The field of legal anthropology continues to produce innovative research on the relationships between local legal subjectivities and global institutional discourse on current social problems. In this book, Sally Merry traces the construction and implementation of the concept of “human rights” in the context of violence against women. Merry is as much interested in understanding the mechanics of the process as she is in discovering to what degree the idea of human rights has taken hold and is used at the grassroots level. To achieve these goals, she undertakes “deterritorialized ethnography,” combining direct observations of UN committee meetings and international conferences with interviews of local and international activists and long- and short-term fieldwork among women’s nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in Fiji, China, India, Hong Kong, and the United States (p. 29). This creative methodology yields a set of interesting findings concerning the impact of human-rights discourse on local responses to violence against women as well as anthropology’s role in promoting a more nuanced definition of culture among all the stakeholders involved in defending women’s rights.

Merry opens her query with the production of rights discourses at the United Nations. Although this meticulous task is directed by the goal to reach consensus among member states, it is far from a conversation among equals. There are coalitions and blocs (usually uniting wealthier northern states), members whose governments refuse to ratify outcomes (among these, not surprisingly, is the United States), and an impressive and growing array of NGO activists who contribute by lobbying official government participants. Despite the slow grind of debate required of consensus making, the results have been an actually impressive set of institutionalized agreements and conventions that, although they lack a formal enforcement body, are still quite useful tools to promote and, in some cases, produce legal reform and social change. In the case of women’s rights, the core document is the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). As with other conventions, CEDAW calls for the United Nations to monitor the progress of member states in guaranteeing legislative protection and providing services for women, and it is here that NGOs play a critical role in evaluating government compliance with the convention’s standards of gender equity and demands for culture change. Yet it is also within the formal monitoring process that Merry discovers the many different uses and meanings of the concept of “culture” among stakeholders. For example, some member states appear to invoke culture, defined as traditional lifeways or primordialist identities, to excuse their lack of progress in complying with CEDAW reforms. In contrast, some local activists have found culture-specific resources to be quite effective responses to violence against women, as in the case of the Fijian custom of bulubulu, or reconciliation. Merry reveals how the CEDAW committee may at times ironically conflate the complexities of local traditions and reject some grassroots strategies as backward and, thus, obstacles to reform. Such rejections are the inevitable result of the legal-rational culture of secular transnational modernity espoused by UN actors, who, moreover, have little time to consider local cases in detail. Merry’s excellent discussion of the competing ethnicizations of local practices and global principles raises important questions about the potential for anthropology to contribute to refining human-rights discourse as a transnational legal framework.

In addition to following how CEDAW has emerged at the level of the United Nations—a task in itself of great value to human-rights scholarship—Merry’s captivating transnational ethnography examines how human rights become a part of local social movements and legal consciousness. In comparing India, Hong Kong, China, and the United States, she finds that a set of similar reforms (including domestic violence laws, shelters, community education efforts, and surveys) has been appropriated and adapted to local contexts. But do these changes have any lasting impact on those most in need of rights protection? Two case studies from Hawai‘i and Hong Kong reveal that although grassroots awareness and assertions depend on personal experiences reinforced by legal institutions that take human-rights reforms seriously, successful movements do not necessarily require deep or long-lasting commitments to human-rights discourse among local communities. The keys to the global flow of human-rights knowledge and practice are individual translators who are able to move between the layers of rights language and local women’s stories. Also crucial to the dialogue is the state, which, from the perspective of both the victim in need and the lofty UN committee hoping to implement change, remains the focus of action.
[notes, references, index]

The editors of this volume explain its central concerns with reference to an earlier volume, Tense Past (Antze and Lambek, eds., Routledge, 1996) whose connecting theme they now see as the overliteralization of memory and the absence of irony. Starting from the Freudian perspective that sufferers may be accomplices in their own condition, they move quickly to link irony with an earlier, much-used distinction between disease and illness: disease involving a literal and illness an interpretive understanding of the situation. Such speedy prolepsis encapsulates both the positive and the negative qualities of this book. The profusion of ideas intrigues and raises questions but ultimately teases, tantalizes, and leaves the reader unsatisfied. General statements such as “irony is inherent in signification” or “irony speaks to and from the human condition” (p. 3) are not hugely helpful in coming to grips with the subject.

However, the subsequent discussion of Richard Rorty’s ideas on irony and his use of the term ironist to describe individuals who find within themselves the capacity to recognize the contingency of their historical and cultural situation offers an easier way in to this difficult terrain. In this connection the editors write, “it has been a deep assumption of anthropologists that the people we study hold nonrelativist commitments to the worlds they live in” (p. 4). However, it is a truism that some peoples are more at ease with a relativist position than others. Coupling irony with contingency opens up the possibility of important questions that the editors fail to raise, let alone answer. Namely, what conditions promote or inhibit the ironical stance in cultures and individuals? These may be elementary questions that students are encouraged to ask to acquire a socioanthropological imagination, and yet they offer a useful reminder of what anthropological enquiry is about. If, as the editors argue, “illness provides a condition (or set of conditions) in which irony rises steadily to the surface” (p. 5), then readers surely need to know why, in some circumstances, there is a commitment to a literalist version of disease and irony appears to be out of the question.

