Drawing from the contributions of anthropology, cultural studies, feminist theory, and psychoanalysis, Mary Weismantel analyzes the politics of race and sex in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru. As she points out, her goals are to contribute to dismantling the myth that Latin America has achieved some kind of racial democracy, to show the continuing power of race in Andean societies, and to shed light on the sexual dimensions of racial oppression.

Weismantel presents readers with a beautifully assembled text that combines her own field experience during the years 1982–87, a review of the work previously done by social scientists in Latin America, and a quite liberal use of travelers’ accounts, visual records, and the literary works of the best-known or the more fashionable writers of this region. As she states, her claim to validity does not rest on her singular authority but on her ability to construct a credible intersubjective narrative (p. xxiv), which is inevitably partial and multiple.

To undertake this task she chooses two paradigmatic figures: the chola and the pishtaco. The first refers to a racial category—between Indian and white, to an actual character: the market woman, to a female image that epitomizes the national mestizo identity, and to a figure of the area’s indigenous movements. The pishtaco is a bogeyman, a fantasy figure common in Andean folklore, which evokes violence and fear. He typifies a kind of masculinity described as macho—violent, aggressive, and hyperphallic—that that is also associated with the sinister side of interracial and gender relations.

Through this unusual combination of an actual character and a fantasy figure, Weismantel seeks to express the contradictions of the Andean racial and gender system. The pishtaco summarizes the fear and abuse implicit in racial and sexual exchanges between Indians and whites. The chola represents a woman who breaks gender and racial boundaries. In that sense, the author proposes that the category chola reveals and even exacerbates racial conflicts.

Weismantel situates her analysis in the marketplace because, as she claims, it is the space where racial boundaries overflow, where whites, mestizos, and Indians interact. According to the author, the ambiguities of the chola, a market woman and a subordinated figure, express the gap between two forms of material exchange: the chimera of reciprocity represented by the Indian and the reality of unequal exchange embodied in the story of the pishtaco.

The author concludes the text by analyzing the ritual of the Mama Negra, the black mother, which she opposes to the pishtaco, the castrating father. The procession of the mama negra, a travestied version of the Virgin Mary, performs the inversion of the racial and gender order: focusing on a figure that breaks every social hierarchy in the Andes and, Weismantel likes to believe, announces a radical democracy that overturns sex and gender oppressions as well as those of race and class (p. 258.) The pishtaco, on his side, exemplifies an ideal of masculinity in Latin America identifying manhood with violence and castration.

Weismantel has made an enormous effort to integrate a wide array of sources to offer readers a thoughtful and solidly built panorama of racial and sex relations in the Andes. I have some reservations, however, regarding her method and her assumptions about Latin American culture and gender identities. First, it is one thing to accept that the ethnographer uses rhetorical tools to persuade the reader of the validity of his or her statements and quite another to treat ethnographic data and literary texts as if they were comparable pieces of evidence. As concerns Andean societies´ racial and sex systems, Weismantel’s analysis is still pervaded by dualism. Although criticizing the assumption that racial hierarchies are static, she re-creates an Indian culture untouched by asymmetry. For instance, Indian economic rationality is rooted on the notion of reciprocity, gender relations are balanced, and the notion of masculinity is centered on the good and caring father: the tayta. She goes on to propose that there are two conceptions of masculinity: the white and mestizo, associated with machismo, and the Indian, centered on fatherhood. In so doing, Weismantel reconstructs a lost paradise free of inequalities degraded by the Western conquest and reproduces the very well known, and already contested, identification of Latin American mestizos and white men with an abusive masculinity.

In November 1997, the Critical Race Theory (CRT) conference at Yale University celebrated its 10th anniversary. One outcome ushering in the second decade of this intellectual and activist project is Crossroads, Directions, and a New Critical Race Theory, a set of revised and updated working papers, which collectively reflect a shift in focus emphasizing “multiple and interlocking forms of discrimination.” No longer outsiders, legal scholars of color insisting on the centrality of race as a theoretical and empirical point of departure in legal studies are no longer either burdened by the schizophrenia of the eighties or distracted by critiques of essentialism. As the “on-going public struggle over knowledge —its production and its dissemination” (p. 5)—remains a challenge inside and outside of legal culture, insights from the CRT project remain significant for all those who work in the academy “fighting battles in the trenches of interpretation” (p. 25).

Social science professors who recognize the importance of teaching students that every body is raced, sexed, gendered, classed, and positioned by nationality, citizenship, and residency will find this compilation, with its clarity, a useful resource when designing or revising syllabi. Divided into three parts, “History,” “Crossroads,” and “Directions,” this volume can be incorporated into undergraduate anthropology courses offering students a broader context within which to (re)consider traditional concepts in the discipline. In particular, the three subsections in “Crossroads,”called “Race,” “Narrativity,” and “Globalization,” provide thought-provoking readings for inclusion on syllabi that are attentive to theories of culture, interpretive anthropology, theoretical pluralism, and multisited ethnographic research.

Cumulatively, the contributions to Crossroads evidence a refinement of analytic models that pave a theoretical track toward “antisubordinationist social transformation” —a recurring phrase in the volume encapsulating the idea that theory cannot be divorced from activism. For professors in departments of anthropology, a discipline burdened by the double legacy of racism and humanism, the essays offer an opportunity to engage with the ongoing issue of diversity in three identified primary spheres: faculty, students, and curriculum (p. 34). Those seeking to cultivate student appreciation for the historical contexts, cultural values, and legal principles that shape representations of groups, social identities, and theories of culture will find a rich array of articles from which to choose for both introductory and advanced courses.

