China is undergoing a massive transformation. An estimated 150 million migrants have moved from rural areas to cities in search of work and entrepreneurial opportunities since 1993. Strangers in the City is an ethnography of Zhejiang Village, an ethnic enclave in suburban Beijing, where migrants from Wenzhou, in the southeast coastal province of Zhejiang, have established a clothes manufacturing and distribution center. Whereas most migrants in China are workers, the Wenzhou migrants are entrepreneurs.

Many problems in urban China are blamed on migrants, and author Li Zhang shows that even the prosperous Wenzhou migrants are not immune to the presumption that outsiders are the cause of problems. Because in the collective era everyone had a fixed residence, migrants are viewed as "the embodiment of the instability and changes brought by the market" (p. 137). Wenzhou entrepreneurs further challenge the dominance and sense of superiority of urban Beijing residents because of their high incomes. They are viewed as out of place and, therefore, lacking moral and social responsibility (p. 140). Zhang contrasts the official media discourse, which portrays migrants as the source of postreform urban problems and crime, with the migrants' own discourse, in which they see themselves as victims of crime and of police incompetence and corruption. However, her insightful discussion of the importance of masculine charisma ("prowess," benshi) (p. 205) and courage, the sudden rise in drug abuse, and the privatization of power (lack access to the law), in fact, suggests that Wenzhou migrants commit much of the crime.

Zhang describes how Wenzhou migrants spread across China in the early days of the reforms (the early 1980s), working as tailors to produce clothes that the state sector was unable to offer. She does not offer many economic details; for instance, readers are told that 10 percent of Wenzhou migrants are bosses, but the source of this figure is not documented. The study focuses more on the entrepreneurs than on the workers (p. 5), and one is left wondering about the lives of Wenzhou migrants who do not become entrepreneurs. Although couples work side-by-side during early stages of an enterprise, Zhang shows how successful men force their wives into a domestic sphere—literally the back of the house—while they travel for business and entertain clients with the assistance of other women.

A major theme in the volume is the production of social space, including the concentration of Wenzhou migrants in one area, the construction of housing and gated compounds for work and residence, the construction of multistory marketplaces, and the attempt by the state to disperse the migrants. In Beijing, the issue of migration is a sensitive one because migrants are thought to reflect badly on the nation's capital. Zhejiang Village was seen as violating visions of a modern city because of its narrow alleys (due to illegal expansion of housing) and the construction of walled "big yards."

Zhang describes the destruction of the ethnic enclave by state fiat in December 1995 and its gradual re-emergence in the following months. Operating under orders from the city and central governments, the demolition team faced resistance from local levels of government and even from Zhejiang provincial representatives. On the one hand, city authorities decided to raze "illegal" structures because they were seen as a challenge to state authority, and, on the other hand, the district government, local cadres, and local farmers who rented out rooms to migrants all sought to prevent or mitigate the demolition, although in vain. The case brilliantly illustrates the increasing complexity of state power in China and how the state can, when politically necessary, implement decisions.

Zhang's book offers a valuable look at the life of migrants by focusing on one place. It offers memorable characters and cases, and the analysis is fleshed out with informants' stories of migration and of relations with native place. Building on the work of Biao Xiang and deftly interpreting press reports, Zhang has drawn out the many implications of this case. The bulldozing of Zhejiang Village halfway through her fieldwork could have been a disaster for the research project, but Zhang turned it into an opportunity, describing local attempts to prevent destruction and the gradual restoration of the community.

Strangers in the City is a valuable addition to our understanding of contemporary China. The issues it deals with (the production of social space, the privatization of power, and clientelist relations between entrepreneurs, state representatives, and workers) are important ones in China and for anthropology. Zhang also counters widespread misunderstandings by showing that the market is not being imported from abroad but has presocialist roots and that the emerging "socialist market economy" is not merely capitalism but a complex mixture of state control, clientelist politics, and free market. She clarifies the concept of a "socialist market economy," making it seem less of an oxymoron.

In 2002 the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs estimated that nearly two million Brazilians were living abroad including some 250,000 Brazilians of Japanese descent who were living and working in the land of their ancestors. The door for this new migration stream was set ajar in 1990, when the Japanese government passed immigration reforms that granted the descendants of Japanese emigrants—up to the third generation—the right to reside and work in Japan for three years. This legislation was in accordance with the jus sanguinis (blood lineage) principle of Japan’s Nationality Law and was meant to resolve the following dilemma: How to attract cheap, docile labor to fill the necessary but undesirable jobs the Japanese themselves are unwilling to take, while at the same time not importing an “alien” population. In essence, the legislation was an attempt to maintain Japan’s racial, linguistic, and social homogeneity in the face of labor scarcity.

Tsuda has presented us with one of the first ethnographies of this recent emigrant tide and he rightly focuses on the issue of ethnicity that lies at the heart of Japanese immigration reform. As a Japanese-American who himself speaks Japanese, he provides the reader with something of an insider’s view of how Japanese in everyday discourse and behavior confront ethnicity, language, and “race” vis-àà-vis this new immigrant cohort in their midst.

Ethnicity and transnational identity are the dual foci of the volume, which is divided into three sections. They describe and analyze (1) the ethnic experience of Japanese-Brazilians in Brazil and the problems they face in terms of their ethnicity after migrating to Japan; (2) the evolution of a minority counteridentity in Japan in response to their difficulties there; and (3), in lieu of the development of a transnational identity, the appearance of a “deterritorialized nationalism.”

Using this framework, Tsuda provides an extensive analysis of the various permutations of Japanese-Brazilian identity within a transnational space. He not only provides a well wrought depiction of the Japanese-Brazilian experience, but uses it as a springboard to engage the reader in a discussion of the larger issues of minority status, ethnic prejudice, transnationalism, and globalization. His goal is to integrate ethnography and theory and, for the most part, he does this very successfully.

The reasons why and the ways in which Japanese-Brazilians retain a distinctive “Japaneseness” in Brazil is important in contextualizing their subsequent experience in Japan. In Brazil they generally take pride in their ethnicity, enjoying some of the positive stereotypes associated with it. But in Japan the tables are turned. In response to the discrimination they face there, they come to define themselves, in fiercely nationalistic terms, as Brazilians.