Reading the introduction feels like listening to someone thinking aloud. This is, of course, both refreshing and annoying. But these criticisms indicate the importance of the subject. The subject matter of this volume is important for undergraduate students and clinicians, and they need a clearer map of this little-known terrain. Having said that, I note that the volume brings together six unmissable essays, including Antze’s “Illness as Irony in Psychoanalysis,” among the most perceptive commentaries on Freud’s thought ever written. Antze draws on the ancient Greek distinction between rhetorical and dramatic irony to throw more light on Freud’s theories of neurotic illness. Rhetorical irony helps one understand neurosis because “neurotic symptoms, such as ironic words and deeds, have a double meaning, one overt, the other hidden” (p. 114). However, the real point of case histories lies outside “the minutiae of patients’ lives, … in what they reveal about a set of larger controlling influences—the Oedipus complex, the psychosexual stages, the life and death instincts, the primal crime, primal scenes, primal repression” (p. 116).

Anne Meneley’s finely honed ethnographic account of fright illness among Yemeni women explores narratives of near tragedy and the way in which they can create “a moment of ironic reflection on the thin line between the comic and the tragic” (p. 25). Although, as Muslims, Yemeni women acknowledge the need to accept the will of God when confronting loss and death, fright illness allows them an ironic mode for challenging the rightness of that will. It introduces the semantic condition whereby the unsaid acquires the power to challenge the said (p. 32).

Other chapters in this volume are of equal fascination. Janice Boddy offers a history of midwifery in colonial Sudan that identifies the complex strategies used by the Wolff sisters in rewording Western scientific ideas in vernacular terms. Andrew Lakoff explores the unlikely marriage of psychopharmacology and Lacanian psychoanalysis in a psychiatric ward in Buenos Aires. Laurence Cohen makes a brief, and somewhat glib, attempt to apply ironic theory to studies of old age. And Michael Lambek presents the case study of one man’s military career and its shaping by what Lambek terms “rheumatic irony.” Through the double identity created by spirit possession, the man, Ali, acquires an enlarged sense of agency: He denies agency and, yet, accepts responsibility for his identity.

Not everyone will be able to see the threads that draw these chapters together. Readers will hope for another volume that is not afraid to provide a more simplified guide to this treacherous terrain.
[notes, references, index]

The Method of Hope: Anthropology, Philosophy, and Fijian Knowledge, by Hirokazu Miyazaki, is an ambitious and interesting attempt to recast questions about the construction of communal identity among the Fijian residents of the relocated community of Suvavou by examining rhetorical strategies for renewing “hope.” Residents of Suvavou once occupied the central land in what is now Fiji’s capital, Suva, but were relocated to a less desirable area in the late 19th century when a high chief from a neighboring area sold their land to an Australian company. Since that time, Suvavou residents have presented numerous unsuccessful claims for compensation. Miyazaki questions how Suvavou people maintain hope in the face of consistent disappointment. He draws on Ernst Bloch, Richard Rorty, Walter Benjamin, and Marilyn Strathern to suggest that anthropologists and Fijians alike develop an “aesthetic” of knowledge that involves drawing on a particular set of forms in a variety of contexts to establish hope of future fulfillment.

In the course of presenting a rich and varied ethnography of Suvavou, Miyazaki examines such diverse materials as land claims, ritual presentations of ceremonial valuables, church services, and public speeches by the Fijian prime minister to argue that all involve a similar aesthetic or structure, defining Suvavou identity in such a way as to maintain hope. Miyazaki first presents the history of the Suvavou residents’ thwarted efforts to claim compensation for their land, asserting that what is at stake here is not just money but also a powerful desire to affirm that the residents are efficacious actors in modern Fiji. For Fijians, the truth (dina) should bring efficacy (mana) and vice versa. Thus, persistent failure to get the government to accept the truth of their claims has led Suvavou residents to question the very core of their identity as effective agents in modern Fiji. Miyazaki proceeds to examine rival constructions of community, arguing that British colonizers imposed the distinctly European view that parts should form a coherent whole, in contrast to the typical Melanesian view that the whole must divide into constituent parts. Specifically, the government claims that the three clans of the village constitute a whole and that all three should share rent money for their land, whereas some of the constituent clans believe that the clans are of independent origin so the lion’s share of the rent money belongs to just one clan.

Miyazaki then gets into the core of his argument, showing that the villagers have developed a style of presenting claims through posing a series of questions. He traces this strategy to a pervasive aesthetic that dominates such diverse genres as traditional presentations of wealth and Seventh Day Adventist and Methodist church services. All of these speech events have a reciprocal structure in which the two sides “serve” each other, and, at the same time, the human community “serves” God and ancestral spirits; God and spirits then reciprocate by “serving” the human community through bestowing mana, or efficacy. In all of these genres, speakers first put their own agency “in abeyance” by denigrating themselves and their presentations and then by attributing ultimate efficacy to some outside agent, usually God. By drawing on this aesthetic of reciprocal exchange, Suvavou residents hope to place the government in the desired reciprocal role and thus to elicit bestowal of the hoped-for “service” or efficacy on the community in return.

