“The ability to respond skillfully to subtle environmental cues is becoming a lost art” in China (p. 204), Dee Mack Williams writes in Beyond Great Walls. In this book, the author describes the grassland enclosure movement in Inner Mongolia in the context of ongoing economic reforms. A proliferation of fence wire on the Mongolian steppe signals the privatization of pasture, the end of an egalitarian ideology, and the concentration of natural resources into the hands of elites that accompany environmental degradation in the grassland environment. Although Williams does not dispute the degraded state of the land, he does contest both Chinese and Western authoritative interpretations of its meanings and causes. The author brings together culture, politics, history, and nature at international, national, and local scales to compare Mongol herders’ sensibilities with those of Han and Western scientists. Claims of desertification are political and bureaucratic, he argues, and there are no undisputed facts in this changing landscape.

Mongol marginalization is at the heart of grassland disputes, and Williams describes four aspects of herder marginality: geographically they are positioned on the frontier with Russia; culturally they lack the confidence, resources, and social skills to communicate with the Han; economically they are impoverished; and politically they receive only intermittent state services (p. 93). Williams describes herders as “ecologically underprivileged” (p. 156), by which he means that herders are likely to have poor grazing lands and to experience their marginal status in embodied ways: Herders tend to suffer from unintended consequences of alcohol use, chronic cold stress, hunger, and loss of limb and life in cold-related incidents.

Han discourses on nomadism blame herders for environmental degradation along axes of space and time (p. 30). The spatial strategy blames peoples far from Beijing who are assumed to be ignorant, irrational, backward, and uncooperative. The temporal strategy blames the policies of the previous Qing, Nationalist, and Maoist governments. At the Shenyang grassland research station where Williams based his fieldwork, Han scientists believe that traditional Mongol herding is the true cause of grassland degradation and that sedentarization and enclosure are the appropriate remedies. At the international level, Western scientists influence the direction of resource management in China through capitalist markets, funding for agriculture, and development agencies. These experts do not distinguish between Han and herders and thus also blame Mongol pastoralism without ever speaking to herders themselves.

Discourses of science help mask Han-Mongol antagonisms, and Williams demonstrates that Mongol notions are often accurate where scientists’ theories fail. He refutes three Han beliefs: that knowledge of the grassland environment is objective, that the current government is not culpable for degradation of the grasslands, and that state policies are saving the grasslands. He also objects to Western scientists’ ideas that cultural understandings of environmental change are less significant than political-economic models, that privatization is a solution to resource degradation, and that Western science enables us to understand resource management in far away and unfamiliar places.

Whereas the research station praises its Han scientists, saying “heart blood has become sweet dew, the desert has become an oasis,” herders restate this verse as “an oasis has become a desert under the management of the research station” (p. 47). Williams explains why herders are reluctant to confront scientists and bureaucrats. Inner Mongolians have lived through a century of state violence and political insecurity, and the landscape is marred by the residue of state incursions: deforestation from the Great Leap Forward, Cold War military structures, the waste and terror of the Cultural Revolution, religious shrines demolished by Red Guards, the high walls of the research station representing Han chauvinism and scientific elitism, and the proliferation of fence wire representing the enrichment of some herders at the expense of others. “The heart has residual fear,” explains one elderly resident, inscribing these characters in the sand with a stick (p. 88).

Mongol herders have their own science and symbolism of land, however. Landscapes that Han classify as barren, Mongols see as alive and beautiful. Whereas Han view cultivation as “opening up the wasteland,” Mongols view it as “shattering the land” (p. 71). Mongols appreciate a wider variety of landscapes and identify a greater diversity of sand and grass types and landscape uses than biologists do. Herders are also more likely to view the land as resilient. Even sand has an economic utility because it can be woven into wool to increase its heft. About the enclosure around the research station itself, Williams writes, “Han scientists perceive that the land has still not recovered, but Mongol herders perceive only a capricious hoarding of community resources” (p. 185).

Williams theorizes that historical materialism is not sufficient for understanding environmental marginalization; we also need culture in our analysis. Although one finds it difficult to critique anything in this beautifully conceived and crafted work, Williams’s use of the culture concept is worth mentioning. In his analysis of ideas of nature in imperial China, he writes “the natural environment was conceived primarily in the context of political harmony the Emperor, as Son of Heaven, was responsible for maintaining harmony between Heaven and Earth” (p. 38). If Chinese acted according to a sense of natural harmony, and if culture was monolithic and mapped neatly onto ethnicity, there would be no grassland degradation. In Williams’s usage, political economy is disarticulated from culture, which is primarily a category for the symbolic or aesthetic.

One great joy in this book is Williams’s ability to narrate the life stories of Mongol herders. Beyond Great Walls is a pleasure to read and an important intervention in environmental anthropology. It will intrigue those with interests in political ecology, environmental justice, and the anthropology of China.

Louisa Schein’s study of cultural production in post-Mao China begins and ends with the Miao, one of China's 56 officially designated minority nationalities. As she points out in her introduction, however, “this book is about China as much as it is about the Miao” (p. 2). Indeed, this book is very much about the complementary and indispensable relation that each bears to the other.

Schein's focus is on cultural production, and much of the text consists of a close examination of representation practices through which “Miao” has emerged as a historical and ethnic identity. The Miao live scattered across seven provinces in southwestern China and four southeast Asian nations, speak dozens of mutually unintelligible dialects and refer to themselves with a variety of names, although “Miao” is not among them. Nevertheless, Miao, originally a derogative imposed by outsiders, has become an official standard and an accepted self-description.

Schein begins by sketching the continuous but unequal relationship between Miao and Han from the late imperial period through the 1990s. Over this period, the Miao have been brought under increasingly tight political, economic, and cultural control by the Chinese state. This trajectory of political and cultural power is reflected in a series of discourses and practices through which the Miao have been constructed as Other. In the 19th century, the Miao were depicted as exotic, dangerous, and promiscuous in popular picture albums. During the Republican period, the Miao were pressured to assimilate, often enduring humiliation and physical coercion. After 1949, a sincere effort to account for ethnic diversity within the new nation-state was first interrupted by the Great Leap Forward and then effectively negated by the conformist pressures of the Cultural Revolution. In the post-Mao era, as markets have overtaken mass movements and top-down policy declarations, new opportunities as well as challenges to Miao cultural agency have emerged.

After the founding of the People's Republic in 1949, China's new leaders sought to realize the state as “a social order of national multiethnicity” (p. 73). Transforming newly fixed ethnic categories into functioning social and political units relied, in part, on the work of young minority men and women who were recruited into training schools called “Nationalities Institutes.” Some were groomed as political cadres and sent back to their communities; those with appropriate talents were trained as artists and performers. Schein's poignant profiles of aging members of this cohort provide valuable insight into the personal and collective struggle entailed in interpreting and accommodating unpredictable shifts in state policy and economic conditions. Once in great demand for their value in promulgating the message of ethnic unity and socialist development, these now-faded stars were highly skilled and well-trained performers. As state-sponsored cultural professionals, they developed highly stylized, sanitized repertoires that combined such elements of traditional Miao culture as courtship songs and shamanic dances with the techniques and aesthetics of ballet and other Western art forms.

