Peter Whiteley has assembled several essays that draw on his field and archival work from 1980 to 1996. Each chapter represents a critique of a particular set of anthropological concepts that have led to the failure of Hopi ethnography to conjoin with Hopi reality. Rather, Whiteley argues, anthropology has not paid enough attention to historical “intentionalities” and, thus, has reinforced the Other as object and infused the gathering of knowledge with hierarchy. In this way, Hopi ethnography has been situated in the context of national and world-system domination. In response, Hopis have begun to treat their cultural forms as property and to participate in the commodification of their own culture as they pursue intellectual sovereignty, for example, by declaring that field notes and photos in museums and archives are tribal property. Whiteley argues that anthropology should be about multifaceted reflection among systems of thought rather than endogamous self-reflection. He attempts to engage Hopi analytical perspectives to show how those perspectives construct, create, and constrain social life and how they may be conjoined with social theory to achieve a more fully intercultural mode of explanation. Through intercultural dialogue, inequalities constructed around cultural and racial differences can be transformed.

In chapter 2 Whiteley argues that structural-functional theories of Hopi social integration do not incorporate a Hopi perspective and, thus, obscure the reality of Hopi society. By focusing on matrilineal descent groups, anthropologists have not paid enough attention to other social relationships, particularly paternal bonds and friendships. Whiteley argues that descent groups should not be regarded as genealogically defined corporate entities formed around joint estates of land and ceremonial ownership. A more realistic perspective is to view descent-group names as cultural constructs used in political and social contexts--today, as well as in the past.

In chapter 3 Whiteley explores how a consideration of Hopi conceptions of power provides a more realistic perspective on Hopi politics than does orthodox political anthropology, which analytically separates “politics” from “religion” and offers a material basis for Hopi inequality. Noting that the anthropological record contains descriptions of both Hopi hierarchy and egalitarianism, Whiteley argues that confusion comes from not factoring in the Hopi view that power emanates from ritual knowledge and that, although this power has material consequences, it is not defined by control over material resources. Whiteley has not undertaken to explain how power and political leadership work today, though he implies continuity with the past. He also hints at significant transformation—noting that the elected tribal council offices are now viewed as a source of power and that ritual symbolism is associated with such offices—but Whiteley needs to explicate contemporary Hopi ideas about power more fully.

Whiteley notes in chapter 4 that in recent years the Hopi have tended to legally change inherited patronyms to Hopi birth or initiation names. He discusses how Hopi names instruct about clan tradition, traditional knowledge, ritual, and the environment, and he shows how individuals use names to construct both personal identity and interpersonal relationships. He convincingly argues that meanings are embedded in the expressed intentions of the name giver and that an understanding of Hopi naming makes clear that structural approaches to the analysis of myth obscure connections between myth and ritual.

Whiteley makes a case in chapter 5 for incorporating indigenous historical consciousness and agency in the analysis of historical process. He discusses an event that took place in 1922: the destruction of the altar of an important ceremony on Third Mesa by a Hopi priest who had converted to Christianity. Whiteley argues that this individual, who intended to challenge and undermine a group of rivals in the secular political context, cast conversion to Christianity as a proper transformation of structure in an autogenous process of cultural reproduction. The effect of this individual’s action was to weaken the traditional ritual system on Third Mesa.

In chapter 6, Whiteley discusses the ways in which religious rituals, sacred landscape, deity masks, and metaphysical beliefs have been appropriated and fetishized by members of the dominant society and refigured as marketable commodities. Hopi perspectives on anthropology and their suspicions of the ethnographic project must be understood in the context of the dominant society’s representations and appropriation of Hopi culture. Whiteley’s point is that anthropologists encourage suspicion when they become disengaged from the lives of their subjects and mystify the politics of their work. He argues for an anthropology that, by paying more attention to Hopi (and, by extension, other peoples’) perspectives and concerns, helps the dominant society appreciate Hopi practice without desecrating it.

In chapter 7, Whiteley explores Hopi conceptions about and uses of natural resources. He shows that a threat to natural resources (here, water) is a threat to kinship, political ritual, and aesthetic life. How Hopis get and use water is central to their identity, religious belief, and daily concerns. Hopi water is being diverted and wasted by the Peabody Coal Company, and as the springs dry up, so does the force of Hopi religious life and culture. Whiteley argues that not enough attention has been paid to cultural and religious conceptions of the environment by industrial concerns and other developers and that anthropologists could help to rectify this situation.

The book is a good example of the value of combining archival and ethnographic studies, and Whiteley is a meticulous researcher. His reexamination of Hopi ethnography will be of great use to specialists on Native America, particularly those interested in the Southwest. Although Whiteley may have overstated the omission of agency or intentionality in social history, his point that anthropologists must pay respectful attention to native perspectives on culture and history is well taken, and, on that basis, this book is an important contribution to the wider anthropological community.

Van Ausdale and Feagin have written an honest ethnography of the playgroup activities of children ages three to six in a racially and ethnically diverse preschool. In addition to providing the reader with respectful and realistic representations of children, they critique a “double deficit” model that reflects professional and popular beliefs concerning children’s capacity to comprehend and employ abstract racial–ethnic concepts. The idea of the double deficit is drawn from Piagetian and other adultcentric theories, which depict children as either developmentally or experientally limited in their abilities to comprehend race. Van Ausdale and Feagin’s approach to children as social actors capable of participating in social systems of inequality places the authors within the tradition of the sociology and anthropology of childhood.

The book’s introduction sets the scene with an extraordinary anecdote, one that typifies how adults (teachers, preschool directors, parents) respond to children who are caught uttering racial epithets or using racialized language. Van Ausdale and Feagin illustrate how adults individuate racist behaviors and practices to absent adults while simultaneously constructing the child as “imitator, not as creator or master of language” (p. 2). They argue further that, by articulating a color-blind liberal ideology, white middle-class adults live in denial that institutionalized racism and its expression in everyday social practices happen at all.

The introduction also contains a literature review, written in accessible language for several audiences. The authors cover enough of the scholarship in cognitive and developmental psychology to establish their expertise. They also provide a gentle introduction to studies of everyday forms of institutionalized racism. Finally, the authors’ discussion and use of Vygotskian theory is appropriate for their analysis of children’s social practices.

