousands of indigenous people gathered in Quito, whereas Macas et al. describe the dynamics of indigenous movements through the experiences of one of Ecuador’s most prominent leaders, Macas himself. Experience matters in ethnography, too; these authors make it look easy.

The authors of the last four substantive chapters take urban orientations and explore identity politics. Dorothea Whitten provides a review of the political meanings of indigenous art, and Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld probes the lives of Tiguan artists. Resurrecting themes of the classic studies of squatter settlements, Colloredo-Mansfeld rejects the notion that “indigenous” means “rural,” arguing that residence in Quito provides a differential space for patterning ethnicity. In unusually revealing ethnography, Jean Rahier documents the impacts of racist and sexist stereotypes on the lives of Afro-Ecuadorian women in Quito. Racism and sexuality are further probed by Mary Weismantel, who deconstructs two female icons of Ecuadorian folklore. In her richly textured discussion Weismantel brilliantly reveals the persuasive power and violence of Ecuadorian social categories.

Individual chapters are all ethnographically and theoretically interesting, yet the volume disappoints just a little when taken as a whole. Whereas some themes (religion, indigenous political activism) are reworked extensively, other vibrant areas of research in the anthropology of Ecuador (and of great importance to poor, if not indigenous, Ecuadorians) are essentially ignored. The net could have been cast a good deal more broadly. Moreover, there is a disjuncture between Whitten’s goal that the issues discussed here have significance beyond the region and the narrow ethnographic focus of many of the chapters. Detailed descriptions of the transformations brought about by transnational migration, multinational business and marketing, neoliberalism and dollarization and the impacts on health of these and other factors, including infectious diseases, contamination, poverty, and even junk food, would have made more obvious the idea that Ecuador stands as a “microcosm of modern and millennial globality” (p. 34). That said, I still think that the volume speaks well for the state of the anthropology of Ecuador. Represented here are promising new ethnographers, scholars, and activists who are profoundly committed to Ecuador as well as anthropologists who have worked in the region for decades and whose perceptions are keenly honed through experience.

Normal museums contain glass cases, dead objects, and labels. Michael Taussig’s “museum” is very different: Through his “displays,” a visitor is treated to an imagined journey in Colombia. The trip starts in Bogotá at the Gold Museum, which is located in the Banco de la República at the nation’s financial center. The gold museum contains nearly 40,000 spectacular, well-protected artifacts. The traveler then proceeds to other areas of the country, through Taussig’s own hum drum collection of artifacts mostly drawn from Colombia’s humid west coast, and comprising descriptions, photographs, drawings, local voices, and meditations. The book defies easy description, which is surely one of its purposes. Sometimes it brought to my mind the title of a John Adams piece—“Short Ride in a Fast Machine”— at other times I found myself saying, “Only connect.” On occasion, I would recall the melancholy and final disappointment in Tristes Tropiques, although structuralism is hardly Taussig’s style. Other visitors to Taussig’s collection will have their responses, which happens when different people wander through a museum.

If gold provided the currency and lure for the Spanish conquerors and other historical adventurers in Colombia, cocaine is the currency and attraction for the buccaneers who are ravishing the country today. But an opposition between gold and cocaine does not define the book because Taussig erases borders to explore and to find words for the unsaid. Always interested in fetishes (such as gold and cocaine) and in mimesis, he never reduces qualities or even quantities to a fixed set of features. Taussig’s museum has no rooms, and I am not certain that it even has walls. It is a product of his wanderings, curiosity, and the way things come together for him in a place, which is perhaps just good ethnography. But Taussig is more likely to invoke Walter Benjamin, William Burroughs, and geographers than anthropology’s standard authors.

The book consists of 31 relatively short chapters connected by diverse themes. If gold for the Spanish was yielded through slavery and the power of the state, the coastal people today toil in economic slavery under both the power and the neglect of money capital. They seem to exist beyond the interests of state and parastate forces, including the national guard, the guerillas, and the paramilitary, however violence ripples through their lives. But I have hardly described the museum’s treasures. One series of chapters revolves about the “senses,” which are not usual anthropological fodder. Taussig evokes the weariness and lethargy that are felt in these humid, torrid zones and that are produced by the state’s neglect. Near the end of the book—stimulated by chance—he presents the sloth who crosses boundaries, is eaten by others, and seems close to death. Is the slow-moving, transgressive sloth the local people or the anthropologist? Taussig’s depiction of miasma, swamps, and bogs tells us much about the pollution, fear, and sickness created by cleaning up everything in bureaucracies and in ethnographic writing. His museum also contains many real artifacts and technologies: for example, through a series of connections (centering on the uses of limestone and coca chewing), the history of cement making occupies a place in his museum. After recalling the historical methods of mining gold, Taussig describes the similar ways it is collected today, by women using shallow wooden bowls and by men using traditional diving devices that perilously supply them with air. Years of digging may produce nothing or entanglements with the devil. A never-mounted museum plaque expresses the admiration that Taussig has for these folk.

At the farthest reaches of the museum lies the island of Gorgona, which is now a highly controlled nature preserve open to the wealthy but once was a fearsome prison—appropriately named. The difference between preserve and prison, between managing unruly nature and unruly humans turns out to be very narrow. Taussig—the anthropological sloth—and his young daughter are quickly thrown off the island when they try to visit without properly stamped official papers.

Some may read this book as an exercise in surrealism or magical realism, as a play on mimesis and fetishism, as untamed ethnography, or even as a mode of geography. I enjoyed it as a fast ride in the author’s feral museum of the mind.

William W. Stein begins his ambitious book by asserting that the Cornell–Peru Project (CPP), also known as the “Vicos project,” “is a well known but poorly understood applied anthropological study that took place between 1952 and 1966 in Vicos, a rural community located in Peru’s Callejón de Huaylas” (p. 2). Commenting as one who was closely involved with the project in its last years and as a periodic visitor since that time up to 2004, I reluctantly conclude that Stein’s wordy tome will leave many with a confused perception of the project: how it was conducted and turned out as well as its place in the sphere of applied anthropology.

First, the CPP was not “a study” but, rather, was a long-term and collaborative international multidisciplinary project that succeeded in carrying out the first successful land reform and indigenous development effort in Peru. Peruvian and U.S. anthropologists Allan R. Holmberg (Cornell), Mario C. Vazquez (San Marcos and, later, Cornell), and Peru’s distinguished biomedical researcher, Carlos Monge Medrano, together conceived, planned, and found ways to achieve the program goals. Over the length of the enterprise, almost 100 Peruvian and U.S. specialists (anthropologists, agronomists, nutritionists, educators, photographers, psychologists, and many students) participated as part of the CPP at various times, in addition to the original 1,703 Vicosinos who were, in effect, the major actors and participants. The CPP empowered, enlightened, equipped, reorganized, and energized this denigrated, exploited, and impoverished community of hacienda serfs ensnared for over 350 years in an unforgiving, colonial-style regime. That account is not easily gleaned from this “metaethnography.”

