“When finally…I stood on the Acropolis and cast my eyes around upon the landscape, a surprising thought suddenly entered my mind: ‘So all this really doesexist, just as we learned in school.’” So wrote Sigmund Freud, having experienced the Acropolis in the midst of modern-day Athens (“A Disturbance in Memory on the Acropolis,” in Collected Papers Volume 5, Hogarth, 1950[1936]). Freud’s reaction was typical of many Western elegies written to this 2,400-year-old landmark--in awe of the past, dismissive of or oblivious to the present. But how do residents of Athens and other modern Greeks live and experience the Acropolis as a material reality and as a site for imagination? What is the “local claim” of the Acropolis? In answering this question, Yalouri takes us on a fascinating tour through the politics of heritage and archaeology and struggles over the control of the circulation of objects and meanings in our contemporary world. This is a case study in the social life of things, tracing the Acropolis through ethnographic examination of people’s interactions with the ruin itself, its myriad representations, and the discourses surrounding it--“the way Greeks and the Acropolis are engaged in a dialectic process of objectification, forming, transforming, or reproducing each other” (p. 17).

In four chapters, Yalouri describes the Acropolis as condensing, contesting, consuming, and aestheticizing:

Condensing. Yalouri argues that the Acropolis functions as a multivocal dream-symbol of Greek national identity as that identity is experienced in space and time. Time itself, particularly in a “glorious history” that founds a nation-state, becomes a physical property, having weight and dimension. The Acropolis becomes the “national body,” grown, like a living object, out of the soil of Greece. Like a physical body, it suffers wounds and decay, as well as revitalizations. In all of these metaphorical imbrications, the Acropolis acts as a lieu de memoire, more expressive than language because of its very visibility, tangibility, and durability.

Contesting. Yalouri provides a fascinating account of the circulation of Greek antiquities beyond the borders of Greece, and of debates over traveling exhibitions and over Greek attempts to reclaim the Parthenon (Elgin) Marbles now housed in the British Museum. Thus the “global fame” of the Hellenic heritage, claimed by some in the West as a world heritage, must both circulate like a Kula shell to increase Greece’s fame and return to Greece to help reassemble the nation-state it embodies. The debate over the return of the Parthenon marbles becomes a microcosm of modern Greece’s attempt to “reterritorialize diasporic Hellenism” (p. 85), to reclaim the fame that has traveled beyond its borders and, in a sense, escaped its control. Thus, Greeks attempt to ensure that Greek heritage belongs “in the world, but to Greece” (p. 112).

Consuming. Here Yalouri explores questions of the commodification of cultural heritage: How can Greek antiquities be both cultural capital and at the same time remain unpolluted by associations with the marketplace? Drawing on Annette Weiner’s notion of “inalienable possessions,” Yalouri shows how Greeks believe that their heritage is a gift to the world; hence, any suggestion of market exchange of antiquities suggests replaceability, lack of uniqueness, which threatens group identity. Yalouri traces this discourse through reactions to the advertising campaigns of several corporations, including Coca-Cola’s depiction of the Parthenon with its columns in the shape of Coke bottles. Within this debate one finds subtle reflections and nonnationalist discourses on questions concerning the triumph of free-market values in the world more generally, as well as on the relationship between originals and copies.

Aestheticizing. Here Yalouri considers the experience of the sensory qualities of the Acropolis, as well as the aura of sacredness that surrounds it. She opposes official discourses, which stress the distance senses, particularly vision, with the everyday experience of the Acropolis through the more proximate senses. For the Greek state, the Acropolis becomes a sort of panopticon, separate from the city of Athens but always visible, looking down on the doings of the city’s inhabitants. Particularly interesting is the taboo against any multisensory appreciation of the Acropolis that might mix the profane and the sacred, best expressed in the visceral reaction of a British, classically trained friend of Yalouri’s who became visibly disturbed at the prospect of eating lunch in the proximity of the Acropolis.

Two additional aspects of Yalouri’s book deserve mention. One is her use of interviews with and essays by Greek schoolchildren exploring the meanings of the Acropolis. The children’s responses suggest both the early internalization of adult views and the ways that those who diverge from such views may be stigmatized. The second is Yalouri’s extensive use of illustrations--images of the Acropolis, newspaper clippings, and cartoons--which provide a valuable adjunct to the textual story and contribute to its overall readability. In short, this is a book that can be read and used at a number of levels. As a focused case study illustrating current approaches to material culture and the ways in which “material goods are converted into non-material fields of influence” (p. 193), it deserves a wide readership among scholars. It should also find its place in courses on material culture, as well as in Western civilization courses, where it would provide a useful corrective to the distancing effects of a long tradition of consuming the Hellenic.

In Badfellas: Crime, Tradition, and New Masculinities, criminologist Simon Winlow explores the changing role of violence and masculine identity in northeast England due to the processes of deindustrialization and globalization and the arrival of postmodernity. Though his focus is primarily on the role of violence and crime in the lives of working-class males in the city of Sunderland, his interest in the ways that masculinities change across epochs and in response to shifting economic and social conditions makes for a more expansive argument. The rise of “disorganized capitalism,” including the decline of local shipbuilding and coal mining industries and rising unemployment, means that traditional male roles involving hard work, physicality, “shop floor masculinity,” and providing for one’s family “have become of limited relevance to a new generation of North-Eastern males” (p. 20). As men face barriers to legitimate careers, favorable attitudes toward delinquency arise, as well as toward violence used in both legitimate and illegitimate arenas (p. 66). Whereas crime in Sunderland was once limited primarily to work-related pilfering and conflict-oriented status struggles, in recent years an entrepreneurial and professional criminal element has emerged. Crime, Winlow writes, “is one of the few traditional trades that still offers an apprenticeship in the post-industrial North East” (p. 170).

Born and raised in the city of Sunderland, Winlow came to his project with preexisting contacts and certain advantages (his accent, his age, his physical appearance, his knowledge of appropriate social behavior and hierarchies, etc.) that helped him gain access to the people and situations he wished to study. He employed both overt and covert research techniques and took on numerous and varying participant-observer roles—conducting unstructured interviews; drinking and socializing at the homes of the men he was studying; attending football matches, boxing events, weddings, and funerals; and eventually working as a bouncer in the city’s nightclubs. Indeed, Winlow’s method is one of the strengths of this text and he pays careful attention to the benefits, limitations, and complexities of the participant-observer role without slipping into solipsism.

Northeast England is an environment in which one can examine the effects of cultural and economic change, and Winlow argues, “there is no better place to observe these changes than in the gyms, bars, nightclubs, and drug dens of the region” (p. 164). The “new men” who populate this landscape are not “the kind who would do the ironing and are not afraid to cry” (p. 164); nor are they just men “of fighting repute” like those from the modern era (p. 166). Rather, they are men who are learning to capitalize on violent capabilities and criminal opportunities, sometimes even as professional gangsters with national and global links. Masculine “protocols” of the past—physical prowess, the ability and readiness to fight, autonomy, and skill—“are not rejected but merge with new influences and take on new meanings in the post-modern age” (p. 22). Physicality, in this new context, “need not be expressed by the hardship of manual labour” but by bodybuilding; “fighting ability need not be restricted to personal displays of toughness to win the respect of one’s peers, but can become a viable commercial asset” (p. 22). In a highly competitive marketplace, violence becomes not only a “cultural expectation” of working-class men, but also a business advantage, a “highly valued commodity that must be recognized, nurtured and defended at all costs” (p. 163).