From Devon W. Carbado to Eric Yamamoto, each scholar challenges narrow categories and emphasizes sites along multiple axes in which individuals can be simultaneously the targets of discrimination and beneficiaries of privilege. Moving beyond reductive social constructionism, critical race theorists accentuate “multiple axes of identity and position.” This reworking of W. E. B. Du Bois’s “double consciousness” has also been articulated as a foundational concept by anthropologists of color as “multiple subjectivity” and by critical race legal feminists as “multiple consciousness” and “intersectionality.”

For departments of anthropology with few students of color, fewer faculty of color, and meager representation of anthropologists of color in required core courses, the works in Crossroads document and denaturalize discrimination and racism through substantive analyses of race, privilege, and power in the areas of disability, gender, immigration policies, and socioeconomic class hierarchies at the national and global levels. Those who seriously engage with the project of Critical Race Theory in legal studies and advocate its adaptation in other academic arenas will be challenged to ignore the ideological assaults from the right, which now includes “multicultural conservatives” as well as “the virtual lunch counter,” manifested by a color-blind discourse, “the rationalization for racial power in which few are served and many are denied” (p. 26).

This backlash still manifests itself in the academy through a strategic insistence on activating a mechanism of democracy in which invoking academic freedom serves to veto inclusive curricular revisions and to silence the “minority.” Readers should not expect to find explicit remedial prescriptions for antidiscriminatory policies as they work their way through the 19 incisive analyses of racism, sexism, nativism, and other isms. But this is not necessarily a weakness—on the contrary, the strength of the volume lies in the project itself: “CRT’s challenge to historic arrangements, liberal curatives, and backlash politics has addressed not only the practices of far-away courts and mighty corporations but also the very make-up of our own profession” (p. 4). In this context, the readings will prove empowering for those faculty and students still isolated in the monochromatic complexion of departments and majors where whiteness remains an unmarked default.

Preceded by Charles Lawrence III’s foreword, a reminder of the difficulty of challenging hierarchy and subordination in the absence of strong student activism, Crossroads concludes with an afterword by Derrick Bell, who instructively notes that although “academic faculties either ban us from their midst entirely or ensure that our numbers do not exceed one or two ... readers who hail our work may not be powerful but they do exist”. For anthropologists, this should inspire efforts to resume a leading, rather than lagging, role in revealing and revoking social sanctions that have enabled discriminatory practices to go underground or to be protected under the shield of various freedoms that the academy’s gatekeepers energetically advocate when faced with objections to their authority. Those at the vanguard of this struggle may be inspired by Derrick Bell’s observation that, although racism may be permanent, collections like Crossroads represent a mission and a contribution against “the multiple permutations of racism and their intersection with other virulent forces of oppression” (p. 412); these are the struggles that make life meaningful.

Dennis Tedlock’s is the third scholarly translation and exegesis of this Mayan dance–drama script in the past decade. One might ask, do we really need another version? The answer would seem to be yes. What does Tedlock bring to this edition that is new? First and foremost, a new translation. All translations necessarily reflect a set of presuppositions about the ethnohistoric and cultural background of a work. Tedlock makes his presuppositions explicit in the notes elucidating and in the chapters following his translation. Moreover, Tedlock is careful not to leave the text in the past he documents but also to situate it in its current sociopolitical milieu. He examines continuity and change, not just of text and textual interpretations, but also in the ideological ends of the performance.

Second, the translation is not based on a single version of the text or a single performance but is textured with nuance gained by careful examination of two written versions, that of Charles Etienne Brasseur de Bourbourg and that of Manuel Pérez (the latter being an incomplete copy and reworking of the former), two complete live performances, and a plethora of private practice sessions with the performance troupe leader and manuscript caretaker, José León Coloch, as well as group rehearsals. Tedlock’s close collaboration with León Coloch enriches the text.

Third, pictures of actions within the scenes, diagrams of the actors’ movements, stage directions within the spoken–written word, elaboration of costume design and evolution, and attention to the musical and ritual accompaniments of the enactment bring the performance to life.

Fourth, the scholarly exegesis exemplifies the position of this script among autochthonous performances of political and social identity, arguing for an unbroken, though plastic, tradition harking back to the Classic Mayan era.

Part 1 is the script of the play, complete with stage directions, information on musical accompaniment, and style of declamation. The text is laid out visually to emphasize the poetic and oratorical style. Tedlock has discovered that the timing of the lines is learned aural–orally and it is not directly deducible from the grammatical structure or reducible to the famous Mayan coupleting. In chapter 4 he provides oscillographs, which show timing and loudness; as loudness and pitch covary, these graphs chart the auditory structure of the utterance, revealing a triadic structure, composed of a couplet with a lead-in or a coda, in beginning orations, which then speeds up into more dyadic or quadratic forms.

In chapter 1 Tedlock draws parallels between eighth-century Mayan (as well as Mixtec and Nahuatl) courtly practice as revealed on stelae, ceramics, and murals and the paraphernalia and symbolism within the modern dance performance. Eerie perserverances and transformations surface: the god K mannequin scepter becomes an axe; nose and lip plugs become mustaches and goatees. In chapter 2 Tedlock explores the precontact survivals within the dance forms and the speeches: the dance within the arena physically re-creates the solar year and its interaction with the 260-day count, establishing four year bearers, and Kaweq’s speeches number the solar months.