The remainder of the monograph is organized along four themes. Two themes treat how children use racial–ethnic categories to define Self and Other. The third theme centers on playgroups and how children employ racial–ethnic concepts and foreign languages to include and exclude multiethnic children from participating in their activities. The final theme concerns how adults at the preschool viewed the children and how they responded to the researchers’ observations and preliminary findings.

Van Ausdale’s descriptions of children’s activities and perspectives reveal that she successfully employed the least-adult method to establish a status of non-sanctioning adult participant-observer. This afforded her a privileged lens into children’s daily practices—practices that children normally conceal from adults in positions of authority. The authors consistently link microinteractional exchanges among children in preschool and macrosociological beliefs about race currently circulating in the United States. Throughout the book, they provide compelling analyses of how children are active, albeit unequal, participants in reproducing racial–ethnic categories, some of which mirror adult, conventionalized racist social behaviors and practices. Many of their observations also reveal that children are equally adept at transcending some behaviors and inventing new ones. In the final chapter, Ausdale and Feagin fully articulate their critique of how white middle-class members of U.S. society (especially “liberal-minded” ones), employ Piagetian beliefs about egocentricity in order to deny that children are as active as their adult counterparts in reproducing social structures of inequality based on racial–ethnic categories. The authors conclude the monograph with a postscript designed to provide practical advice for teachers, parents, and researchers about “what can be done” to effect social change by “recognizing how central the tools of race and racism are in the social toolbox” in order to “begin rendering them obsolete” (p. 201).

I applaud Van Ausdale and Feagin for tackling this subject matter with these subjects. Their careful and faithful observations of playgroup practices are commendable. The central theme is of equal importance; however, I feel as though they have only scratched the surface of a complex subject matter that deserves more theoretical rigor. Although the authors acknowledge the work of some scholars working within the sociology and anthropology of childhood, they overlook others who have made key contributions in historicizing the concept of “the child” and problematizing children’s agency in an era of late capitalism. For example, absent from their analysis is a theoretical discussion of the interdependence of race and class relations and how they are changing in response to postindustrial society. The authors are clearly aware that race and class inform U.S. structural inequalities, but class falls through the cracks in their analysis except in cases where they critique liberals’ ideology of race. I would, nevertheless, recommend this book precisely because, unlike so much of the literature on child socialization, Van Ausdale and Feagin do not ignore the discursive power that cognitive and developmental psychological theories continue to have in professional and popular circles.

In this book Spielvogel situates the fitness club in contemporary Japan at the intersection of globalization and consumption, of bodily discipline and display, and of constructions of health and illness. One of the many interesting questions she explores is why, despite the Japanese government’s push for increased leisure and healthier lifestyles among its citizens, members quit fitness clubs at alarming rates. During her fieldwork at three fitness clubs in the Tokyo metropolitan area--as an aerobics instructor at two clubs and as a member–observer at another--Spielvogel cast her critical eyes on political, economic, and cultural trends in Japan through her in-depth participant-observation of the fitness population. Although members at these clubs vary in gender, age, class, and nationality, the voices of young Japanese women dominate her ethnography. They are both instructors and students of aerobics, and they are avid consumers of the beauty industry, which sells cosmetics and diet aids by promising its buyers slim bodies and radiant skin.

As Spielvogel claims, “There has been little written on female participation in sport in Japan” (p. 34). In this respect, the book is a fine contribution to the anthropology of Japan, the anthropology of sports, and gender studies. In the book, young Japanese women emerge as vibrant actors who, despite being victimized by larger definitions of femininity and sexuality, often subvert them by eating or refusing to eat, drinking, and smoking. Although these women’s relations with other women, whether housewives with children or middle-aged and older women, should be explored more, Spielvogel’s book definitely complements other ethnographies of women in Japan.

The book, however, succeeds less as a contribution to globalization studies. Throughout the book, Spielvogel emphasizes that Japan and the West are not binary categories but merely ideological constructions (pp. 4, 35–39, 87–88). And yet, the members and instructors of fitness clubs largely appear in the dichotomous framework of the West (which is equipped with scientific knowledge) and Japan (which lacks it). In those parts of the book in which Spielvogel relies on “Japan” and “the West,” she appears more as a “scientific” aerobics instructor from the West rather than as an anthropologist, thereby invoking the very dichotomy she refutes. Statements like, “In Japan, the central aim of exercise is to sweat as a personal release from stress” (p. 83) are reminiscent of The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, published in 1946, in which Ruth Benedict treats physical pleasures in Japan as an opposite concept to self-sacrificing duty. I believe that the notion of “exercise” in contemporary Japan has gone through radical changes since then.

Spielvogel notes that nearly 40 percent of members of the fitness club in the Roppongi district in downtown Tokyo are foreigners (p. 155). They work in the investment banks, modeling agencies, and embassies located nearby, as well as in the hostess bars and strip clubs. They are from the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Israel, Europe, and Mexico and plan to stay in Japan for only a few months or a year at most. It is a great pity that, in Spielvogel’s book, these foreigners never speak. How do they associate themselves with Japanese fitness club members? How do Japanese women see them? How do they work together in the fitness clubs? What I wish to see are ethnographic descriptions of these scenes, in which Spielvogel portrays herself as one of the many agents of globalization in contemporary Japan. By relating the voices of “foreigners” to the voices of Japanese women and men at fitness clubs, Spielvogel could have achieved a great deal more than she does. In terms of theory, then, although Spielvogel utilizes the notion of “situated knowledge” quite effectively in her book, I wonder whether she also needs another powerful weapon of feminist theory--the politics of location. The diverse populations of contemporary Japan--particularly Tokyo--do not necessarily come to the fitness clubs from the location Spielvogel calls “the West.” Rather, they come from various places in the world and represent different genders, classes, and positions. And yet they all contribute to the formation of notions of health and illness in Japan. By utilizing the politics of location effectively, Spielvogel could have liberated “the Japanese women” from the rigid divide of East and West that still dominates anthropology of Japan.

This ambitious effort analyzes how forces of economic reciprocity and dynamics of class formation operated and mutated in and around the area of Thomastown, a historically important commercial exchange route on the Nore River in County Kilkenny, Ireland. Its author, Marilyn Silverman, is recognized as a contributor to understanding Ireland’s social past and to the field of historical anthropology. This book is the second in an expected trilogy, the first being Merchants and Shopkeepers: A Historical Anthropology of an Irish Market Town, written with P. H. Gulliver in 1995.