Winlow’s analysis sidesteps tired debates about structure versus agency: The subjects of his book are shown actively shaping their worlds but always in the context of the changing social and economic conditions of the community in which they live. Though the book is slow reading at first, the characters that Winlow introduces us to are interesting and multifaceted men who engage in local criminal activity, watch Goodfellas and The Godfather, listen to foreign rap music, and enjoy the sensual and aesthetic aspects of violence in addition to valuing its practical uses in their everyday environment. To be a gangster, Winlow writes, “represents an idealized form of masculinity to elements of the male working-class, with the money, the women, the esteem and respect, the fear, the lack of mundanity and regimentation, the battle with convention, all comparing favorably with the blunt reality of life in the working-class northern city” (p. 167).

Though Winlow is primarily focused on the ways men define their masculinity in relation to one another, it might have been helpful to know more about how this new masculinity was affecting and was being affected by women’s changing aspirations and practices. Women are a backdrop in the world presented here—“bouncer groupies,” strippers, lasses, or bitches—and are seen as one of the rewards of successful masculine performances. They seem somewhat disconnected from this changing environment of work and play and the men’s adaptive responses to it. Of course, an ethnographer cannot do everything, and Winlow gives us a humanistic portrayal of the men whose lives he explores. Winlow’s ethnography adds to a growing literature on masculinity in different cultural contexts, social situations, and historical periods, and given its interesting predictions and attention to the ways in which the local is informed by the global (and vice versa), it should be of interest to anyone studying the material basis of gendered expression as well as to those working in criminology or the sociology of deviance.

Dr. Cathy Winkler uses her training as an ethnographer and anthropologist to narrate and contextualize her own experiences as a VISA--her term for “VIctim as Survivor and Activist” (p. vii). She writes of three rapes: the physical rape(s) Kenneth Redding inflicted on her on a summer night in 1987; the “social rape” friends, counselors, colleagues, and others subjected her to following the first rape; and the “legal rape” perpetrated by the criminal justice system as she fought for ten years to bring Redding to justice and prevent him from raping again.

The resulting ethnography is horrific, farcical, tragic, incisive, and inspiring. It is also difficult in some ways to review. First, how does a social scientist writing for a scholarly journal critique a book the author herself describes as “nonfiction, fiction, fantasies, and memories” (p. vii)? This characterization gives Winkler permission to deviate from academic conventions. If I then find myself annoyed when she reveals that a detailed and realistic story she has just told is only a fantasy, how can I object when she has already made this “leeway” explicit? Second, when a book is so profoundly an account of a person’s life, how does one assess the book without at the same time evaluating how the person lived that life, and thus risking becoming one of the very people Winkler describes as culturing rape? If Winkler appears to me “defensive” as she defends virtually every action she has taken and interaction in which she has been involved, am I “judgmental” as I judge, another of those who “isolates” and “silences” VISAs (p. 287)? Although Winkler’s innovative style is highly effective and her efforts to explain and justify her life are entirely consistent with research on revictimization processes, some readers may be put off.

They should read the book anyway. It is richly detailed, employing thick description of the original rape and of Winkler’s interactions with Redding and the people surrounding her in its aftermath, letters written by and to her, journals, the written commentary of her students, journalists’ accounts, and more--an anthropological treasure trove accumulated during a long and painful odyssey. The organization of these materials is chronological, but also theoretical; importantly, Winkler develops a well-articulated cultural framework for rape and shows how each of the three kinds of rape she describes fit within it, despite their seeming dissimilarities. She thus makes important contributions to social theorizing about culture even as she adds significantly to a much-needed substantive literature on the lived experiences of VISAs. She also offers a methodological critique of quantitative research on rape, pointing out that the “constrained choices” of the survey researcher are “just like the rapist imposed” and that they perpetuate the “culturing” of rape (pp. 115–116).

These elements combine to create a compelling saga and analysis that has the potential to inform, educate, and mobilize diverse audiences. I have never read a more awful, pain-full, and disturbing account of a physical rape, even though Winkler expresses the difficulty of trying to “demonstrate the terror and shock”: “How does a writer who controls words present rape without control?” (p. 176). Winkler spares no details, including even those things too terrible for her to have told anyone previously. She refers to the “realities” of rape in her subtitle, and anyone who works with or knows VISAs, or would teach others about them, can benefit from reading this section of the book.

Perhaps even more important is the story that follows, especially the descriptions of Winkler’s interactions with those who helped and those who (often inadvertently) hindered her. They reveal what happens in the criminal justice system (and other arenas) to people who do not meet cultural expectations of what victims should act like. Winkler astutely captures societal reactions to the “deviant victim”--one who is not passive, compliant, and helpless, but who instead takes an active role throughout. In her efforts to save her life during the physical rape, to find appropriate therapy, to investigate the crime, and to prosecute Kenneth Redding, Winkler, as a survivor and an activist, finds herself the target of a great deal of antagonism and misunderstanding. I have seen just this kind of process occurring when women fight for their rights as “victim-witnesses” in legal arenas serving not their interests, but those of the state and of the accused. Winkler documents this brilliantly and in doing so adds tremendously to scholarship in this area. In sum, I have learned a great deal from this book, however uncomfortably, and highly recommend it.

Given the Islamist Welfare or Virtue Party’s rise to power in recent Turkish elections, the timing of this book's release must be the answer to a publisher's prayer. By an "Islamist movement" White means, "a general mobilization of people around cultural, political and social issues that are presented and interpreted through an Islamic idiom" (p. 6). In Turkey this has taken place largely since the 1980s, in the context of a constitutional democracy dominated by a military that is none too friendly toward the Islamists. White's orientation as a political economist is reflected in the way she contextualizes the rise of the Islamists in relation to economic changes over the last quarter century and their attendant impact on the class system, particularly in urban centers of Turkey.

The primary field site for White’s study was a poor working-class neighborhood of Istanbul, a hotbed of Islamist mobilization. The Islamists did not go unopposed by the secularist "modernists," or Kemalists, although it was apparent that the Kemalists were far less successful in winning adherents than their religious counterparts. White asks why this was the case. Critical at the time were the corruption scandals that surrounded the secularist parties and alienated actual or potential constituencies among the poor. But this negative factor alone could not account for the rapid rise of the Islamists, because they were organized along similar lines as the secularists. In White's estimation, what was decisive was not structural so much as it was procedural: the way in which the Islamists situated their messages and galvanized support.

White calls this process "vernacular politics"--that is, a politics that is not so much "official" and based on a conventional party apparatus as it is local, linking up neighborhood networks with regional and national institutions (see especially chs. 1 and 2). The Islamists understood how to appeal to voters through local cultural values (particularly imece, or community-based support, and himaye, or hierarchical cooperation based on family, region, and party) as well as through face-to-face, oral forms of interaction that often took place in the more intimate spheres of the neighborhood and household. To penetrate the latter spaces, women activists were crucial to the Islamists, and not surprisingly they are at the core of White's study (see especially ch. 7 but also throughout the book). By contrast, the Kemalists appealed to a more "modernist" narrative in which local peoples did not necessarily recognize their own regionally specific identities or sensibilities. Moreover, because of their relative lack of education, local people felt uncomfortable with the decontextualized, print-oriented forms of communication favored by modernists. Vernacular politics is also at the core of White's exploration of the outreach work that Islamists did through various institutions of civil society, such as political associations and charitable foundations (ch. 6), as well as the process through which the notion of democracy was interpolated into Islamic law (ch. 5).