In chapter 3 Tedlock outlines the ideological adaptation of the play under Spanish rule, syncretism with the martyrdom of Paul perhaps allowing the survival of the play, while its ratification of the indigenous social order is affirmed and inverted by a counterplay, an indigenous satire on the Rabinal Achi, which is also performed within the dance–drama cycle of festivities. In chapter 4, Tedlock examines the role of the script and the performance in constructing text and meaning. Careful attention to aural recordings reveals the crucial role of silence in scansion. Finally, in chapter 5, Tedlock situates the play within its ritual context, following the players through private and public ceremonies, preparatory to and bracketing the performance. This attention to the social setting of the drama mediates the seeming contradiction between the play’s cultural import and the relative inattention of audiences, which may be small, may drift in and out of the area, or may not be present at all.

In his notes and final glossary, Tedlock gives analyses of personal names, titles, place names, and idioms that might not be transparent (even to modern speakers of Achi). Although interesting, the absence of the complete Achi text leaves these observations floating.

Photographs, drawings, and graphs help bring the performance to life and tie it not just to Mayan but also to Mesoamerican culture, past and present.

“As UROCAL (a regional rural organization) became the vehicle through which individual peasants petitioned development offices for credit and other resources,” Steve Striffler writes (p. 191) in his nearly flawless book, “the peasantry’s collective capacity for political mobilization was diminished.” Tracing distinct phases of rural production in southern coastal Ecuador, Striffler again and again makes the point that increased access to resources—whether credit, land, markets, or political clout—among Ecuadorian peasants and agricultural workers often came at the price of collective action and influence with the state. This occurred despite peasants and workers, through popular struggle, having played central roles in transformations of the state and capital as capitalists moved from enclave banana production to contract farming and the state moved successively toward and away from agrarian reform.

Unevenly incorporated into the state and capital, peasants were able to marshal successful land invasions against not only United Fruit but other powerful multinational, capitalist concerns as well, forming viable peasant communities on lands that technically belonged to United Fruit. These successes were due in part to the lack of coordination among the different divisions of government as its various representatives attempted to extend state control over Ecuador’s rural regions and people. Striffler’s detailed historical analysis of Hacienda Tenquel, a large United Fruit banana plantation on Ecuador’s southern coast, illustrates the contradictions that large multinationals perpetuated and faced while establishing enclave production regimes that were destined to be short-lived because of the susceptibility of bananas to disease. During the 1940s and 1950s, United Fruit provided excellent jobs, schools, health care, social spaces, and other benefits for workers and their families, viewing family-oriented workers as particularly well suited to their operations. It was a kind of total institution: Company representatives were able to enforce their ideas about family, worker, and community not only by providing good jobs and wages but also through the isolation of the plantation, the use of their own private police force, and their ability to stem unfriendly union activity through the management of leisure time with social clubs. Workers Striffler interviewed in the 1940s and 50s remembered this time with nostalgia. As Panama disease cut into production and forced reductions in the labor force, labor relations grew less friendly. By this time, moreover, peasants had been colonizing idle lands along the edges of the enclave, at times even cultivating idle Hacienda Tenguel lands, engaging United Fruit in property disputes and forming communes with the assistance of the state. Striffler’s characterizations of the land invasions—emphasizing the changing roles of women in the formation of the communes, the ways peasants appealed to local officials, increasingly aligning their discourse and strategies with the growing popular support for agrarian reform and growing into skillful political actors that eventually forced United Fruit to abandon enclave production—are among the most enlightening of the book, rich in their insistence that “we place human actors at the center of abstract categories such as capital, the state, the church, the ‘popular’” (p. 208).

Although many might celebrate these peasant and worker successes, one of Striffler’s strengths is his insistence that capitalists and state actors, far from merely representing structures that peasants and workers deal with, are themselves highly active agents in the transformations taking place, marshaling their own political and economic forces to undermine how far reaching such peasant–worker successes might become. Increasing state assistance led to loan and other programs that indebted peasants without significantly improving their material conditions. Foreign-owned enclave production gave way to locally owned production in which local capitalists and state officials became more intertwined even as foreign capital retreated to a position where it could maintain control over production without incurring the risks of peasant land invasions or worker unrest. What emerged was contract farming, with local capitalists producing bananas on contract for foreign firms with temporary workers who no longer identify themselves as workers, and who thereby have lost yet another basis for collective action.

About halfway through the book, after chronicling the success of a popular peasant struggle against United Fruit, Griffith writes, “To stop the narrative at just the moment when subordinate groups have achieved some long-sought-after goal is not only populist, and dangerously so, but bad history. It is to replace processes with events” (p. 110). His account, by contrast, is history that, highlighting process, is enlightening.

The demographic transition in the United States poses inherently cultural challenges to the nation’s existing health care system. The ethnographic works contained in Gray Areas uniquely addresses these challenges by examining the complex relationships among lifespan development and identity, paid and unpaid caregiving roles, and the historical dominance of the medical model in long-term care settings. Families and service providers alike struggle with the definition of “quality of life” and with how its realization seemingly evades long-term care institutions for frail or cognitively impaired elders. The differing roles and priorities of these stakeholders often serve to further frustrate the successful transition of elders into a long-term care setting. By providing ethnographic insight into the minutiae of resident, family, and staff interactions as well as historical and macrolevel perspectives on the political–economic development of the long-term care system, the contributors to Gray Areas provide both a sorely needed overview of the current state of chronic illness care in the United States and a working model for qualitative researchers seeking to understand nursing home culture.

Nursing homes are popularly conceived of as a last resort, and many Americans assert a preference for death over institutionalization. Stafford’s introductory chapter traces the proliferation of nursing homes and links mechanisms for their financial development to social perspectives on medical aspects of older age. He describes and illustrates a model for understanding “the nursing home as a contested cultural space upheld by social processes” (p. 10). This model visually demonstrates the difficulties inherent in providing individualized quality caring within a nursing home setting by contextualizing interpersonal exchange within competing frameworks of nursing home inhabitants as patients and nursing home residents as persons.