In the bulk of the work, Silverman endeavors to solve the problem of how class characteristics like "landlord paternalism" and "labourer deference" functioned over time to comprise an eventual "common sense"—or hegemonic—worldview. Silverman hopes to extend Gramsci’s notion of hegemony by arguing that ideology formation is processual rather than static (a point emphasized in other contexts by Sally Falk Moore in the 1990s). Moreover, Silverman maintains that shifts in ideology construction can be located in discursive forms such as oral narratives, letters, and print media. Silverman believes that she can determine when and how structurations of hegemonic thought gained sway in Ireland by coupling the microsocial with the macrohistorical, and by providing extensive data on how laws relating to trade, fishing, housing, and education were interpreted and negotiated at the local level. She further claims that her model can extend the methodological playing field of historical anthropology.

Unfortunately, these perspectives are not stated outright; rather, the reader encounters the aforesaid in the book’s conclusion, which serves as a kind of apologia for the preceding 475 plus pages. This lack of guidance through formidable amounts of newspaper reports, court proceedings, and personal interviews renders large parts of the book unapproachable. To make matters worse, Silverman’s inattention to recent scholarly work on famine, labor, colonialism, and state formation, both in Ireland and elsewhere, substantially saps the strength of reader altruism.

Undoubtedly, Silverman combed over a century and a half’s worth of regional archives to glean data on the networks of class relationships in Thomastown. Strong chapters occur toward the book’s end, revealing lives embroiled in civil war, affected by powerful clergymen, and compromised by British Army recruitment. Also, at times Silverman’s studies yield startling and compelling diatribes, such as a poet’s comment on life under the constitution, printed in the Kilkenny Journal in 1937. Part of it reads, “Was it for this that Patrick Pearse faced the British firing squad, and James Connolly, broken . . . but still defiant, was dragged to his equally splendid death?” (p. 385, ellipsis in original).

Despite rich passages like this, Silverman’s overall project is perturbing, partly because her study appears to spurn both centuries-long Anglo-Irish relations and salient shifts in Irish history. For instance, considering that the Great Irish Famine (1845–1852) fell within the first 50 years of the author’s time frame, Silverman’s omission of recent historiographic works published to commemorate the event seems blatantly irresponsible. Through death or emigration, the Famine claimed over three million of the working class, the very same people who form the backbone of Silverman’s analysis. Likewise, by confining her chronicle of colonization and state formation to the years between 1800 and 1950, Silverman seriously understates the importance of the Insurrection of 1798, on the one end, and the international policy shift of Seán Lemass in the late 1950s, on the other. The former precipitated an enduring redefinition of political arrangements through the Act of Union; the latter reversed isolationism and prepared Ireland for the present state of Celtic Tigerism.

Silverman’s holistic paradigm begs to be enriched by the politics of representation (which in Ireland often served the goals of the colonizer) and Irish resistance (which was frequently utilized for ideological purposes to bolster the psyche of the laboring poor). Coupled with the author’s use of oversimplified categories like "paternalism" and "deference," these deficiencies preclude attention to the full range of discursive patterns and nuances of the Irish colonial predicament. The career of Daniel O’Connell serves as but one example.

An even more trenchant critique concerns Silverman’s handling of specific cases, which she exhibits in boxed format throughout the text. These are not only subjected to the heavy hand of ellipsis, but they are also weighted with authorial comment. Both methods curtail the ability of researchers to apply other types of analysis to the data. Silverman also seems to ascribe verisimilitude to large amounts of printed news sources; as media constructs, these reports were neither disinterested nor value free.

Silverman is correct in her assessment that a historiography of Irish working-class life should be written from a holistic perspective, and her description of Thomastown extends beyond the spatial dimensions of the typical community study. These decisions deserve commendation. However, by failing to chronologize her data within important historical purviews, by neglecting the rich body of theory that speaks to the process of class formation within the modern context, and by disregarding the preservation of even the essence of primary sources, Silverman undermines her own project. Scholars of Ireland and of historical anthropology are impoverished historically, ethnographically, theoretically, and methodologically as a result. One can only hope that Silverman will address these issues and offer correctives in the final work of the Thomastown trilogy.

Recent trends related to high modernity, transnationalism, and globalization have led to transformations in practices of witchcraft, or brujeríía, in modern Puerto Rico. As Romberg illustrates in Witchcraft and Welfare, change is not unusual in vernacular religions; in many ways, it is what defines them. The difference today, however, is the speed at which transformation occurs and the readiness with which it is embraced. The superfluity of commodities and ideas moving among practitioners of diverse vernacular religions throughout the Caribbean and North and South America, to say nothing of the movement of practitioners themselves, has increased the potential for the borrowing and lending of religious signifiers. These include concrete goods such as candles, books, and images and statues of Catholic saints, Buddhas, and Hindu gods, and less concrete goods such as ceremonies, prayers, and charms.

Romberg’s arguments in this book are framed by an introduction and epilogue, both of which wrestle with the concept of authenticity. Haydéée, Romberg’s primary informant and “the number one witch-healer of Villas de Loiza,” seems unconventional in many ways. She welcomes Romberg into her inner circle, in exchange demanding that her life be recorded via photography and audiotaped interviews, a process that increases Haydéée’s power and reputation as a healer. Despite Haydéée’s unconventionality and eclecticism, or perhaps because of it, she is a natural ally to help Romberg illustrate the point that changeability is brujeríía’s most authentic quality.

The only place where I feel Romberg falls short is in her failure to analyze the 70-plus images included in her book. Rather than using the images to illustrate specific points, she allows them to simply stand as illustrations. It is surprising that she devotes so much text to exploring the significance of signs in general and so little to discussing the specific signs themselves.

The arguments in this book are insightful, the descriptions rich and evocative. Romberg draws on impressively diverse historical and ethnographic material to produce a two-part account. Part 1 is primarily historical and concerns itself with the three waves of globalization that have washed up on Puerto Rico’s shores since 1502, when the island became the domain of the Spanish Catholic state. The first wave was marked by slavery and Catholicism, two global forces that helped to shape brujería from its very inception. The second wave began in the mid-19th century with the push toward independence and a rise in anti-Spanish sentiment and extends through the 1898 U.S. invasion and into the 1970s. The most important religious influences of this period were the introduction of Scientific, or Kardecean, Spiritualism and the influx of Protestant beliefs. Romberg’s thorough examination of Kardecean influences on brujería practices is a long overdue contribution to the study of religion in the Caribbean. Equally impressive is her handling of the third wave of globalization, from 1980 to the present, which she calls the “commodification of faith.” Here she offers an in-depth look at the internationalization of objects sold in the religious goods stores known as botáánicas.