Stein aims “to combine the somewhat autobiographical mode with the critical ethnography of a North American research and development project in relation to the Vicos workers, as well as observe the deconstruction process. My approach is post structuralist… . It may even be postmodern” (p. xiii). The six chapters include his description of the project; a detailed examination of the relationships of the early project personnel to each other and the community; explorations of some of the changes brought through the project’s “potato experiments,” the Vicos workers relations to the project, and aspects of the medical interventions; and finally a “deconstruction” of the project.

Stein, who studied a nearby community, was close to the project during its earliest years and sees this work as a “final statement” about the CPP. He uses extended quotes from the copious research notes in CPP archives at Cornell to elaborate some of the difficult organizational aspects and personnel problems of the first four years as Holmberg, Vazquez, and others were developing a participatory approach that would eventually lead to the community members’ independence from serfdom and ownership of their lands. Although he points out some limited development issues and insightfully analyzes, that is, deconstructs, aspects of these early difficulties, the successful ten-year-long project story up to the sale of the hacienda to the community in 1962 is lost in a welter of commentary and speculation. Despite the author’s considerable erudition, the result is a wandering, postmodern, often psychoanalytical account of the project and some of its personnel that greatly detracts from the Vicos story. The book is replete with such writing as the following excerpt:

If the project was in Vicos not to make a gift but to arrest social unrest, the kind of unrest that threatens the socially rested, the rest of humanity, also with unrest, it aimed to do this by determining scientifically how people may be made more productive, thereby satisfying their needs and losing their restlessness. [p. 286]

Here temptation to judge the past with the benefits of hindsight in terms of current theoretical and literary fashion becomes reality and leads to real misunderstanding. Despite its sometimes detailed reporting of published works and field data, this book is about “discourse” more than Vicos. Primary research material (and the dubious use of the informants’ real names) is liberally interspersed with lengthy quotes from 40 referenced publications of Jacques Derrida (and other postmodern desconstructionists), taking the reader on tangents far from this place in the Andes.

The project history in the first chapters views events as through a camera with parallax problems, omitting key portions of the scene. The pioneering and innovative agreement between Cornell and Peru’s Ministry of Labor and Indigenous Affairs that governed events from the first is mentioned but not examined nor is the ministry program that managed the project in consultation with Cornell after 1956. Important publications by Vazquez and others dealing with such matters as CPP annual reports, education, kinship, demography, and nutrition do not inform the discussion. Thus, although the author ranges over an impressive variety of works, much is overlooked in this “final statement.” At the same time, Stein uncritically quotes such ill-informed opinions of the project as those of John Bennett, Glynn Cochrane, and Javier Avila-Molero, among others. He erroneously says that the hacienda was simply expropriated (pp. 201, 446) but elsewhere correctly notes that the Vicosinos bought their land (and thus freedom from serfdom) directly from its institutional owner, the Beneficiencia Pública de Huaraz, with their own money (which they earned as a result of CPP interventions) in June 1962.

Although admitting that the CPP was a technical success (p. 245), Stein claims (p. 342) that the project never dealt with a needed redistribution of subsistence lands. In a sense, that is correct, although not in the way Stein implies: It was the elected Vicos community council that undertook such redistribution after 1957 under CPP aegis, as Vicosinos progressively assumed direct control of the hacienda and community affairs. Although he laments the CPP’s use of the hacienda power structure to initiate the project he offers limited discussion of the critical later years (1956–62) as power devolved on the community, culminating in Vicos’s purchase of the hacienda.

In his preface Stein notes that the “Oedipal aspects” of his relations with his teacher Allan Holmberg are “obvious,” and these intrude throughout the narrative. The slaps he aims at unnamed CPP personnel for imagined “posturing, fetishing, and self-promotion” (p. 446) strike unsupported sour notes as well. The same applies to his dark notions that someone may have removed material from the CPP files to hide something; that some potential publications were deliberately suppressed to obscure Vicosino desires for their rights (p. 21) or to conform to the holistic Policy Science approach Holmberg used to analyze the community and project efforts; or that Cold War–era thinking lurked ominously in the background. The project began after all, in 1951–52, but it was tightly tied to Peruvian domestic policies concerning indigenous affairs, rural education, and agricultural development and was inspired in part by the newly promulgated UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights ratified by Peru, whose articles were later emblazoned on building walls around the Vicos plaza.

Alas, each chapter is a frustrating mix of Stein’s often interesting observations and reviews of project data accompanied by excursions into Freudian fantasizing, postmodernist critique, factual error, and contradiction. This is so much the case that it overwhelms any review of this nature. In his final pages Stein seems to argue that the CPP need not have promoted any changes because, as one now sees, many things such as land reform and the abolition of peonage were going to happen anyway sometime. The implications of that kind of thinking puts everything in the hands of fate with a kind of Alfred E. Newmanesque “What, me worry?” attitude. In summary, the book leaves the reader with as many questions as are raised, although in the end Stein concludes that, “never a horrible monster, the Vicos project was much more helpful than harmful” (p. 476). Amen. If nothing else, the book points to the insecurity some anthropologists may feel when confronted with active, disciplinary-driven efforts to address human problems and needs.

A great scandal erupted in 1998: The brain of the famous California Indian called Ishi had not been cremated with his body in 1916 but sent to the Smithsonian Institution to be pickled in formaldehyde and kept in its collection of human remains. Orin Starn, who grew up in Berkeley as a faculty member’s kid, had decided to write a book about the idealized Ishi, the Yahi man who had roamed around Mt. Lassen for decades with the remnants of his band—an older man and woman and a woman he considered a sister—until they (probably) died and he surrendered in 1911 to a sheriff in Oroville. Alfred Kroeber and his assistants, Thomas T. Waterman and Edward W. Gifford, arranged for the man to live in the new anthropology museum in San Francisco, where he could work as informant with them and, in 1915, with Edward Sapir. Ishi died of tuberculosis in March 1916, and the Berkeley anthropologists had his body, with a selection of his artifacts, cremated and the remains placed in a black Pueblo ceramic vessel in a San Francisco columbarium niche. Following up a claim made by a Maidu, Art Angle, Orin Starn found a letter in the Bancroft Library archives verifying receipt of Ishi’s brain by the Smithsonian’s Ales Hrdlicka. In accord with NAGPRA (Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, 1990), the Smithsonian then arranged to return the brain to the nearest living descendants of Ishi’s tribal group, who buried it with his cremated remains in his homeland.