With the advent of the post-Mao economic reforms, however, these stylized representations were rejected as artificial and inauthentic by both Chinese consumers and global markets. Although the most successful performers still enjoyed the prestige and privilege of an elite status in their adopted urban milieu, most found themselves eclipsed by rough-hewn rural troupes who were better able to satisfy the fantasies of urban Chinese consumers and foreign tourists.

The marketization of ethnic images entailed the emergence of new forms of exploitation as well as new opportunities for cultural agency. Schein's descriptions make it clear that neither trend dominates the current process. For instance, the commodification of authentic, ethnic, female Miao bodies certainly serves to reify ethnic and gender relationships, reproducing the asymmetries of power among Han and Miao, male and female. Many Miao women are distressed by the indignity of being subject to the yearning, idealizing, and sometimes sexualizing gaze of the consumer. Yet in the interactions between some Miao women and male Han tourists, officials, and other expectant consumers of exotic, Miao femininity, Schein discerns creative attempts to reclaim individual and collective agency. In one of the most insightful passages in the book, she describes how some young Miao women respond to these potentially exploitative situations. When recruited by Han photographers to appear in traditional festival garb, some opt out entirely, whereas others have become habituated to the point that they are able to manipulate the procedure and dictate the terms of remuneration (p. 211). In one case, young women made their own arrangement to sing privately for an amateur Han folklorist, defying (and ultimately drawing a reprimand from) their elders. Here, Schein shows that Miao women have been able to subvert both the expectations of their own communities and the “urban gaze” of Han tourists. By taking control of the commodification process, their actions transcend mere resistance to domination.

In Minority Rules, Louisa Schein skillfully combines theoretical debate with detailed and engaging description in a work that is as intellectually insightful as it is ethnographically informative. As a study of the Miao and of the dialectics of gender, power, and representation in the post-Mao era, Schein's book is an important addition to the ethnography of the minority peoples of southwestern China and should interest all anthropologists of contemporary China. Yet this work ultimately deserves a broader audience; this is a significant contribution to the theory of cultural production.

Quantitative assessments of Las Vegas’s phenomenal growth in recent years have not been matched by qualitative accounts of what it is like to live and work there. Among a handful of exceptions is the collected volume The Grit Beneath the Glitter: Tales from the Real Las Vegas, offered by its editors as a corrective to what they call “outsider reportage.” Hal K. Rothman and Mike Davis claim that Las Vegas “has become the favorite setting for hip anthropologists to mock the distended appetites of the majority; in the process, they tell us more about their own faux elitism than they do about the people they are observing” (p. 5). Perhaps overstating their case, they allege that “no one has ever before stopped to ask the people of Las Vegas what they think of their place” (p. 14). Accordingly, their objective is to present readers with an insider view of the city. Although their claim to representational authority has a distinctly territorial tone and too quickly dismisses other recent work on Las Vegas, distinguished urban historians Rothman and Davis—both of whom have long-standing intellectual commitments to the city—are ideally suited to the task they have set out for themselves. In their introduction, Rothman and Davis characterize Las Vegas as “a supple response to the changing cultural, intellectual, economic, and social trends of the nation and the world” (p. 1) and propose that the hermeneutic key to the city is its “fundamental malleability.” To explore this malleability they have assembled an impressively eclectic mix of historical, sociological, personal, journalistic, and photographic studies of Las Vegas. The 21 pieces are elegantly plotted around a theme of juxtaposition—between glitter and grit, reality and fantasy—immediately conveyed by the volume’s cover image: a 1950s Cadillac and a modern Winnebago huddled together beside a dilapidated shack overgrown with trees, the sleek pyramid of the Luxor hotel and casino—icon of 1990s Las Vegas corporate fantasy architecture—rising in the background.

The volume appropriately begins with a section entitled “Image and Reality,” in which contributing authors explore the architectural, literary, and cinematic face of the city. Klein opens with “Scripting Las Vegas,” describing the “gritty patches” that interrupt the narrative order of the Strip and provide clues to the disorder that its designed spaces (or “ergonomic labyrinths,” as he aptly calls them) attempt to hide through superficial illusion. Menendez follows with a discussion of how Las Vegas has figured in movies as “a moral testing ground” for U.S. audiences, and Goin offers a remarkable photographic tour of the city through the mobile frame of the car windshield. In “Nuts and Bolts,” the more substantial section that follows, authors leave behind the sparkling play of surfaces to home in on the political-economic details of city infrastructure, or its lack thereof. As we learn of Las Vegas’s fiscal, electricity, water, and labor union crises, the style of presentation also switches gears, from playful to empirical. Several pieces in this section might be described as clinical and dry, were it not for the always fascinating nature of the material itself. Moehring, eminent historian of the Southwest, outlines a regressive state tax structure that puts social programs at risk while benefiting a healthy gaming industry. Parker’s meticulous look at the social costs of rapid urbanization is a particularly effective account of how southern Nevada’s pro-development agenda systematically discounts the welfare of residents by dismissing problems of environment, health, and crime as “externalities.”

A third cluster of articles, entitled “Voices,” is composed of subjective commentaries on life in Las Vegas told by locals. Following the theme of juxtaposition that shapes the book, Miller’s “Inside the Glitter” presents readers with double photographic portraits of casino workers in their roles “on” and “off” the Strip, alongside excerpts from their life stories. McMackin presents an engaging set of reflections on her Vegas childhood, in which she mourns the incremental disappearance of the desert without being overly nostalgic. Other authors seem caught between a desire to celebrate the uniqueness of the city and a competing desire to stress its ordinariness. Two of the most compelling pieces in the anthology, Devereaux’s ethnographically sensitive journal of her time spent as an educator in a local prison and Davis’s journalistic snapshot of post-Rodney King racial discord, appear in “Shaping Life,” a section whose structuring logic and distinction from “Voices” is not altogether clear.

Contributors to the final section, “From Pariah to Paradigm,” return more directly to the volume’s introductory query: “Will Las Vegas fulfill its promise as a prototype for the urban twenty-first century?” (p. 13), but not in the didactic manner that often spoils the concluding sections of edited volumes. Throughout the book, I was struck with the analytically unfinished feel of the contributions; although frustrating at times, this unfinishedness was a refreshing change from editors’ tendencies toward overcoherence in analytic approach and presentational style. Despite Rothman and Davis’s rather directive sorting of pieces by tone and type, which left me wondering whether the editors’ opening emphasis on Las Vegas’s vital malleability might have been more provocatively borne out through a looser, more dynamic sequence, the relatively untheorized and interdisciplinary nature of this volume encourages readers to conjure up their own provisional answers to the challenging questions raised at the outset.

By the end of the anthology I found myself questioning the volume’s framing logic of juxtaposition. Is the call to look behind the city’s shiny veneer—to find “tales from the real Las Vegas”—as radical and original a departure from the standard casting of Las Vegas as Rothman and Davis claim? Ironically, their attempt to dispense with the tropes of Las Vegas is guided by one of its master tropes—the juxtaposition of reality and fantasy. Steve Wynn, reigning visionary of corporate casino culture in Las Vegas, once remarked that unsettling tourists’ expectations (presenting them with a rain forest in a desert, for instance) sets up a conflict that confounds and yet delights. As he recognizes, the city is quite explicitly premised on a split between the possible and the impossible, the real and the mirage. Clearly, “locals”—even local scholars—are not immune to the allure of this split. The glitter-grit binary is in fact a cornerstone of the sort of stock portrayals of the city that the editors decry; by grounding their book in this binary, they risk participating in the representational current of Las Vegas against which they position themselves. Perhaps a more radical way to frame the anthology would have been to question this very split, to probe the mutual inflection of glitter and grit at the level of experience and representation.