In part 2 of the book, Romberg draws on ethnographic material to describe contemporary brujeríía practices, specifically its entrepreneurial aspects. She goes to great lengths to demonstrate perceived links between spiritual and material wealth. Although her material is rich, it seems that she is preoccupied with explaining and justifying the materialism that marks brujería and is perhaps too focused on linking this materialism with the effects of American consumerism. Near the end of the book Romberg writes, “although I show that vernacular religions have emerged historically as a contestation of official, often repressive forms of religiosity and healing, I cannot assert that this is what propels brujeríía today” (p. 267). She argues that brujeríía and other popular religions are no longer “liberating and transformative revolutionary forces in society” (p. 267). Although Romberg seems to welcome this contradiction to theoretical expectation, one also gets the impression that she is a bit disappointed by it. Perhaps this is why she spends so much time trying to convince the reader that it is, indeed, all right. Despite this preoccupation, however, Romberg really is at her best in the second part of the book. Her respect for her work and for her research subjects is evident throughout the text. I highly recommend this book for students of religion, the Caribbean, globalization, and transnational studies. It provides an excellent overview of vernacular religion in Puerto Rico for beginning students, as well as many new details for experienced scholars.

Shelley Mallett’s ethnography, Conceiving Cultures, is valuable and interesting because it makes the reader think hard about the process of fieldwork and the (post)colonial structures and histories that shape this unique kind of social interaction. Although the text is interspersed with insightful theoretical discussions of personhood, conception beliefs, and the anthropology of experience, and although it contains interesting ethnographic details about Nuakata, a small island in the Massim area where other such illustrious ethnographers as Malinowski and Annette Weiner worked, it is really an ethnography about doing ethnography. Those who are about to embark on their first stint of fieldwork, or those who have just returned, will be particularly absorbed, entertained, and comforted by Mallett’s frank and intensive analysis of her own fieldwork process. I would recommend this text for graduate courses on fieldwork, methods, or ethnographic representation.

Mallett has a gift for the microanalysis of dialogic moments, even when those moments involved silence on the part of the women she attempted to interview and converse with, and she does not shrink from exposing her naïve hopes, her missteps, her epiphanies, the limitations of her data, or her ethical quandaries. Moreover, the ethnography is largely organized chronologically, so the reader is privy to each step of Mallett’s process, from trying to formulate a research topic, to establishing relationships with her interlocutors in “the field,” to how she chose to represent her conversations and observations once she returned home.

Mallett states in the introduction that she is informed by debates over whether there can be a “feminist ethnography,” and she takes to heart the feminist injunction that ethnographies should be “accessible, self-critical, and mindful of the theoretical and narrative strategies they employ” (p. 34). Mallett’s ethnography is every one of these things, sometimes to a fault. For example, after devoting 11 pages to the story of her arrival on Nuakata, Mallett informs the reader that she is fully aware of the critique made of arrival tropes in establishing ethnographic authority, and having struggled with this critique, decided that to forego this discursive step would be “a potentially disingenuous gesture to nonconformism, a denial of the ethnographic process” (p. 50). In another instance Mallett takes the reader through her first experience of a funeral on Nuakata, her painful feelings of voyeurism, her self-disgust at having eagerly anticipated the event as a source of data, and her ultimately faulty decision not to attend future funerals unless acquainted with the deceased or his or her kin. As she says, “Confronted with people’s real, tangible loss, their wailing and tears … I questioned my right to be there. ... By what violent act of abstraction had I hoped for a death, imagined the bereaved as disembodied representatives of distinct mortuary rituals…?” (p. 222). This persistent stepping back to analyze her own decisions is generally thought provoking but sometimes feels like a tempest in a teapot. Indeed, Mallett’s study raises the unresolved, and perhaps irresolvable, question about reflexivity in an ethnographic text: when is it useful and necessary and when is it too self-involved?

I have not said much about the ethnographic content of Mallett’s book for two reasons. First, I think Mallett’s book is most interesting and valuable for its analysis of the fieldwork process. This is not to suggest that the data analysis is inadequate; rather, her analyses are quite robust, but somewhat ad hoc. That is to say, certain ethnographic domains—conception beliefs, mortuary rites, a Maternal Child Health clinic—are analyzed richly, but it is unclear how these domains and events are meant to work together as one overarching argument or topic. The introduction is packed with astute theoretical discussions of ethnographic representation, the social construction of gender, phenomenological accounts of the subject, and Marilyn Strathern’s theorization of Melanesian personhood, but in the end it is unclear what exactly Mallett seeks to argue. Mallett’s fieldwork was cut short by illness in her family. Perhaps as a result, her text has an odd quality of being analytically rich, but somewhat thin ethnographically. This reader is still pondering whether it may actually be to our advantage that Mallett had to work with the data she had, forcing her to focus her intellectual energies on the process of her research as much as on its outcome.

Bradley Levinson examines high-school education in Mexico through a critical ethnographic study that originated with his dissertation research at the University of North Carolina. Levinson conducted his study in a small rural town he calls “San Pablo,” and his focal participants are 20 ninth-graders in a secundaria. Levinson’s main data collection took place in Mexico during 1988–1991, and his follow-up research with the same group of participants spanned a seven-year period up to 1998.

The organizing principle of Levinson’s study is the idea that secondary education in Mexico cultivates a sense of identity that reflects a unique interpretation of equality among the nation’s citizenry--hence the title We Are All Equal. The students’ conflicted attitudes toward this notion of equality provide a rich framework for examining the limitations of assumptions notably fractured by gender and class. The implications for Levinson’s research are intriguing. How does equality come to be defined in a nation conditioned by a traditional norm of machismo that subordinates women? Also, given the disproportionate distribution of wealth in Mexico, as evidenced by a large working-class population, the high status of the concept of equality in public school populations is ironic. Levinson’s focus on the development of Mexican gender identity among ninth-grade students is a definite innovation within the genre of ethnographic research. Drawing on the work of Robert Connell (Gender and Power: Society, the Person, and Sexual Politics, Stanford University Press, 1987), Levinson delineates a Mexican “gender regime.” He describes in precise detail the construction of gender through particular family roles, as well as family members’ various inconsistencies in enacting these roles. For example, during one family visit, Levinson encountered a father ironing clothes in the living room. He strategically used this encounter as an opportunity to interview the parent and inquire about notions of machismo and domestic gender roles.