Starn’s book is written in the form of a heroic quest. The young anthropologist (well, nearing 40 and coming up for tenure at Duke) wonders whom to trust, where to go next, and encounters gruff refusals and heartwarming acceptance by the Indians he befriends. At the end of the book, downplaying the fact that he had not been invited to Ishi’s burial, Starn describes an invitation he did get, after telephoning, to the hundredth birthday party of the oldest Maidu. Interwoven in the story of Starn’s quest are Ishi’s history, the tragic persecution of California’s Indians in the 19th century, and many critical notes on Theodora Kroeber’s classic 1961 biography Ishi in Two Worlds. A full set of notes with source citations follows the narrative, an anticlimax after its highly personal style.

The volume edited by the Kroeber brothers, both distinguished academics, understandably more kindly appreciates Theodora’s book; it can be read as its sequel to that book. When, in 1999, Karl Kroeber wrote to the chairman of Berkeley’s anthropology department offering to testify that his parents would have spoken in favor of repatriating Ishi’s remains, he was surprised to be told that the department was riven by agitation to publicly apologize for Alfred Koeber’s “indefensible” treatment of Ishi. With his mother Theodora also censured, Karl and his brother gathered a potpourri, encompassing memories of Ishi, papers on “primitives” as spectacle and specimen, the Berkeley controversy, analyses of Ishi’s knapping technology, language, and stories, and a 1906 summary of California Indians. Although choppy to read, this book has more in it for the anthropologist than Starn’s book.

Both books offer extended discussion of anthropological practices in Ishi’s day, 1911–16, contrasting them with current ethos honoring First Nations. Starn expresses outrage at insensitivity toward Ishi, the apparent exploitation of his capacity to give data, even to Saxton Pope (his medical doctor) photographing him as he was dying, autopsying the body, and preserving the brain for science. The Kroebers better appreciate the desperation Boasians felt for salvage ethnography and the wealth of information it produced, used by informants’ descendants for the last half century and into the present day. Their book documents the strong affection Ishi’s anthropologists felt for the man, the freedom he enjoyed to roam San Francisco (with wages he earned), his pleasure playing with neighbor children—he who had never been able to marry and raise children—and his willingness to demonstrate his skills before admiring audiences or for recording. In contrast to a young Pygmy man, Ota Benge, displayed in the Bronx Zoo’s Monkey House after being shown at the 1904 World’s Fair, and to the Inuit brought to the American Museum by Robert E. Peary—both books describe these examples—Ishi’s humanity was championed by Kroeber, Waterman, and their colleagues. Kroeber apparently never knowingly endangered informants as Elsie Clews Parsons and Leslie White did their Pueblo collaborators. His children remember his principal collaborators as friends visiting their home; Kroeber, like Clark Wissler, not only prepared Indians to collect ethnographic data for him but also gave one of them, Robert Spott, coauthor status. Kroeber’s sons, as editors, note that their father was an exemplary witness for Indian land claims in the 1950s.

Neither Starn nor the contributors to the Kroebers’ volume give readers a fair understanding of why Ishi’s brain was preserved for science. Remarkably, it was kept in the same Smithsonian vat as the brain of John Wesley Powell, founder and longtime director of the Bureau of American Ethnology. To me, this bespeaks signal honor to Ishi. As late as 1942, the brain of Egyptologist W. Flinders Petrie was put in formaldehyde and shipped to a museum, that of the Royal College of Surgeons in London. Flinders Petrie, 89 when he died, had, like Major Powell, willed his brain for scientific study in the expectation that it might reveal the anatomy of his intelligence. Ishi himself did not talk about the disposal of his mortal remains nor about funeral customs; his people did not speak of the dead. (And Ishi’s English was surprisingly—or was it stubbornly?—limited.) Major Powell’s brain, incidentally, is still floating in that vat in the Suitland storage building. Demands to bury First Nations skeletons, and brains, if preserved, reflect Western ethos and a coded assertion of sovereignty as much as or, in instances, instead of particular indigenous customs. For example, Northern Plains nations placed corpses on scaffolds or in trees, or in the case of some leaders, in sealed tipis, letting the soul leave and the rest decay; elderly people who had grown up before reservations begged agents not to insist that their bodies be buried. Southeastern nations, as did the Inca and the Soviet Union with Lenin’s body, kept corpses of rulers on platforms in temples for, it would seem, centuries. Alfred Kroeber was distressed that, in his absence (he was in New York), Ishi’s brain was taken out of the body, but he felt that donating it to Hrdlicka’s important collection, alongside Major Powell’s, acknowledged Ishi’s intelligence. Had Hrdlicka not come to realize that his dissections revealed little, he might have found Ishi’s brain compared favorably with Powell’s.

One difference between Theodora Kroeber’s 1961 Ishi and the books here reviewed is their depictions of California Indians fighting against usurping colonists. Certainly the Indians were victims of genocide, unequivocably called for by local newspapers, but many colonists were murdered, too, as the later books make clear. Indians as well as colonists heartlessly massacred women and children. Indian resistance went on throughout the 19th century, and both Starn’s and the Kroeber brothers’ books attest to the complexities of that period. Ishi and other Indians in his region used some Spanish words, presumably gained when working for “Mexican” ranchers there before U. S. takeover. Ishi knew words in Maidu and Atsugewi, implying that he, or his relatives, had spent time with these neighboring foreign nations. Steven Shackley, a contributor to the Kroebers’ volume, states that Ishi’s lithics were more similar to those of Wintu than to Yana–Yahi and notes that Ishi himself physically resembled Wintu–Maidu somewhat more than northern Yana. In a lengthy section of the Kroebers’ volume on Ishi’s language and stories, belatedly translated and analyzed in the 1980s, Ishi’s version of a Coyote tale is contrasted with one recorded from a northern Yana, Sam Batwi, brought in to help Ishi adjust when he gave himself up in 1911. Pages here are spent pondering whether Ishi’s exacting detail reflects nostalgia or a style he had learned. Both Starn’s and the Kroebers’ books belabor the point that Ishi was not “the” Indian, or “the” California Indian, but a man who had lived for some fifty years on a volatile frontier.