Aside from these criticisms—which confirm the success of this book to stimulate its readers—I found the anthology a marvelous demonstration of Las Vegas’s capacity to inspire a truly expansive range of questions, disciplines, and interests; in this sense, it stands as a testament to the city’s malleability. Together, the pieces of this diverse collection made for a thoroughly convincing portrait of Las Vegas and one that was a pleasure to read.

Chile is one of a handful of small countries whose political and economic history of the last 30 years disrupts regional typologies. Chile’s iconoclasm points to national processes of governance that pose genuinely troubling questions not only about the nature of Chilean democracy but also about the character of contemporary worldwide neoliberal economic reforms, which found their first fertile testing grounds in Chile under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-90). Since then, these reforms have accompanied democratic transitions in the former Soviet bloc, settlements to civil wars in Central America, the collapse of Marxist and Maoist revolutionary movements in Asia and Africa, and reconfigurations of state and society in the dozens of democratic Western industrialized countries that have followed the leads of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Especially because the study of democratic transitions and neoliberalism has been largely the purview of political scientists, Marketing Democracy, Julia Paley’s account of Chilean democracy in the postdictatorship period, will be welcomed by anthropologists seeking to understand the political and economic context of contemporary power relations.

In her book Paley examines the relationship between political action and political knowledge--how political knowledge is produced, how it is constrained and co-opted, and how it can be converted into a weapon against a democratic regime that shapes the techniques and purposes of that knowledge. More specifically, Paley documents how the social movements that brought down the Pinochet dictatorship now contend with a form of consensual politics that, paradoxically, disadvantages these movements in ways that they themselves have sanctioned by participating in electoral politics. She illustrates how the abstract and objective measurements of electioneering produce what she calls the “marketing” of democracy (pp. 125-130), promoting democracy as good while organizing its practice in ways that naturalize associations between the free market and political freedom. Paley argues convincingly that merging the market with politics eviscerates political opposition. Citizens in a democracy become indistinguishable from commodity consumers. She illustrates how in Chile the structural inequity that destabilized an authoritarian regime became legitimated under a democratic one.

At the center of Paley’s ethnography of democracy is Llareta, a grassroots health group in La Bandera, a shantytown (población) in the southern part of Santiago notorious since its inception for its simmering political opposition. Llareta was founded during a flurry of internationally supported clandestine organizing against the Pinochet dictatorship in the early 1980s. According to Paley, Llareta plays a central role in the history of La Bandera. Llareta’s founding members belonged to some of the original families who homesteaded La Bandera during a massive invasion organized by militant socialists against the more conciliatory communists during the volatile administration of Salvador Allende. Llareta persisted a decade after the fall of the Pinochet dictatorship in spite of the massive demobilization of grassroots organizations, which was accomplished by integrating many organization leaders into the formal bureaucratic organization of the democratic state. Llareta’s survival sets the group apart and makes it an ideal foil for describing democracy’s political pacification. Like many grassroots groups, Llareta underwent its own transition in the postdictatorship period when the repressive state, the object of its opposition, disappeared. Unlike many other groups, however, Llareta managed to survive this transition by challenging the democratic state’s insistence on personal responsibility. In Paley’s account, Llareta members admirably convert the democratic state’s emphasis on individual responsibility for health and well-being into demands for public sector accountability. They do so by using the state’s techniques of democratic knowledge production (such as health surveys and health campaigns) against the state and by showing how household and personal health problems stem from conditions created by the state in the first place.

During her fieldwork, Paley actively aligned herself with Llareta members, and as a result, Marketing Democracy is a self-conscious demonstration of activist scholarship. Paley uses her book to give voice to her principal informants by privileging their analyses of democracy’s limits on political activism. She also demonstrates her commitment to making Llareta members part of the scholarly process of producing her ethnography. She begins the book, in fact, with an evocative description of the day she returned to La Bandera after a two-year absence to share the findings of her dissertation research with Llareta members. Paley’s narrative structure continues this braided thread: prologues to substantive chapters describe the responses to her dissertation by informants, community members, and one Chilean intellectual.

Paley’s experiment in ethnographic presentation falls short, however, because neither the activist account nor the scholarly account of her research is complete on its own. Although Paley makes it clear that she dutifully and assiduously repatriated the ethnographic knowledge that she had acquired while researching her dissertation, she does not make clear what comprised that knowledge. In the epilogue, she notes that “as it turned out my analysis closely paralleled the health promoters’ own commentary” (p. 214). Indeed, it is difficult to identify how her account of the history of the población and her critique of democracy differ from those of the health promoters. This begs an interesting question: if knowledge is entangled with the power relations that produce it (which seems to be a premise of Paley’s argument), how is it that Paley and her informants came up with the same analysis? Stated differently, what did Paley learn that differed from what her informants learned about the transition to democracy? This question suggests that Paley has sacrificed theoretical rigor in order to present a book faithful to her informants’ points of view. The danger therein, as one of Paley’s interlocutors points out after reading her dissertation, is that “what strikes me… is that I didn’t hear anything new” (p. 188). Although much of what Paley writes is worthwhile and will be new to readers unfamiliar with Chile, some readers might concur that Paley’s analytic method and its presentation are less than novel.

Despite my concerns about Paley’s narrative form, I believe that Marketing Democracy is an important contribution to studies of social movements, governmentality, and power. Marketing Democracy is also an engaging read; Paley’s history of Chile’s urban social movements over more than 30 years is richly detailed and comprehensive, and her vivid descriptions bring life and texture to both the depredations and triumphs of Chilean shantytown activists.

Elegance and sophistication are widely lauded virtues of contemporary social theorizing. Susan Ossman's study not only exemplifies these qualities but it also engages with them as critical themes in social practice, identity construction, and globalization. Far more than an ethnographic examination of beauty salons (although somewhat less than this as well), Ossman’s book offers a philosophical meditation on representation and embodiment, desire and constraint, world making and transcendence. Her analysis moves among salon aesthetics in Casablanca, Cairo, and Paris, exploring both the connections among these places and their differences, making effective use of a methodology she aptly describes as "linked comparisons."

The central concern of Ossman's work is the condition of modernity, characterized by an absence of qualities. The venerable attributes of post-Enlightenment epistemologies and socialities such as generalizability, transposition, clarity, and transparency all prove to be absolutely central to the work of beauty. Through Ossman's subtle account we see how these values not only inform the images through which beauty represents itself in fashion magazines and the beauty industry but also in the aspirations that concretely motivate the aesthetic choices and pursuits of the women Ossman presents to the reader. Indeed, Ossman argues, it is absolutely critical to recognize that these values, which eschew all particularity and specification, derive their force and allure only in the shifting between highly contextual and grounded modes of being (a married, Muslim woman's veiled presence in Casablanca or the gossipy entanglements of beauticians and their clients in neighborhood salons in Paris) and the promise of unlimited potential embedded in beauty. The search for beauty is thus a means of "passing between worlds" and, so, a means of challenging hierarchical distinctions--and indeed, the boundaries between the "original" and the "inauthentic," the "traditional" and the "modern," the "local" and the "global." Ossman develops a kind of poetic idiom, a set of distinctive, more suggestive than analytical phrases that capture the processes and situated positions through which beauty works.