Although Levinson’s designation of schools as institutions for social assimilation does not necessarily represent an innovation in ethnographic investigation, his focus on one Mexican high school through a historical lens, coupled with an interpretation of “culture” that fully takes into account the intersections of class, gender, and ideological variables, is relevant for understanding the complexity of education in contemporary Mexican society. In his follow-up research with original research participants, Levinson considerately updates the most recent progress of the students profiled in his case studies. Some of his observations, particularly in relation to popular culture and identity, seem somewhat anachronistic, such as his reference to rapper Vanilla Ice’s popularity with Mexican students. Another limitation of Levinson’s study is his etic, or outsider, perspective when describing Mexican cultural nuances. His translation of Mexican Spanish, for example, focuses on individual terms, rather than on dialogue. Consequently, there is considerable representation of Mexican Spanish through an English interpretation for a mostly English-dominant readership. For example, Levinson notes the symbolic value of the huarache (sandal) among the young students: “For the schooled San Pabloan, the huarache--a rough, homemade sandal--was the ultimate country signifier, a symbol of rurality, poverty, and little schooling. For these San Pablo girls, the huarache ‘was like, no way’” (p. 175).

By focusing on specific Spanish terms, Levinson is able to provide insights into how students perceive themselves. Levinson conveys an important element for understanding students’ perception of gender, in a manner that is accessible to the non–Spanish-speaker. As a Mexican American fluent in Spanish, I would have preferred to read more Mexican Spanish discourse; however, Levinson has an excellent grasp of essential concepts and terms despite his etic perspective. Levinson’s insight is strengthened by a sincere grappling with cross-cultural issues of subjectivity. Throughout the volume, Levinson remains conscious of his own subjective limitations. At the outset, he acknowledges his English-speaking background--even his limited ability to communicate with his Spanish-speaking housekeeper. Levinson also interrogates himself about details that might have been glossed over by less thorough researchers, such as his researcher–informant relationships with female participants who were romantically attracted to him during the course of his study. Levinson exemplifies what Banks (“The Lives and Values of Researchers: Implications for Educating Citizens in a Multicultural Society,” Educational Researcher 1998:4–17) would call an “external insider” perspective; that is, an informed perspective deriving from the researcher’s adoption by the community under study. We Are All Equal reflects Levinson’s comprehensive entréée into the community of San Pablo. The book should be of value to educators interested in dynamic interpretations of Mexican culture in a school setting, as well as to researchers who wish to explore issues of subjectivity in working with culturally different populations.

The past two decades have seen heightened interest in the anthropology of emotions. Megan Jennaway adds to this growing literature with Sisters and Lovers, her account of women’s romantic and sexual desire in rural North Bali. Jennaway is concerned with how “women express their eroticized subjectivity, through strategies ranging from secrecy and deception to succumbing to hysterical illness” (p. 6).

Jennaway’s ethnography is unique in that it incorporates a fictionalized narrative of the lives of three sisters in the village. She writes from the third-person omniscient perspective, giving insight into their thoughts and feelings. The purpose of these fictionalized interludes, clearly segmented from the traditional ethnography with the use of italics, is to “render more vivid some of the stories being told” (p. 215) and to provide access into the subjective experiences of the women as they experience romance, marriage, childbirth, and divorce.

In the first chapter, Jennaway describes Punyanwangi (a pseudonym), a small village located in the mountainous area of North Bali. She introduces her three fictional protagonists and presents her arguments for the use of a constructed account of their lives. In the next chapter, Jennaway argues that anthropology has largely ignored research on sexuality and desire and cites philosophical and feminist psychoanalytic theories on the topic. Drawing on Julia Kristeva’s work, Jennaway argues that women in Bali are doubly muted, denied subjectivity as well as the ability to act on their desires. This repression produces a Freudian hysteria that is somaticized as illness. Jennaway concludes that “as hysterics, [Balinese] women are enabled to seize upon a rare and delectable luxury, to ‘speak’ their desire, albeit ‘through’ their bodies” (p. 30).

Chapter 3 is a straightforward ethnographic description of the economy and social organization of Punyanwangi. Although her informants espouse a complementary and reciprocal working relationship between the sexes, Jennaway finds that women are predominantly engaged in domestic, unremunerated, or physically tedious tasks. This exclusion from ritual power and civic engagement leads to a further muting of women in Punyanwangi.

In the fourth chapter, Jennaway writes about how concepts of love and marriage are expressed by women in Punyanwangi. She begins with classical kinship constructs of women as passive objects of exchange and moves to a much more textured look at women as active agents. Jennaway’s ethnography shines the most when she quotes directly from the women she worked with, whether single or in monogynous or polygynous marriages. We see their romantic worlds as imaginatively rich but frustrated by various social constraints.

In chapter 5 Jennaway temporarily shifts her attention to Lovina, a tourist resort located about five kilometers northwest of the village. There, young Balinese men perform as both tour guides and paid gigolos for foreign women. Jennaway explores the construction of sexuality and desire that transpires between the men and their foreign girlfriends–clients–patrons. She notes that she did not observe any foreign men dating local women and suggests that Balinese women are forbidden from the urban “economy of pleasure” (p. 100).

In chapters 6 and 7, Jennaway merges her interest in feminist psychoanalytic theory with her training as a medical anthropologist. She challenges the classical anthropological interpretation of Balinese as emotionally flat. She portrays Punyanwangi adolescent women’s desire as turbulent and erotically charged, but ultimately muted. This repression manifests itself as babainan (p. 197), a form of what Jennaway describes as a Freudian hysterical-type disorder that leads women to behave in socially inappropriate ways. In chapter 7, she provides a detailed description of the health and illness models found in Punyanwangi.