The model encapsulates the essential cultural tension within nursing homes. Nursing homes invoke the social power and authority of allopathic medicine on many levels, yet these markers of medical authority may falsely signify immediate access to medical treatment. Jeanie Kayser-Jones’s research evaluates the decision-making process for acute illness incidents in nursing homes and found that many cases are inadequately treated. Despite appearances to the contrary, nursing homes suffer from infrequent physician visits and a lack of diagnostic equipment. Recently, nursing homes have marketed themselves as providing specialized care for specific chronic conditions, for example, Alzheimer’s disease (AD). J. Neil Henderson explores the rhetoric surrounding AD special care units, which are characterized by higher staffing, decreased sensory stimulation, and increased security compared with other units. Henderson’s work connects the socially acceptable desire for medical treatment of a progressive disease with the socially less acceptable desire for relief from care for a demented family member.

The essential tension of the nursing home cultural model is also evidenced in several authors’ discussions of personal autonomy and failure to thrive. Stafford’s piece, “Homebodies,” describes how facilities attempt to ease the tension between their competing identities as hospital and home via a simulation of home life. Stafford underscores the importance of identity and selfhood in the meaning making of space; the normalcy evoked by nursing homes is made abnormal by virtue of its spatial and historical dislocation. Eating, a basic sphere of social interaction, is transformed into medicalized interventions and, ultimately, into sites of resistance. Nursing homes provide nutritious food and monitor the weight and eating habits of residents, but they often operationalize these responsibilities by producing uniformly bland, textureless meals devoid of positive social meaning. Joel Savinshinsky explains how residents’ resistance to eating may serve as a venue to express their lack of autonomy, markedly redefining the ultimate cause of “failure to thrive.”

Residents’ noninstituionalized family members are also members of nursing home culture. Graham Rowles and Dallas High create a model for understanding the different decision-making roles family members claim and demonstrate that positive familial engagement enhances this change fine with me the quality of life for residents. Renee Shield’s contribution reminds readers that the hierarchical power structure among staff must be taken into consideration by family members. Margaret Perkinson’s research investigates the positive effects of facility-initiated family involvement on family–staff relations and resident care. Perkinson’s project invited family members and nursing assistants to develop a family guide to the nursing home, validating various stakeholders’ vantage points and producing a model for improving family–facility interaction. Maria Vesperi’s chapter addresses the reflexivity required by residents and anthropologists alike as they struggle to make sense of their own aging trajectories. Vesperi reflects on residents’ reluctance to acknowledge this suggestion accepted their loved ones’ roles in the institutionalization process.

Nursing homes may strive to become more homelike while retaining the authority vested in them as medical facilities; however, a plethora of new alternatives to nursing homes is being aggressively marketed to “soon to be old” and older adults alike. Continuing care, independent living, and assisted living facilities frame themselves as residential communities for active seniors who desire the security of knowing that help is nearby. The final chapter in this volume investigates the rhetoric used by an assisted living facility. Paula Carder describes the linguistic devices used by administrative staff to underscore the themes of independence, individuality, and privacy. It is clear that nursing homes are becoming more responsive to their clientele; however, the importance of using culture as a model for understanding the dynamics within these institutional communities has not changed. This volume demonstrates that anthropological insights into the relationships among meaning making, aging, and the experiences of long-term care residents remain relevant and vital components to improving quality of life for those nearing the end of the lifecourse.

The worldwide interest in the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) has generated a vast literature in political science, psychology, philosophy, and conflict resolution. So far, however, few full-length ethnographic studies of the TRC’s work have been published. Fiona Ross’s Bearing Witness begins to correct this imbalance in a finely grained and humane account of women’s experiences during apartheid and of their “testimony” during the TRC’s “victim hearings.” The chance to offer testimony at these hearings was supposed to give apartheid victims an opportunity to “set the record straight” about the historical facts of apartheid. It was also meant to help them (re)claim a “voice” they were presumed to have lost through their violation. This voice was supposed to emerge through a particular kind of testimony about the gross violation of human rights. And it was supposed to “empower” victims, psychologically, socially, and politically.

In this ethnography, however, Ross critiques “conventional ways of attending to suffering and recovery” (p. 1) and argues that the TRC’s “grammar of pain, couched in terms of violations of human rights, permitted the expression of certain kinds of experience while eliding others” (p. 1). Building on the growing recognition that human rights discourse is unable to express the many forms of human suffering, Ross provides a useful case study of how the “testimonial practices” (p. 27) promoted by the TRC were particularly unsuited for expressing the experiences of women during apartheid.

Her fieldwork was conducted with women who had not only suffered in various ways from apartheid’s violence but had also been politically active in their own community’s (Zwelethemba) long resistance to apartheid. Like all lives under apartheid, the lives of these women were complex, composed of “layers of experiences” (p. 42), and cut through with both the “everyday” and the more spectacular forms of violence and suffering. And their stories spoke as much, if not more, about resilience and overcoming as about victimization. At the TRC, however, these women were transformed into victims of physical harm, especially, of sexual violence. In the process, the TRC “elided [the] political activism” (p. 93) of these women and the social character of their suffering, concentrating instead on moments of passive individual violation.

Ross examines the constitution of the category “woman” as a particular kind of passive and sexually vulnerable subject at the TRC, unpacks the form and content of women’s testimonies at the TRC, and highlights how the TRC was unable to provide an adequate vehicle of expression for the experiences of this group of politically active women. Particularly effective in bringing together these many themes is the chapter in which Ross examines how the complex experiences during apartheid of one specific woman were told and retold, packaged and reinterpreted over a three-year period by the TRC, by journalists, by academics, and by members of her own community. In the process, Ross demonstrates vividly that “testimonies do not exist intact, awaiting an opportunity for expression, but emerge from interactions shaped by… race, class, gender and conventions of speech” (p. 162).