She begins her assessment with a discussion of what she calls "anywhere bodies," the elusive, deracinated, and decontextualized personae that are the mainstay of the beauty industry. These figures also function within the broader narrative or arc of identity construction that characterizes women's pursuit of beauty in all three cities. This pursuit is described in terms of "epics of opening" through which women seek not simply to transcend or replace the "heavy bodies" of religion, tradition, and proximity, but to locate these forms in a world that "en-lightened" women can navigate and master. This idiom—"anywhere bodies," "epics of opening," "en-lightening" dialectically paired with "heaviness," "density," and "reminders/remainders"--runs like a lyrical refrain through the work, pulling together disparate discussions of the sociality of salon conversation; a typology of salons characterized by neighborhood intimacies, "fast salon" efficiency, or the technical proficiency and luxury of "elite" salons; and the gaze within and beyond the salon.

The work of beauty--from images of Hollywood cinema stars, to wearing the hijab in contemporary France, to the creation of interior spaces for discreet bodily beautification in Cairo's sophisticated salons--clearly articulates with central philosophical and political questions about the nature of publics, of discourse, and of human freedom. Her work engages the concerns of Habermas and Rorty, among others, on these central concerns, to show not only how the salon constitutes a "public sphere" but also how its projects fashion society. Ossman is particularly astute at demonstrating how the optical praxis of the salon does much more than produce an abstracted image of beauty or even privilege a picture of reality. Instead, it facilitates a host of bodily techniques: ways of looking, of sitting, of orienting one's self to the touch, position, and perspective of others. In turn, Ossman shows how it is precisely such techniques, such repertoires of gestures and positions, that produce the salon as a recognizable transnational form. This dimension of her work offers a novel perspective on global relations that moves us well beyond efforts to describe the production of locality.

The range of issues raised in Ossman's work speaks to its sophistication. And the quality of the writing is elegant and alluring. Indeed, Ossman’s writing is often as seductive as the problems she investigates. This quality, though, will no doubt generate resistance on the part of many readers, especially because the poetic refrains of Ossman's style occasionally serve as shorthand evaluations of more complex issues. Her discussion is often more suggestive than it is persuasive--and I think this may even be Ossman's intention. This is certainly a legitimate tactic, especially given the insights that her suggestions often make possible. I found, for example, her rereading of Mauss's classic essay on bodily techniques to be strikingly original, but I also felt that she too easily dismisses the central problematic of Mauss's work, linking him to the project of modernity and "anywhere bodies" without giving due credence to the way he directly challenges many of modernity's assumptions. I am persuaded that beauty is no mere epiphenomenon, and so I am loathe to suggest that its significance needs to be further demonstrated (this, after all, is an all too familiar critique of the body, beauty, and women that this book successfully dismantles). Still, it seems clear that Ossman could have achieved greater depth in her discussion of salons had she situated the salons, beauticians, and clients in a wider world of practices and forces. What are the lives of women like in Casablanca and Paris and perhaps especially Cairo (which is not examined in the same detail as the other contexts), and how do women’s life worlds give beauty the value that it clearly has for them? A bit more flesh on some of these "heavy bodies" might have made the stakes of beauty work more compelling. In spite of these reservations, I have great respect for the intellectual quality and beauty of Ossman's text. It should be of interest to a wide range of readers for the breadth and depth of the issues it engages.

Brazilian media frequently define middle-class Brazilians as victims who have lost their paradise along the bumpy road of a chronic political and economic crisis. After a period of rapid upward mobility during the 1960s and 1970s, when the military regime was engaged in modernizing Brazil, this middle class seemed to have become an ephemeral phenomenon, a "dream," or "an "illusion" (p. 21). In Consumption Intensified, O'Dougherty sets out to investigate middle-class people's daily struggles to "attain, maintain, and perform" (p. 3) their class identity in the face of permanent job instability and high inflation. In addition, she examines the relationship between the Brazilian middle class and an unabashed media that volunteered to define its economic and political raison d'être.

During her fieldwork (1993-1994), O'Dougherty perceived a general insistence on internal middle-class differences that she identified as part of a local management of boundaries. O'Dougherty claims that adopting this line of thought would overshadow the power mechanisms that produce the inequalities constitutive of processes of differentiation. Consequently, she employs a broad concept of middle class to observe a "situated," "non-representative" (p. 9) sample of 24 families--mostly liberal professional couples and their school-age children living in gentrified neighborhoods of São Paulo--who "shared certain significant structural and subjective experiences" (p. 8). Their lives and class identity had been affected not only by the economic crisis but also by its negative effect on the meaning of modernity to which the notion of middle class was so closely linked.

O'Dougherty builds her main theoretical argument around the subject of consumption. She shows how and why consumption intensified as the economic crisis threatened the maintenance of middle-class material and symbolic bases (home and car ownership, job security, private education, and cultural pursuits [ch 1]). In this context, consumption constituted a hierarchical set of practices explained under a specific discourse of "cultural and moral superiority" (p. 3), in conformity with which the middle class disassociated itself from both the frivolous materialism of the noncultivated nouveau riche and the misfortunes of the racialized poor Northeastern migrants. Education, "refined" culture (p. 14), and certain signifiers of modernity formed the symbolic values of this morality.

Following de Certeau, O’Dougherty observes Brazilians' "unique tactics and strategies" (p. 52) of market research and stockpiling of household goods as means of protecting their money against hyperinflation and adapting to frequent government stabilization plans (which she describes in chapter 2). Absorbed in their daily "shopping nightmare" (p. 51), O’Dougherty’s informants perceived themselves to be caught in a vicious cycle, the culture of inflation, in which their own protective responses to economic instability were intrinsically inflationary and would eventually be obstructed by yet another governmental plan. The temporary relief provided by the government would ultimately lead to a new period of recession when the middle class resorted to another inflationary strategy. A further "survival tactic" (p. 53) was the middle class’s uneasy move toward an informal economy of small businesses and services, often associated with the petite bourgeois. Supported by the media, Brazilians have found new ways to transform these ventures into honorable middle-class occupations (ch. 3).

Given these inevitable material adjustments, Brazilians turned to a special kind of consumption, "creating a dual vision--of the immediate reality of crisis and the desired reality of the First World" (p. 15). Drawing on Bourdieu's idea of class distinction and on recent theories of consumption advanced by Daniel Miller, Arjun Appadurai, and Colin Campbell, among others, the author demonstrates the ways in which Brazilians recontextualized transnational goods (ch. 4) and experiences of modernity (ch. 5) to "display their values" (p. 49) while reinforcing their place in the local social hierarchy. The acquisition of foreign goods (even through contraband) and the practice of international travel (mostly to Disney World) have become privileged means to create class distinction and support middle-class identity through a symbolic connection with modernity in a First World style. O'Dougherty asserts that, contrary to current assumptions about the flattening effect of globalization and transnationalism, Brazilian middle-class transnational consumption and defiance of protectionist policies not only adapt global structures of power to reinforce local inequalities, but also re-accredit the ubiquitous and troublesome presence of the nation-state.