The greatest weakness of this text is that Jennaway does not connect her research with more recent scholarship on emotions and desire. Her assertion that this is an undeveloped area in anthropology is myopic. There has been significant interest in emotionality and desire in Southeast Asia, and references to work by scholars such as Aihwa Ong, Michelle Rosaldo, Evelyn Blackwood, or Catherine Lutz would have strengthened her theoretical framework. In recent years, there has been an efflorescence of innovative work in Latin America by scholars such as L. A. Rebhun, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, and Setha Low. Within feminist ethnography, Lila Abu-Lughod’s insights have challenged the classical models of women’s repression and muting used in this text.

Nonetheless, Jennaway’s insights on women’s desire and marital relationships should make Sisters and Lovers useful for scholars of North Bali. Psychological anthropologists may find the most utility in the text as a whole, whereas those interested specifically in tourism, gendered agrarian economies, Balinese somatic models, or women’s sexuality may find sections of the book focusing on those topics illuminating.

Robert Hefner’s Civil Islam is a landmark attempt to read a century of Islamic participation in Indonesian politics. Combining historical rigor, cultural insight, and a keen commitment to social justice, Hefner succeeds in demonstrating the deep and enduring roots of pluralism and democratic ideals among Indonesian Muslims.

Hefner begins by tracing the “civil precedents” of Indonesian Islam back to the precolonial era, when political power was dispersed across a diverse, multiethnic array of city-states and kingdoms whose influence was kept in check by merchants, religious leaders, and external rivals. He describes how Dutch colonialism encouraged a new political absolutism by reifying a distinction between a universal “Islam” and local “custom,” marginalizing the former and transforming the latter into a rigid prescriptive code. He then turns to the nationalist era, when Islamic groups sought to reestablish political influence within Sukarno’s fledgling republic—jockeying for power with the military, the communist party, and the secular nationalists. Targeted by efforts to reform land tenure, while simultaneously feeling themselves sidelined by Sukarno’s 1960 disbanding of Parliament and the country’s largest Muslim organization, many Muslims were drawn into participation in the 1965 massacres of those accused of communism, a complicity Hefner interprets evenly and perceptively.

It is in his discussion of the 32 years of Suharto’s New Order regime, however, that Hefner makes his most important contributions, contextualizing Indonesian Islam within shifting relations of power. Whereas other scholars of recent Indonesian history have tended to attribute the intensification of Islamic activities that began in the 1980s to a revival of premodern beliefs or to the import of ideas from the Middle East, Hefner argues that Indonesian Islam must be seen in relation to the postcolonial state’s strategic concern with controlling and channeling religious expression. Without reducing religion to a tactical move, Hefner illustrates how Suharto’s attempts to sever Islamic piety from Islamic politics, encouraging the former while stifling the latter, ironically, led to a surge in democratic Islamic discourse. In an effort to placate Muslims excluded from political participation and construct a new moral order that would bolster state authority, the New Order regime introduced a mandatory religious curriculum into the public schools, financed the building of thousands of mosques, and placed the hajj under rigorous state supervision. What occurred, however, was not a standardization of Indonesian Islam in the service of the state but, rather, a multiplication of points of protest as the divide between conservative, proregime Muslims and liberal, critical Muslims grew more pronounced. When other channels for democratic expression were blocked, mosques and Islamic groups provided space to articulate political aspirations and to imagine new forms of governance, leading to vibrant dialogue among Muslim intellectuals.

Hefner’s finely textured narrative lends convincing support to his main argument: Islam can be a powerful force for democratization. His sympathetic reading of the struggles of liberal Muslims to create tolerant and pluralist communities in a climate of state surveillance, strict censorship, and backroom political intrigue is both compelling and timely. His analysis offers an important counterweight to “culturalist” descriptions of Indonesia that pose a static Javanist tradition as the guiding force behind government policy and describes how Suharto, his cronies, and his generals were willing to indulge almost any ideology as long as it proved useful to their goals of amassing and exerting power. Hefner also challenges simplistic understandings of civil society that see it as a bounded, independent entity, demonstrating how in postcolonial Indonesia, civil Islamic groups and the state have allied, broken apart, and forged new coalitions to serve changing strategic ends. It is this last point that leads Hefner to his cautious conclusion: that “the culture of civility remains vulnerable and incomplete if it is not accompanied by a transformation of state. This is to say … that civil society is not opposed to the state but deeply dependent on its civilization” (p. 215).

An easy critique of Hefner’s book would take issue with its claim to be “a social anthropology of democratization in a majority Muslim society” (p. xviii). In contrast with Hefner’s previous ethnographic works on religious modernities and contemporary conversions in Java, Civil Islam pays little attention to how Indonesians (Muslim or otherwise), outside of a minority elite, have responded to the assertions of prodemocracy Islam or imagined democracies of their own. Although Hefner generously highlights the diversity of Islamic perspectives in Indonesia, he is less concerned with exploring how the members of mass Islamic organizations like Masyumi, Nadhuatl Ulama (NU), Muhammadiyah, or Himpunan Mahasiswa Indonesia (HMI) interpreted the claims and tactics of their leaders. Hefner hints at the occurrence of contestation within organizations, as when he attributes Abdurrahman Wahid’s 1996 détente with Suharto as an attempt to safeguard the rank and file of his NU organization, but he gives little indication of how popular piety articulated with the positions of public intellectuals. And although Hefner notes the appearance in the late 1980s and 1990s of inexpensive Islamic mass media and “pop revivalists,” he does not address the emergence of informal and fluid Muslim networks, such as Qur’anic study groups (pengajian), women’s gatherings, university discussion groups, or even communities of Internet users or Islamic commodity consumers that, without claims to fixed organizations, mass membership, or a coherent discourse on the relationship between Islam and politics, nevertheless have had extraordinarily political impact. Perhaps most importantly for those reading Civil Islam with an eye toward current conditions in Indonesia, Hefner’s sympathy with his liberal interlocutors frequently leads him to a caricatured view of those he calls “ultraconservative” Muslims and to an oversimplistic reading of contemporary calls for an “Islamic state,” leaving us unable to understand the positions of those nonregimist intellectuals and activists who have come to hope—rightly or wrongly—that a fixed and unyielding reading of syariah can undo decades of harm wrought by corruption, nepotism, and the callow manipulation of state power.