Miyazaki’s attempt to interpret familiar material about constructing identity in a postcolonial environment through a new lens is illuminating and thought provoking, if a bit forced at points. I did not think that it was unusual that Suvavou residents had retained “hope” for restitution of their land given the potentially large amount of money at stake and the success of other similarly old land claims in Fiji and other areas. Likewise, the various debates about the structure of the village seemed to have less to do with differences in Melanesian and European aesthetics than with strategic attempts by various groups to carve out for themselves a larger piece of the rent pie. I sometimes found that the attempts to link Suvavou debates to anthropological ones got in the way of a larger understanding how marginalized people in postcolonial environments work within existing constraints to form an effective identity. Overall, however, the rich ethnography and new perspective make this a valuable addition to the literature on Fiji.
[maps, photographs, note on Fijian orthography, references, index.]

Although scholarly attention to the U.S. nuclear arsenal is usually limited to issues of international peace, Joseph Masco’s book is about the post–Cold War security culture and the internal effects of the U.S. nuclear project on U.S. citizens, on U.S. land and water, and on U.S. security. Masco’s ethnography deals with the region most directly affected—northern New Mexico—and the communities most immediately involved—the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and the scientists who produced the bomb and the Hispanics, Native Americans, and antinuclear activists who for over 50 years have been affected by a nuclear economy that has dramatically reshaped their everyday lives and modes of thinking. He began his fieldwork in 1993 and over the next decade spent three years studying a world that has controlled the terms by which citizens confront issues of their own survival.

The long-term effects of the Manhattan Project have included more than technoscientific and environmental issues. The project has changed the way Americans think about life and death, and psychologies and social organizations have been permanently altered. The nuclear arsenals have changed the way Americans think about nature, reproduction, technoscientific progress, and the democracy we are supposed to be. Masco is dealing with complexity of a high order, a technological achievement, a “revolution” he calls it, one that catapulted the United States to superpower status while also creating crises in our democratic form and practice of government. He sees the United States as the nation-state most colonized by the bomb, a national obsession. The Manhattan Project is multigenerational, a biosocial experiment that has not only reorganized our national purpose but international life as well. Although the effects are global, Masco’s work lies in the detailing of the communities in northern New Mexico—the Nuclear Borderlands.

After an impenetrable introductory chapter, Masco analyzes the community of nuclear weapons science, its ideological and technoscientific practices in which bodies and machines are confused, a common technique for internal control of laboratory workers. He notes that the expertise necessary for maintaining those machines is separated from an understanding of the consequences of using the technology.

For the Pueblo Indians, the permanent technoscience presence on the plateau with an unending possibility for reinvention not only causes a national cultural rupture but also a loss of land and sacred area. Federal management of Pueblo lands meant lost title to 18,000 acres, a loss of subsistence economy. LANL is foreign to the Pueblo philosophy of man–nature relations; their lands are expendable; they are a sacrifice to another colonialism. Ironically, high-tech scientists borrow from an imagined Tewa ritual to make high-tech kivas: modern mysticism channeling the spirits of Pueblo religious leaders while ignoring local, living Pueblo cultures. The testing is more unpredictable intrusion, and the buried nuclear waste a multimillennial hazard. But with the end of the Cold War, there is active resistance. The Hispanics are caught in the “tri-ethnic trap” and feel they have no political recourse. They predate the U.S. Forest Service and the “enviromaniacs” in Santa Fe. Many work at the laboratory, which is both a resource and a threat, and they become aware of race, class, and health issues.

In the late 1980s, antinuclear activism was energized by the ending of the Cold War and the opening of records hitherto secret. The politics of nuclear secrets are part of Masco’s subject as are the types and degrees of radiation exposure and the hazards of moving nuclear waste. Masco’s analysis is guided by key statements from diverse informants. Readers are never far from the participants, whether scientists or local citizens, whether nuclear is normalized or made exotic.
As ethnography, this work is in a class by itself—subtle, careful, thoughtful, and, in places, brilliant. In an era of preemptive war, Masco helps readers understand current U.S. debates as they relate to the legacies of the Cold War nuclear project. The Cold War rhetoric leads to post–September 11 mobilization around the “war on terror” and “weapons of mass destruction,” and citizens are left hanging between fear and denial. Anthropology at its best.
[photographs, notes, references, index.]

Jennifer Hecht’s The End of the Soul offers an intriguing exploration of the contributions of 19th-century French physical anthropology to the entrenchment of secular and republican French society. Hecht firmly establishes the significance of what might otherwise seem only a colorful footnote to serious history of science by compellingly arguing, in her final full chapter, that useful insights into both Henri Bergson’s vitalist philosophy and Emile Durkheim’s science of society emerge when one understands their work as a response to claims and counterclaims made over their lifetimes by French physical anthropologists seeking to redefine conventional understandings of humanity in secular, scientific terms.

In approaching this study, it is useful to remember several elements of French history. First, by most accounts, republican France was definitively secured only at the very end of the 19th century, a few decades after the establishment of the Third Republic in 1870. Second, France has long been closely connected institutionally with the Catholic Church as its “eldest daughter,” and during the 19th century the church was generally associated with monarchism and antirepublicanism. Beginning with the Third Republic, the French state has generally been assertively secular, even when held by rightist majorities. Predominantly Catholic (at least by some measures), France is one of the few European countries without a state religion and one of the first and few to legislate the separation of church and state (in 1905). Finally, the public role of intellectuals—as a highly visible corps of counselors to and critics of the secular state and civil society—has been especially important in France and, by most accounts, emerged in its contemporary form over those same last decades of the 19th century that ushered in the secular republic.