Throughout the book O'Dougherty remarks on the influential place of media that have assumed the role of middle-class interpreter. Similarly, she continuously reflects on the middle class’s claims of superiority. The recurrence of these themes makes chapter 6 and parts of 7--on the media and on narratives of nation, race, and culture, respectively--somewhat redundant. An excess of information only adds extraneous detail to issues she has previously considered. For example, her meticulous description of one magazine's coverage of Fernando Collor de Mello's disastrous presidency, albeit engaging, ultimately distracts from her main argument. One explanation for this excess may be O'Dougherty's direct confrontation with a certain Brazilian intellectual protectionism (p. 179). Perhaps now, with such resourceful ethnography and keen analysis, some native intellectuals will have to admit that this U.S. anthropologist does indeed know something of Brazil's history and daily life.

My only other critique concerns O'Dougherty's inattention to social interaction within and between classes, which would have taken her cultural analysis on the power involved in daily politics of distinction and inequality a step further: when and how was the middle-class claim of superiority altered or disputed? In spite of this critique, Consumption Intensified is a much-needed and intelligent contribution to the ethnography of the middle class, particularly in Brazil.

An observant undergraduate once emailed me in the wee morning hours before an exam: “Does June Nash ever sleep?” A fine question. Nash’s newest book, Mayan Visions: The Quest for Autonomy in an Age of Globalization, is written with the same urgency as a human-rights delegation report from the region of her concern, Chiapas. Mayan Visions addresses “indigenous social movements and their challenge to the course of globalization” (p. 27), drawing on Nash’s near-half-century span of research in Chiapas and generously cited research from Chiapas, Mexican and foreign NGOs, government, community- and movement-based scholarship, and the academy. Mayan Visions provides both a detailed political-economic history of Chiapas before and after the 1994 Zapatista uprising and an interesting experiment, in which the confirmed materialist Nash engages postmodernism. It is also one more case study in Nash’s career-long query regarding the future of people who rely on collectively held resources to cultivate directly much of their subsistence and who are treated by the state as obstacles to the extraction of mineral and biological resources in the territories they occupy.

In her opening chapter, Nash defines the “Mayan visions” of her title as those “distinct worldviews that place Mayans (and other indigenous societies) at the center of a collective enterprise to maintain the world in balance” (p. 2) that includes distinctive processes of democratization, biosphere management, and gender relations.

After the introduction, four chapters analyze periods of Chiapas’s indigenous-state relations, from the colonial Indian republics to the Indian pueblos to the “institutional revolutionary communities” that emerged after 1917 (chapter 2), to the rise and fall of the PRI’s nationalist redistributive policies in the 1970s, their impact on Maya family and community processes, and the indigenous and nonindigenous mobilizations convoked in the 1980s and early 1990s, particularly those centered on the 1991 Agrarian Law (chapter 3). Chapter 4 covers the “radical democratic mobilization” between January 1, 1994, and the February 1996 San Andres accords and the subsequent formation of autonomous communities in the Chiapas highlands and Lacandon rainforest. Chapter 5 describes the militarization, low-intensity conflict, and Chiapas peace movement that have developed in the wake of the Mexican government’s broken promises.

Nash affirms the contribution of postmodern theories to anthropology and of globalization for subsistence and semisubsistence producers. Nash’s use of the globalization perspective serves her project well, with clear roots in her ongoing political-economic perspective. But there are difficulties integrating her postmodern explorations with her commitment to people whom she does not consider fragmented, hybrid, or willingly deterritorialized but, rather, deeply rooted in a real place, responsible for 500 years of ongoing concerns, such as their real need to produce actual things from the earth. Her allegiance is to “the whole history of the conflict of real material interests that are structurally sustained through the institutions of a society that we once thought of as the class struggle” (p. 222).

At points, Nash’s postmodern experiment veers towards romanticizing community, the Maya, and the Zapatistas. For example, Nash asserts that despite world-market pressures, people in Chiapas operate by a distinct cultural logic, not limited by Western Cartesian assumptions. Community is the “habitus” of indigenous peoples, who value dignity, autonomy, collectivity, and the moral validation of power in their pluriethnic vision. There are even some disconcerting moments when Nash’s gender analysis reifies the storied Maya gender duality, such as her statement that women “are the ones teaching the next generation autonomy during the early years that define future behavior” (p. 199).

Fortunately, Nash dissects the contradictions of Chiapas. She reveals how gender complementarity can undergird a brutal neoliberal-reinforced “traditional” patriarchy in Chiapas that polices Maya women’s education and political participation and imposes responsibility for (and little authority over) subsistence, child-rearing, and culture-carrying. She pinpoints where the discourse of community involutes under certain pressures into conformism, cultural cleansing, and murder. For example, she discusses how the Maya ideologies of harmonious balance between community and cosmos, men and women, initially drew her in during her first fieldwork in Amatenango del Valle in the 1950s but a decade later barely masked the cumulative evidence of murderous conflict in the guise of diviner/curer-guided witchhunts. Particularly gripping is her analysis of how state-of-siege policies of the post-Zapatista PRI in effect imposed the “closed corporate peasant community” on rural Chiapas, which exploded during the 1997 Acteal massacre, in which indigenous men served as killers.

In the book’s conclusion, Nash looks to the promise of the convergence of indigenous advocates with international human rights advocates, “alliances [that] will help open space for the development of a transnational civil society that cultivates multicultural coexistence” (p. 254). This reviewer appreciates Nash’s Vision, as well as her solidarity with subsistence producers and looks forward to a more critical reading of the transnational alliances Nash participated in as a study tour leader, international elections observer, and nonviolent bodyguard for the Zapatistas. Mayan Visions is well worth the read for Nash’s clear analysis of the violence of change cloaked and worked out in the region’s gender dynamics, the discourse of costumbre or “traditions” of divining-curing and intolerance of religious pluralism, and the neoliberal order’s dependence on low-intensity conflict.

Many years ago, Vine Deloria Jr. remarked that American Indians cycle into style every few years, only to cycle out again. He may have to update this assessment to reflect the fact that it seems Indians are here to stay, at least in the consciousness of consumers who want to own a piece of Indian country and the scholars, both Indian and not, who turn out books on an increasingly regular basis on the producing, buying, selling, and appropriating of American Indian performances, representations, and cultural objects. In Selling the Indian, editors Meyer and Royer do not pretend to be doing anything particularly new in putting together these interesting pieces. Their goal, in fact, is modest: to add to understanding of the ways that cultural imperialism has operated in a variety of contexts: world’s fairs, “savage Olympics” (p. 11), flute performances, Indian fairs, museums, tv programs, and tourist shops; and how cultural imperialism is reflected in a variety of objects: flutes, baskets, pottery, dance hoops, romance novels, and pillowcases. The attempt is successful, if uneven, with the stronger pieces clustered in part 2, “Marketing the Indian,” where political scientist Erik Trump, historian Carter Jones Meyer, American studies scholar Sarah H. Hill, and ethnomusicologist Chris Goertzen provide political-economic perspectives on ways that the production and marketing of Indian arts have been deeply influenced by colonialism, neocolonialism, poverty, violence, gender inequality, and internally and externally imposed reform.