The analysis of Japanese notions of purity and foreign pollution is particularly helpful in understanding Japanese reactions to the Japanese-Brazilians who, for all intents and purposes, are culturally Brazilian. As such, they are perceived as foreigners “with Japanese faces.” In fact, this ethnography provides the reader with a rather comprehensive knowledge of Japanese perceptions of the Other.

Tsuda’s discussion of his role as ethnographer in terms of his own social position, ethnicity, and ethnic identification vis-àà-vis his Japanese-Brazilian and Japanese informants is not the standard naval gazing discussion of reflexivity and it is mercifully free of postmodernist jargon. The author’s description of the differential reception he received from Japanese-Brazilians and Japanese sheds light on the ethnic and social issues that played out among these groups along with the internal social divisions among his Japanese informants.

This is a well written, engaging book that successfully interweaves theory concerning majority–minority relations, ethnicity, and nationalism with the author’s own research findings on this particular migratory stream. For this reason, it will be welcomed by specialists in transnational migration, globalization, and ethnic studies and will be useful in advanced undergraduate and graduate courses that deal with these topics.

Stanley Tambiah has provided a comprehensive and systematic account of Edmund Leach’s (1910–89) intellectual and personal journey through social anthropology. His is a long and complex book, a summary of Leach’s major publications supplemented by interviews with his close associates and material from his personal papers. Tambiah’s task was complicated by Leach’s bold and iconoclastic stance and the originality, versatility, and breadth of his work: He wrote on kinship, politics, ethnicity, land tenure, economy, biblical texts, art, and architecture, among other topics. Tambiah’s aims are to link the personal and the intellectual and to explore continuities and changes over a career that spanned many decades. He finds the continuities to lie in a distinctive take on structuralism and functionalism, a mix of idealism and empiricism, and a pragmatic instrumental, or strategizing, perspective.

Leach combined skills as an ethnographer and an essayist; he also was an effective administrator, a distinguished lecturer, and a public intellectual who contributed to the debate on contemporary culture. The first part of his career focused on analyses of field studies conducted in nations then known as Burma and Ceylon and yielded two path-breaking ethnographies that challenged conventional thinking. The first, Political Systems of Highland Burma (Harvard University Press,1954), criticized assumptions of social equilibrium derived from Durkheim and assumptions that the boundaries of a society, culture, and language are necessarily coincident. The book and early articles also pointed to errors in Lévi-Strauss’s analyses of Kachin marriage. Leach’s second ethnography, Pul Eliya (Cambridge University Press,1961), was based on field research in dry-zone Sri Lanka. In it, he argued against the structural–functionalist and kinship theories of his contemporaries and made what was then a radical assertion, that kinship was “not a thing in itself but rather a way of thinking about rights and usages with respect to land.” (Leach 1961). Tambiah shows how this view was foreshadowed in the earlier book (pp. 208, 364). Leach also challenged his colleagues in his 1959 Malinowski Memorial Lecture (entitled “Rethinking Anthropology”) by criticizing functionalist organic analogies and poorly reasoned typologies, famously depicting the followers of Radcliffe-Brown as “anthropological butterfly collectors” (pp. 68–69). That same year he used his Sri Lankan materials to challenge Wittfogel’s hypotheses about hydraulic societies. Tambiah comments that Leach knew that his polemical stance and predilection for “combatively contesting settled orthodoxies … made him vulnerable to criticism … [and that] he deliberately took the risks entailed in such polemics” (p. 208). He also hints that this stance may have had sources in Leach’s early experiences (p. 16), although this point is not well developed.

In the second phase of his career, Leach produced essays that drew from published sources, notably biblical materials. These studies were inspired by Lévi-Straussian structuralism “supplemented by Leach’s own adoptions from information theory” (p. 236). Yet, at the same time, Leach criticized Lévi-Strauss’s universalist, reductionist assertions regarding the innate propensities of the human mind, his lack of fieldwork experience, his lack of discrimination in the use of source materials, and his growing disinclination to link myths to their local social, cultural, and material contexts. Tambiah notes the marked contrast with Leach’s own enduring empiricism and concern with ethnographic contexts. Whether in analyses of biblical materials or land ownership, he supported his arguments by “exhaustively taking note of all the relevant evidence from every context” (p. 301).

Tambiah explains Leach’s long-standing attraction to equations of relations and transformations as due to his early training in mathematics and engineering. Another continuity in his writing on culture and society was his idealism and pragmatism. As early as Political Systems, Leach defined social structure in terms of ideas strategically applied to practical situations, “a pattern structure of verbal concepts, open to diverse interpretations, rather than empirically observable and existing kin groups” (p. 94). Tambiah traces this perspective to the influence of Malinowski and Firth, to a line of theorizing that stresses how individual actors use and manipulate ideal categories and norms to further their interests and goals, rather than to the focus on social structure organized in terms of statuses, roles, moral guidelines, and jural norms associated with Radcliffe-Brown and Fortes. By the time Leach encountered Lévi-Strauss, he was deeply enmeshed in those presuppositions of British social anthropology that made sense to him. This explains the ways in which Leach followed and faulted Lévi-Strauss and adapted structuralism to his own agenda.

A good deal of Tambiah’s book is devoted to exploring Leach’s many high-profile debates with other leading anthropologists of his generation, and an entire chapter focuses on the issue of paternity recognition in Australia and the Trobriands. Tambiah states that Leach’s comparison between “paternity ignorance” in those societies and dogmas of virgin birth in Christianity stemmed from his interest in “parallel structures of reasoning between different cultures and societies” (p. 288). The problem of cultural translation continued to occupy Leach’s thinking, as it did that of other social anthropologists of the time.