Although her stress is understandably on the relative successes of the Islamist party, White is also cognizant of the strains, both personal and structural, that the party’s members have experienced. Chapter 4 is about Generation X's surprisingly receptive response to the creation of an Islamic polity and the tensions this has produced in that generation’s relations with the older generation that is steeped in a more secular politics. Chapter 7 focuses on women who participate in the Islamist movement and the problems they face in trying to wield, or at least share, power in the male-dominated party hierarchy, as well as the tensions they feel in relations with their husbands and fathers over issues of their personal autonomy. White is also cognizant of the profound structural contradictions that beset a movement whose grass-roots appeal at the local level does not necessarily translate into strength at the national party level.

This book has been made timely by world historical events. And it is gratifying to see the discipline of anthropology used so perspicaciously to explain those events. For that reason, and because of its accessible prose, it deserves to be read not only in Middle East Studies, the anthropology of Islam, and political anthropology, but also more widely by the nonacademic public.

A man in business attire is welcomed at the front door of his home by his wife and children (a boy and a girl). This cover image from Nicholas Townsend’s The Package Deal captures the main theme of the book: to examine the construction of masculinity for middle-class men in the United States. Using substantive quotations from men’s narratives, Townsend identifies four main elements that create “the package deal”: marriage, work, fatherhood, and home ownership. The interrelationships between these make for a compelling account of the masculinity, normative cultural expectations, and conflicting tensions that create the “American Dad.”

The Package Deal is a welcome addition to the growing body of literature that has turned the anthropological gaze onto North American cultural identities and cultural production. Townsend conducted fieldwork from 1980 to 1992 in a town he calls “Meadowview,” in northern California’s Silicon Valley. After World War II “Meadowview” was transformed from an agricultural and cannery town to a suburban town. The narratives in the book are based on Townsend’s interviews with 39 men in their late thirties who had graduated from Meadowview High School in the early 1970s. The author’s fieldwork also included interviews with the men’s female classmates, wives, and former teachers. At the time these men were in high school, 95 percent of the population of “Meadowview” was white (p. 18). Townsend’s interviewees included five Hispanic and Asian men (13 percent of his sample). Despite this diversity, Townsend did not find that the men he talked to “had different visions of what it means to be a successful man and a successful father in the contemporary United States” (p. 20)--more on this below.

Existing scholarly work on U.S. families has often focused on the performance of gendered roles or on the conflicts or imbalance women experience juggling work and family life. Townsend, nudges this discussion beyond the basic factors involved in work–life role imbalance to examine how fatherhood itself is inherently constructed on inevitable contradictions born of the cultural imperative to be both a good father and a good provider. Townsend relies on insights from feminist analysis, apparent from the bibliographic essay presented in Appendix 2. This is a careful study of a less often examined aspect of gendered identity in the United States: the everyday social construction of masculinity among west coast middle-class men. In their gendered lives the men try “to achieve their composite goal by following a culturally approved life script” (p. 29). Townsend reveals how their masculinity is constructed through the links among fatherhood, marriage, home ownership, and employment. The men’s family lives are defined through this multiple lens, and contradictions and challenges abound. Townsend carefully reveals the ironies hinging on this construction of American fatherhood. One of the most fundamental is that men are required to be caring fathers precisely as demands on their work time (including commuting time) increase (p. 145). Townsend clearly lays out the interrelationships among the four aspects of the package deal. For instance, he shows how men’s experiences of fatherhood are mediated by women’s roles and activities (see, for example, chapter 4), how middle-class identity is tied to occupational issues (p. 122), and how links between home ownership and the provider role bind men to choices in employment (p. 144). In highlighting these aspects of men’s lives, Townsend explores the dominant cultural view of U.S. kinship and the concomitant and inevitable ties to family material circumstances.

Embedded in the men’s quotations is a narrative of personal achievement and choice. This is not surprising, given the Protestant work ethic that these men embody, with its emphasis on individual accomplishment. Townsend’s careful ethnography reveals how these narratives must be understood in a context of social situations and circumstances that precisely guide the kinds of choices the men are able to make. For instance, kin (often parents) assist the men in purchasing their own homes. In some cases, this assistance involves a substantial financial contribution toward a down payment. In other cases, it involves living arrangements that allow men to purchase houses (e.g., living with an aunt and not paying rent; purchasing a house with a sibling, with the agreement that the sibling will be “bought out” at a later date). In turn, the men speak about their future plans for and obligations to their parents. Some envision “joint-family” arrangements (to borrow from South Asian kinship terminology), with multiple generations living in the same household. Others indicate that they have discussed their parents’ needs and preferences with their parents, to accommodate these considerations in their own nuclear family decisions. Despite these references to multiple forms of financial and social obligation and interdependence, in their narratives the men emphasize that they have bought their own homes and that they are self-made. Beyond the narrative of self-achievement, this assertion that they are self-made is also linked to what Townsend calls “the voluntaristic approach to inter-kinship obligations” (p. 172).

The Package Deal has many strengths that cannot be covered in a short review. Even so, Townsend’s discussion of class status, an inevitably pervasive aspect of these men’s lives, remains a less satisfactory aspect of this exploration. This is perhaps not surprising given that in “September 2000, 69% of adults in the United States considered themselves middle or upper middle class” (p. 122). This renders class a social category that is simultaneously comparative and normative. Townsend’s discussion of class is clearly tied to employment and earnings both in terms of the distinction he draws between jobs and careers and in terms of the level of income and income trajectory that he says these men can expect over their lives. Townsend thus acknowledges the men’s precarious “middle position” but does not link it to any other aspect of their lives beyond employment. In this way, Townsend seems to compartmentalize class identity as a narrowly defined notion of earnings, which otherwise eclipses his more nuanced descriptions of the interconnections between other aspects of these men’s identities. Similarly, Townsend does not address the intricacies of masculinity, fatherhood, and the mens’ ethnic identities. Of the 39 men whose narratives inform this book, three were Hispanic and two were Asian American. Townsend states, “In my interviews, the racial-ethnic category was not associated with different fundamental values about the place of fatherhood and family in men’s lives, although some men did invoke their particular ethnic or cultural background to explain adherence to values that were in fact widely shared” (p. 20). Were the men who envisioned joint families Hispanic or Asian American? It is not clear, and more concrete examples of such invocations would have been illuminating. One also wonders why the author decided to think of ethnicity as optional (á la Waters), as he states, “I have not treated racial-ethnic categories as explanatory variables” (p. 21). Simply excluding such categories as factors in analysis and examining “the lives and words of people who accept the dominant values” (p. 21) seems to undo an important aspect of the construction of masculinity.

Nevertheless, The Package Deal is a welcome addition to discussions of the changing notions of family life in North America as examined through a gendered lens. It will prove a useful resource for researchers because of its in-depth perspective and would be suitable for senior undergraduate or graduate courses on kinship, the anthropology of family, and North American ethnography, as well as courses on gender and identity. It provides a perspective, too often overlooked in the pursuit of the far-flung “native,” on the agency and complications of those right outside our front doors, in this case, by unpacking the trope of the dominant cultural view of fatherhood and family life in the United States.

Circe Sturm, with aplomb and sensitivity, has dared to delve into the slippery issue of American Indian identity in her new book Blood Politics: Race, Culture, and Identity in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. Sturm sets out to “examine how Cherokee identity is socially and politically constructed and how that process is embedded in ideas of blood, color, and race that permeate discourses of social belonging in the United States.” She does so by paying full attention to and giving intricate ethnographic and ethnohistoric detail of the lives of multiracial members of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma (CNO) (p. 2).