The pathos of the last free Yahis comes out in an episode that Starn recounts (p. 240). In 1908, surveyors with a local cowboy guide happened on the Yahis’ tiny huts concealed by brush. Under ragged blankets sat a frail old lady, likely Ishi’s mother. The intruders kindly gave her a drink of water and assured her (in English) that they would not harm her. Then they picked up for souvenirs all of the Indians’ possessions: fur cloaks, mortars, quiver with arrows, baskets, fish nets—their necessities of life. Ishi has been said to be America’s Anne Frank. Perhaps he was more Anne’s father, living to grieve the cruel deaths of his loved ones. Theodora Kroeber’s biography of Ishi (who had died years before she met her husband) remains the most readable story of “the last Indian.” Orin Starn’s quest book adds historic detail and a great deal on contemporary repatriation politics. The Kroeber brothers’ volume combines direct accounts and data analyses with sections on the Berkeley controversy over their predecessors’ ethics. Ishi seems to have become a genre.

This remarkable book examines the interrelated histories of the Sicilian mafia since World War II and of the more recent civic movement fighting against it. In so doing, it reconstructs what is known about the covert structures of political and social power in Sicily during the Cold War and the following decade.

Jane and Peter Schneider are ideally placed to write this history of the present, having been engaged in long-term ethnographic and archival fieldwork in western Sicily since the sixties. They bring to this study their knowledge of the terrain, their familiarity with Italian and foreign reflections on the mafia phenomenon, and their eclectic intellectual outlook—spanning anthropology, history, and political science.

This well-researched book is divided in two parts. The first chronicles the genesis of the Sicilian mafia, its sociocultural background, the various analyses of this social formation over the last 50 years, and the mafia’s involvement in the political administration of Sicily. The second part focuses on the resistance to organized crime by a significant portion of the local population, after decades of indifference to—if not collusion with—this parallel system of power.

As the Schneiders discuss, what makes it possible for the mafia to grow and prosper is precisely its ability to use violence, or the threat of violence, and political influence to intimidate, pillage, bribe, and corrupt the productive forces of society, from small shopkeepers to major construction companies. Their case in point is a detailed and harrowing analysis of the transformation of Palermo’s urban landscape since World War II and the mafia involvement in it. The book opens with an analysis of the “sack” of the city in the 1950s, when an unregulated and undercapitalized rush into rebuilding after the war saw the mafia and its political and economic associates profit enormously from development schemes, in particular the decision to abandon the ruin-filled historic center to build in the countryside abutting the city. Public parks and protected areas were cemented over and filled with unregulated single-family houses, and century-old orange groves were destroyed to make room for high-rise building compounds lacking such basic infrastructures as public transportation, reliable water, and shops. One quite disturbing photo in the book shows an 18th-century villa totally surrounded by apartment houses several times its height. The mafia profited twice from this situation: initially through the construction racket, and in the long run because the living conditions of the great majority of the popular classes caused considerable anomie in the young, who came to see the mafia as the only viable outlet for their pent-up anger and directionless lives.

Although the first part is commendable for its broad range and detailed knowledge of the material, it is the second half that makes this book rise above the many studies of the Sicilian mafia produced in recent years. By investigating the genesis of the antimafia movement, its accomplishments, shortcomings, and prospects, the Schneiders successfully extend their analysis beyond an examination of the deep roots of the mafia’s cultural legitimacy. They combine archival research with participant-observation and ethnographic interviews (in particular with middle-class, educated informants) to provide an accurate understanding of how an urban, enlightened, and socially engaged middle class feels living in a world of collusion between an often impotent, if not complicit, state and an aggressive parallel power, able and willing to usurp collective wealth for its own profit and to eliminate anybody trying to interfere. In this second part readers find the ethnographic sensibility that makes it possible to understand the first widespread hostility to the mafia as reaction to the successive brutal murders of the high-profile state officials most active in fighting the criminal organization: General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, the national high commissioner against the Mafia, Pio La Torre, the leader of the regional Communist Party (both killed in 1982), and two extremely popular antimafia prosecutors, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino (murdered in 1992). Only after these murders (in particular those of the two prosecutors) did a considerable portion of the local population realize that it could no longer remain silent. The Schneiders chronicle in detail the formation of the many social groups and political initiatives produced by this new resolve. They also chronicle the continuous bickering, turf wars, and political intrigues among the various players in the antimafia camp. In particular, they discuss the two areas identified by the antimafia movement as crucial for any social change: the education of the next generation and the transformation of the urban landscape. The rationale behind this focus is that only by shaping the antimafia imagination of the youth and transforming the practices of everyday life can a reborn civic society rid itself of such parasitic and paralyzing power. Although their title suggests the possibility of reversing the mafia’s influence on the public sphere, their precise analysis of the microphysics of power relations within myriad antimafia groups paints a much bleaker picture of the prospects for sustaining (let alone winning) a concerted fight against the colossal pull and longue durèe influence exerted by the mafia.

The main strength of this book is its combined ethnographic and political-economic analysis of a contemporary city. The Schneiders do for Palermo what Mike Davis did for Los Angeles in his City of Quartz (Verso, 1990). But where Davis relied mostly on written and archival sources to provide his analysis, the Schneiders combine their archival work with an exquisite ethnography, providing readers with the lived experience of the people forced to inhabit a territory shaped by the arrogance of the covert structures of political and social power.

Dhooleka Raj draws readers’ attention to the utterly mundane question, “Where are you from?” She explores how it is experienced by middle-class, suburban Hindu Punjabis (HPs) living in London and how its unstated meanings have profound implications for identity and ethnicity.

Raj begins with a critique of research on ethnic minorities in Britain. Because anthropological research on South Asians in Britain exoticizes them as perpetual sojourners, it has not informed literature on Britain. Critiquing the emphasis on homeland and “retained” or “lost” traditions, Raj asserts that South Asia does not produce closed communities that then reproduce themselves in dispersed settings. Although others have made this argument, Raj pushes her critique further: Even scholars working at both ends of the migration chain have assumed two self-contained and present-time societies for comparing “here and there” (p. 49). For example, the fact of British colonialism seems incidental in much of this work, even though, as Raj argues, the “push” factors were linked to policies of the British Raj.

Indeed, Raj’s most illuminating and richly supported argument is that HPs construct an ethnic identity of being from nowhere on the basis of an earlier displacement. Life stories begin with loss of family and land at the moment of Partition. The 1984 storming of the Golden Temple and the subsequent assassination of Indira Gandhi confirmed their suspicion that Hindus no longer belong to Punjab; since then, being Punjabi has increasingly meant being Sikh. Thus, Sikhs in Britain teach their children written Punjabi, whereas HPs’ shift from Punjabi to Hindi was due to an earlier territorial move and to religious identity as Hindu—it is not a case of culture “loss” caused by migration.