This book admirably meets its goal of providing an intellectual biography, and Tambiah adheres closely to the mandate of a biographer. It is difficult, however, not to wish for more. An appraisal of Leach’s weaknesses as well as of his strengths and of his legacy in the history of sociocultural anthropology would have been highly useful. And, although Tambiah cites many instances of Leach’s openness and generosity toward his students, one learns little about his impact on the work of those students and others who followed him. More could be said about the mutual influences between Leach and his contemporaries, particularly those colleagues who also were influenced by Lévi-Straussian structuralism. And despite Leach’s own statements, one sees echoes of Durkheim and Radcliffe-Brown in his work, for example, in his dismissal of Spiro’s inferences about individual psychology and in his stated goal of understanding how social systems work and why they hold together, mentioned in his controversial biographical essay in the Annual Review of Anthropology (“Glimpses of the Unmentionable in the History of British Social Anthropology,” 1984:1–23). Tambiah attempts to put a positive spin on this piece, casting it as an exercise in the sociology of knowledge (p. 474). One can see Leach’s attribution of his adversaries’ concern with social equilibrium and enduring social structure to their immigrant origins and lesser class backgrounds, however, more as a way of discrediting their contributions than of setting the record straight about the history of anthropology in Britain. Despite these quibbles, Tambiah’s is an excellent book and I highly recommend it.

The biggest problem with Joel Sherzer’s Speech Play and Verbal Art is that it is so darn hard to read in a straightforward, linear way. The book is so packed with examples of verbal play in several languages that the eye desperately wants to leap from example to example, enjoying the play and skipping the explanatory text in between.

Indulging in this playful impulse is an education in itself. One could learn, just by relating examples to subheads, what is meant by iconicity, reduplication, play languages, punning, jokes and riddles, verbal dueling, figures of speech, repetition, parallelism, code-switching, poetics and metaphor. Not only this, but one might learn how these work differently—both because of structural and contextual differences—in Bali, Brazil (both among Portuguese and Kuna speakers), France, Latin America, and the United States.

When one finally breaks free of the play frame and turns to the connecting text, one is rewarded by a clear, coherent argument about the interplay of language structure and verbal play. Sherzer emphasizes the extent to which such play is central to language. Building on the work of Roman Jakobson, he focuses on the ways speech play seizes on the potentialities of language structure and exploits them to social, cultural, and aesthetic ends. The goal is to use speech play to offer “a view of language structure and language use as creative, adaptive, and emergent, in which grammar and the sociolinguistic situation provide potentials which are actualized and exploited in discourse” (p. 70).

In the introduction, Sherzer explores the meaning of play and its relationship to language structure. “While there is always some play for play’s sake, play often involves culture exploring and working out both its essence and the limits of its possibilities” (p. 8). He expands on this argument in the second chapter, The Play of Grammar and the Grammar of Play. Emphasizing iconic forms of word play such as reduplication and sound symbolism, he looks at the considerable freedom to play that grammatical rules provide.

Chapter 3 examines the ways that such freedom to play are exploited in social interaction, and how these come to be grouped into genres. The shift “From Speech Play to Verbal Art” is explored in chapter 4. And chapter 5 explores, albeit in a very cursory manner, some of the ways contexts are linked to genres in the Balinese, Kuna, French, Latin American, and North American contexts from which his examples throughout the book have been primarily drawn.

There are flaws in the book, most of which revolve around a tendency to write in ways that appear to attribute agency to culture without people as agents. The quotation above from page 8, in which culture works itself out, is an example. One result of this approach is a lack of attention to performers of verbal art. A related result is a failure to draw attention to the role of verbal play in the use of power. I am thinking of how the Ayatollah Khomeini constructed particular metaphors to achieve domination over his clerical rivals by rhetorically constructing a worldview, or Ronald Reagan’s use of the metaphor of war as a way to shift public discourse about drugs in American society or George W. Bush’s use of forms of verbal art in his attempt to restore a bipolar worldview.

Sherzer touches on power in his discussions of the range of potential meanings of such speech genres as ethnic jokes, but I would have liked to have seen this dimension of speech play explored more thoroughly. Sherzer is good at showing the nontrivial nature of seemingly trivial bits of language play, but his examples never link these to the exercise of power by particular situated agents who employ the potentialities of language creatively to achieve particular ends.

But perhaps this is too much to ask of this little gem of a book that, like “the Kuna place” described to him by one of his Kuna hosts, is not a serious place but “a talking place and a laughing place” (p. 154).

Two basic forces shaped the daily lives of Puerto Ricans throughout the 20th century: colonialism and migration. In 1898, U.S. troops invaded the island as part of the Spanish-Cuban-American War. In 1902, the U.S. Supreme Court defined Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam as “unincorporated territories” belonging to, but not forming part of, the United States. In 1917, Congress extended U.S. citizenship to all persons born in Puerto Rico. In 1952, the island became a U.S. commonwealth with a greater share of local autonomy, but it remained politically and economically dependent on the U.S. mainland. Since World War II, the island has experienced a massive displacement of its people to the continental United States. Today, nearly half of all persons of Puerto Rican origin live abroad. As colonial migrants, Puerto Ricans are, therefore, distinct from other contemporary Latin American diasporas.

The books under review here approach U.S. colonialism and Puerto Rican emigration as two sides of the same coin. In Reproducing Empire, Laura Briggs examines how U.S. imperialism constructed Puerto Rican Others through the discourses of science and medicine, focusing on sexuality, gender, reproduction, and development. Briggs charges that U.S. colonial images of working-class Puerto Rican women and their families portrayed them as deviant, deficient, alien, and exotic, as well as in need of reform and, sometimes, radical change. During the first two decades of U.S. rule, public policies on the island were geared toward controlling prostitution and promoting legal marriages. In about 1920, colonial administrators began to promote birth control and, later, migration to reduce overpopulation. Since the 1930s, Puerto Rican women have increasingly resorted to sterilization to avoid unwanted pregnancies. Between the 1940s and 1960s, the island became a “laboratory” for economic development through rapid industrialization, as well as the testing ground for the contraceptive pill and other family planning methods. More recently, Puerto Rican migration to New York gave rise to Oscar Lewis’s infamous “culture of poverty” thesis, which further stigmatized Puerto Rican women, their reproductive practices, and their alleged welfare dependence.