Sturm does an excellent job of synthesizing various writings on phenotypical difference, from the pronouncements of Pope Paul III in the 16th century to Linnaeus’s 18th-century categorization of such difference in an all too simplistic color-coded hierarchy of white, yellow, black, and red (p. 45). She offers an explanation of how Europeans cum Americans, who once thought of the indigenous inhabitants of this “new land” as equals, came to view them as barbaric “redskins.” Sturm’s analysis of the Cherokee meanings of “red” and “white” is drawn from the fact that “in referring to [King George] as a white father and to the Cherokees as his red children, [a] speaker invoked metaphors of both Cherokee kinship and town politics to assume certain social relationships with the British. The British would be the white peacemakers, the diplomats, the fatherly providers, while the Cherokees would be the red warriors in need of material goods” (p. 46). European traders intermarried with the Cherokee as early as the 17th century, and by the time African slaves began to be the preferred objects of chattel slavery--because Indians tended to run away to go home--the multiracial Cherokee person was already in existence (pp. 50-51).

Sturm effectively chases the 100-year evolution of race from a concept that she alleges was used by the Cherokee in nation building early in the 19th century to a concept used by the United States federal government to find a “final solution” to the “Indian Problem” (pp. 52-53). Sturm points out that laws were passed by the first constitutional Cherokee Nation (ca. 1820) that brought harsh punishment to any Cherokee who married a “negro slave” (p. 54). Such laws and associated language, however, were those of the elite, plantation- and slave-owning Cherokees, and Sturm later points to the complexity and perplexity of “constitutional law” versus “clan law” with the case of a negro slave named Molly, adopted into the Deer Clan (pp. 57-58).

The case of Molly can be interpreted as the 19th-century harbinger of the contentiousness of racial identity for the Cherokee Nation throughout the 20th and into the 21st centuries. Sturm states that this “has involved two competing notions of race” (p. 86). Both are Euro-American. One is the sense of “ethnonationalism linking blood, race, and nation” (p. 86). The second is the notion that “racial identity was tied to blood quantum” (p. 86). Yet family and community ties continually undermine these notions and force the question, “Who is Cherokee?” No matter how strong one’s ties are to family, community, and cultural systems, however, Cherokee Nation law requires some form of proof of blood quantum. Sturm points out that, contrary to “traditional” ways of belonging, “the significance of blood quantum was internalized and then codified by tribes themselves . . . in the wake of the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act” (p. 87).

Sturm succinctly explains the evolution of the rocky political course to Cherokee nationhood throughout the 20th century. From a principal chief in mid-century who was marginally Cherokee as well as the CEO of Phillip’s Petroleum, to the current principal chief (ca. 2002), who is the grandson of Redbird Smith of Keetoowah fame, the political changes within the nation have been remarkable. Sturm points out, however, that “by electing tribal leaders who are increasingly Cherokee in a cultural and phenotypical sense . . . the public face of the Cherokee Nation reflects not the tribe’s demographic reality but its imagined center” (p. 107).

As a fellow researcher on the Cherokee, doing both ethnohistorical and contemporary ethnography, I find chapter 7, “Challenging the Color Line: The Trials and Tribulations of the Cherokee Freedmen,” the most profoundly important and exciting section of the book. Sturm’s in-depth analysis of black-Cherokees is a strong statement of what identity means for a person of African and Cherokee descent. Since the late 19th century, the CNO has resisted the efforts of black-Cherokees to attain Cherokee citizenship (p. 171). This, despite the fact that the legitimacy of the black-Cherokees’ claim was demonstrated by inclusion of their names on a U.S. government recognized tribal roll, has held true through present day (pp. 194-200). Through individual cases Sturm effectively presents the depth and complexity of racial politics in the Cherokee Nation. One day, she alludes, the rejection of black-Cherokees may come back to haunt the CNO (p. 200). This is true because many of the black-Cherokees are native speakers and have, in many ways, maintained “traditional” lifeways more successfully over the centuries than the white-Cherokees. I maintain that the CNO cannot afford to ignore these people and lose their political and social support in the widely dispersed communities in northeastern Oklahoma.

I would recommend Circe Sturm’s book to anyone who researches and tries to navigate the labyrinth of American Indian identity in context with covert and overt racial politics in the United States. The difficulties inherent in such research are products of more than two centuries of a colonial force that is still in the business of determining “who is an Indian.” It will continue until the federal government and U.S. “mainstream” society actually come to terms with and accept the fact that as a nation-state the United States has left a trail of broken treaties.

¡Zapata Lives! is an important addition to a growing body of research on the contemporary zapatista movement in Mexico. Lynn Stephen rejects formalistic political analysis in favor of an assessment of the movement in its historical, cultural, and regional specificity. She analyzes zapatismo at multiple levels, encompassing the local (agricultural collectives and population sites, or ejidos), the regional, the interregional (indigenous areas in both Chiapas and Oaxaca), the national, and even the global. Stephen demonstrates how the figure of the revolutionary Emiliano Zapata has been appropriated both by the Mexican state, in the context of agrarian, educational, and economic policy, and by indigenous populations, whose visions of history follow strikingly different “paths of imagination, storytelling, memory and codification” (p. xxxiv). One of the author’s principal interests is nationalism, specifically the dialogue between hegemonic forms of nationalism and local “nation views” that assimilate, contest, or reformulate dominant paradigms, projecting counterhegemonic perspectives back to the center.

Stephen provides a broad historical overview of both Chiapas and Oaxaca, based on ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, and an extensive survey of published historical and ethnographic literature. Oaxaca’s indigenous communities retained a significant amount of communal land through the colonial and even the national periods. Long-term land conflicts, both between Zapotecan communities and between those communities and nearby haciendas, were the backdrop for extensive intervention by state officials and teachers from the 1920s onward, especially in the 1930s, under the auspices of President Lázaro Cárdenas. Agrarian reform, education, and the formation of mass political organizations were all couched in a discourse of revolution and identified with Zapata’s legacy. In Chiapas, in contrast, from the colonial period onward indigenous communities were stripped of communal lands, virtually enslaved on coffee plantations, and eventually displaced. The presence of postrevolutionary governments was much more limited than in Oaxaca, both in agrarian reform and education. As a result, in Chiapas government officials and official nationalist ideology made few inroads, leaving fertile ground for the growth of a variety of independent political and religious movements beginning in the 1970s.

In the 1990s, as Stephen demonstrates, these divergent histories informed distinct local responses to the zapatista movement and to the overtly neoliberal policies adopted by the PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional; until recently Mexico’s dominant party), which has couched its own policies in the legacy of Zapata, as if the fragmentation of the ejidos into individually owned parcels represented the consummation of Zapata’s struggle. In Chiapas, many indigenous ejidatarios rejected the new government programs and joined the zapatista movement, which was specifically antigovernment in nature and aimed at securing indigenous political and cultural autonomy. Participants in the movement embraced a sacralized Zapata, known as Votán Zapata, a figure born of a fusion of indigenous Tzotzil culture and Mexican nationalism. In contrast, in Oaxaca many ejidatarios participated in neoliberal programs, despite being broadly sympathetic to the movement in Chiapas. For Stephen, this seemingly contradictory “pro-zapatista and pro-PRI” (p. 287) posture is an outgrowth of the Oaxacan ejidatarios’ historical experience, which has lent national heroes like Zapata and Cárdenas an “almost familial status” in local historical memory (p. 240) and fostered an enduring, though tenuous, relationship to the Mexican government.