With somewhat less depth, Raj further links the formation of a Hindu identity to the colonial British attempts to create “community consciousness” and disentangle syncretic traditions. The result is that, despite overlap in practice, Hindus and Sikhs in Britain identify in terms of discrete religious “communities.” Although temples foster a sense of Hindu identity in a non-Hindu world, visiting temples is neither a regular practice nor the only way to practice being Hindu in Britain. Thus, temples do not constitute community. It is not entirely clear what Raj intends in describing British Hindus as a “community in moments,” but it is clear that Hindu identity is not only a product of living in Britain but also of South Asian religious politics.

In marriage practices, ethnicity is highlighted and explicitly gendered. Raj describes the complex negotiation between parents and children, in which children agree in principle to arranged marriage while also using various strategies of subversion to ultimately get what they want. Parents are constrained by the need to protect family reputation and the somewhat contradictory need to utilize wider social networks in their search for a suitable match for their child.

How is racism experienced by “visible” minorities who are also middle class? The parental generation was silent on the issue, the younger generation more likely to interpret experiences in terms of racism, but both agreed that racism had worsened. Raj’s explanation for these perceptions is that the idea of a biologically immutable racial hierarchy has been replaced by a new racism of absolute cultural difference, in which visible markers of difference like skin color or dress still prompt the question, “Where are you from?” HPs’ strategies for dealing with racism reveal their middle-class status. They not only hide their success from white neighbors who they feel resent their prosperity, but they also distance themselves from poorer groups such as Bangladeshis. Here, the development of ethnic consciousness results from racism.

Raj also considers critiques of diaspora as a framing device (for its emphasis on homeland, for ignoring hierarchy, and for always ascribing culture change to movement), but she finds it useful because it invokes global relations while allowing research on local populations. Although rejecting the frame of “homeland” in other parts of the book, here Raj analyzes the “myth of return” as not entirely a myth, noting the retirement mantra of “six months here, six months there” (p. 172). Again, attention is drawn to the role of Britain, and India, in this myth: It is the fear of being British, yet not belonging to Britain (fueled by British multiculturalism as well as by memories of South Asians being evicted from Amin’s Uganda) that renders India the de facto homeland. The Indian government, from its side, has also constructed itself as homeland with such initiatives as the Person of Indian Origin card.

The conclusion presents a critique of British policies of multiculturalism, which echo colonial benevolence, exert pressure to choose an identity, conceptualize difference as a problem to be overcome through tolerance, and perpetuate nostalgia for culture. Britain teaches its children “tolerance” of minorities and expects the latter to do the bridge building but does not consider expanding the very definition of British identity. For this reason, the simple question of the book’s title is experienced by HPs as where are you really from?

Only two critiques strike this reviewer as important. The boundaries of “middle-class” status are both notoriously elastic and central to the analytical frame of the study, yet readers are offered neither a definition of the category nor an understanding of Raj’s reasons for focusing on middle-class HPs. Is it because Hindu Punjabis (as opposed to Sikh Punjabis) are primarily middle class in Britain or because these were the people the author met? Also, the conclusion does not explicitly draw together disparate themes, such as arranged marriage and multiculturalism. Nevertheless, the author’s analyses of strategic negotiations of arranged marriage, the new racism of multiculturalism, and the link between the history of Partition and HP identities in contemporary Britain make a significant contribution to literature on South Asian diaspora, ethnicity in Britain, and multiculturalism.

This collection of essays, mostly written by historians, focuses on the 19th- and early 20th-century history of German anthropology. The editors hope to correct the continued underappreciation of the importance of early German research.

German anthropology has followed a path different from that of the Anglo-American (and French) tradition. Germany’s late formation as a nation-state (1871) and its acquisition of colonies only in the 1880s partly explain this, as does its defeat during World War I and the impact of Nazism. During most of the 19th century German anthropology was characterized by liberal humanism, interested in documenting “cultural plurality and historic specificity” (p. 1) and in better understanding the German Volksgeist (genius or spirit)—in contrast to Anglo-American cultural evolutionism. Franz Boas subsequently introduced this liberal, historical perspective to U.S. anthropology, and the British turned to structural-functionalism. In Germany the discipline adopted an objective and deductive scientific stance that stressed cultural differences linked to environmental and racial contrasts.

The editors point out that although the colonial experience was important to German anthropology—both providing locations in which to work and influencing methods and objectives—it was not the only contextual factor shaping the discipline. Intellectual developments “from within the German context” also mattered (p. 10). They emphasize that there was no “seamless march toward” anthropology as a race science from the late 19th century onward (p. 28). The historical situation during that period, as shown by this volume’s contributions, was more complex.

The essays are not explicitly arranged thematically. The first two focus on 19th-century German anthropology. Harry Liebersohn describes how Pacific natives were perceived by German explorers–scientists Adelbert Chamisso early in the 19th century and Augustin Krämer at the turn of the 20th century. He indicates how their view of natives—the former naive romantic, the latter more practical scientific—contrasted because of their respective historical contexts. This case also “suggests a distinctive German cultural mission” (p. 32) that diverged from the longer Anglo and French colonial history. Matti Bunzl examines the late 19th-century journal, Zeitschrift fürVölkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft, and the degree to which it (and folk psychology) reflected German–Jewish relations. The journal was a liberal Jewish undertaking that, among other things, tried to show that Jews could integrate into the German cultural tradition without loss of their identity. Culture, to the Jewish editors of the journal (Steinthal and Lazarus), is malleable, a view that became less appreciated as the 19th century progressed.

The following two essays make the 19th- to 20th-century transformation of German anthropology their principal theme. H. Glenn Penny takes the “rise and fall of Bastian’s museum” in Berlin (p. 90)—the most important late 19th-century ethnographic museum in Germany—to illustrate the shift from the inductive perspective that stressed cultural diversity in a unitary humanity to one that emphasized human cultural differences within geographic and racial constraints. Sierra Bruckner examines commercial ethnographic displays in which troupes of natives toured the countryside. At first praised by the anthropological community as encouraging the education of the bourgeois populace, these displays received increasing criticism in the 20th century by the new generation of anthropologists for seeking to satisfy the entertainment needs of an increasingly proletarian audience.

The growth of racial science in German anthropology in the late 19th and early 20th centuries is the subject of essays by Andrew Zimmerman, Andrew Evans, and Pascal Grosse. Zimmerman traces the history of German anthropometry in colonial Africa and elsewhere. Because of the resistance of local subjects, he notes the tendency among scholars to rely on measurements of bodily remains of natives shipped to Germany. He addresses the ethical issues involved, while arguing that the objectification of the natives for such scientific examinations easily led to racial interpretations. Evans concerns himself with anthropometry conducted within World War I POW camps operated by Germans and Austrians. He finds that the context of these prisons and the emotions of the Great War encouraged a “conflation of race, nation, and Volk” (p. 20) and its application not only to overseas natives but also to Europeans considered enemies. Grosse traces the acclimatization debate. Could Europeans, especially Germans, physically adapt to the tropics? Initially, German anthropologists answered negatively. As the call for German settlements in the newly acquired colonies grew, however, the argument shifted and eventually ended with the eugenic position that selective breeding could create tropically adapted Germans.