Trained primarily as a historian, Briggs documents her arguments through the extensive use of archival and manuscript collections, especially the Rockefeller Foundation Archives, the National Archives, the Library of Congress, and the Colección Puertorriqueña at the University of Puerto Rico. She also incorporates many references to U.S. and Puerto Rican government documents, such as the annual reports of the Governor of Puerto Rico, and to local newspapers such as El Mundo (San Juan) and La Democracia (Ponce). The analysis of these primary sources sheds much light on the emergence of an extremely coherent colonial discourse on female sexuality, in both its liberal and conservative incarnations. One problem with these sources, though, is that they seldom allow the voices of “the subaltern”—in this case, poor Puerto Rican women—to be heard. Nonetheless, Briggs skillfully weaves together the threads of various kinds of narratives (even progressive and feminist ones) that end up buttressing the racial, cultural, economic, and political hegemony of the United States over Puerto Rico.

Briggs’s work on Puerto Rico resonates strongly with postcolonial and subaltern studies elsewhere. In an informative epilogue, she discusses “why Puerto Rico is the most important place in the world,” “a place where political conditions and its people brilliantly theorize current global instabilities” (p. 195). She also argues that “in Puerto Rico, the things we normally think of as necessarily aligned to constitute a nation or a region—its people, language, geographical borders, government, economy, and myths, stories, histories, literature, and/or imagination—can be radically discontinuous, occupying entirely different spaces” (p. 196). (Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas further elaborates this point, as seen below.) Briggs is primarily interested in how U.S. natural and social scientists have produced certain kinds of knowledge about Puerto Rican sexuality, which, in turn, have helped to legitimize the island’s colonization. Here she takes a cue from Michel Foucault, Ann Stoler, Gayatri Spivak, and others who are less concerned with describing the actual sexual practices and preferences of their subjects of study than with deconstructing the political and cultural premises of dominant public discourses.

Reproducing Empire is a welcome addition to the growing literature on postcolonial, subaltern, cultural, and gender studies. It contributes significantly to understanding how colonialism has historically drawn on rhetorical strategies of sexualization and racialization to justify the territorial and ideological subordination of some peoples by others. From an ethnographic perspective, however, Briggs’s analysis is less compelling because of “the absence of the ‘real’ working-class women” (p. 208) from her narrative. “This book,” she writes, “understands the subject of these texts to be the author, not the women they wrote about” (p. 208). As a result, the impact of textual representations on people’s lived experiences is largely left unexplored. This kind of history does not have much to say about how Puerto Rican women and men contend with, negotiate, or repudiate the ideology of imperialist domination in their everyday lives.

This is precisely one of the main strengths of Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas’s ethnography. Her book, National Performances, substantiates the strong resistance of Puerto Rican migrants in Chicago to assimilation into mainstream U.S. culture. Instead, “most of the Puerto Ricans with whom [the author] talked had a positive view of nationalism as a loosely scripted and staged mode of identity production, activist rhetoric, and cultural performance in Chicago” (p. ix). Ramos-Zayas’s monograph shows that community leaders and ordinary migrants deploy Puerto Rican nationalism to advance their ideological and material interests, such as those grounded in class, race, and gender.

National Performances is primarily based on a year and a half of ethnographic fieldwork in Chicago between April 1994 and September 1995. The author taped 60 life histories of Puerto Rican residents of the Humboldt Park area, where many of the island’s working-class migrants have settled, as well as grassroots activists and middle-class professionals who tend to live in the suburbs of Chicago. In addition, she conducted 50 semi-structured interviews with other informants, mostly students, neighbors, and activists. She also participated actively in the daily routines of her Humboldt Park neighbors and attended many of their parades, festivals, marches, religious services, and museum exhibits. Moreover, she analyzed local publications, personal correspondence, and institutional archives. Finally, she volunteered as a teacher in four community organizations, including an alternative educational project, the Pedro Albizu Campos High School. These methods yielded a wealth of qualitative material on the history, development, and contemporary situation of Puerto Rican Chicago.

According to Ramos-Zayas, nationalism has brought together many activists and residents of the Puerto Rican barrio in Humboldt Park. Her well-supported thesis is that Puerto Rican immigrants and their descendants in Chicago have reelaborated the core symbols of Puerto Rican nationalism (notably, the mythical figure of Albizu Campos) as proofs of cultural authenticity. These icons have been widely disseminated through community institutions, including schools such as Roberto Clemente and Pedro Albizu Campos, and cultural centers such as Juan Antonio Corretjer and Segundo Ruiz Belvis. In contrast to the island, Puerto Rican nationalism in Chicago combines an anticolonial ideology with cultural practices that do not rely exclusively on the Spanish language or Hispanic culture. Rather, it seeks to counter the public representations of a criminalized and marginalized community, through the reaffirmation of its hybrid identity, for example, by the use of rap music and “Spanglish,” that is, code switching between Spanish and English. In short, “Puerto Rican nationalism in Chicago [has] conflated anti-colonial politics and porous transnational identities” (p. 8).

One unproven assumption in Ramos-Zayas’s argument is that rank-and-file Puerto Ricans in Chicago are predominantly proindependence, nationalist, or radical. Despite its reputation as a hotbed of anti-U.S. terrorism, Chicago’s Puerto Rican population is largely composed of immigrant workers who probably do not sympathize with the island’s independence or other leftist movements. Compared with other diasporic communities, however, they seem to be better organized to resist ethnic prejudice, racial discrimination, and residential displacement. Ramos-Zayas’s excellent book documents the high degree of community mobilization around the nationalist discourse of some of its leading members. I remain intrigued by the question of why that discourse gained more popular support in Chicago than in other Puerto Rican settlements in the mainland and even on the island.

In sum, the books under consideration help to elucidate how the U.S. empire was reproduced in Puerto Rico, as well as how the Puerto Rican nation is performed in the U.S. mainland. Taken together, Briggs’s and Ramos-Zayas’s research illuminates the tensions between colonialism and nationalism and the extension of these symbolic struggles to a transnational context. Each book deals, in its own way, with the ominous consequences of the racialization of Puerto Ricans as “nonwhite” citizens of the United States. Whereas Briggs emphasizes the sexual and gender overtones of U.S. colonial discourse on Puerto Rico, Ramos-Zayas privileges the anticolonial and subversive gestures of Puerto Rican grassroots politics in the United States. Although using different perspectives, locations, and methods, the two authors have greatly advanced the scholarship on Puerto Ricans on and off the island.