Hecht’s starting point is not unfamiliar, although her late 19th-century French case offers an especially pointed example: Individually and collectively, the shift from a world largely explained in theological terms and organized around stable social hierarchies to one explained in scientific terms and demanding egalitarian meritocracy as the legitimate basis of social order is neither self-evident nor angst-free. Hecht argues that over the latter half of the 19th century, French physical anthropologists, grouped in associations such as the Mutual Autopsy Society and the overlapping but less radical Society of Anthropology of Paris, offered a strategic vantage point from which to observe such a transition and, indeed, played a key role in helping French society move from one worldview to the other. Adamantly anticlerical, atheistic, and egalitarian, these anthropologists, she argues, made influential public scientific claims about domains that had previously been private and religious, effectively elaborating deconsecrated understandings of much human experience (e.g., life, death, mind, and sexuality) and transforming awe-inspiring issues into the stuff of rational knowledge. Further, she explores their creation of functional replacements for religion in both its institutional and existential dimensions. Constituting a kind of secular priesthood, they offered a variety of rituals as well as profane understandings of life and death, the promise of immortality through contributions to scientific knowledge, and other redemptive salves to the terrors of existence in a godless, heavenless here-and-now.

The history of the vexed relationship between scientific knowledge and religious belief stands at the center of this study. Certainly, Americans’ experience at the turn of this century is usefully illuminated by that of a century ago on the other side of the Atlantic. But Hecht’s analysis offers more: most notably, provocative insights into the striking variability of causes or political positions for which scientific analysis may be pressed into service. Her discussion of the strongly antireligious twist (absent from the original) given to Darwin’s Origin of Species by its first French translator, Mme C. Royer, provides one case in point.

Another is her discussion of the markedly egalitarian reading of Darwinist evolutionism by most late 19th-century French anthropologists, initially drawn to it as a counter to conventional theological justifications of gender and class hierarchies and as a radical alternative to spiritual explanations of the human condition. G. Vacher de Lapouge offered a contemporary alternative: No less opposed to theological explanations or convinced of the scientific, biological bases of human social organization than were other 19th-century anthropologists, he argued that claims about natural social equality rested on unprovable belief. He elaborated, instead, a conception of European society based on biologically determined racial hierarchies that, although largely dismissed or used as a straw man in France, was influential among U.S. and German eugenicists. (Hecht notes the irrelevance of the “colonial other” in these 19th-century debates about difference, hierarchy, and social equality.)

Finally, Hecht’s work offers a thought-provoking argument about the historical development of French social thought: Especially after 1859, 19th-century anthropologists, she suggests, were concerned with displacing theological modes of thought and so evacuated all nonmaterialist explanation from their vision of human experience. In contrast, Turn-of-the-Century thinkers such as Bergson and Durkheim could take largely for granted secular worldviews. Concerned, instead, to correct the excessively scientistic thinking of their predecessors, these scholars reintroduced elements of immaterial (although now nonreligious) forces to their understanding of the human condition (vitalism for Bergson, collective unconscious for Durkheim); further, Durkheim’s understanding of religion as a social fact to be understood rather than a falsehood to be rejected is, according to Hecht, usefully understood as a response to the work of earlier secularist thinkers like the physical anthropologists considered here.

Although this study is occasionally marred by trite expressions and pat explanations, its overall line of argument is unusually engaging and stimulating. It offers an important contribution to the histories of scientific racism, social science in the service of social problems, and European political culture. Without a doubt, it is a remarkable contribution to the history of anthropology.
[illustrations, references, index.]

In my experience, many discussions on Chinese tourism and tourists are characterized by misunderstanding and reductionism. There are, of course, exceptions to this general muddle. Wolfgang Arlt of Stralsund University of Applied Sciences has pursued a long-term study of Chinese outbound tourism (see www.china-outbound.com), and, of course, Alan A. Lew of Northern Arizona University keeps scholars updated through his insightful web pages and the Asia tourism forum.

Pal Nyiri’s book, however, provides something different. Neatly sidestepping the commercial challenges facing countries receiving Chinese tourists, he takes readers right to the heart of the matter as only an anthropologist can. By focusing on power, identity, and tradition within the context of the tourist (taking an openly acknowledged lead from Dean MacCannell’s oeuvre), Nyiri continually draws our attention to what matters: the paradox of how Chinese tourists respond to scenic spots and the desire of the Chinese state to maintain exclusive authority in interpreting and representing Chinese culture.

The book comprises four chapters with a very instructive introduction that takes to task existing analytical frameworks for tourism, which tend to sublimate European tourists over “othered” resident populations who are either grateful for the tourists or submissively waiting to have their cultures altered (yes, I am being ironic).
Nyiri starts by setting several contexts, starting with insights into Maoist cultural politics of tourism and tourists. After Mao’s death, negative views about bourgeois use of leisure faded, and the government saw the potential of domestic tourism and started promoting it through glossy brochures that provide, along with multisited ethnography, the data for Nyiri’s first stage of analysis.