Rainer Buschmann and Robert Gordon focus on the relation between the German colonial experience and anthropology. Buschmann describes a relatively positive dimension of this relation by taking the case of Albert Hahl, governor of German New Guinea. Frustrated by the tendency of German anthropological expeditions to concentrate on collecting material culture and measuring body parts, he advocated the need to study current conditions among natives through actual fieldwork (anticipating Bronislaw Malinowski) and by adopting a broader ethnographic perspective. This would improve the science and be more relevant for colonial governance. Although some anthropologists responded (most notably Richard Thurnwald), ultimately Hahl’s call fell on deaf ears. Gordon paints a more negative picture of the interface between colonialism and anthropology. German settlers in German South-West Africa at first wanted to eliminate or exploit the “racially inferior” local Bushmen population. When the region became a mandated territory of South Africa after World War I and scientific interest in the Bushmen increased, these same settlers used the natives to ensure their own cultural survival, advertising their “special knowledge” about the natives to the scientific community, while retaining their racial bias even well after World War II.

In the final contribution to this volume, Suzanne Marchand reaches beyond Germany to cover German-speaking anthropology, specifically in Austria. She examines the role of religion, a dimension, the editors lament, that so far has been neglected by historians of anthropology. The author identifies the critical role of Catholicism in Austria and the absence of colonies in accounting for the divergence of Austrian from German anthropology. Another factor was the work of the energetic Father Schmidt. During the first half of the 20th century Schmidt became the pivotal figure in Austrian anthropology, his mission to document, by means of the diffusion-based Kulturkreislehre, that “pygmies” (p. 288) in Africa and Southeast Asia had monotheistic traditions that became corrupted in more complex societies. His was a conservative but not racist anthropology, demonstrating that the racist paradigm was not an inevitable outcome of anthropology in the German-speaking world.

This is a rich set of insightful essays. Scholars interested in the history of anthropology in general, not only that of Germany, will find this work of considerable value. Three critical points are worth mentioning. First, the editors and some of the contributors seem to favor the “Counter-Enlightenment” (p. 11) humanistic project of 19th-century German anthropology with its stress on cultural plurality, pure native traditions expressed through their individual Volksgeister, and the disruptive influence of the West. They fail to point out that this relativist and essentialist view of culture played nicely into the hands of those who later linked culture to race. The notion of “Volk,” as containing some lasting Geist, or spiritual essence, was one generally shared by both 19th-century liberal anthropologists in Germany and 20th-century Nazi ideologues. By contrast, classical cultural evolution anchored in the idea of psychic unity may have been less subject to such distortion. Second, although the editors and some of the contributors establish a link between 19th-century German liberal anthropology and the early Boasian tradition in the United States, they fail to point out the extension of this link (via Ruth Benedict) into contemporary U.S. anthropology in the form of hermeneutic anthropology and cultural essentialism of Clifford Geertz and others. Finally, maps of German colonial Africa and the Pacific would have been of considerable help, and the index does not do justice to the scope of this volume.

A great scandal erupted in 1998: The brain of the famous California Indian called Ishi had not been cremated with his body in 1916 but sent to the Smithsonian Institution to be pickled in formaldehyde and kept in its collection of human remains. Orin Starn, who grew up in Berkeley as a faculty member’s kid, had decided to write a book about the idealized Ishi, the Yahi man who had roamed around Mt. Lassen for decades with the remnants of his band—an older man and woman and a woman he considered a sister—until they (probably) died and he surrendered in 1911 to a sheriff in Oroville. Alfred Kroeber and his assistants, Thomas T. Waterman and Edward W. Gifford, arranged for the man to live in the new anthropology museum in San Francisco, where he could work as informant with them and, in 1915, with Edward Sapir. Ishi died of tuberculosis in March 1916, and the Berkeley anthropologists had his body, with a selection of his artifacts, cremated and the remains placed in a black Pueblo ceramic vessel in a San Francisco columbarium niche. Following up a claim made by a Maidu, Art Angle, Orin Starn found a letter in the Bancroft Library archives verifying receipt of Ishi’s brain by the Smithsonian’s Ales Hrdlicka. In accord with NAGPRA (Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, 1990), the Smithsonian then arranged to return the brain to the nearest living descendants of Ishi’s tribal group, who buried it with his cremated remains in his homeland.

Starn’s book is written in the form of a heroic quest. The young anthropologist (well, nearing 40 and coming up for tenure at Duke) wonders whom to trust, where to go next, and encounters gruff refusals and heartwarming acceptance by the Indians he befriends. At the end of the book, downplaying the fact that he had not been invited to Ishi’s burial, Starn describes an invitation he did get, after telephoning, to the hundredth birthday party of the oldest Maidu. Interwoven in the story of Starn’s quest are Ishi’s history, the tragic persecution of California’s Indians in the 19th century, and many critical notes on Theodora Kroeber’s classic 1961 biography Ishi in Two Worlds. A full set of notes with source citations follows the narrative, an anticlimax after its highly personal style.

The volume edited by the Kroeber brothers, both distinguished academics, understandably more kindly appreciates Theodora’s book; it can be read as its sequel to that book. When, in 1999, Karl Kroeber wrote to the chairman of Berkeley’s anthropology department offering to testify that his parents would have spoken in favor of repatriating Ishi’s remains, he was surprised to be told that the department was riven by agitation to publicly apologize for Alfred Koeber’s “indefensible” treatment of Ishi. With his mother Theodora also censured, Karl and his brother gathered a potpourri, encompassing memories of Ishi, papers on “primitives” as spectacle and specimen, the Berkeley controversy, analyses of Ishi’s knapping technology, language, and stories, and a 1906 summary of California Indians. Although choppy to read, this book has more in it for the anthropologist than Starn’s book.