Leslie W. Rabine’s The Global Circulation of African Fashion examines the shifting markets for and meanings of African and African-style textiles and dress across three diverse sites—Dakar, Nairobi, and Los Angeles. Rabine weaves through these case studies an exploration of the diverse notions of authenticity that are projected onto clothing and its consumers. She also provides valuable insights into the livelihoods of urban African artists and merchants in the face of economic globalization.

Rabine’s eminently readable voice and her light-handed integration of the theoretical frames that elucidate her subjects are among the book’s strengths. She brings people and their stories to the fore without assigning them to neatly ordered positions in networks of global exchange—these artists, merchants, and consumers have complex attitudes toward authenticity and the markets that demand it. They adapt their work to local as well as global expectations in a struggle to succeed or, in some cases, to simply survive. Rabine describes her research experience as immersion “in the contradictory narrative that unfolded before me” (p. 170). She acknowledges the complicated nature of her own position, describing the ethical dilemmas she faced as she became enmeshed in the complexities of personal relationships and economic exchange.

Documenting the shifting forms and fortunes of textiles and garments that are marketed as “traditional,” “authentic” African products, Rabine elucidates the ways in which objects associated with “traditional” culture may emerge out of surprising histories, identities, and motivations. The book is a model of multisited ethnography, drawing together diverse contexts to illuminate global systems of objects, meanings, and ever changing traditions. Rabine’s project also traverses methodological borders, using semiotic analysis to trace the mobile referents of key terms and design elements, ethnographic fieldwork, stylistic analysis of textiles and garments, and textual analysis of reports produced by multinational entities. Thirty black and white photographs of artists, markets, and textile provide another layer of insights into the people and places Rabine describes.

Rabine organizes her analysis into overlapping chapters, including two devoted to fashion design and textile production in Dakar, Senegal, and one focused on Nairobi’s designers, many of whom look to West Africa in their efforts to create “authentic” Kenyan styles. A fourth chapter deconstructs the efforts of transnational agencies and companies (the World Bank and JCPenney) to capitalize on consumer interest in “authentic” African products. Rabine is, understandably, critical of the callous, productivity-obsessed rhetoric of multinational entities, yet one wishes their perspective had been represented by more than documents and reports; this analysis might gave been enriched by interviews with their representatives. Rabine’s final chapter offers a rich, revelatory analysis of the author’s own place in this research, describing her struggles to find an analytical framework to contain globalized markets and identities even as she finds herself drawn into the exchanges that are her subjects.

Rabine’s chapters on the Senegalese textile industry exemplify the skill with which she teases out the complexities of tradition in contemporary cultures. In Dakar, Senegalese designers who work for an Indian-owned British company create “traditional” patterns that are derived from Indonesian batiks that were imitated in French, Dutch, and British factories to serve the African market. Meanwhile, the same designers invent patterns to be sold as distinctively African (therefore traditional and authentic) in the United States, yet that are viewed in Senegal as European or Western in style. Rabine traces the shifting forms and associations of the textiles, using interviews with designers, merchants, and consumers. She concludes that “what is ‘African’ about the fabric is not a particular image of authenticity imprinted on the cloth, frozen in time and confined in space. It is rather a mobile social history and an open geography that produce the cloth” (p. 138).

By elucidating the economic and political location of SOTIBA, Senegal’s leading textile manufacturer, Rabine explores the impact of international business and financing on the ability of African designers and manufacturers to control an “authentic” African product. Founded under the French colonial government, the company was so heavily subsidized by the French that it undersold all competing sources of textiles, driving Senegalese merchants out of the market and creating a captive audience for its products. After independence, the firm was sold and resold to multinational entities, none of whom invested in its infrastructure although the black market in textiles increased to supply consumer demand. SOTIBA’s fortunes encapsulate, on a large scale, the circumstances faced by the many designers, tailors, cloth dyers, and merchants—African and African American—who seek to compete and to represent their own cultural identities through clothing and textiles.

As Sherry Ortner observes in New Jersey Dreaming (p. 90), high school plays a remarkably significant role in the American cultural imagination. In this readable book, Ortner casts an anthropological lens on the experiences of her own high school class. Ortner graduated in 1958 from Weequahic High School in Newark, New Jersey. Of the 304 members of the class, 83 percent were Jewish; the remainder were African Americans and “a very mixed group of kids of hyphenated ethnic identities.” (p. 69) Ortner’s once predominantly middle-class neighborhood has changed markedly since she graduated and the school’s students now are mostly African American and poor.

The members of Weequahic high school class of 1958 have done very well as a group and the story Ortner tells focuses on social mobility. Many of the parents of the students in Ortner’s high school came from poor families (often immigrants from Europe or the U.S. South); their move into the Weequahiac area represented a considerable improvement in socioeconomic circumstances. The members of the class of 1958 mostly left Newark; many have become part of what Ortner calls the “professional/managerial” class. Much of New Jersey Dreaming is a careful examination of changes in the class composition of Ortner’s cohort. She shows how her peers talk about socioeconomic rank in the past and present and provides tables giving details about the occupations of class members and their parents and spouses. Comparisons are made of the experiences of men and women and of people from different ethnic/racial/religious groups. The material is presented in an engrossing way, with long excerpts from interviews, amusing accounts of the fieldwork process, and reflexive comments about the problems of studying one’s own group. Ortner is acutely aware of the difficulties of constructing an ethnography via interviews about the past from a scattered population.

Because Ortner is a well-known advocate of practice theory, her book unsurprisingly places considerable emphasis on the interplay between the experiences of class members and various historical trends. The social mobility of the Weequahic class of 1958 is examined in the context of the improved position of Jews in the United States, the civil rights movement, and changes in women’s roles and activities. Ortner does a nice job of showing variations in people’s experiences, backgrounds, opportunities, and choices.