These are easy critiques, ones arguably outweighed by Hefner’s important challenge to the excesses perpetrated in the name of cultural relativism by conservatives ranging from Samuel Huntington to Suharto, who found common ground by claiming that a respect for political pluralism and human rights was incompatible with the Muslim societies of Asia. And although they raise difficult questions for scholars of Indonesia and elsewhere, including how we might frame “civil society” to make it a useful and inclusive category of ethnographic analysis, they do not detract from the power of this book to speak across disciplines and refute rigid views of Islam’s political potential.

Civilizational modes of thinking—ideas that the world can be split up into “Civilizations,” including Euro-American or Western, Chinese, Latin American, African, Hindu, and Islamic—seem to be all too commonplace these days, both in the political realm and—frighteningly, for people who consider culture to be important—within the academy. One of the many problems with such thinking is that it assumes a primarily religious character for certain “civilizations,” most noticeably “Hindu” (for India) and “Islamic” (for the Middle East, Pakistan, Indonesia, and other majority Muslim nations). One’s religion, it is assumed, is one’s foundational identifying characteristic, and ideas of the self, personhood, identity, and the impetus for one’s actions are believed to come primarily out of religious sentiment.

Peter Gottschalk, in his excellent Beyond Hindu and Muslim: Multiple Identity in Narratives from Village India, finds this to be a problem in scholarship on South Asia. Specifically, he argues that “Western scholars of the Subcontinent rely too heavily on Hindu and Muslim as descriptive adjectives and analytic categories” (p. 3). Not only does this show up in the ways scholars conceptualize and write about individuals and groups in South Asia, but it is also reflected in conceptualizations of space, time, and history, which are often split up into a tripartite scheme: “Hindu,” “Muslim,” and (significantly) “Modern” (p. 29). In order to challenge such characterizations, Gottschalk, a historian of religion, has written a thoughtful ethnography—based on 14 months of fieldwork—which focuses on “a local demonstration of some alternative group identities available to individuals … identities that complement and compete with Hindu and Muslim” (p. 4) for residents of a constellation of villages in rural northern India.

Gottschalk highlights these alternative identities, including family, class, caste, gender, territory, and nation, through “group memories” reflected in narratives of past events, which become illuminative of present-day interests. Narratives include those regarding shrines to a Sufi and to a powerful Brahmin spirit, the foundational narratives regarding the village and those who reside there, and narratives of nation. Chapter 1, “Multiple Identities, Singular Representations,” is a critical overview of historiography in India, particularly regarding issues of religious identity and communalism. Chapter 2, “The Village Nexus,” introduces the reader to the villages included in the study, focusing on the importance of territory and place to many group identities. Chapter 3, “Identity, Narrative and Group Memory,” considers narrative and group memory using the theoretical work of Paul Ricoeur, Paul Connerton, and Maurice Halbwachs. Chapters 4 and 5, “Ocean of the Strands of Memory” and “Institutions of Integration and Disintegration,” illustrate how multiple constructions of the past create multiple identities in the present village and nation. There is also an intriguing appendix, which lays out, chapter by chapter, the Indian Standard II to Standard X Social Studies–History class texts.

Beyond Hindu and Muslim was a pleasure to read. Gottschalk’s prose is lucid yet fluid and reflects a rare sensitivity. I do have some quibbles, particularly regarding language. The languages in which Gottschalk conducts his research are primarily Hindi and Urdu, two intimately related and mutually intelligible languages that are, as he describes them, “at opposite ends of a spectrum of north Indian vernacular languages” (p. 31). Most speakers vary their linguistic choices—how “Hindi” or how “Urdu” they choose to speak—depending on many variables, including context and subject matter. Gottschalk takes considerable time and effort to discuss the intertwining of language, politics, and identity in India and what he calls the village “nexus.” He mentions, for example, that those identifying themselves as mother-tongue Hindustani speakers diminished by 99.99 percent between the 1951 and 1961 censuses (p. 31). Yet throughout his account, he identifies speakers by their self-professed mother tongue--going so far as to use different transliteration schemes (pp. xvii–xviii). Such a choice has Gottschalk falling into the trap he accuses others of doing, textually concretizing otherwise fluid (in this case linguistic) identities. The other quibbles regarding language are minor, relating to poor or incorrect translation in some places (he translates the Bhojpuri ham log as “we people,” rather than “we”; he speaks of Gandhi, the Father of the Nation, as rashtrapati (president) rather than rashtripita, and so on). But these are minor errors in an excellent work.

Gottschalk has provided a thoughtful and insightful book, which deserves the attention of all who study South Asia. What makes it particularly useful for an undergraduate classroom—besides the clear, unpretentious writing style—is the accompanying detailed website “A Virtual Village” (http://www.colleges.org/~village/), created by Gottschalk and Mathew N. Schmalz, which allows students to “roam” around the paths, walkways, and locales mentioned in the text, and to some degree to “interact” with residents.

Anthropologists have often approached media as something haphazardly stumbled on while conducting fieldwork or as a basis of anecdotal comparison in discussions of more substantial issues. The topic is consistently approached uncritically, and the presence of various forms of media in different cultural settings is either considered exotic or disregarded as commonplace. In the edited volumes The Anthropology of Media and Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain, a number of pivotal essays complicate the conceptualization and place of media in the anthropological project. Whereas the primary aim of The Anthropology of Media is to clarify an interdisciplinary historical approach to the analysis of media and to introduce a possible new subfield for anthropologists, Media Worlds assumes this background and boldly demonstrates that a methodological direction for the ethnographic analysis of media is already mapped out and being followed. Both volumes are welcome at a time when the importance and recognition of media in anthropology is growing. Although I will touch on the considerable content of both of these volumes (a combined 42 essays), my primary emphasis in this review is on the claims made by the editors and on the role of the volumes as foundational texts that mark a shift in anthropology toward a more active engagement of media.

The editors of both volumes acknowledge past attempts to review anthropological approaches to media, as well as works from other disciplines that laid a foundation for the exploration of media and society. Common ancestors claimed include Raymond Williams, Marshall McLuhan, Hortense Powdermaker, Margaret Mead, and Stuart Hall. Both volumes also include thought-provoking and well-constructed introductory essays that trace the history of the interdisciplinary underpinning of media analysis within anthropology and provide a possible methodological vision for a future course of action. This is especially true in Media Worlds, where the editors have not concerned themselves as much with asserting the validity of studying media in anthropology as they have theorized the possibility of producing “new kinds of knowledge” (p. 23) through an ethnographic examination of media and their related processes in different cultural settings.