Both books offer extended discussion of anthropological practices in Ishi’s day, 1911–16, contrasting them with current ethos honoring First Nations. Starn expresses outrage at insensitivity toward Ishi, the apparent exploitation of his capacity to give data, even to Saxton Pope (his medical doctor) photographing him as he was dying, autopsying the body, and preserving the brain for science. The Kroebers better appreciate the desperation Boasians felt for salvage ethnography and the wealth of information it produced, used by informants’ descendants for the last half century and into the present day. Their book documents the strong affection Ishi’s anthropologists felt for the man, the freedom he enjoyed to roam San Francisco (with wages he earned), his pleasure playing with neighbor children—he who had never been able to marry and raise children—and his willingness to demonstrate his skills before admiring audiences or for recording. In contrast to a young Pygmy man, Ota Benge, displayed in the Bronx Zoo’s Monkey House after being shown at the 1904 World’s Fair, and to the Inuit brought to the American Museum by Robert E. Peary—both books describe these examples—Ishi’s humanity was championed by Kroeber, Waterman, and their colleagues. Kroeber apparently never knowingly endangered informants as Elsie Clews Parsons and Leslie White did their Pueblo collaborators. His children remember his principal collaborators as friends visiting their home; Kroeber, like Clark Wissler, not only prepared Indians to collect ethnographic data for him but also gave one of them, Robert Spott, coauthor status. Kroeber’s sons, as editors, note that their father was an exemplary witness for Indian land claims in the 1950s.

Neither Starn nor the contributors to the Kroebers’ volume give readers a fair understanding of why Ishi’s brain was preserved for science. Remarkably, it was kept in the same Smithsonian vat as the brain of John Wesley Powell, founder and longtime director of the Bureau of American Ethnology. To me, this bespeaks signal honor to Ishi. As late as 1942, the brain of Egyptologist W. Flinders Petrie was put in formaldehyde and shipped to a museum, that of the Royal College of Surgeons in London. Flinders Petrie, 89 when he died, had, like Major Powell, willed his brain for scientific study in the expectation that it might reveal the anatomy of his intelligence. Ishi himself did not talk about the disposal of his mortal remains nor about funeral customs; his people did not speak of the dead. (And Ishi’s English was surprisingly—or was it stubbornly?—limited.) Major Powell’s brain, incidentally, is still floating in that vat in the Suitland storage building. Demands to bury First Nations skeletons, and brains, if preserved, reflect Western ethos and a coded assertion of sovereignty as much as or, in instances, instead of particular indigenous customs. For example, Northern Plains nations placed corpses on scaffolds or in trees, or in the case of some leaders, in sealed tipis, letting the soul leave and the rest decay; elderly people who had grown up before reservations begged agents not to insist that their bodies be buried. Southeastern nations, as did the Inca and the Soviet Union with Lenin’s body, kept corpses of rulers on platforms in temples for, it would seem, centuries. Alfred Kroeber was distressed that, in his absence (he was in New York), Ishi’s brain was taken out of the body, but he felt that donating it to Hrdlicka’s important collection, alongside Major Powell’s, acknowledged Ishi’s intelligence. Had Hrdlicka not come to realize that his dissections revealed little, he might have found Ishi’s brain compared favorably with Powell’s.

One difference between Theodora Kroeber’s 1961 Ishi and the books here reviewed is their depictions of California Indians fighting against usurping colonists. Certainly the Indians were victims of genocide, unequivocably called for by local newspapers, but many colonists were murdered, too, as the later books make clear. Indians as well as colonists heartlessly massacred women and children. Indian resistance went on throughout the 19th century, and both Starn’s and the Kroeber brothers’ books attest to the complexities of that period. Ishi and other Indians in his region used some Spanish words, presumably gained when working for “Mexican” ranchers there before U. S. takeover. Ishi knew words in Maidu and Atsugewi, implying that he, or his relatives, had spent time with these neighboring foreign nations. Steven Shackley, a contributor to the Kroebers’ volume, states that Ishi’s lithics were more similar to those of Wintu than to Yana–Yahi and notes that Ishi himself physically resembled Wintu–Maidu somewhat more than northern Yana. In a lengthy section of the Kroebers’ volume on Ishi’s language and stories, belatedly translated and analyzed in the 1980s, Ishi’s version of a Coyote tale is contrasted with one recorded from a northern Yana, Sam Batwi, brought in to help Ishi adjust when he gave himself up in 1911. Pages here are spent pondering whether Ishi’s exacting detail reflects nostalgia or a style he had learned. Both Starn’s and the Kroebers’ books belabor the point that Ishi was not “the” Indian, or “the” California Indian, but a man who had lived for some fifty years on a volatile frontier.

The pathos of the last free Yahis comes out in an episode that Starn recounts (p. 240). In 1908, surveyors with a local cowboy guide happened on the Yahis’ tiny huts concealed by brush. Under ragged blankets sat a frail old lady, likely Ishi’s mother. The intruders kindly gave her a drink of water and assured her (in English) that they would not harm her. Then they picked up for souvenirs all of the Indians’ possessions: fur cloaks, mortars, quiver with arrows, baskets, fish nets—their necessities of life. Ishi has been said to be America’s Anne Frank. Perhaps he was more Anne’s father, living to grieve the cruel deaths of his loved ones. Theodora Kroeber’s biography of Ishi (who had died years before she met her husband) remains the most readable story of “the last Indian.” Orin Starn’s quest book adds historic detail and a great deal on contemporary repatriation politics. The Kroeber brothers’ volume combines direct accounts and data analyses with sections on the Berkeley controversy over their predecessors’ ethics. Ishi seems to have become a genre.

From the beginning of this book, which proposes a patchwork psychological model accounting for all misogynies, David Gilmore seems unclear even to himself whether he wishes to address the fear and hatred of women by individual men or by whole cultures. Gilmore explains that “this book is an inquiry into misogyny as it occurs and has occurred in cultures around the world” (p. 8). But, in the very next sentence, Gilmore presupposes that misogynistic cultures are composed of men only, and in two definitions of the term, he shifts from societies or cultures to men only: “by ‘misogyny’ I will mean an unreasonable fear or hatred of women that takes on some palpable form in any given society. ... Misogyny, then, is a sexual prejudice that is symbolically exchanged (shared) among men” (p. 9, emphasis added). These statements suggests that societies and cultures are primarily made up of men; the place of women is not clear. It is this absence of real women (as opposed to mythological ones) and the confusion between individual men and their cultures that ultimately undo Gilmore’s arguments.

That misogyny is widespread across the globe (and history) is not in dispute, and Gilmore’s chapters documenting women hating in what seems like every culture, time, and religion are ultimately fascinating and revealing. Gilmore shows readers not only the widespread nature of misogyny but also its variety. Women are hated in many ways and for many overt reasons around the world: for their bodies, for their tempting of men, and for their “evil natures,” among others. This “tour of misogyny” occupies the first half of the book, after which Gilmore organizes this variety into what he claims to be “commonalities.” But after pointing out some commonly appearing (but by no means universal) themes in misogyny, Gilmore’s classification of “many misogynies,” (p. 147) ends up emphasizing variety rather than commonality. Rather than exploring this variety, Gilmore moves on to consider psychological, and then structural and materialist, causes of universal misogyny.