All anthropological studies of particular places and times must consider the extent to which findings can be generalized. Relatively few high schools in the past and present in the United States share Weequahic’s ethnic configuration and it is tempting to regard Ortner’s class in the context of the particular experiences and culture of the urban East Coast American Jewish community in the 1950s. Many readers will therefore be surprised by Ortner’s willingness to regard Weequahiac high school circa 1958 as being (p. 105) “squarely within the overall spectrum of American high schools” and “as ‘representative’ as any other of a certain American … way of organizing adolescent social life.” The experiences of my own high school class of 1964 from Plainfield, New Jersey (which I have learned about through a lively, ongoing internet discussion group), for example, seem quite unlike those that Ortner describes in Newark because of (1) my class’s much greater diversity in ethnic, religious, and economic background; and (2) the earlier impact on my cohort of the social movements and transformations of the 1960s. If such stark differences exist despite the close temporal and geographic proximity of these two classes, surely the experiences of members of, say, a high school class in rural Oklahoma in 1985 would be really unlike those of Ortner’s cohort.

In the book’s most ambitious chapter (pp. 90–109), Ortner argues that the Weequahic class in 1958 shared an underlying structure of social categories with many other U.S. high schools past and present. This explicitly Léévi-Straussian structure involves a four-cell table (p. 97) with two axes of difference—one of class (family’s place on the socioeconomic ladder, family’s cultural capital in the Bourdieusian sense, emotional/psychological quality of family life) and the other of personal attitude/style (tame and wild). The four boxes are more capital/tame (popular kids, class officers), less capital/tame (ordinary citizens, eggheads [nerds]), more capital/wild (jocks/cheerleaders), and less capital/wild (hoods/sluts, smokers, burnouts). Although Ortner thinks that her class had an unusually high proportion of tame members, she feels that the scheme shows that 1958 Weequahic resembled many other U.S. high schools. Readers will vary in how convincing they find these arguments. I remain a skeptic.

Despite these reservations, New Jersey Dreaming is consistently cogent, thought provoking and just plain fun to read. Because of the accessibility of the subject matter and the lucid discussions of anthropological method and theory, I highly recommend this book for classroom use.

Lines in the Water is a long-awaited ethnography of the fishermen of Lake Titicaca in the Bolivian and Peruvian Andes by a gifted and experienced Andeanist. Orlove uses new ideas in landscape ecology and experimental writing to approach his material, eschewing a problem-oriented, linear narrative. Throughout the book, the device is adopted of posing an intellectual question and sharing with the reader the search for an answer. In the preface, for example, the author engages the reader in his inquiry into vehicles to express the sense of space and time surrounding Lake Titicaca. We enter into the terrain of the novelists Dreiser, Chandler, and Atwood, the nature writers Thoreau and Williams, the short story writer Slouka and the humorist, Keillor. Of the lot, Thoreau’s organization of Walden as a series of separate essays best fits the author’s goal of telling a rather “simple” story (pp. 45–46) of Lake Titicaca fishermen, the state, and communal resource management. Chapters Lakes, Not Forgetting, Mountains, Names, Work, Fish, Reeds, and Paths follow.

In the chapter on not forgetting, the author explores the anxiety expressed by the villagers on his imminent departure for the United States. He uses an analysis of the lyrics of their folk songs to unpack the notion of “forgetting.” Two subtexts—betrayal and abandonment—are related to villagers’ inferior statuses of peasant and Indian, classic Andean themes of class and ethnicity. Yet although Lake Titicaca fishermen’s lives have improved for the better, they have not abandoned or betrayed others in their villages, that is, “forgotten” where they came from. Nor was their anxiety about Orlove’s abandonment of them warranted: On returning to the United States, he used their rich musical tradition to “remember” them, hosting for years a radio program on Andean folk music on his home campus.

The chapter on names is an extended discourse on conceptualizing and operationalizing terms used to refer to the research population, normally a task relegated to a footnote or a paragraph. For some the effort will seem overly literary and discursive. But there are unexpected rewards. Exploring the lack of a verb to fish, for example, opens up a number of otherwise hidden dimensions of local culture and linguistic dilemmas confronting villagers in their use of Spanish, Quechua, and Aymara.

Throughout the book, we follow Orlove’s train of thought, his discursions, dead ends, promising alleyways, and aesthetic reflections. Although this carries the risk of the author’s subjectivity dominating the material, these and other rhetorical devices are used judiciously and imaginatively to enliven the presentation. In the chapter on fish, for example, otherwise tedious technical and historical aspects of fishing are presented in the guise of an imagined museum.

Much of the material treats themes familiar to ecological anthropologists and regional specialists. Andeanists, for example, will recognize common cultural principles and schemas in the author’s chapters on mountains, work, and paths. But for the student and nonspecialist, important elements are not always made explicit. An endnote reference, for example, to the literature on Andean social organization would have clarified the cultural context of fishermen’s expressions of duality, equilibrium, and the like. Indeed, the fictional, natural history and social science models often seem to work at cross-purposes. The lack of subheadings places a premium on a detailed index, particularly with so much hiding in the chapters; the lack of numbers in the text referencing endnotes does not help. There are a very few numbered footnotes that provide the Web address to access the databases discussed in the text, an interesting accommodation to problem-oriented social science.

Although ecological anthropologists and regional specialists will welcome the new material, the book is especially rewarding for students and the nonspecialist. It is often difficult to convey the satisfaction and creativity of ethnographic research when much of what we have to give them to read is so tedious and off-putting. A talented teacher can communicate the excitement in the classroom, but written productions do not always work. Lines in the Water, in contrast, is engaging on all levels. The author succeeds in attracting the reader to his path of discovery without compromising ethnographic standards. The book will serve as a model for future directions in ethnographic writing.