Ross’s account of how women narrated their experiences, both at the TRC and in their own community, offers a much-needed ethnographic rendering of the promises and pitfalls of “transitional justice” mechanisms like the TRC. She argues persuasively that the historical account of apartheid produced by the TRC was limited in its ability to express and account for women’s experiences and that the TRC, in its narrow focus on individual, physical forms of harm, “effaced certain of power’s historical dimensions” (p. 16). There is a further question, however, that lingers at the edges of her account, a question about the relationship between this kind of testimony and power in its present-day dimensions. Why, for example, has this brand of testimony, so evidently insufficient to express women’s experiences—or any person’s experiences, for that matter—become such a widely popular form of postconflict intervention? In her epilogue, Ross advocates for the development of “a new language of social suffering” (p. 165) that would more adequately express women’s experiences. Developing this more appropriate and expansive model, however, will first depend on explaining, in terms of the dynamics of power in the present, why the “inadequate” model has proven so persistent. Any answer to this question, though, must start in the same ground that Ross has so carefully explored here—women’s lived experiences (and ever-changing expressions) of the violation, resilience, struggle, suffering, and recovery that continue to shape and reshape their lives.

Recent studies in economic anthropology have considered the moral values ascribed to money and market-based exchange, especially in small-scale societies in which the introduction of Western currencies and markets is challenged by local values stressing reciprocity. In the 1990s, a similar confrontation of values took place in postsocialist societies. Guided by socialist ideology, the citizens of Soviet-bloc countries had long been encouraged to believe that most forms of market exchange were immoral and that the state was responsible for providing economic security. With the postsocialist transition, socialist enterprises were dismantled, socialist benefits were eradicated, and new market values were introduced. The fascinating collection of essays in Markets and Moralities takes a close look at the “clash between deeply ingrained moralities and the daily pressures, opportunities and inequalities posed by market penetration” (p. 1). Each of the essays included in this volume is based on original ethnographic research in Eastern Europe, Mongolia, or the post-Soviet republics. Although there are several other edited collections dealing with the postsocialist experience, this volume is a welcome addition to the literature because of the ethnographic approach, microlevel analysis, and economic focus of each case study.

This volume contains an introductory essay by Caroline Humphrey and Ruth Mandel, followed by ten case studies, loosely organized into three sections. The essays in the first section examine changing cultural and moral values associated with trade, entrepreneurship, and money. Farideh Heyat, for example, describes the interplay between cultural values that limit Azeri women’s public activities and postsocialist realities that encourage them to pursue entrepreneurial opportunities in the trade and services sectors. In a chapter on rural markets in Bulgaria, Deema Kaneff argues that Bulgarians who view bazaar trade as immoral and shameful tend to define work in terms of something that benefits the state, whereas those who view bazaar trade more positively define work in terms of something that benefits the household. Julian Watt’s chapter also deconstructs moral attitudes toward entrepreneurship. In the Pomorye region of Russia, Watts argues, people make strong distinctions between immoral entrepreneurs who cheat their customers and profit from speculative trade and moral entrepreneurs who work hard and contribute to local economic development. In her chapter on currency usage in the Górale region of Poland, Frances Pine demonstrates how the social values attributed to different foreign currencies, including the U.S. dollar, have shifted from the socialist to the postsocialist period.

One of the most striking changes in the postsocialist states is the increased availability of consumer goods and the end of what Humphrey has referred to as “involuntary homogeneity.” No longer forced to wait in lines, consumers now have more options than they can possibly afford. The essays in the second section of this book examine how local actors understand and respond to these new consumer options. By comparing different approaches to home decorating and cleaning in Romania, Adam Drazin suggests that some Romanians are choosing to pursue what they consider a “modern” lifestyle by purchasing newly available cleaning products and redecorating their homes. Ingrid Rausing discovers that, in addition to associating Western goods with prestige and status, most Estonians view the consumption of Western goods, which are typically more expensive than local products, as a return to “normality” wherein Estonia is linked with Western European countries. In his study of a Western fried chicken chain in Hungary, André Czeglédy examines local responses to this new culinary option, the tension between international management and local franchise owners, and the impact of fast-food chains on cultural attitudes toward the division of labor.

The third section of this book examines the harsh realities faced by rural citizens in postsocialist states. Using both quantitative and qualitative data, Louisa Perrota’s chapter provides clear explanations for why collective farms in Ukraine are insolvent (although still in operation) and why rural households cannot easily profit from private farming or small business development. Although sympathetic to the plight of the poor, Perrota believes that local expectations regarding government aid limit efforts to develop local solutions to socioeconomic problems. In his chapter on economic reforms in rural Mongolia, David Sneath argues that neoliberal policies are unlikely to increase productivity and efficiency in the pastoral economy because private land ownership and other market-based concepts are not indigenous to Mongolia. In the final chapter, Rosamund Shreeves explores the gendered effects of decollectivization in rural Kazakhstan. Whereas the majority of rural men are emasculated by the struggle to provide for their families, women’s increased contributions to the household economy are undervalued as state farm salaries disappear and new private farms become registered in men’s names.

The essays in this volume are written in a lively style with a lot of attention to ethnographic detail. Regrettably, however, several of the chapters present one or two interesting case studies but do not provide enough information for the reader to assess whether or not these cases are representative of a larger pattern (Kaneff, Czegéldy, and Shreeves). A related problem is that the essays (with the exception of those by Rausing and Perotta) do not discuss research methods in sufficient detail.