These influences are also present, although to a lesser extent, in the analyses carried out in part 1: “Staging the Indian.” In the first chapter, “The ‘Shy’ Cocopa Go to the Fair,” anthropologist Nancy Parezo and historian John Troutman sketch the events that led a group of Cocopa of the lower Colorado River to travel to the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition to be part of a “living history” exhibit illustrating a “narrative of human progress” (p. 8). In this exhibit, the Cocopa were to typify movement from the “Law of the Maternal Family” to a stage at which people organized confederacies and more astutely recognized paternity. Although the stated purpose of this chapter is to highlight the decision-making agency of the Cocopa in the face of social Darwinist agendas, the stronger picture is that of the failure of fair organizers and scientists to protect Indian workers and consultants from economic exploitation and the often lethal ravages of malaria and tuberculosis.

The combination of economic necessity and a desire to control cultural production and representation that impelled turn-of-the-century Cocopa to travel to St. Louis is also a factor in the contemporary Native American exhibitions and performances examined in part 1. Performance-art historians Katie N. Johnson and Tamara Underiner look at the Faustian pact undertaken by Native performers at Tillicum Village, a tourist attraction located near Seattle, where visitors wander through longhouses, eat “authentic” Indian smoked salmon, and view a dance spectacle that provides a 30-minute condensed introduction to Northwest Coast Native society. The jury is still out regarding how much these performances are really under the control of the diverse Native group that enacts them or to what extent “subtle moments of active resistance” (p. 57) can prevail amidst the demands of a ravenous tourist market.

Ethnomusicologist Pauline Tuttle pursues similar questions in her sympathetic piece on the well-known Lakota hoop dancer and flute player Tokeya Inajin (Kevin Locke), who weaves aspects of Lakota and Bahá’í traditions in what Tuttle describes as the intersubjective, sacred space of American Indian dance and musical performance. Building on Locke’s own words (drawn from a variety of texts), Tuttle lays out the varieties of what is erroneously lumped together as “Indian flute music” and provides an exegesis of hoop dance symbolism. The communicative universalism that inheres in aspects of hoop dancing recalls Black Elk’s messages while remaining consistent with Bahá’í beliefs. A weakness of this otherwise instructive article, however, is its failure to achieve enough distance from Locke to allow much of it to read as more than a detailed biography.

Anthropologist S. Elizabeth Bird’s “Savage Desires: The Gendered Construction of the American Indian in Popular Media” examines ways that American Indian men and women have become both sexualized and desexualized “in relation to the white gaze” (p. 63) in the context of captivity narratives, romance novels, films, and the television programs “Northern Exposure” and “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman.” Although Bird successfully lays out the “bifurcated” images of the female princess/seductress and male warrior/abuser (with an interesting discussion of the ever-present “Wise Elder”[p. 75]), the article is marred by a tired, monaural argument that sets up the anthropologist as the primary villain in the construction of these narratives.

By contrast, Erik Trump’s opening piece in part 2 on white women reformers’ attempts to revitalize American Indian economies by developing Indian arts and Carter Jones Meyer’s account of the relationship between Collier-era political reforms and the commercialization of Pueblo peoples provide nuanced accounts of the complexities of Indian-white relations in the workshop, museum, and souvenir shop. Trump’s article in particular provides a poignant account of the double bind that white women found themselves in as they often wrongheadedly turned their energies to getting Native women’s artistic accomplishments valued in the marketplace. Meyer’s focus on the work of luminaries Edgar L. Hewett and Mary Austin, particularly when they were at odds with John Collier and with each other, provides an excellent window into the analytic inseparability of Indian policy reform, tourism promotion, paternalism, and the diversity of opinion held by early anthropologists regarding the best ways to address the Indian question.

The final two articles in the book bring us into intimate contact with objects that can tell us stories if we are patient enough to unravel their historical, cultural, and personal significance. Sarah Hill’s focus on the multiple processes that led to the production of Cherokee baskets for a variety of markets before World War II brings to our awareness the very different ways that “social missionaries,” cultural revivalists, Indian Reorganization Act reforms, and WPA work influenced Western and Eastern Cherokee basket makers, most of whom were women looking to enhance their household income.

The book concludes with Chris Goertzen’s detailed study of the contexts in which a Mayan huipil-inspired pillow cover was created. This is the only piece in the book that takes us south of the Rio Grande, and it succeeds in tying together the ways traditional craftsmanship, gender relations, political and structural violence, and cultural resistance converge in a global tourist industry. Goertzen’s main point, that the objects and experiences we purchase reflect our reluctant if necessary participation in the tourism economy, can readily be applied to each contribution to this fine collection. As we reflect on the “highly corrosive process” (p. xi) of cultural imperialism, these articles bring to our attention the ways that the intersections of science, commerce, empire, globalization, and nation-building necessitate continuing skepticism regarding the “objective good intentions” of scientists, capitalists, and reformers alike.

One of the most provocative and thoughtful new works on Northwest Coast culture comes from an artist and art historian. Shadow House is Jonathan Meuli’s wide-ranging essay on the history of the social and political contexts of production, collection, and display of Northwest Coast (especially northern Northwest Coast) objects, from precontact indigenous communities to the modern day.

At first glance, browsers might assume Shadow House follows a postmodernist model (à la James Clifford) of travelogue peppered with ruminations on globalization and the politics and semiotics of representation. Indeed, Meuli’s fieldwork has been limited to museum-strolling and a few interviews with Northwest Coast artists in urban settings like Prince Rupert, British Columbia. His conclusions, however, are far from mere metacommentary and are based on intensive research, including examination of primary documents.

In the first chapter, “Indigenous Northwest Coast Aesthetics,” Meuli offers close readings of Swanton’s Haida texts and other sources for insights into precontact meanings and patterns. At times, his cataloguing of references is numbingly Boasian in its exhaustiveness, but his exegesis is at least restrained. From there, Meuli moves to a richer second chapter excavating the indigenous mnemonic processes apparent in early field notes and hypothesizes about the relationships among oral narrative, social structure, visual experience, and memory. For one not particularly concerned with the theoretical side of ethnography, Meuli shows a startling grasp of social-structural concepts and their cultural and methodological implications. His synthesis should be read as a call for ethnographers and others to explore the relationship between built space and social space on the Northwest Coast--not only in early historical longhouses, insofar as we can reconstruct them, but also in metaphorical lineage-house spaces such as the church basements, gymnasiums, and community halls used for potlatching today. Meuli does make a real contribution to the current literature on house societies, a literature that is only beginning to be applied, deservedly, to the Northwest Coast, the area, after all, to which Lévi-Strauss first applied the term.

“Collecting Objects and Ascribing Meanings” is the theme of the third chapter, a detailed examination of artifact-collecting expeditions. Meuli draws on the Swanton-Boas correspondence and attends particularly to the constructions of meaning inherent in the cataloguing process itself. He comments thoughtfully on the styles of display of different Northwest Coast museum collections around the world.

With chapter 4, Meuli brings us into the 20th century with an unflinching and unbounded exploration of the role of Northwest Coast art in British Columbia and southeast Alaska today. He examines the politics of repatriation and display, the life histories of artists (with interesting comments on northern British Columbian cannery towns in the mid-20th century as places where diverse local traditions comingled), different touristic and ethnographic regimes of representation, and the landscapes in which Northwest Coast public art lives, from First Nations villages to the totem parks in non-Native communities.