A number of other similarities exist between the two volumes. First, the editors see a need to expand the notion of what is considered media beyond the “visualist bias” (Askew and Wilk, p. 3) to include radio and other mediums they believe are often overlooked or subsumed under visual anthropology. Second, the editors of both volumes see the late 1980s as a post “crisis of representation” point of departure for a contemporary analysis of media within anthropology. Although media were of critical interest to a few anthropologists prior to this time, the editors claim that the insight gained through the postmodern critique of anthropology has enabled a more robust understanding of media and their processes. Finally, there is primary emphasis in both volumes on the need to take into account the social contexts in which media occur.

The emphasis placed on social context by the editors of both volumes is meant to provide a logical space for the inclusion of ethnographic methodology in the analysis of media. This insistence on the importance of social context also moves beyond previous discussions within anthropology that failed to deal with the complex social milieu in which different forms of media are located. As Askew points out,

Recent decades have witnessed an explosion of fascinating critical approaches to the study of culture and media that interrogate in creative ways the all too common tendency to divorce media technologies and media texts from their social contexts. We seek to continue this trend by foregrounding the people taking pictures, listening to the radio, working behind and posing before the video camera, and examine how they manipulate these technologies to their own cultural, economic and ideological ends [p. 1].

Referring to ethnographic approaches that analyze the local contexts in which media occur, Ginsburg, Abu-Lughod, and Larkin assert that “such strategies help us see not only how media are embedded in people’s quotidian lives but also how consumers and producers are themselves imbricated in discursive universes, political situations, economic circumstances, national settings, historical moments, and transnational flows, to name only a few relevant contexts” (p. 2). These statements will undoubtedly anchor many discussions of media in anthropology in the coming years.

Askew and Wilk position the majority of essays in The Anthropology of Media as a collection, intended for reference, of seminal works in the development of an anthropology of media. In her introduction, Askew asserts that the purpose of the volume is to “tease out the commonalities and differences in media experience and the interpretation of media experience” (p. 2). In this sense, she is stressing a need to appreciate the unique way in which anthropology sees media “as simply one aspect of contemporary social life” (p. 10). As Askew herself suggests, the volume would be most pedagogically useful in conjunction with current full-length ethnographies of media. To this end, Askew and Wilk divide the volume into five sections, with the overall purpose of providing the reader with a background in the historical, ethical, and theoretical issues confronting the contemplation of media in anthropology. Part 1, “Seeing/Hearing is Believing: Technology and Truth,” includes fundamental early essays that expressed hope in the possibilities offered to social science by supposedly objective visual instruments and early critical thinking regarding media and society. The essays assembled in parts 2 and 3, “Representing Others” and “Representing Selves,” question both the role of media in “promoting distortions and misrepresentations of cultures” (p. 73) and the concomitant queries that arise when “Others” produce media themselves. In part 4, “Active Audiences,” authors engage the theoretical shift toward recognition of the agency of the audience. This section includes the only essay in the volume that extends the focus of media analysis beyond the visual form (Tacchi). The last section, entitled “Power, Colonialism, Nationalism,” represents a point of departure, as the editors guide the reader toward a critical assessment of how media operate in different social contexts. Many of the foundational essays for the new subfield being proposed by Askew have been part of the critical rethinking of visual anthropology in recent years, so although the collection of these essays in one volume is important and welcomed, it does not necessarily support Askew’s declaration of the creation of a new legitimate subfield within anthropology.

The essays in Media Worlds provide instrumental methodological utility to current anthropology. There is evidence in the volume of a movement beyond the commonsense analysis of the production, content, and reception of media, to the engagement of the activist and applied notions that any visual or media anthropologist should have as his or her primary focus. What is also apparent in Media Worlds is the editors’ understanding that the researcher will be more prepared to contemplate the place of media within culture with a firsthand understanding of the practices of production. Ginsburg et al. argue that, “refiguring the ethnography of media necessitates a further expansion by taking into consideration the physical and sensory properties of the technologies themselves and examining the materiality of communication across cultures” (p. 19). They focus on the localities in which ethnographies of media are taking place, while at the same time demonstrating the need to consider the larger transnational, socioeconomic, and political empowerment efforts in which they are situated. The volume is arranged in sections along a “sociopolitical continuum” (p. 7), from anthropological approaches to media that look at larger government and commercial productions to those that focus on the smaller, but no less significant, “self-conscious practices” (p. 7) of individuals in various struggles for empowerment. The reader gains a more active and dense sensibility of media’s place among indigenous production, state politics, various technological practices, and the myriad sites of its production. There is no doubt that Media Worlds will be looked on in the future as the canonical text for this established and expanding field of study in anthropology.

It is impossible to discuss every important essay in these volumes, and some are shared between the two, but several stand out and deserve mention because they demonstrate important steps in the analysis of media in anthropology. In Askew and Wilk’s volume, Lila Abu-Lughod fluidly links ethnographic detail with the impact of media in a subaltern cultural setting while contextualizing Egyptian television and the state. By doing so, she epitomizes the analysis of media and their social context that the editors of both volumes are advocating. Wilk asserts an important methodological focus in his discussion of the way people talk about television in Belize. He demonstrates that “television has become a social, cultural and political issue” (p. 296). In Ginsburg et al., Jeff Himpele addresses the complexity of actually conducting a media ethnography in his discussion of complicity and “the parallax effect” of his own role in Bolivian media. And, finally, Debra Spitulnik’s attempt to widen reception studies through her analysis of Zambian radio culture and its links to everyday life demonstrates an important expansion into nonvisual forms of media.

Although the movement toward a recognition of media as a legitimate subject within anthropology anticipated by the editors and authors in both volumes ferments interesting approaches and topics, it also signals a semantic and possible theoretical confusion that inevitably occurs when a growing area of study attempts to formulate methods and accompanying analytic language. When focusing on media and their social context, are we conducting media anthropology under the rubric of an anthropology of media? Or do we practice media ethnography guided by a theoretical approach toward an ethnography of media? And should we embed the study of any media in a sound theory of communication? Undoubtedly, these questions will be considered as more researchers continue to consider the role of media in anthropology. Both The Anthropology of Media and Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain indicate important steps in the anthropological engagement of media, and for those looking to garner a rich understanding of this movement, the two volumes should be required reading.