Stephen is right to emphasize the importance of nationalism in the zapatista movement, and some of her evidence supports this. Her larger exploration of “nation views” and “local nationalism,” however, is limited on several fronts. First, Stephen’s focus on the 1930s and the 1990s illuminates two critical periods but obscures the struggle over nation and citizenship in Mexico from the early to mid-19th century on. Thus the “official” nationalism of the 1930s is made to seem overly monolithic, and a previous century of popular involvement in struggles over the nature of the nation disappears from view. Moreover, Stephen does not elaborate enough on the content of “nation views,” a term she uses to encompass “pro” and “anti” government views of the ejidatarios, ethnic identifications (such as “Zapotec” and “Mexican”), and historical memories of national figures like Cárdenas and Zapata. Although all of these elements may be components of a vision of the nation, a more systematic exploration of explicitly nationalist discourse is needed. Stephen’s interviews with zapatistas explore critical issues like gender equity, the impact of low-intensity war, surveillance and repression, and land reform but do not address the issue of nationalism; her interviews with ejidatarios focus on the local histories of the ejidos and on memories of Cárdenas and Zapata rather than on how ejidatarios imagine the nation and their relationship to it. Finally, the author asserts that zapatismo’s alternative nationalism was projected back to the center and, via a process of “transvaluation,” was appropriated by a wide variety of groups in Mexico City and beyond as a “global discourse” (p. 175). Although Stephen provides examples of zapatistas addressing themselves to a national audience (via communiqués or demonstrations in Mexico City), she does not examine thoroughly the discursive appropriation of zapatismo at the national or global levels.

I have chosen to focus on the issue of nationalism; Lynn Stephen’s important discussions of human rights, globalization, and the ethics of anthropological fieldwork, however, are also deserving of note. By including extensive firsthand testimony, Stephen introduces zapatista leaders and activists to readers who may not have access to the testimonial literature published in Spanish. The most important contribution of ¡Zapata Lives! is Stephen’s insistence that readers listen to the zapatistas--to their words, but also to the diversity of histories, experiences, and perspectives that inform their visions.

In Celibacy, Culture and Society Sobo and Bell present essays that explore celibacy as an individual strategy, a domain of symbolic meanings, and a form of social regulation, suggesting that examining what people choose not to do sexually can lead to a richer understanding of sexuality itself. By saying that they will use celibacy as a lens through which to explore the “significance of the body and of desire as inherently social rather than as biological givens upon which social practices are inscribed” (p. 6), the editors imply a desire to push the envelope on what is meant by the construction of sexuality. The essays in the volume, however, fall somewhat short of this goal. Michael Duke, Peter Phillimore, and Peter Collins provide compelling accounts of the locally and historically specific reasons why celibacy may help individuals achieve status mobility and increased autonomy. Hector N. Qirko, Mario I. Aguilar, Peter Collins, and Mark S. Fleisher and John R. Shaw perceptively explore how institutions regulate sexuality via celibacy to achieve greater social cohesion or social control. None of the authors, however, explore celibacy as an embodied practice. This is a theoretical omission as well as a substantive one; what is missing is a more phenomenological approach to celibacy.

A strength of the volume is the inclusion of ethnographic, structural, historical, bioevolutionary, and legal perspectives. Qirko, for example, explores how the bioevolutionary concept of “manipulated altruism” (pp. 70-71) could explain how and why the Catholic Church manages to institutionalize celibacy among recruits. He also makes the inevitably controversial point, echoed in the essay by Paul Southgate, that the institutionalization of celibacy was shaped more by the centralization of church power and a desire to keep recruits from investing in relationships that could siphon resources away from the church than it was by theology. If true, this certainly provides a structural explanation for why priestly failures to remain abstinent have not been more aggressively prosecuted from within the church.

Two particularly compelling chapters use strong ethnography to make clear theoretical points. In one, Duke explores how the practice of ritual abstinence among the Mazatec in Mexico draws on beliefs about gender, reciprocity, social roles, and the body and allows the Mazatec to separate themselves symbolically from the “messiness and contingencies of everyday life” (p. 133). Duke’s sophisticated use of culture is noteworthy; rather than simply mapping out “the logic and internal consistencies” of abstinence as a cultural form, he includes “its contradictions and silences” (p. 134). In the other chapter, Aguilar discusses the local resonances and meanings of priestly ordination in Chile and Kenya. In both contexts, the ordination itself follows a standard liturgy, but in Kenya celibacy is viewed as a way of becoming more European, whereas in Chile, with its longer history of Catholicism, celibacy is seen as the fulfillment of a local tradition. Aguilar provides a compelling example of how useful it can be to explore local interpretations of an externally imposed global practice, and he highlights the importance of a comparative and historically grounded ethnographic approach.

The diverse theoretical approaches of the volume’s contributors, however, could have been more integrated; the more structural, sociological or historical chapters are ethnographically thin, and the more ethnographic chapters tend to lack a sense of social structure. Furthermore, the geographical and substantive range of the chapters misses some key issues. Three of the 13 chapters address celibacy in India, but none address extended postpartum abstinence in Francophone West Africa, which has been linked to the spread of HIV. Victor C. De Munck discusses the meanings of abstinence to college students in the northeastern United States but ignores social and political factors behind these meanings; given that social conservatives have been so successful in shaping sexual health policies requiring that all states receiving federal funds for sex education explicitly adopt a focus on abstinence, this is a significant omission. Negative examples might also have been usefully included in the book, focusing either on how individuals understand their own failures to be abstinent or on societies in which abstinence is not valued. Southgate, for example, writes that celibacy is “alien to Muslims, abnormal to Jews, ... impossible in Kikuyu ... and sinful among the Masai” (p. 249), suggesting that one could also learn about sexuality by comparing those who value abstinence and those who do not.

Finally, although the editors note that they explore the “political economy of female celibacy” (p. 19), nowhere is mention made of what is perhaps the most critical factor shaping long-term abstinence globally: labor migration. In central Mexico, for example, as around the world, widespread labor migration means that many married couples spend 11 out of 12 months a year apart from each other as involuntary (and sometimes noncompliant) celibates. Furthermore, exogamy among labor migrants means that many women who remain behind never marry; they are referred to as las quedadas, the leftover women. Exploring the experiences of these “leftover women” around the globe would have added a more explicitly political-economic approach to the focus on how the social organization of gender shapes celibacy.

In spite of its flaws, the book would be useful for graduate or advanced undergraduate courses in sexuality or gender studies and, given the three articles on India, for area studies. Ultimately, the list of topics and theoretical perspectives enumerated in this review serves less to critique the volume than to suggest that celibacy is a potentially fertile area for further comparative research on sexuality; the omissions noted should be seen as challenges to other researchers from across anthropology to address the topic in a way that is widely descriptive, deeply ethnographic, and theoretically significant.

Selves in Time and Place is a collection of essays by Himalayan area anthropologists that attempts to integrate various perspectives on human agency, history, and experience into “a practice theory of the self” (p. 4). These essays contribute important insights into human selfhood based on the authors’ ethnographic field research and experiences. Many of the essays have been published previously (those by Mary Des Chene, Todd Lewis, Stan Mumford, Sherry Ortner, Steve Parish, Debra Skinner, and Dorothy Holland). Those essays are reconfigured with heretofore unpublished contributions into a coherent collection, enabling readers to rethink the older material in terms of history and agency from widely diverse niches of Nepal.