In The Dialectics of Shopping, Daniel Miller presents (in revised and expanded form) his Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures delivered at the University of Rochester in 1998. In keeping with the Morgan legacy, Miller’s goals in this book are wide ranging and ambitious. In particular, he argues for drawing closer connections between the fine-grained and intimate goals of ethnography and the grander concerns of philosophy and higher-order theory—a combination, he argues, that is essential to the future of anthropology as a truly ethical discipline. Miller sees crucial similarities between the roles of the anthropologist and the philosopher: The work of both “is to keep culture under scrutiny and to judge it by the canons of those ethical standards that are believed to express reason as an instrument of human welfare” (p. 181). Miller anchors this project—and tries to illustrate how it may be achieved—in a multilayered analysis of the everyday practices and discourses of shopping, using his own field research with household residents and shopkeepers in an “average” (p. 6) North London street. Miller examines how people’s everyday shopping practices and discourses reveal (and work to reconcile) pervasive contradictions between, on the one hand, cultural ideals or normative discourses in modern urban society and, on the other hand, actual social relations and individual behaviors. As a result, Miller argues that contemporary shopping represents a form of cultural dialectics; that is, shopping is a significant (perhaps even the primary) means through which people in modern urban settings seek to reconcile contradictions between the normative and the experiential, the general and the particular. Thus, Miller sees in North Londoners’ daily shopping acts new avenues toward the theorization of modern complex societies.

The central chapters of the book develop this argument in relation to different levels of social analysis: kinship, community, ethical systems, and arenas of global capitalism and transnational business management, or what Miller calls “political economy.” A chapter is devoted to each of these levels, discussing what ordinary shopping trips and neighborhood conversations can reveal about the conflicting motivations and ambivalent negotiations that pervade and define modern social life. Chapter 2 explores contemporary urban kinship and the contradictions between cultural models of love and caring and the often divergent behaviors of family members. Chapter 3 addresses the conflicted position occupied by local shopkeepers as representations of idealized locality and community amidst a geographically mobile, class-stratified, and ethnically divided populace. Chapter 4 shows how broadly accepted ethical goals of social responsibility (specifically, discourses about environmental awareness and the conditions under which commodities are produced) clash with other imperatives, such as the economic constraints facing individual households and moral priorities of thrift. Chapter 5 moves into the realm of globalization, exploring how institutional dynamics of global capital and transnational policy making constrict the possibilities for consumer choice despite normative claims that capitalism is merely responsive to customer demand. Miller ends the book with an argument for linking the goals of anthropological ethnography with the philosophical insights of Hegelian dialectics, concluding with a call for anthropology to “get real”—a project that would entail studying the processes of contemporary societies (including shopping) with greater seriousness and thereby claiming for anthropology “a new role in reconciling through understanding the vast and fragmented nature of modernity” (p. 205). (A warning note here: Readers unfamiliar with Hegel’s 1821 treatise Philosophy of Right may find sections of this last chapter difficult to follow.)

A longtime ethnographer of modernity, in general, and of consumption, in particular, Miller affirms with this book a career dedicated to bringing the mundanities of shopping and consumption into the center of serious social analysis. This in itself is an important reminder (if no longer so unusual a claim) for contemporary ethnography everywhere. Unfortunately, the higher-order ambitions of Miller’s analysis are not entirely fulfilled. The strength of this short monograph rests on the ethnographic material presented in it; Miller’s data is thought provoking and at times quite illuminating. Yet one of the main disappointments of the book is the overall thinness of the ethnography (although we are told that more detailed discussions appear in other and forthcoming publications). Although ethnographic examples are central to the arguments of most chapters, this presentation of field data often seems abbreviated or is accompanied by only minimal contextualization. Other evidence, particularly examples drawn from British popular culture such as television soap operas, is not always adequately explained for a non-British audience. Consequently, the crucial links Miller seeks to establish between the ethnographic and philosophical components of his argument are more often suggested than clearly demonstrated.

To some degree these limitations are caused by the necessary brevity required for a lecture series and the aim (also quite appropriate to a lecture series) of offering innovative questions and provocative suggestions, rather than a complete and sustained development of these. In an effort to expand on some of the key issues raised, Miller has added appendices to several chapters in which he discusses “my rather more dense points of articulation with discussions within anthropology” (p. 5); however, these serve more often as complex tangents to the argument than as clarifying additions. Ultimately, the difficulties of this book tend to frustrate, rather than enable understanding. Adding to this frustration is the fact that the text is strewn with grammatical errors and poorly edited sentences. Unfortunately this makes the reader’s task much more of chore and detracts considerably from the overall impact of Miller’s vision for the future of anthropological inquiry as informed by the study of modernity, consumption, and philosophical dialectics.

In the Otavalo area of the northern highlands of Ecuador, over the last two or three decades, indigenous textile merchants and musicians have become prosperous entrepreneurs and binational transmigrants, working and living both in Ecuador and in Europe, North America, or other Latin American countries. In so doing, they have challenged both the sociopolitical and economic domination of white-mestizo townspeople in Otavalo and widespread notions of what authentic Andean Indians should be (agricultural, poor, etc.).

In Andean Entrepreneurs, Lynn Meisch outlines the emergence of weaving and its commercialization in this zone, demonstrating the pre-Columbian roots of local textile production, how that production was reorganized for tribute payment under Spanish authorities, and how local producers have created new goods to satisfy changing market demands since the 1940s. Part of her argument is that rapid change in designs and materials is itself traditional—in the sense of having deep historical roots—and, so, the recent adoption of synthetic fibers to satisfy new demands should not be seen as somehow inauthentic.

Similarly, in discussing local musical traditions, Meisch provides a detailed and historically situated narrative of the production and commercialization of local music since the 1980s, a period that has seen the recording of compact discs in international music studios for the consumption of Otavalos at home, for the large numbers of Ecuadorians living abroad, and for foreign consumers. In particular, Meisch shows how indigenous musicians themselves have drawn on popular—and usually inaccurate—images of authentic Andean culture in their effort to succeed in the international ethnopop music scene. One anecdote she relates concerns a collaboration between an Italian ethnopop group and Otavalo musicians. The resulting Andean music, played by Italians and recorded in Italy, is mistaken by many Otavalos themselves for locally composed and produced music.