On a theoretical level, the essays push for a better understanding of postsocialist experience. In reading these essays, one wonders how these postsocialist experiences compare with postcolonial situations, especially those in which similar structural adjustments have been introduced. This issue is not addressed in any of the essays, although, noting the diverging experiences in postsocialist spaces, the editors question how long scholars will continue to think in terms of “postsocialism.”

Despite these limitations, this volume successfully outlines the contradictions between socialist moral values and postsocialist market economies. Although the focus is on the postsocialist present, the essays benefit from historical descriptions of socialist and presocialist periods. For example, Heyat describes black market trade during the Soviet era, Czegéldy discusses local precedents to foreign fast-food, and Sneath discusses land use in presocialist Mongolia. The arguments found in these essays are strengthened by careful depictions of the local nuances associated with basic concepts, such as “work” (Kaneff), “entrepreurship” (Watts), “normality” (Rausing), and “ownership” and “property” (Sneath). Finally, several chapters (Heyat, Drazin, Szegéldy, and Shreeves) benefit from careful attention to gender issues.

In this book, Meena Khandelwal delivers an empirically satisfying and theoretically interesting account of female Hindu world renouncers in Haridwar (also known as Hardwar), an important North Indian temple town and pilgrimage center. Known as sannyasinis, these women renounce the world and symbolically die to the social order and their former social identities to devote their lives to spiritual pursuits. They are few. This is because Hindu traditions construct renunciation primarily as an option for males, and misogyny is an entrenched feature of the subculture of male renouncers. As a result, women renouncers face special problems of discouragement, disapprobation, and physical hazard.

Khandelwal bases her study on interviews with and observations of 19 sannyasinis (and an equal number of male renouncers) taking place over a period of 18 months. She concentrates on two sannyasinis with whom she obviously developed exceptionally close relationships. They are quite different from each other: one relatively withdrawn and committed to a contemplative and devotional spiritual mode, the other busily engaged in social service and the management of a flourishing ashram. Khandelwal's prolonged participant-observation with these two women is the book's main empirical foundation, and the result is a satisfying portrait of their day-to-day activities: their routines, clothing, food, rituals, spiritual disciplines, interactions with others, and much else. By highlighting their distinctiveness as individuals, Khandelwal conveys a sense of the extraordinary variations of personality and lifestyle permitted within the framework of the renouncer's vows.

In theory, to renounce the world is to depart the social order completely, but Khandelwal shows how social identities follow renouncers into renunciation. In actuality, the tension between social engagement and withdrawal exists within renunciation, not simply between worldliness and otherworldliness. Her sannyasinis see renunciation as a journey, a pilgrimage of sorts, with twists and turns in and out of the social order, and the appropriateness of withdrawal from the social world depends on where one is on one's own path to liberation. World renunciation is a difficult path for Indian women, a “transgressive act” that carries penalties, which is why the sannyasinis do not urge their choice on other women. But it also offers special opportunities, for it opens a “site of undetermination" (p. 43), offering women the chance, within limits, to defy convention and determine their own lives.

Anyone can call herself a renouncer. The truth of such a claim depends on the claimant's inner state of mind, and because even surface fraudulence can be a mask for deeper authenticity, the question of who is or is not the genuine article is no easy issue in India. In one of her most interesting chapters (one equally relevant to male and female renouncers), Khandelwal describes how Hindus use behavioral and other clues to make such judgments. In tutelary relationships, the authenticity of the renouncer–guru is especially subjective and rests on a subtle, almost ineffable, psychic concord between renouncer and individual disciples.

Despite the common orthodox assertion that there “is no male or female” in renunciation, Khandelwal shows that gender is the most important identity that accompanies renouncers into renunciation. Not only do sannyasinis strongly identify themselves as women but they also see themselves as exemplifying feminine traits of nonrenouncer women; indeed, they identify with householder women as much as they do with male renouncers. The sannyasinis believe that certain qualities they attribute to women—having less ego or pride than men, or more easily (as they believe) adapting to celibacy—actually make the disciplines of renunciation easier for women. The symbolic key to renunciation in its feminine mode is the concept of the selfless love of motherhood, and female renouncers tend to be imaged as maternal figures. One quite striking manifestation of this is the emphasis sannyasinis place on feeding their devotees, in contrast to the male renouncers' expectation of receiving food donations from others.

This book is admittedly narrow in scope—a study of a small sample of a rare species. But what Khandelwal loses in breadth she regains in the depth of her treatment of individual cases. Special cases can in fact be illuminating. The richness of the materials she reports enables her successfully to challenge procrustean dichotomies (such as the supposed radical opposition between the life of renunciation and life in the world) that litter the field of South Asian studies. And, although her book deals with a small subgroup of renouncers, Khandelwal extends and deepens anthropological outsiders’ understanding of world renunciation as a core feature of Hindu civilization.

Statistics and population counts are a ubiquitous part of the landscape of modern life. In the last two decades the confluence of a number of theoretical developments—poststructuralist political theory, particularly studies of governmentality; science and technology studies; and critical demography—together with the generalized interest in the politics of representation have paved the way for an interdisciplinary inquiry into statistical measures—their history, uses, and political effects. Census and Identity makes a valuable contribution to this emergent body of work, bringing together a well- integrated collection of studies that focus on that most iconic form of state-sponsored enumeration: the national census. For anthropologists interested in statecraft and the social construction of collective identities, this book is a must-read.