The chapter on the psychological theories is perhaps persuasive if one subscribes to the notion that (neo-)Freudian psychology (developed to analyze individuals and based on a self-selected sample of patients) is a valid way to explain cultural patterns, practices, and beliefs. I found that the number and mutation of these “theories” only showed the weakness of the whole enterprise: chiefly, that there is no way of knowing whether they are right. The structuralist and materialist theories have the advantage that they explain cultural phenomena through culture, rather than through individual male psychology. Gilmore, however, dismisses these theories as not being sufficiently powerful to explain universal misogyny.

In a fascinating twist, Gilmore then illustrates that most misogynistic cultures (or men) also have gynophilic aspects, that they often have an equal and opposite reverence for some women—the coexisting Madonna and whore being a prime example. Gilmore argues that it is this two-sided ambivalence toward women in men’s psyches that drives misogyny. Men are misogynists, argues Gilmore, because of castration anxiety, sexual frustration, and anger at being so dependent on women (especially mothers), while at the same time they harbor a regressive impulse to return to the womb or infancy. Each aspect of this explanation is meant to address a different aspect of universal misogyny. But Gilmore has shown that not all misogynies are present in every culture, so one wonders whether it is even appropriate to ask the prime mover question.

Still, even if one is skeptical of a grand psychological explanation, one does wonder why misogyny is so widespread. Perhaps it is visible and named in the first place because it is men who do the naming (and sacred-text writing) in most cultures. And what about the women? Do they believe themselves, for example, to be “dirty” or “polluting” when they are isolated during menses? At least some women must be complicit in this misogyny and believe in the religious and mythological evil in themselves. This is an important point, especially because the psychological explanations should not apply to women, but it is not raised at all by Gilmore. This oversight leaves the entire project incomplete.

Passage in 1990 of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) by the United States Congress will be recognized by Native Americans and anthropologists as a key event in the last half of the 20th century and beyond. Although I expect to see many future books written on this topic, Kathleen Fine-Dare is one of the first anthropologists to focus directly on the pre- and post-NAGPRA processes. She states that her monograph offers “a partial retrospective and a cautious perspective” (p. 7) regarding the implementation, complexities, and far-reaching consequences of the NAGPRA. She does not have an easy task, and many readers will note omissions both positive and negative that have made the NAGPRA an emotionally charged issue.

Fine-Dare divides her case study into two main parts. In part 1, she focuses on the “Historical and Legal Contexts of the Repatriation Movement.” She notes that the object collecting and museum building associated with colonial expansion have not been strictly phenomena of the United States but were carried out by many European powers. Fine-Dare discusses how military domination of indigenous Americans was backed by philosophical and, later, scientific justification for ascribing inferiority to disappearing and “dying” native cultures relative to Europeans. She describes many instances illustrating how and why the acquisition of Native American cultural and religious objects as well as human remains became a standard practice of the dominant Euro-American society.

Unfortunately, however, Fine-Dare’s attempts to describe the numerous instances of horrific treatment of American Indians make part 1 overly convoluted and complicated. Although examining these facts is clearly important, the disastrous consequences of Native American and Euro-American interactions have been extensively and thoroughly documented by other writers, both Native and non-Native. Fine-Dare’s attempt to tell readers as much as possible about the oppression, the natural historization, and the subsequent political struggles of indigenous peoples makes part 1 uneven and creates large sections of text that often seem incomplete. I often felt that my time would have been better spent rereading books by Vine Deloria, Peter Mathiessen, or David Hurst Thomas as well as many others or tuning into National Native News or Native America Calling to hear these issues debated in real time. I would have preferred that Fine-Dare spend less time on these well-known historical issues and more time explaining some of her insightful anthropological observations. For example, she notes how Native Americans were pushed aside as the legitimate caretakers and authorities of their cultural history only to be replaced by the federal government, in the guise of either the Smithsonian Institution or the National Park Service. Another higher-order issue concerns the interaction between Native religions and the NAGPRA process. Fine-Dare briefly offers native voices who succinctly state the absurdity of U.S. governmental policies requiring Native Americans to justify why an object must have cultural or religious significance before it can be repatriated. Exploring these higher-order questions is where Fine-Dare could have made a stronger intellectual and consciousness-raising contribution to anthropology.

In part 2, Fine-Dare provides an insider’s view, from her former position as chair, of how the anthropology department at Fort Lewis College in Colorado attempted to negotiate the nuances of NAGPRA compliance. Individuals who have been involved in this process will recognize the frustrations, difficulties, and, one hope’s, the rewards experienced by Fine-Dare and her colleagues as they met for the first time with representatives from different tribes to discuss repatriation.

What I find particularly compelling both in part 2 and in the entire book is that Fine-Dare manages to convey the incredible burden and responsibility placed on Native tribes to retrieve, manage, and protect what clearly belongs to them, particularly as that process involves the presentation of their cultural history to outsiders. She notes that repatriation is a difficult process for all involved, but especially for Native Americans who, to have their cultural heritage repatriated, are often forced to review and confront the long list of atrocities, war crimes, human rights abuses, racism, and one-sided government policies that have led to their subsequent treatment as far less than second-class citizens in a land where they were once the majority. Fine-Dare highlights the concerns voiced by numerous tribal governments that repatriation issues can pit different tribes against each other, especially when opposing claims may affect larger issues such as land rights.

In part 2, Fine-Dare touches on several questions that require greater exploration in the future. One issue is how anthropologists adhere to previously created social constructs for grouping Native Americans (e.g., Puebloan, non-Puebloan) that some Native Americans think are not legitimate. Such issues, I think, cut to the core of what the NAGPRA legislation should actually mean to anthropologists. Instead of viewing NAGPRA as a negative imposition, anthropologists should see it as an opportunity to forge partnerships in which all parties involved are on equal terms. Such equal footing raises an additional higher-order issue briefly discussed by Fine-Dare, that of intellectual and cultural property rights. I wish Fine-Dare had devoted more discussion to these issues.

I commend Fine-Dare for highlighting the contentious but important issues surrounding the impetus and implementation of the NAGPRA and its subsequent and continuing impact on the Native and academic communities. As the NAGPRA is a hot-button issue, writing a book on this topic that is not provocative and controversial is almost impossible. Although most of the NAGPRA-related issues discussed by Fine-Dare are extremely important, overall, her book is somewhat disappointing. Fine-Dare does not appear to have conducted any of her own original interviews with either Natives or anthropologists participating in the NAGPRA process. Although such interviews may have been difficult to conduct, Fine-Dare is in an opportune geographical and professional location in southwest Colorado to add these different “Voices” and could have expanded all sections of her book with such interviews. However, I am sure that many anthropologists, including myself, will use Fine-Dare’s book in future classes.