As entrepreneurs of music and textiles, significant numbers of Otavalo Indians have migrated internationally on a seasonal or semipermanent basis, and extensive migrant networks exist in Holland, Spain, the United States, Canada, and Colombia, among other countries. Just as their products have been influenced by global trends and Otavalos themselves have become global travelers, their hometown—particularly the well-known Saturday craft market—has become an important destination for international tourists. One innovative aspect of Meisch’s discussion of tourism is her attention to its sexual politics, especially female tourists who are attracted to what one of them called “Madison Avenue Andean Indians” with “long hair, high cheekbones, white teeth, [who are] well-built, nice-dressed, friendly.” (p. 215). The plethora of gringa–Otavaleño liaisons since the mid-1980s is due to factors such as the unusual prosperity of Otavalo Indians as they have capitalized on international markets for ethnic goods and to the improved health and nutrition among Otavalos that has resulted in much taller sons in relation to fathers. Indians’ greater success with foreign women (due partly to these women’s search for the exotic) is just one more source of tension between Indians and white-mestizos in a context in which much of the local economic power and, recently, local political power, as well, are in the hands of Indians.

With its thoroughgoing challenge to notions of authenticity and tradition, Andean Entrepreneurs is well suited for use in undergraduate courses. Given the two decades of research that the author has undertaken in this region and her long-term relationships with more than two dozen compadres and godchildren in Otavalo, the narrative is rich with anecdotes that reveal the complexities of globalization, in its many different manifestations, as it affects this area.

Nonetheless, I have two criticisms of this book. One is that, in several chapters, Meisch presents large amounts of undigested primary information: I think here of the extensive descriptions of compact disc cover images and text and of the repetitive quotes from ethnohistorical sources about local music or textile production. This material could usefully have been edited to distill the points central to the author’s argument. My second criticism concerns the emphasis on changing power relations between Otavalo Indians and white-mestizo townspeople. Such a focus allows scant attention to changing relations among the Indians themselves, as some prosper and others are impoverished as they all struggle with the challenges and opportunities associated with globalization.

Despite these criticisms, I plan to adopt this book for use in a Latin American ethnography course I teach, and I look forward to seeing my students confront prevalent stereotypes of Andean Indians, so usefully deconstructed in this monograph.

Sometime in 1961, at a time when the South African apartheid regime sought to contain the mounting wave of popular resistance through a spate of massacres, the banning of African political movements, and forced removals, a couple of white producers in Johannesburg put on a show they called Drums of Africa, which featured the “sexulating rawness and glamour of some of the most beautiful non-European women.”

Despite its sensational title, Sound of Africa! is not about Africa’s tribal traditions, scantily clad, stomping Zulus, and skin-covered drums. It is about how Africa, being Zulu, sound, technology, making music during an especially tense moment of South African history—the transition from apartheid to the country’s first democratic elections in 1994—and writing about all these of things impinged on one another, how they “made” each other. The convergence and interaction of these entities and forces were refracted in the production, in a Johannesburg studio, of an album of mbaqanga music by the female vocal group Isigqi Sesimanje.

The book contains six chapters or, rather, “cuts.” In the first cut author Louise Meintjes introduces the key characters—producers and musicians—and the genre of mbaqanga, adroitly avoiding essentializing either by presenting biographies and genre as emergent categories, “co-constructed” in metacultural and metamusical discourse (p. 69). In cut 2, the reader is taken into the secluded, magical sphere of the studio, which is described as both a source of creative symbolic power and the locus of a means of social control. In cuts 3–5 Meintjes discusses a variety of timbral and linguistic aspects of the album being produced to highlight the contested elaboration of mbaqanga’s presumed authenticity within parameters such as its “liveness,” Zuluness, and difference from “white” music. The intersection of local and global spheres in South African musical production is the topic of cut 6.

Sound of Africa! is a fascinating read, but it stands out (and will endure) for three main reasons. For one thing , it is the first scholarly treatment of what arguably is (or used to be) one of South Africa’s most vibrant musical traditions. In addition, and potentially more important, Meintjes’s work is one of the first ethnographies to examine the complexities of today’s media-driven forms of popular culture, not, as is so often the case, from the perspective of the consumer, but at the site of production itself. Meintjes does not chime in with the chorus of scholarly critics who still disparage the industrial production of music as inherently alienating and impeding listeners’ agency. And, finally, Meintjes is the first scholar ever to explore the studio production of popular music within an African setting. This conjunction of methodology and research locale is as significant as it is carefully chosen. With the intersection of high-tech media, global market forces, and the sensibilities of marginalized, Third World musicmakers having become ever more volatile in the wake of digitalization, deregulation, and the emergence of new media, the South African case offers fascinating and urgently needed insights into power dynamics both within the specifics of a peripheral, African economy and within an increasingly integrated, albeit fickle and differentially empowering, global music market.

The focus on industrial production of music as a form of mediation has important consequences for the textual strategy pursued in Meintjes’s book—a strategy that marks Sound of Africa! as a strikingly novel and compelling narrative in its own right. The most obvious level at which this will be registered by the reader is the brazenly self-referential terminology adopted throughout the book. Thus, chapters become “cuts,” summaries become “playbacks,” and what is normally titled preface here is called “demo tape.” But the author does not confine herself to this rather harmless metaphoric level. In line with her overall goal of uncovering the empowering potential of studio production and of exposing the “analytic limitations of dichotomizing production and consumption” (p. 16) (yet, at the same time being acutely aware of the fragmented nature of the production process itself), Meintjes self-consciously chooses to adopt a nonlinear style of writing that privileges unexpected connections, sudden insertions, and verbatim repetitions, mimicking the recording process itself. Consequently, her account is assembled rather than unfolding, synchronized rather than sequential.

Much of this attempt to mimetically represent mediation in a form of poetics that pushes ethnographic representation to its limits harkens back to Walter Benjamin (whom Meintjes rarely mentions) and Michael Taussig, to a thinking that seeks to recover capitalism’s magic, utopian dream moments in metaphor, flashes, and techniques of montage. Like Benjamin and Taussig, Meintjes is convinced that all a distanced, analytic rhetoric will achieve in looking at what Marx called “the theological whims of commodity production” is to shroud in even more mystery the processes ethnography is supposed to illuminate in the first place. Very few books on media and popular culture are as shrewdly aware as Sound of Africa! of how this dialectic must inform the very way ethnography mediates between the author, the people she writes about, and the reader. Even fewer achieve this awareness while being informative, empirically sound, and engaging at the same time.