The editors offer a lucid introductory overview of the analytical approach and central questions that tie this interdisciplinary collection together. States, as they note, have been counting in a variety of ways for a very long time. But what motivates the census of the modern state—the regular, periodic enumeration of individuals we know today—is not only an interest in extracting resources but also an attempt to create an ordered map of the population. It is the worldview generated by this map and its consequences for collective identities that occupy center stage in this volume. Counting, as the editors explain, inevitably involves reductionism and simplification of a messy and complex reality. But along what lines does a census choose to carve up a mass of people? What does a state census want to know (or not know) and why? The six case studies approach these questions for the most part from a social constructionist perspective that rejects statistical realism—the notion that the object to be counted exists prior to and outside of statistics. Contributors historicize the making of census categories and approach these as complex processes of political struggle and debate.

The first three chapters, by Melissa Nobles, Calvin Goldscheider, and Dominique Arel, take a look at census data gathering on race, ethnicity, and language, respectively, in a variety of countries. Nobles, for example, offers an insightful comparison of the intersection between racial discourses and census counts in the United States and Brazil. Her analysis shows the very different ways race has been tabulated in the two countries and also makes a convincing case that census bureaus need to be recognized and studied as active participants in racial politics. The comparative perspective of this and other chapters helps to illuminate the influence political ideologies have on the kinds of official statistics gathered. Goldschieder, for example, shows that in Israel, where immigrants are expected to be absorbed into a common Israeli identity, ethnic (but not religious) cleavages disappear from the official record, whereas in Canada, the ideology of multiculturalism has done just the opposite, encouraging a proliferation of possible ethnic categories. Part of what plagues census counts (and makes them fascinating to study) are the controversies and meanings invested in them. Arel shows this well in his comparison of language questions in national censuses. Language has often been used as a surrogate for nationality, leading to quite intense debates over what to measure: the language(s) learned in the home (but perhaps now forgotten or repressed) or the language habitually spoken in the present?

Readers will encounter cases where certain kinds of counting are resisted, as Alain Blum shows in his analysis of ethnicity in France, and also where they have been an accomplice to deadly violence. The latter situation is explored in a gripping article by Peter Uvin on the history of the census in Rwanda and Burundi, where population counts managed to mask the massive ethnic genocide. David Abramson closes the volume with a superb analysis of the history of census taking in Uzbekistan during and after the Soviet regime. Of all the contributors, he and Uvin speak most directly to the central question of the volume: namely, the relationship between census questions and categories and collective identity formation. Both argue that the effects of the census are difficult to isolate from other categorizing practices and policies that precede and interact with it. As Abramson says, people do not “magically” come to see themselves as having a collective national identity simply from answering a census question. But census designs can be instrumental in contributing to a political culture that frames social experience in terms of nationality, for example, while downplaying other ways of drawing alliances. Understanding the impact the census may have requires at the very least a broader analysis of how these categorizing practices are embedded in the institutions and policies of the state and beyond. For, as Uvin and Abramson are keen to point out, development agencies and international NGOs increasingly are key actors in technologies of counting, imposing on newly independent and impoverished nations standardized systems of counting and categorizing whose effects can be felt, as Abramson’s study shows, at quite intimate levels of neighborhood life. A fitting close to the volume, Abramson’s study is especially relevant to anthropologists in pointing to the utility of ethnography as a tool for answering the very question the book seeks to pose: how officially sanctioned terms of identity do or do not make their ways into the everyday lives of social actors once the census taker has left.

The title of this biography aptly describes its author’s approach. Virginia Kerns is interested in the influence of “autobiographical memory and the personal construction of meaning” on Julian Steward’s work, especially his theory and method of cultural ecology (p. 14). Drawing on his published writings and extensive archival sources, as well as on interviews with many colleagues and relatives (including Dorothy Nyswander, Steward’s first wife, Jane Cannon Steward, his second wife, and noted colleagues and students such as Sidney Mintz, Robert Murphy, and Gordon Willey), Kerns constructs a moving, yet meticulous, account of Steward’s life (1902–72) and career. Above all, she explores the experiential, familial, and social factors that, she argues, shaped his work. This is not, then, a narrow account of intellectual influences, but an extended meditation on the relationship between Steward’s life and times and his scientific work and career.

Steward was born in Washington, D.C. in the year of John Wesley Powell’s death (indeed, a paternal relative had accompanied Powell on one of his expeditions). Between 1918 and 1921, he attended the Deep Springs school near Death Valley, California, then went on to Berkeley (where he took his first anthropology course, team-taught by Alfred Kroeber, Robert Lowie, and Edward Gifford) and Cornell, where he studied the sciences, especially geology, graduating in 1925. He received his Ph.D. from Berkeley, studying with Kroeber, Lowie, and the geographer Carl Sauer. Steward’s interest in “subsistence” (in environment, work, and social organization) struck Kroeber as eccentric, but his training with Sauer and his growing friendship with fellow student Duncan Strong reinforced his scientific inclinations. Between 1928 and 1933, he taught at the University of Michigan and the University of Utah, but then struggled, nearly unemployed for two years, until he landed a job with the Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE), where he edited the Handbook of South American Indians. He accepted a professorship at Columbia in 1946 and then at the University of Illinois in 1952.

Kerns argues convincingly that both the high desert environment at Deep Springs and the social organization of the school—in which male students and teachers cooperated in their studies and in the ranch work that supported life at the school—made an indelible impression on Steward, one that was later expressed in his devotion to “Basin-Plateau” ethnography, his research focus on cultural ecology, and, especially, his emphasis on the patrilineal band. Steward’s two marriages are also a crucial part of Kerns’s story. Steward met Nyswander, a psychologist, in 1925 and married her in 1930, leaving Michigan to join her at the University of Utah, where she was an established professor. Kerns suggests that Nyswander’s influence on Steward can be seen in “the many behaviorist elements” in his doctoral dissertation (p. 111) as well as in his later work, with its emphasis on the observable details of subsistence activities. Yet his marriage to Nyswander influenced him more greatly, Kerns argues, in a negative sense, as he came to believe that his “matrilocal” move from Michigan to Utah—where, “to his lasting disgust,” he was occasionally addressed as “Mr. Nyswander” (p. 134)—had led him to sacrifice his career mobility to hers. He made no such mistake in his second marriage, as Jane Cannon was willing to follow him (“patrilocally”), in a marriage geared to the necessities of his career.