The editors divide the volume loosely into three thematic parts, focusing on experiences of selves, cultural identity, and political identity formation. In part 1, “Personal Trajectories," the contributions by Des Chene, Parish, Skinner and Holland, and Alfred Pach focus on the socioculturally mediated abilities of Nepali men and women to act in the face of various social and political constraints. These narratives tend to consider agency as a synonym for resistance, as the actors resist patriarchies (Des Chene, and Skinner and Holland) and state-sanctioned Hindu social hierarchy (Parish). Such narratives of oppositional agency contain rich ethnographic substance illustrating how women and low castes, as subalterns, assert their own political agendas and interests. For example, Parish’s essay on narrative subversions of caste hierarchy details how Newar occupational castes such as butchers emphasize a moral standard of human equality that ideally should triumph over Hindu caste codes of social hierarchy. Yet subalterns’ narratives of social hierarchies do not simply invert the powerfully entrenched realities of social caste but, instead, represent nuanced utopian alternatives. For example, subaltern groups may simultaneously contest “closed” hierarchies yet validate “open” systems of hierarchy in which low castes may have a chance of upward social mobility. Parish notes that some members of low castes remark bitterly that “power, wealth, and knowledge are held by some, and not by others” (p. 68). It would have been informative to read more about the pragmatics of these narratives as fragments of liberation ideologies, especially about how untouchables act out their frustrations through political demonstrations or other forms of political resistance.

In part 2, “Cultural Production of Identity,” contributions by Mark Liechty, Ernestine McHugh, Mumford, Premalata Ghimire, and Kathryn March revolve around notions of identity and its construction. Each essay in this set can be read alone, as they thematically intersect only loosely. Each, however, is wonderfully full of ethnographic details and contains interesting theoretical perspectives on identity. For example, Liechty argues that Kathmandu's middle classes must delve "ever deeper into consumer values" to maintain their social position in contemporary Nepalese society. In support of his argument, he collects numerous historical pieces of material evidence that indicate Nepalese fascination with things English and occidental, demonstrated by his ethnographic subjects’ interests in various consumer goods and ideas. Although at times the essay reads as too subjectively interpreted through his own lived experience as an American, overall Leichty brings together rich ethnographic details and insightful perspectives on the growing problems of consumerism in Kathmandu.

Perhaps the most distinctive contribution in part 2 comes from Premalata Ghimire. Ghimire writes about the Hod (alt., Hor, Santal, Santhal, Satar), an Austro-Asiatic-speaking post-foraging society of southern Nepal. The Hod have developed a creative way of maintaining their distinct ethnic identity as a group in the face of enormous pressure to assimilate into the underclasses of Nepalese society. Although marriage and descent normally are determined among the Hod on the basis of their patrilineal kinship system, when Hod women marry exogamously with Hindu caste men or when they give birth after involvement in illicit exogamous affairs, their children have the opportunity to be incorporated into the Hod ethnic group through matrilineal recognition of Hod ethnicity. Of all the essays in the collection, Ghirmire's is one of the most important because it uses detailed ethnographic information toward understanding the dynamics of identity preservation among people who face daily challenges to their human rights and cultural autonomy.

In part 3, “Politicized Selves,” Ortner, Elizabeth Enslin, and Lewis round out the volume with essays devoted to the political dimensions of agency and selfhood. Lewis's essay is interesting, for example, for its historiographic rendering of a young children's book, called Jhi Macaa ("Our Child"), written by the Newar author Chittadhar Hridaya. In his essay, Lewis portrays Newars as having experienced submission to the Hindu hegemonic state through prohibitions of Newar cultural expressions, including laws against use of the Newar language, banning of Newar religious associations, and restrictions on gift exchange in marriage ceremonies. Lewis describes how the writing and publishing of Hridaya’s book, which the author penned while in prison, championed Newar traditions while simultaneously acknowledging the de facto multiethnicity of the modern Nepalese state. Whereas Lewis's rendering of how this Newar children's book fits into a larger picture of ethnopolitics is laudable, his conclusion takes a somewhat overambitious direction, as he ponders economic and ecological stagnation in the Kathmandu Valley and the impact of global mass media on Newar youth. As a reader, I was interested in a more direct connection between the chapter topic and its ramifications, for example, exploring how contemporary Newar families incorporate Newar children’s literature into their children’s early social and political identity formation. Nevertheless, the essay makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of the political dimensions of Newar cultural identities, and it sheds further light on the impact of repressive laws that limited Newar cultural expression.

The volume concludes with an afterword by Robert Levy that aptly sums up and suggests trajectories for further contemplation. Levy writes, "The conditions of life in Nepal, as the chapters vividly suggest, are the sorts of conditions which cause a kind of hypertrophy of the 'I'" (p. 328). Broadly, this volume represents a vision of selfhood that enables its authors to interpret theories of self in diverse ways and ultimately allows a subjectively valid rendering of individual lives as social action. There is much here for specialists of many kinds, including those interested in comparative psychology, Asian studies, South Asian modern history, ethnopolitics, indigenous human rights, religion and politics, and contemporary cultural change. Selves in Time and Place is a valuable contribution to the literature on identity, agency, and personhood.

In the last decade, language ideology has become an important topic of research in linguistic anthropology. This fine collection significantly elaborates on work that was first presented in a "Language Ideology" session at the 1991 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association and that was published in preliminary form in 1992 in a special issue of the journal Pragmatics. In subsequent years, at conferences in Santa Fe, Chicago, Atlanta, and Washington DC, many of the same writers developed their respective themes further. The volume under review seeks to incorporate the thoughts presented at these many different meetings and conferences.

One important source of the concept’s appeal lies in how language ideology systematically links form with function. As Woolard points out in her useful introduction, authors vary in the relative emphases they place on form or function. One approach to the topic draws from Michael Silverstein's metapragmatics and examines implicit and explicit commentary on and signaling about language-in-use. Another approach focuses on languages in contact and the resulting ideologies of "purism" and "standardization." A third line of inquiry examines the influence that linguistic theories and social movements have had on each other. In most of the essays under review, the social function of language is the clear focus of interest, as the implicit audience for this volume is sociocultural anthropologists and linguistic anthropologists who are interested in the social functions of language use.

The concept of language ideology, however, also has much to contribute to the study of linguistic form--metapragmatic and otherwise. Studies of language change, for instance, have tended to focus on mutations in phonological, morphological, and syntactic shapes but have paid relatively little attention to the social functions that those shifts might play. But some structural changes are difficult to explain without bringing the concept of language ideology to bear. A stunning example is the disappearance of the once-familiar thou in English. Its use by the egalitarian Quakers to address everyone, justified on rationalist grounds as numerically precise (although sometimes honorifically problematic), provoked a backlash in 17th-century England to the point that by 1700 the shift to you was completed. Without linguistic ideology, this change is hard to explain, given the practical difficulties it must have created for reference as well as the generally conservative nature of pronominal systems. One of the great benefits of the concept of linguistic ideology is that it links language structure with the social and moral interests of the speakers.

The essays in this volume deal in a variety of ways with the social and moral interests of speakers. The first group of essays examines the scope and force of dominant conceptions of language in selected African, Mexicano, New Guinean, and Arizona Tewa societies. Judith Irvine's discussion of honorifics among Zulu, Wolof, and ChiBemba (and also Javanese) considers the hypothesis that the presence and form of honorifics can be explained with reference to features of social structure--social stratification and the presence of court systems, for example. Examining the historical and sociological data, Irvine finds this explanation insufficient and argues that grammatical honorifics in these very different societies are all accompanied by ideologies about the importance of flattened affect, conventionality, and the avoidance of engagement with the concrete or sensory.