For one coming to this topic from other disciplines, Meuli makes surprisingly few missteps and is aware of his own limitations. An exception is his extended discussion of the Tsimshian cliff paintings attributed to Chief Ligeex (pp. 110-116, 349-353), to which he devotes an appendix. He doubts the Canadian Museum of Civilization’s cataloguing of a photograph that depicts a set of petroglyphs reputedly at the mouth of the Skeena River (p. 114), noting oral historical references to the pictures at the mouth of the Nass River. But the catalogue is correct; there are in fact two sets of petroglyphs, one near the mouth of each river. The photo Meuli questions (reproduced on p. 112) does indeed show the Skeena glyphs, and they are clearly visible from the highway Meuli must have traveled, judging by the communities he mentions visiting. Also in this connection, he states incorrectly that it is because oolichan do not spawn on the Skeena that the Tsimshian visit the Nass to harvest these fish (p. 349).

The volume might have benefited from the inclusion of fewer of Meuli’s own photographs, which are scattered almost randomly through the text. Many of these are artfully computer manipulated into montages and the like, at the loss of the usefulness and clarity readers expect from illustrations in an academic book. Most grievously, there is a shocking proliferation of typographical and grammatical errors, such that I found myself wondering at times if any copy editing occurred at any stage of production. Editorial shoddiness aside, this book is a major contribution to the study of Northwest Coast aesthetics and culture, and I recommend it to ethnographers, artists, curators, and anyone interested in an erudite and truly interdisciplinary synthesis of many facets of an artistic tradition.

Claudio Lomnitz’s book Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico is valuable because it approaches nationalism from different angles and at multiple levels. Lomnitz focuses in one chapter on communitarian ideologies since the Aztecs, in another chapter on disjunctures between local and national public spheres and in another on changing links between privileged intellectuals and national elites. He brings to bear years of fieldwork in the county of Tepoztlán, where Redfield and Lewis had previously conducted research. However, he also draws on a corpus of mainly secondary historical materials, together with his experience of decades of intellectual and political life in Mexico City.

The book’s title hints at the direction of Lomnitz’s argument. Guillermo Bonfíl wrote in México Profundo: Reclaiming a Civilization (University of Texas Press, 1996) that a modernizing national elite had repressed Mexico’s millenarian civilization. Lomnitz’s response is that the political culture of Mexico’s masses has been “silent” rather than simply “deep.” The silence, he argues, is less the result of repression than of the weakness of Mexico’s public sphere.

The two key elements of Lomnitz’s approach were introduced in his previous book Exits from the Labyrinth: Culture and Ideology in the National Space (University of California Press, 1992). First, he emphasizes the diverse and fragmented nature of Mexican social space. He focuses on negotiations within and between localized interest groups, whether shantytown residents, smallholding peasants, bureaucratic officials, or transnational businessmen. Second, he looks at the ways in which the interests of each group are legitimized. Most of his previous book was focused on the hegemony established by elites in two Mexican regions. Most of this book is focused on the groups that struggle to govern in the name of the Mexican nation.

Lomnitz draws on Goffman to analyze the many ways in which budding elites have staged the Mexican nation. He emphasizes that Mexico gets staged differently by different elites and for different audiences. He also notes that such representations can conflict with each other and are often difficult to sustain. For example, elites are not always successful in their attempts to portray Mexico as modern for an audience of other governments and foreign investors. In catering to those audiences, elites also run the risk of being taunted as foreign by domestic audiences.

Lomnitz focuses on the claims of elites to represent national sentiments. His key point is that national sentiments have never been articulated through public debate. Opinion has been expressed, but only in private, because few have been in a position to risk raising their voices in public. National elites have certainly been forced to make concessions to interest groups in order to maintain a semblance of order and legitimacy. However, few groups are able to demand anything but access to services and resources. Groups have often staged public demonstrations in order to attract attention, but the subsequent negotiations have been carried out behind closed doors. The same groups have had to play their part in nationalist ritual in exchange for the benefits they receive.

So what might be the future of the transition to democracy in Mexico? This is not a book for the hopeful. Lomnitz writes that Mexican elections, particularly before 1994, were one more pageant in which groups would participate in return for benefits. But elections are now the focus of intense competition between political parties, each investing large sums of money in mass-mediated campaigns. Campaigns are financed by various bourgeois groups whose interests the political parties have come to represent. Many other groups, however, are left in a weaker position than ever. Mexico’s poorest had received something, if not a voice, in exchange for their role in the charade of revolutionary nationalism. Now they have little to offer in exchange for the services they need more than ever. At best they can also seek exposure by catching the eye of the mass media--Lomnitz’s only mention of the Zapatistas comes in this context--but they stand in greater danger than ever of being stigmatized as unruly masses.

Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico is a collection of essays, most of which have already been published. Most essays are easily accessible to non-Mexicanists. There is some overlap between the essays, and at times some of Lomnitz’s material is a little too sketchy for comfort. He does make good use of ethnographic studies, including his own, but the mix of anecdotal history and ethnographic reference is sometimes uneasy. Perhaps this is the price of boldness. Readers will no doubt find plenty to disagree with but will still find the book most rewarding.

Lomnitz remarks that foreign scholars have been content to cite a handful of Mexican intellectuals, such as Paz, Fuentes, and Rivera, as bearers of national sentiments. He complains that this not only sidelines the work of many other Mexican intellectuals but also diminishes the contribution of all Mexican intellectuals to wider theoretical debates. I myself recall being advised by a U.S. professor to regard Mexican intellectuals as informants. Lomnitz concedes, on the other hand, that Mexican intellectuals, preoccupied with Mexico’s alleged backwardness, have tended to address national problems instead of wider concerns. It is to be hoped that his work will inspire Mexican anthropologists to address wider debates and foreign anthropologists to engage with the work of Mexican anthropologists.

When Corinne Kratz first worked among the Okiek people in Kenya as an undergraduate in the mid-1970s, her parents gave her a camera. Wanting to document Okiek life as part of her research, she took photographs, which eventually grew into a collection of over 5,000 images. While completing her dissertation in Nairobi in 1988, she contemplated doing a photographic exhibit, an idea that expanded into a transnational traveling exhibit, Okiek Portraits. Traveling exhibits, of course, are never the same twice. As the exhibit changed and developed with each of its seven venues, so did Kratz’s insights about the nature of exhibition. She began jotting down her thoughts, which turned into this book. The book--like the photographic project itself--feels like something of a rolling stone that gets weightier and more interestingly textured as it gathers momentum. Indeed, the book represents quite a landmark--a probing, reflexive, insightful, and complex rumination on a range of topics including photography, visual anthropology, the nature of exhibition as a communicative medium, visitors’ varying engagements and understandings in museums, stereotypes and their persistence, and more. Yet Kratz continually weaves her discussions back to her two main topics of interest, namely exhibition communication and the politics of representation.

Surprisingly, the exhibit on which the book is based is relatively unassuming (and cleverly reproduced in the book). It includes 31 color photographs of Okiek people, individual and group portraits, a subject matter Kratz chose to create a sense of personal engagement for the viewer. The photographs, most of which were taken in the 1980s, are organized around a life-cycle theme. To each photo she added brief descriptive commentary in both of Kenya’s national languages: English and Kiswahili.

The individuals in the photographs are members of two groups of Okiek who live in west-central Kenya. Unlike most other Kenyans, whose livelihood is based on agriculture or pastoralism, the Okiek have, until recently, maintained a forest-based mode of subsistence in which they hunt wild game, make beehives, and collect honey. They are one of Kenya’s smallest ethnic groups, now numbering less than 25,000, and within Kenya remain relatively unknown. A slightly negative image of them as people who have no cattle persists, especially among their immediate neighbors, the Maasai.