Although Steward’s immediate anthropological forebears were Boasians (Kroeber and Lowie), his scientific orientation was perhaps more profoundly shaped by the 19th-century U.S. scientific tradition represented by Powell and the BAE. At Columbia, Steward referred to himself as a “forester” and to his students as “city-slickers” (p. 244). It is only a small irony that many of his students furthered his research interests by combining his cultural ecology with various strands of European social philosophy, especially Marxism, which Steward himself dismissed.

In remarkably even-handed, and frequently eloquent, prose, Kerns argues that Steward’s experiences in the high desert, his “subsistence” struggles during the Depression to establish himself professionally, and the gender politics of his milieu overdetermined (as a Marxist might say) his anthropological work. She notes in particular his unwillingness to give up on the idea of the patrilineal band as the “normal” form of hunter-gatherer social organization—despite the fact that in his own fieldwork, he never discovered unambiguous evidence for its centrality. In her biography, Kerns brings a sustained feminist critique to bear on the work of a major, mid-century male anthropologist, all the while recounting his life just as a good ethnographer should—that is, with great skill and sympathy.

State-sponsored violence and its doppelganger, insurgent paramilitarism, have recently risen to the top of research priorities for many anthropologists wanting to meet the cultural predicament of our times head-on. In Northern Ireland, 2003 electoral triumphs of hard-line unionism and republicanism reminded the world afresh that even in those political landscapes brimming with EU optimism, tenacious, objectifying practices of inclusion in and exclusion from ethnoreligious communities should not be underestimated for their capacity to blunt political reform conceived and hatched at the state and transnational levels. It may be the case for some time to come that anthropologists are compelled to write critical studies of regions whose status among a sanguinely postatavistic “family of nations” has been prematurely assumed.

I was reminded of this ongoing challenge in reading The Troubles in Ballybogoin, William F. Kelleher Jr.’s thought-provoking contribution to a rich and still burgeoning field of Northern Ireland ethnography. Based primarily on fieldwork conducted in the early and mid- 1980s among Catholic employees of the “Drumcoo Glassworks,” the author sets for himself the task of understanding how the socially divided world of one town in western Northern Ireland (the eponymous “Ballybogoin”) is made and unmade, largely through the way people talk about it and about each other. Much of his argument turns on the idea that in investigating everyday discursive practice, anthropologists can better understand the complexity and nuance of decolonization: a process that everywhere staggers along in increments, fitfully, and without clear direction.

For Kelleher, the significance of talk is not a function of message content, narrowly interpreted. Rather, talk is a vehicle for the constitution of a “moral community,” narrating and listening the practices in and through which relationships are built and maintained. By extension, the absence of these practices is read as a sign of unwillingness to fashion social relationships. In Ballybogoin, talk about memory has a key role in shaping subjectivity; how do individuals become crystallizations of “the cultural practices and social forces that make difference”? (p. 15).

The author’s ethnographic exposition of this theme is richly revealed over the course of several chapters and in a variety of contexts that are significant for their “ordinariness.” For instance, Kelleher analyzes the hidden texts encoded in the historical memories of friendly residents. The “same” region torn by a legacy of dispossession in the eyes of local Catholics was for Protestants a site of productivity and industry. In narrative, residents highlighted the ways in which acts of movement were simultaneously acts of memory. Likewise, the power of everyday language to define landscape is revealed in local knowledge about what is signified by the river Bann, which bisects Northern Ireland. Everyday practices of movement and language style in those regions east of the river are seen as “modern, industrial, orderly and valued,” whereas western regions (“Wobland”) are cast as “partially industrialized, disorderly, and less valued” (p. 31). Talk and memory thus mediate knowledge of “the long ago” (the politicoreligious contests of the 17th century) and of recent years (Northern Ireland’s current “troubles”).

Kelleher’s most compelling analysis is reserved for the events surrounding a 1985 labor-management dispute at the glassworks. In its drive to modernize and rationalize production, catholic management was perceived by workers as supplanting a workplace ethic of relationship building through talk with one of silent efficiency and thereby substituting “working work,” entailing self-discipline and order, for “working moves,” which involved a willingness to question and subvert authority but, more significantly, a willingness to establish relations through talk. For many Catholic workers, metonymically merged into the wider Catholic community, the latter of these was perceived and mediated in social memory as an inevitable historical consequence of living under the yoke of a Protestant political–economic establishment. Hence, Irish nationalism and paramilitarism took on the evasive and even mischievous characteristics of “working moves” against those state forces that excluded and marginalized the Catholic population.

Kelleher’s book suffers in places for its failure to analyze a rapid sequence of shifts in power during the 1990s and the early years of the 21st century. Although I have no principled objection to presenting historical ethnography as a “snapshot in time” (provided it does not sacrifice all sense of historicity in the process), the author’s penultimate decision to bring readers “up to speed” on events and personalities as they have changed subsequent to his original fieldwork results in a somewhat strained discussion reminiscent of “Where are they now?” popular journalism. Still, his insights into the workaday roles of language in shaping historical memory and of social memory in specifying meaning in language—particularly as it is employed mundane situations (the pub, the tour, the factory floor)—constitute a welcome contribution to the field.