Chapter 2 contains the fieldwork findings. It is apparent just how ruthless the authorities are in constructing and maintaining identity and how voracious the petty entrepreneurs are in hawking their wares and, in a sense, shaping the tourist experience. The main thrust of the chapter, however, is encapsulated on page 49 in a discussion of “delimitation and development”: “The agenda [standardizing the vista, ejecting local people, and designating tourist routes] reflects a view of tourism as a means of modernization and ‘civilization’ … as an official explained … villagers ‘don’t understand how to develop tourism. … If they open their villages by themselves it will be a mess.’ ” Nyiri goes on to state, “According to … officials, locals could be used as a resource, but in a strictly regimented fashion. Their interaction with tourists had to be controlled, lest they subvert development” (p. 50).

In chapter 3, Nyiri suggests why domestic tourism in China is so very different from that in the West. Drawing on the literature in chapter 1 and field experiences in chapter 2, Nyiri makes a very elegant case in proposing two causes. First, Chinese authorities have appropriated domestic tourism as part of the nation-building project (and perhaps as a way of undermining troublesome ethnics) and therefore retain tight control over tourist routes and spots. Second, tourism emerged in the post-Enlightenment West as an educative, self-improvement project. Also in chapter 3, Nyiri reveals another fascinating discourse on what has come to be known as the State–Economy–Culture triangle (p. 97), which provides a lens through which to view the zeitgeist of any particular society.

In the final chapter, which is very brief, Nyiri introduces migration into the equation in an attempt to separate modes of mobility from tourism. I am not so sure this is such a great idea. In a book of such limited size, and with such a clear focus, this issue should have been integrated into the context-setting first chapter or omitted. Also introduced is a very thoughtful analysis (frustratingly brief) of how Europe is constructed as a destination by official Chinese tour-guide books (pp. 105–106). In a sense then, this last chapter is the weakest but only in that it fails to reprise and draw together the analysis put forward in earlier chapters.

I found this to be a useful insight into the complexities of the sociopolitical quagmire that is global tourism and a useful addition to the canon on tourists and tourism. Anthropologists cannot ignore tourism, and those not familiar with this particular intellectual terrain will find this book a useful introduction.
[illustrated, notes, bibliography, index.]

This is a compelling book. It is a rare anthropological page-turner, despite the long timescale Thomas Sheridan covers: He begins with the prehistory of the Tohono O’odham and ends in the very late 20th century. His topic is time and space in southern Arizona and the construction of space, a theme that he takes from critical geography. Taking up the history of the Upper Santa Cruz river valley and its occupation by different cultures, Sheridan gives an account of the way in which each society has lived in and conceived of the land, for use or possession, sharing or competing.

Sheridan divides the book into two parts, titled “Landscapes of Community” and “Landscapes of Fraud.” In the first, shorter, part, he begins with the O’odham creation story, told by Juan Smith to Julian Hayden, recounting the O’odham conquest of Hohokam. He next describes the entrance of missionaries, first the Jesuits and subsequently the Franciscans. Sheridan describes this “conquest” and the social and ecological revolution that the missions brought about for the O’odham. He moves on to the Hispanic settlement of the area and the ongoing changes and shifts of power that the Spanish military brought to both the missions and the O’odham.

It is in the second, and longer, part that Sheridan tackles the major topic of his book: the land speculation that is so much a part of recent, especially western, U.S. history. The O’odham and, secondarily, the missions are the crucial background for—or perhaps, backbone of—the author’s focus, which is land and the displacement of community. The way in which land speculation in Arizona in the 19th and 20th centuries played out in this particular region is a critical element of his exploration of the social construction of space. Sheridan uses the details of the Tumacácori Land Grant, the Baca Float, and the legal, political, and capitalist games played by a range of characters and institutions to provide a detailed account of the culture that turned land into capital—as he titles chapter 6 “Fictitious Capital and Fictitious Landscapes” (p. 138).

The Baca Float or, to be precise, floats, as there were more than one, were areas selected to compensate heirs of Luis Maria Cabeza de Baca, whose 1821 grant of half a million acres was being turned into a community grant. Tired of battling Comanches, the Baca family had ceased to use the land; after its settlement by small Hispanic farming families, another generation of Bacas attempted to reclaim it. By the mid-19th century, there was a new type of conqueror: “grant litigation had turned the territory into a golden cash cow for lawyers and their political allies” (p. 144). From this point on, the Baca heirs were pawns in an endless series of lawsuits, and the legal battle for possession of the Baca Float is the fraud indicated in the book’s title. Sheridan does full justice to the byzantine lawsuits, the politics, and corporate involvement and to the way in which “ownership” of land in this area led to capital or the appearance of it. He describes, as well, the personalities of different players in this game and the changes in the legal system that supported the speculative and cultural claims of possession, repossession, dispossession of, and profit in, land.

Sheridan’s historical account is underpinned by his anthropological understanding of and geographical perspective on constructions of space, which differ from culture to culture and time period to time period. He writes without jargon, and his preference for a slightly purple prose is expertly used to drive along an account that would in other hands be dry, especially when it reaches the details of the legal cases and the claims and counterclaims of ownership. Instead, the book is a vivid story told by an experienced author who footnotes every detail but brings the land and people to vivid life. He only sketches the shift from Spanish to U.S. power, the changing and developing laws, the society of a changing frontier with its many minor confrontations (such as that between the military and the missions), and the use and abuse of law and writing, all of which could have been taken up in long chapters of their own. But Sheridan keeps a clear narrative thread, allowing the reader to enjoy all the implications without slowing this important and sobering story.
[maps, illustrations, notes, glossary, references, index.]