Jane Hill finds that the speakers of Mexicano (Nahuatl) who are most nostalgic for the past are the ones who are, ironically, the most hispanicized; the ones most likely to dispute the nostalgic vision of a past in which respectful people spoke Mexicano are those who speak it now. But where Irvine seems to suggest a sort of analytical autonomy to the notion of language ideology, Hill seems to imply that Mexicano language ideologies might be linked to the political economy of disenfranchisement experienced by Mexicano speakers over the last century or more.

Don Kulick finds that in the tiny Papua New Guinea village of Gapun, despite villagers' insistence that they value their local language, Taiap, it is rapidly disappearing because of local ideologies that associate it with anger, femininity, vulgarity, and self-display. Here is a striking example of the multiple layerings of ideology.

Kroskrity's piece introduces the useful concept of "strict compartmentalization"--an ideological proscription by Arizona Tewa speakers against the mixing of sociolinguistic varieties. "Just as ceremonial practitioners can neither mix linguistic codes nor use them outside of their circumscribed contexts of use, so--ideally--Tewa people should observe comparable compartmentalization of their various languages and linguistic levels in their everyday speech" (pp. 109-110). For example, the mixing of Tewa with either English or Hopi is explicitly devalued.

A second group of essays focuses on the operations of language ideologies in institutions of power. Elizabeth Mertz audiotaped the first semester of contract law classes in eight different law schools. Although she does not attempt any quantitative generalizations (despite the existence of what must be a very large corpus of data), she nonetheless notes the way in which professors use language to force students to adopt role playing in which there are "right" and "wrong" answers, and in which hesitation, uncertainty, and silence are not permitted. The professors’ tactic socializes students for life in a legal system that constructs only "winners" and "losers" and in which people are translated into roles (plaintiff or defendant) and their actions into legal categories (tort, breach of contract). Debra Spitulnik examines the ideological presumptions guiding the state allocation of radio air time among Zambia's multiple languages and discovers that beliefs about demographic predominance, urban provenience, and linguistic distinctiveness are subtly interwoven with official ideologies of egalitarian pluralism. Jan Blommaert and Jef Vershueren's essay on the role of language in European nationalist ideologies makes the intriguing observation, based on the authors’ reading of German, Belgian, and French newspapers, that in Europe, multilingualism is acceptable and praiseworthy as a feature of an individual but is a more dangerous and corrosive force when part of a nation or society. They argue that the media they surveyed overwhelmingly assume an ideology of one nation, one culture, and one language. Their sample was small, however, and their conclusion might have been stronger had they reviewed, for the sake of contrast, some of Europe’s minority-language newspapers.

A third group of essays focuses on the collision of multiple ideologies of language in particular contexts. Charles Briggs argues in his essay on the Warao of Venezuela that there is no single ideology of language that encompasses the discourse of the senior male curers, women, younger men, and older men lacking the status of curers. He shows how, for example, the discourse of the curers, in particular, devalues and deflects the speech of challengers as a form of gossip. James Collins provides a vivid account of how his commitment to professional linguistics nearly ran afoul of his Tolowa friends' efforts to produce their own grammar as a tool for preserving--indeed reviving--their native language. Joseph Errington uses the context of an extraordinary Javanese Language Congress held in 1991 to reflect on Indonesian ideologies of language development. On the one hand, all participants supported the egalitarian, nationalist sentiments that gave rise to the national language; on the other hand, much concern was expressed over the decline of (relatively esoteric) courtly and refined politeness and literary forms. Like Errington, Schieffelin and Rachelle Charlier Doucet discuss elite commitment to rare but cherished language usages; in the case of Haitian kreyol, conflict arises over what "real Haitian creole" is and how to write it down: Is it a dialect of French? Or is it an autonomous language of the masses, and if so, which one (e.g., rek, swa, gwo?). Susan Gal concludes with a particularly clear and concise summary and an intriguing proposal outlining some general features--iconization, fractal recursivity, and erasure--by which forms and functions interlock in language ideologies to produce linguistic and social change.

Although many of these important essays have appeared in print elsewhere, their publication together in a volume in the distinguished Oxford Studies in Anthropological Linguistics makes it more likely they will reach the wider audience they deserve.

Margaret Rodman has chosen to explore the British colonial presence in the New Hebrides from an oblique but evocative perspective: its administrative architecture. The uncontestable value of this approach is enhanced by Rodman's decision to focus not only on the major public buildings of the Anglo-French Condominium as a measure of imperial intent but also on its official residential architecture. Her emphasis on domestic housing and the memories these station houses elicited from their former administrative residents gives the study its special strength.

The book’s structure, however, has an uneasy cadence. Rodman begins, appropriately, with her own domestic experiences on the island of Ambae during her early fieldwork there, for it was the intensity of these memories that drew her into a more systematic study of New Hebrides architecture. She then offers an important historical overview of the Anglo-French Condominium (1906-1980) and the design of its capital, Port Vila. The chapter on the Residency of the British Commissioner introduces the reader through this single emblematic structure to both the domestic and official world of the New Hebrides with wonderful texture and insight. The book then abruptly careers into a chapter on prison architecture and its logistical implications for Condominium labor, followed by a chapter on the British Paddock, the main British settlement at Port Vila. In the final two chapters on the administrative centers on two outlying islands, Espiritu Santo and Tanna, the essential mission of the study comes fully into its own.

Rodman introduces the reader to an intriguing range of public structures, charting the complex Condominium politics that determined the location and design of the major administrative offices, post office, courthouse, and prisons. But it is in the seemingly endless contest over "suitable" residential arrangements that the challenge to assert an effective British presence under French surveillance is most evident. The determination of both British and French to achieve a precise parity of jurisdiction expressed itself with excruciating explicitness in negotiations over the alignment and elevation of their respective residencies and flagpoles.

The New Hebrides were acknowledged to be a marginal possession, particularly by those who had left more prestigious posts in East Africa or Hong Kong. The Condominium therefore was modestly funded. Official housing, transported from Australia in pre-cut kits, was spartan. Local bureaucratic resistance to residential expansion made the conditions of existing housing a highly sensitive and explicit measure of expatriate discontent. Even minor negotiations over renovations required extensive bureaucratic exchanges, diagrams, and invoices, ensuring an unexpectedly rich and revealing archival record of the period.

More compelling than the fiscal and administrative deliberations that dictated the location, size, and plan of the initial structures was the later political and social rationale that prompted seemingly endless accretions through which residences were expanded for domestic or official purposes. Verandahs, or more accurately the inadequacy of verandahs, became the arena in which status and rank were negotiated. Securing "suitable housing" was the enduring obsession of all officials, but the terms of suitability went well beyond simple issues of seniority. Each residence bore the mark of the discontent or aspirations of its new occupants. The official record of these requests reveals the changing expectations of those who served in the New Hebrides and their growing intolerance for fusing official and domestic space. The floor plans that Rodman provides are themselves an eloquent measure of these shifting priorities.

Official correspondence, particularly the minuting of files and invoices, which Rodman refers to as "the email of its day" (p. 90), exposes the tensions and often random willfulness that underlay official action. But Rodman has gone far beyond the rich potential of the archival and commercial sources to elicit from both the retired officials and their wives their personal memories of their lives in the New Hebrides. It was an inspired decision to focus on their residences for, as she notes, they viewed her project as "uncontroversial" and "innocuous." Other more politically explicit or sensitive topics would have met with certain defensiveness, yet the opportunity to reminisce about their "homes away from home" drew them into telling critiques of the colonial service. Domestic memories, in their very banality and intimacy, evoked some astonishingly candid and unapologetic accounts.