Kratz’s intentions when originally staging the exhibit were sincere and unequivocal, namely to challenge stereotypes and disseminate information from her research to a general Kenyan audience. Her goal in writing the book was more complex. She hoped to spur “further critical reflection on exhibitions, the communication and politics of representation fundamental to them, and how understandings of identity and difference might be formed and changed through these processes” (p. 4).

An example of the type of complex critical reflection she engages in deals with exhibition text. When the exhibit opened at the National Museum in Nairobi in 1989, label copy included only Kratz’s descriptive commentary. When showing albums of the exhibit photos to the Okiek, however, she noticed the interest they took in the photos and audiotaped their comments. In order to make the exhibit more multilayered, she decided to include their commentary as captions at future venues (in Okiek and in English translation). Turning casual conversation into label copy raised issues about perspectives presented, languages used, and translation. Their comments (one example: “It’s Pilini that’s being married here. But where are the people who are bringing her? I say, aren’t we here, Cory?”) indicate that Okiek were not only looking at pictures of themselves but were also imagining others looking at their pictures.

As Kratz moves from the Nairobi venue and follows the exhibit through its U.S. venues, which include showings in natural history museums, university museums, and art galleries, she also reflects on the ways in which physical adjustments in the designed space create a totally different exhibit each time. She uses both these physical changes in the displays and the different audiences who viewed them as a springboard to explore how visitors engage with exhibits in varying ways, depending on what they bring to the museum experience. For example, in Kenya, stereotypes of Okiek were based entirely on ethnic distinctions. In the United States, however, Okiek were virtually unknown and the Kenyan ethnic-based stereotypes were irrelevant. Instead, visitors related through their own stereotypes of Africans that were rooted in ideas about race, not ethnicity. In the United States, Okiek were usually seen as representing all of Kenya or even Africa, which was a curious inversion of their minority status at home.

What is particularly refreshing about this book is the way in which Kratz combines probing theoretical insights with a demystification of the exhibitionary process and her role within it. She humbly starts the project with the question: “Could a small photographic exhibit make a difference?” (p. 104). But she later reveals, “Over time, as I worked on Okiek Portraits, I came to understand how naive (though not uncommon) a plan to change stereotypes merely by presenting more credible and realistic alternatives actually was” (p. 104). Kratz not only teaches us a great deal about the Okiek people and museum exhibition but also about the role of an anthropologist, as she moves through her research and explores every path down which it leads her. She begins by innocently looking through a camera lens at others. She ultimately turns the gaze back--intelligently, meticulously, and insightfully--on every imaginable aspect of the project.

Fast-paced and marked by frequent forays into radical and deconstructionist theory, The Funeral Casino is less a book about Thailand than about how to make sense of violence, death, and the possibilities of sociality in the “neoliberal” global era. Klima knits together three disparate ethnographic scenes that seem to have little in common other than the overarching theme of death: the May 1992 massacre of prodemocracy protesters on the streets of Bangkok, a Buddhist meditation practice focused on corpses, and the economy of gambling and exchange at the upcountry funeral for his Thai father-in-law. Although at times it is easy to lose track of what connects each of these threads of Klima’s story, his analysis of funeral exchanges and Buddhist meditation on images of death ultimately circles back to and sheds light on the photographic representations and ritual commemorations of those killed in Bangkok during “Black May.” Klima’s aim is not only to make sense of Black May and the mass-mediated images of violence and death marketed and circulated in the aftermath of the killings; he also attempts to theorize and thereby come to terms with his own encounters with the dead. Taking his cue from Benjamin, he constructs a “philosophical ethnography” in which philosophy (or what we might call “ethical theory”) is built out of ethnography rather than being caged in a totalizing frame (p. 8). It is in this sense that Klima claims to have inverted the conventional relationship between ethnography and theory.

In Klima’s study, although Buddhist meditation practices and funerary economies are sources of “theory,” these perspectives do not significantly displace the Western critical theory with which they are juxtaposed. Instead, these Thai ways of contemplating relationships between the living and the dead are illuminating precisely at the points when they run parallel to the insights of theorists such as Derrida, Mauss, Benjamin, or Kristeva. This strategy allows Klima to bring a wide range of ideas and perspectives into productive dialogue. Thus, his discussion of exchange and the spirit of the gift is informed by, but goes well beyond, his experience collecting funerary contributions and making merit for a particular dead man in northern Thailand. Klima extrapolates his analysis of moral economies and the logic of a return to the shifting international exchanges of military aid and investment capital. Similarly, he examines the proliferation of mass-mediated images of dead bodies in relation to the technologies of photography and satellite transmissions, but he is wary of deterministic accounts that look at media structures outside of specific historical and material relations. Klima also considers the visual aspect of images of death through a discussion of sensory experience and the abject, showing how Buddhist meditation practices might help deconstruct an overly essentialized (and humanistic) understanding of the senses. Readers with interests in any of these areas of theoretical concern will find Klima’s book provocative and full of creative interventions.

Klima’s ethnographic contributions are also significant, although Thai specialists and Southeast Asianists might be disappointed that there is not more ethnographic detail and context to flesh out his keen observations. Likewise, those unfamiliar with Thailand may gain a highly selective perspective on Thai society and politics. The most substantial ethnographic material deals with the events leading up to and evolving out of the 1992 massacre of prodemocracy protestors by the military. Klima’s riveting first-hand account of scenes from the streets of Bangkok is coupled with an analysis of the historical precedents and the place of memories of military killings in 1973 and 1976. The echoes of the past reverberate in his narrative of the deadly confrontation with the military. We can see him sitting through the long, hot nights of speeches and songs; in these pages the building tension and fear is palpable. After fleeing from bullets and escaping to safety, Klima returns to the scene of violence and picks up with the story, now one of images of death and their political power. His descriptions of spattered brains, bullet-riddled pieces of flesh, and blood-soaked sidewalks evoke the feelings of shock and fascination that street vendors of photographs and videos readily tapped into as they hawked their wares. And at each turn, Klima situates his account within global flows of mass media, capitalist investment, and military aid. He shatters the harmonious, docile image of Thai society projected by anthropologists and tourist brochures alike. Behind the clean, smiling faces of the Miss Universe contest and the World Bank meetings, both hosted in Bangkok in the months leading up to the massacre, Klima shows us the brutal side of the “New World Order” and the bourgeois-dominated modernity in which Thailand is compelled to take part.

Klima’s challenge to the Western and Thai middle-class narrative of progress and democratization is one of his most valuable contributions. His critique of the neoliberal “New World Order,” a new order that forgets where it came from and the sacrifice of lives that made it possible, rests on a rereading of Mauss using the concept of kamma (karma) and Buddhist gift giving. Here the sources and nuances of Mauss’s ideas are unraveled and read against Bataille and Derrida. By examining Buddhist meritmaking as a type of exchange, and showing how gambling at funerals is itself a form of making merit, Klima explores the linkages between the spirit of the gift and the wagering of high-capitalist finance. Explicating the intersections between material and spiritual exchanges, between the living and the dead, is Klima’s way of giving back and insisting that those who died on the streets of Bangkok in May 1992 did not die in vain.