In Women’s Health in Post-Soviet Russia, Michele Rivkin-Fish explores why recent efforts to improve women’s reproductive health in Russia have reinforced socialist values and power relations. Focusing on the World Health Organization’s (WHO’s) attempts to democratize maternity hospitals in Saint Petersburg, she interrogates the logic of neoliberal reform in Russia, Western feminist politics, Russia’s medical infrastructure, and the Russian sex and gender system. The result is an informative and fascinating study of women’s health crisis on institutional and personal levels. Rivkin-Fish challenges feminists and nongovernmental organizations to reconcile their own objectives with the realities of local Russian knowledge and practice.

In “Part One: Projects,” Rivkin-Fish engages in a macrostudy of the conflicts surrounding the privatization of health care. On the basis of the platform of women’s universal right to self-determination, WHO officials stressed the “dehumanizing” nature of maternity care as the main reason to retrain doctors. Democratizing seminars advocated marketizing maternity wards to include patients in decisions about the birth process. Saint Petersburg hospital officials, however, “saw the maternal health crisis as an issue of low fertility, related to government-created poverty, technological deficits, and women’s apathy” (p. 42). Rivkin-Fish pertinently demonstrates how WHO initiatives privileged personal relationships and silenced discussion about “the structural bases of disempowerment” (p. 37). As a result, the creation of paid and unpaid birthing wards ultimately sharpened class divisions in Russian society. In a similar development, clinic doctors, attempting to educate youth about appropriate sexual relations, refused to acknowledge the socioeconomic reasons for women’s poor reproductive health. These doctors oriented their lectures toward addressing the low level of culture among young people. They therefore “shared the tendency of policymakers to target the self for moral transformations” (p. 91).

In “Part Two: Practices,” Rivkin-Fish provides a microlevel investigation of how Russian doctors and patients responded to these institutional initiatives. Her vignettes of women’s attempts to navigate the system to benefit themselves and their unborn children are at times inspirational and heartbreaking. The same could be said for the overworked female obstetricians and gynecologists, for Rivkin-Fish is interested in why they go out of their way to help some women but ignore the suffering of others. To guide her thinking through these findings, she uses a modified version of Michel Foucault’s theory of “medicalization” to analyze “how Russian doctors and patients distinguish between appropriate and abusive expressions of professional power, and strategized in particular ways to create ‘benevolent’ forms of expert power” (p. 23). She also relies on Pierre Bourdieu to understand how physicians misrecognized the ways that they controlled their patients by seeing these practices as completely different from those employed by other state bureaucrats whom they resented. She insightfully demonstrates how paid care has increased a woman’s choice for luxury accommodations, but it has done little to give her a say in the actual birth process, for that is still up to the doctor’s discretion. Physicians, in turn, feel trapped by the new moral economy of money. They welcome extra cash to pay for their daily life needs, but they find unjust the establishment of “distinct levels of comfort and care under the rubric of paid services,” criticizing the state for “abdicating its role in supporting health care” (p. 191). Market reforms ironically silenced both patients and health providers in the realm of public policy.

Rivkin-Fish has crafted a study that appeals to a broad audience, and this appeal is the book’s asset as well as its shortcoming. She eloquently speaks to policy makers and feminists, aiming to make them understand that Russian culture counts in implementing effective institutional and personal development programs. As a feminist anthropologist committed to “gender equality, social justice, and community empowerment” (p. 212), Rivkin-Fish concludes her work with a clear set of proposals to provide women and their doctors with more agency in the medical system. She encourages Western reformers “to offer a middle ground” that is open to “Russian concerns with personal morality and interpersonal obligation” and holds the state accountable for the welfare of its citizens (pp. 221, 218). However, in offering anthropology as the way to alert WHO and other bureaucrats to “what is really going on,” Rivkin-Fish portrays ethnographic knowledge as the “Truth,” a concept much debated in the discipline. I would have appreciated a more nuanced and forthright discussion of her own positionality as a researcher, mother, feminist, and friend in Saint Petersburg, a city that cannot represent the realities of Russian life beyond the metropolis. That said, however, Women’s Health in Post-Soviet Russia is a must read for specialists in the region, medical anthropologists, feminists, and policy makers alike.

[notes, works cited, index.]

Forced to take a second job to pay the bills, former University of New Mexico archaeologist Robert Leonard took up driving a taxi in Albuquerque. One result of that experience is this collection of fragments, prose poems, and vignettes. The challenge in this review is to try to connect this work of creative nonfiction to the professional interests of anthropologists.

Understandably, Leonard’s colleagues and friends encouraged him to publish this material. Cab drivers are in a unique position to sample city life. What comes across in Leonard’s anecdotes is the city’s smarmy underbelly of transients and the service workers, mostly prostitutes and cab drivers, who serve their needs. Everyone else has his or her own car. Or is it the case that the elderly, the handicapped, and the middle-class residents shuttled back and forth to the airport do not have compelling stories to tell? Leonard’s fares have compelling stories. Theirs are lives of significance, even if they are among the most transitory and powerless inhabitants of Albuquerque. Leonard conveys their experiences with respect and honesty. As creative nonfiction, his book is a first-rate read.