Rodman introduces her informants with a careful reconstruction of their Colonial Office careers both in the New Hebrides and in other posts, so that the positions they take during the interviews have unusual resonance. Because of their disposition to describe the domestic challenge posed by the quarters to which they were assigned, the wives of the British officers have a prominence in the narrative that would be denied them in more official administrative histories. Particularly compelling are the short excerpts from these interviews, which are set independently from the text: "Why Melanesians are Different," "Close Your Eyes and Think of England," "Tanna as a Heavy Place," "The Charms of Backwardness," and "Musings on Half Castes."

Much has been made in anthropology of multivocality, but rarely is a study so explicitly invested in the composite voice. Rodman conducted interviews with families who occupied the same residence. Their disparate memories of a common house are a powerful measure of the various administrative periods of the Condominium and of the changing expectations of colonial service. One regrets only, given the domestic focus of this book, that children and servants had no systematic voice in Rodman’s interviews.

Imperial practices are central to her subjects' memories, notably in the chapters on the Residency and the British Paddock, whose parkland accommodated the sports and ceremonies so emblematic of the imperial presence throughout Britain's empire. The transformation of the Paddock common from pasture to garden to golf course drew Rodman's informants into a wider discourse on the shifting fortunes of Great Britain in the Pacific, balancing their more personal domestic memories of the buildings themselves. Elsewhere, particularly at the more isolated and controversial posts on the outer islands, notorious, even tragic, experiences of earlier administrators defined the culture and collective expectations of succeeding generations of official residents.

The world of the British administrator was a closed one, its insularity intentional and fiercely defended. British officials and their families remained resolutely aloof from their French counterparts as well as from the settlers and missionaries and the Americans who assumed control of the New Hebrides during World War II. Their post, however extended the tour, was never home. They marked their transience by referring to their residences as "cottages" and giving the streets of their spartan housing developments names evocative of the bucolic civilities of the counties and cathedral towns they had left behind. Idiosyncratic accretions of portable possessions from earlier posts or from Britain became in the Pacific "one's things." The decorative conventions and domestic priorities of these officials reveal much about their determination to keep the world they had been charged to control at bay. Not only was Melanesian culture and cuisine despised, but all indigenous design and “native” materials that might have served them well in the tropics were also studiously avoided in their domestic architecture. "Southwest Pacific corrugated Edwardian" (p. 164) was their preference.

Rodman has focused on the world of the British official and presents the colonial voice so effectively that it seems highly ungrateful of readers to expect more. Yet her informants’ candor as they discuss nonofficial communities also draws her into the worlds of settlers and missionaries, key actors in this complex imperial narrative. One hopes that Rodman will extend the skills she has so manifestly demonstrated in this book to the worlds that are here marginalized or silent.

Much of the scholarly literature on Caribbean identity and expressive culture has focused on the African diaspora to the near exclusion of the Indian presence. In Trinidad the world-renowned traditions of carnival, steel band, and calypso music elide the fact that people of African descent comprise only 39.3 percent of the population; a slightly greater percentage are of Indian descent. In Creating Their Own Space, Tina Ramnarine provides an important corrective to this bias by focusing on chutney music in Trinidad and its significant role in shaping Indian-Caribbean identity. Although Ramnarine historicizes “diasporized conditions,” she effectively locates the production of “Indianness” in contemporary performance practices shaped by national cultural politics in Trinidad in tension with transnational communities and music markets.

Methodologically, Ramnarine approaches her topic as both an ethnomusicologist and a social anthropologist, but I found her musical analysis to be more compelling than her social analysis. Because there are few archival records and no sound recordings of early Indian-Caribbean music, she traces the history of chutney by collecting diverse oral histories from both Trinidad and Guyana. Ramnarine agrees with the commonly held position that chutney music emerged from the female musical and ritual space of the Mathkor ceremony in Indian weddings. By the 1980s, however, chutney became secularized and popularized largely by male Indian singers who drew on the fast, “spicy” beat. In chapter 2, “Making the Music,” Ramnarine discusses the musical elements of chutney, including lyrical content, instrumentation, and song structure. Rather than focusing on historical authenticity or debates about cultural retention, Ramnarine describes traditional instruments as “symbols of ‘Indianness’” (p. 68), specifically the drum, the percussion instruments called the dholak and the dhantal, and the harmonium, a French instrument disseminated by colonial powers in India. Contemporary chutney music may also include electronic drums, keyboards, brass, English lyrics, and themes of partying or wining (dancing), all of which create semiotic affinity with Afro-Caribbean soca music, thus generating much controversy.

Ramnarine rightly identifies debates about “authenticity” as crucial to new constructions of a Caribbean “Indianness” in a context in which “being ‘Indian’ serves both to remind Indian-Caribbeans of their ancestry and to further local political debates and interests” (p. 10). Ramnarine, however, provides little analysis of the national context and elides the seriousness of definition in Trinidadian society, as perceptions of Indian and African cultural traditions become polarized within volatile racialist and nationalist discourse. The movement of chutney into the public sphere parallels the broader ascendancy of Indians into the center of political life in Trinidad, with the election of the first “Indian” government in 1995 and subsequent sweeping changes in official national cultural policy. Moreover, the privatization of media in the 1990s fostered a number of new “Indian” radio stations, generally viewed by the black population as a threat to their own cultural and political hegemony. A final point here concerns Ramnarine’s avoidance of the term race throughout her book. Whereas the difference between “race” and “ethnicity” remains ambiguous in much anthropological literature, in Trinidad race is the commonly employed term in public discourse as well as in social-science research (for example, at the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of the West Indies). Moreover, I would argue that the term race more effectively communicates constructions of difference in the highly contested domain of contemporary cultural politics.

Ramnarine draws on interviews with musicians as her primary data, but attending to the complexities and politics of reception would strengthen her analysis, especially in relation to national class interests. In the final two chapters, she discusses how the reception of chutney is highly contested even within the Indian population, as “some” see it as an important Indian-Caribbean expression, whereas “others” view this popular form as cultural degradation because of the its attendant suggestive dancing by young female performers. The indefinite quality of the word some leaves the reader wondering whether differences in reception are simply matters of personal taste. I would argue instead that this debate has a specific class component, which is highly significant in relation to Indian nationalist politics. Although Ramnarine cites the Hindu Women’s Association--a group that actively fosters high cultural forms like Indian classical music and dance--as a central opponent of chutney, she doesn’t adequately explain the significance of this and other organizations in terms of a specifically Indian (and Hindu) nation-building project. Ramnarine makes an important point about the gendered context of performance, but the debate about sexually suggestive dancing circulates within broader questions regarding the representation of Indo-Trinidadian culture.

My critique has focused on the national context; Ramnarine offers an interesting perspective on the transnational production of identity through musical dialogue by tracing chutney performance from Guyana and Trinidad to London, Toronto, New York, and even back to India. She effectively argues for “multivocality” in the development of postcolonial counternarratives and illustrates how music is a powerful, rapidly circulating medium shaping identity in the diaspora. Although the text includes some postcolonial theory, it is appropriate for undergraduates and may be useful in courses studying transnationalism, the Indian diaspora, race and ethnicity, global popular culture, and cultural nationalism.