It has been awhile since the ethnographic writing experiments of the 1990s introduced flâneurie to the anthropology vocabulary. This is a subgenre of creative nonfiction in which the author assumes the pose of a disinterested observer of an urban scene. The flâneur is an aimless watchful figure, a shopper with no intention of buying, an educated and wealthy citizen with the time to collect the lives of fellow residents and transform those lives into text. First practiced by Charles Baudelaire in mid-19th-century Paris and raised critically by Walter Benjamin to catch the interests of social scientists and historians, the genre was proposed a decade ago, primarily by British scholars, as an possible solution to lack of reflexivity in ethnography.

The position of cab driver is closer to that of the flâneur than it is to that of the ethnographer. Like the flâneur, the cabbie is not interested in anything except the fare and his own personal safety. This is a point Leonard makes several times in fragments. The cabbie has no question, no analytical frame, no grounded theory, no disciplinary context, no structure of authority, no warrant, and no search criteria with which to filter the information that comes over the seat in the form of monologues from passengers. The encounters last from a few minutes to about an hour. There is no second chance to check the validity of the account or to develop the details of a remark.

This is not say that Leonard did not select from among the many hours of conversation he experienced, excluding fragments that may have made certain points and including ones that are merely about the cleverness of language. But the criteria he used are ambiguous and multivocal. Of those anecdotes that did find their way into the collection, the more telling ones are situational, a term of art among flâneurs first coined by Guy Debord in his 1967 situationist manifesto, The Society of the Spectacle. To savor the full effect of Leonard’s book, I would recommend reading it together with Debord’s. Debord created a politicized aesthetic based on the way a spectacular image (i.e., a fragment that Leonard chose to include) presents itself simultaneously as society, as a part of society, and as a means of unification between the two. This contradiction stems from the quality of separation that lies at the heart of spectacle.

In Leonard’s fragments, the separation is in the time and space his passengers experience as they move through the city. The liminality frees them to reveal the truths of their lives to the stranger at the wheel. It is also the separation in class between the sex worker and her client. It is the separation between those with street addresses and those who live under bridges. It is the separation between gangs and the police, the tourists and the residents, the transnationals and the indigenous, and the two-dollar fare from the forty-dollar fare. The cab driver witnesses these divergent social relations. The fragments Leonard offers in this collection mediate between the reality of those experiences as narrated in the back of the taxi and readers’ own experiences. They become the spectacle through which we understand Albuquerque, and through Albuquerque, all cities. In this collection, Leonard makes a case for the universal in urban culture. This is perhaps its greatest contrast with urban ethnography.

Margaret E. Dorsey examines the liaison of “borderlands music, U.S. politics, and transnational marketing” as they come together in the event called “pachanga” in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas. She is to be credited for identifying and exploring the recent permutations of this subject. These contributions, however, are marred by turgid, theoretically overwrought, repetitious and occasionally infelicitous writing. This problem is compounded by an uneven gathering and management of her data, lapses in scholarly referencing, and minor errors.

The central term, pachanga, is thrice-used, once at length (p. 4), before it is defined on page 5 as “a gathering of friends and family that incorporates music, food and drink.” Dorsey briefly references the work of Paredes, Limón, and Pena in this same area, saying they “focused on the role of verbal and musical artistry … for expressing resistance to Anglo domination.” She offers, as a seemingly novel thought, “The system of domination—neither now nor in the past—cuts crisply along ethnic lines. Economic interests and forces must be more closely considered” (p. 11). A cursory reading of the authors she mentions, however, shows their clear concern for intraethnic class divisions. Later, in discussing the economy of the “gift” (p. 94), she ignores Flores’s important work on just this concept in south Texas, and her food discussion (p. 39) bypasses Limón’s and Montano’s respective work on food in south Texas.

With a left-of-center academic’s amused distaste for the middle and upper classes, she wryly explores the permutation of the “traditional” pachanga into the political, spectacular pachanga involving transnational market forces such as the Anheuser-Busch beer conglomerate, makers of Budweiser beer. (In a hypereffort to note Budweiser’s obvious capitalist character, readers learn on page 53 that “Budweiser is the top-ranked beer in the United States and the signature product of Anheuser-Busch,” only to be told again on page 55, “Budweiser is the signature product of Anheuser-Busch, a tremendously powerful company,” exemplifying a penchant for repetition seen several times in the book.) This new pachanga is at some distance from “a gathering of friends and family,” the latter (following, but not citing, Limón) understood as a site of complicated resistance. These corporate pachangas only appear to celebrate the “triumph of Mexicano [Mexican American] capital,” as her key informants seem to believe. For Dorsey, however, “the type of pachanga spectacle used by local marketers … to sell further erases contradictions or reflections that might arise at more active family associations” (p. 167).

A major example is Budweiser’s sponsorship of the Hispanic Scholarship Fund Extravaganza. The printed invitation to the event is interpreted (at tedious length) as part of an insidious hegemony. Of an unneeded accent over the letter i in the word fiesta, she says, “A ‘parodic pejoration’ of Spanish expression reduces Spanish speakers and Spanish to a subordinate status, as it is strategically used to reduce the Hispanic community to marginality” (p. 77). But what if the English-dominant hegemonists who crafted the invitation simply made a common mistake in adding the accent mark? More significantly, “The Hispanic Scholarship Fund Fiesta Extravaganza brought together the powerful members of the community: public servants mingled together with private entrepreneurs” (p. 86), but Dorsey tells readers very little about these particular actors: Who are they biographically, and what do they say about this event? My own field participation among these same people—in background talk, mostly in Spanish—reveals exactly the contradictions and reflections that she says are erased by this spectacle: yes, capitalist consumption and self-display, but also critical intelligence; a continuing ethnicity and pride in their achievement, given backgrounds of poverty; as well as a palpable sense of a successful community, one still enlisted against adversity on behalf of others. One central figure is a prominent, wealthy real-estate developer misidentified as “Albert” Cantu (Alonzo Cantu) whose major real-estate development is in Sharyland not “Sherryland.” From Dorsey, readers learn of his “power,” but they do not learn that he is a major figure in promoting health and higher education in the area, a Democrat, a major contributor to the Clinton (Bill and Hillary) campaigns, and a former farmworker. Moreover, Dorsey wholly ignores the social-educational outcome of the considerable funds raised at this event for scholarships by the unwitting t(f)ools of capitalism in attendance. A deeper exploration of life trajectories and social context might seriously qualify Dorsey’s conclusions about the seemingly nefarious mix of power and culture in this community, now experiencing high social achievement compared with the past. Together with much close editing and better referencing, the yield would be a much more interesting book.

[map, photographs, tables, references, index.]

In Yemen Chronicle, Steven Caton interweaves two narratives into a beautifully written ethnomemoir of his fieldwork in Yemen. On the one hand, he provides a riveting account of a tribal war—and its poetic mediation—that he was caught up in while in the field during the late 1970s. On the other hand, he offers a highly personal account of the fieldwork experience itself, drawing on extended excerpts from his field notes, diaries, and letters as well as vivid memory fragments and reconstructed dialogues. In pushing these narratives up against one another, Caton seeks to blur the genre conventions of ethnographic writing and, in particular, the split between the personal, subjective writing usually confined to diaries and letters and the more detached or objective style associated with field notes. By turns dramatic, funny, poignant, irreverent, ironic, and confessional, the book is practically a page-turner—a distinction all too infrequently conferred on ethnographic works. Although the author draws largely on his previous field materials and memories, he incorporates a pivotal return trip to the Yemeni highlands in 2001.

One of the great merits of this work is that it brings to life the vivid and sometimes tenuous connections between tribal politics and tribal poetry as they unfolded through time. Caton plunges the reader into a dramatic tale of abduction, dissimulation, and betrayal: Two Yemeni women were taken from a nearby hamlet, triggering a regional conflagration accompanied by an impassioned exchange of poetic missives. Caton reveals his day-to-day struggles to gain access to and make sense of this poetry even as he sought to stay out of the crossfire (at one point, sleeping in his back room to avoid the bullets flying through his parlor). Through this account, both Caton himself and his Yemeni interlocutors emerge in all their human dimensionality.

In Caton’s attention to the poetry of dispute resolution, readers will find continuities with his earlier project (Peaks of Yemen I Summon: Poetry as Cultural Practice in a North Yemeni Tribe, University of California Press, 1990). For reasons no doubt related to both tribal and academic politics, he scarcely mentioned the war in his earlier work. Here, however, it emerges as central both to regional politics and to Caton’s own fieldwork experience. Caton’s previous discussion of a cohesive, but somewhat static, tribal poetic system yields to a far more complex account of the uncertainty, risk, confusion, and fear inherent in attempting to resolve a regional conflagration with words alone—for both Yemeni tribesmen and the ethnographer. Caton was literally caught up in the dispute: at one point, he was abducted, spent several nights in a Yemeni prison cell, and faced interrogation by National Security agents.

The book is neither a conventional ethnography nor a classic memoir. Readers expecting a new performance of Caton’s sophisticated theoretical training in the philosophy of language and poetics will find little formal semiotic analysis. The author presents the poetic texts as episodes in an unfolding drama that rhyme, meter, and metaphor help to build. Caton thinks with theorists—among them, Bakhtin, Burke, Clifford, Durkheim, Goffman, Lacan, Ricoeur, and Said—almost as if they were another kind of informant, useful for bringing particular kinds of illumination to discrete aspects of a social scenario. This dialogic engagement with theory is enabled by Caton’s framing of the work as an ethnomemoir, a move that also allows him to break with several genre conventions associated with ethnographic writing. Like a memoir, this book is unencumbered by citations, footnotes, references, and native-language poetic texts. Yet Caton’s exquisite attention to the embeddedness of the poetry within a particularly sensitive social situation makes the book far more than a conventional fieldwork account. The poems come alive: first, as creative, sophisticated, witty, and sometimes biting exchanges between savvy poets; second, as ethnographic documents that Caton only gradually gained access to via dialogic, engaged, and often frustrating encounters with his own interlocutors.

Caton writes in a lively, jargon-free prose accessible to readers of all backgrounds, from undergraduates to interested lay readers. At the same time, he raises key issues about fieldwork practice and ethnographic writing that make this book appropriate for advanced graduate seminars. With Yemen Chronicles, Steven Caton has produced a tour de force that lays out compelling new terrain for ethnography.
[maps.]